Close Range – Annie Proulx

Typical collection of short stories for my lunch breaks.

Being Annie Proulx, typically well written and extremely interesting (kind of like Cormac McCarthy when he’s not too gruesome). The standout story is clearly Brokeback Mountain, but pretty much every single one of them is remarkable either for its humour, or for its gripping portrayal of life in the Mid-West, or even for its portrayal of attitudes towards mental illness in rural Wyoming.

I think this book would deserve something more than these two lines, but being short stories I’ve sort of ran out of insightful comments already…

The Innocent – Ian McEwan

And with this I have officially finished all the hard-copy McEwan books that I own (although I still want to read Black Dogs).

Much like in Sweet Tooth, McEwan develops both a love and a spy story in parallel, and I feel that he doesn’t do either excessively well. Somehow I had very little doubt as to where the love story was going to end (it is pretty much stated from the start that the relationship won’t last, and it’s also quite clear that Leonard doesn’t really understand Maria). As for the spy story, despite the cheesiness of the depiction of the British/American divide, its premises are actually really quite interesting (and Operation Gold something that even I had never heard of) – it’s just so hard to write a great spy story in a country that has produced Graham Greene and John Le Carré (and maybe I should also add to this list Alan Bennett, whose work on the Cambridge Spies was actually really quite interesting). 

Chocolat – Joanne Harris

I found this old best-seller in a phone box turned book exchange in Lewisham and I’ve only really picked it up because once upon a time my mom won a literary award that was presented to her by Joanne Harris (I was more interested in the 10kg of chocolate that came with it though).

Unfortunately, the book is way more The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul (minus its underlying racism and a little less shallow) than Babette’s Feast. The characters are overall so dreadfully predictable, the attacks on the Catholic Church and on life in small villages not inventive, and the plot, well, borderline pathetic. The only remotely interesting part was the children story-esque ending, with the evil priest gorging on chocolate before fleeing.

Really not a wonder then that this book sold so many copies. 

Radetzky March - Joseph Roth

Ah, Joseph Roth and the finis Austriae! Does it get any better than that? Well, in a way it does, considering that my favourite Roth novel (or rather a short story - The Legend of the Holy Drinker) is actually set in Paris...

Radetzky March is a wonderful novel (despite the fact that it took me a week to finish it because of the impending fatherhood and, erm, the Olympics...) and one of those books that I wish I could persuade my students to read.

Interestingly, Roth ultimately seems to love his characters despite the fact that more often than not these have to be bailed out by the Emperor, and that their careless actions lead directly or indirectly to the death of a number of people throughout the book (then again, the atmosphere surrounding the duel in the first half of the book reminded me of Ridley Scott's The Duellists so those deaths are justified!).

Speaking of the Emperor and his powers - the chapters directly related to his ageing are possibly the best-written of the book, but (speaking as a historian...) Roth seems to conveniently forget the fact that by 1914 the Austrian one was ultimately an empire hell bent on starting a war with Serbia (although not with the whole of Europe).

Another Part of the Wood - Beryl Bainbridge

And with this I, sadly, have exhausted my bookshelf's apparently never-ending supply of Bainbridge novels.

Another Part of the Wood is, yet again, an excellent read (although I should have thought twice about reading one of Bainbridge's books a couple of weeks before the birth of my first child, but hey...). Disquieting as always, the author gives an excellent portrayal of the various characters that are crammed in the rural huts and of their extremely dysfunctional relationships - it's kind of The Big Chill in Wales, with characters worried by even smaller issues (at least initially) and who have probably never liked each other anyway.

Much like with most of Bainbridge's novels, the reader knows from the start that tragedy is just around the corner - although this time it is presented in a very poetic way and doesn't have the gruesome end of that masterpiece that is Harriet Said...

The Crossing - Andrew Miller

I'm grateful to my old English teacher for introducing me to Golding, Orwell, Greene, Vonnegut and countless others.

I'm not grateful to my old English teacher for introducing me to Andrew Miller.

Seriously, the book is an easy read, but it is also excruciatingly boring. And very implausible: sure, there are plenty of people who find it hard to relate to others, but Maud seems to me to be a tad bit excessive (much like her parents - who, with a daughter in ICU following a dreadful head injury, just drop by her hospital before vanishing into thin air, presumably to go home and watch telly).

And what is the solo crossing of the Atlantic meant to represent? Is it Maud looking for her true self, or the author showing off his nautical skills and knowledge of sailing terms (and yes, reading about mast and sterns is that exciting for someone who has never sailed).

Had she sunk it would have added a bit of depth to the novel, but luckily she survives, lands, meets the token noble savages who help her and are not helped in return, and then leaves in the night on a mysterious train - leaving behind her a trail of magic. And utter boredom.

The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster

Quite possibly the best Paul Auster novel I’ve ever read, and I don’t say this lightly.  

Hector Mann, the real protagonist of the book, is as mysterious and fascinating a figure as Master Yehudi in Mr Vertigo (and his bizarre career path post-acting reminds one of Walt’s life in the same book). The love story between the narrator and Alma is a thing of beautiful delicacy, and by the end of the book the reader is happy to know that Zimmer has moved on, but also that he sees no need to tell us anything about who has taken Alma’s place. And it is always refreshing to read an Auster novel that is not set in New York (despite the fact that Zimmer lives there for a while, accidentally in Brooklyn – who would have ever thought…).

The fact that Auster went through the trouble of inventing not just a character, but also his movie plots and his entire body of work, is something that deserves a literary standing ovation (and they’re so realistic that I actually had to look up Hector Mann on Wikipedia, thinking he was a real – if a bit obscure – figure of the silent film era that I had never heard of…). 

Uno, Nessuno e Centomila – Luigi Pirandello

How dreadfully boring! Seriously, I understand this book is meant to be one of the greatest Italian 20^th century novels, but can we all just agree that it’s a 150-page yawn in the 21^st century?

So, Vitangelo Moscarda (even his name is dreadful) is a loan shark and is having second thoughts about his life and his identity. So what? 90 years after the book’s publication all its brilliant points are just so utterly trite. I got really happy when towards the end he got mortally wounded – knowing that there were still a few pages to go I was hoping that the first-person narrator would then start telling some bizarre after-life tale that could add a bit of flair to this novel. Sadly, Pirandello just seemed to use the term “mortally wounded” rather inappropriately, as Vitangelo survives…

Or maybe I’m just being harsh because Pirandello was fundamentally a Fascist?!?

It’s a Battlefield – Graham Greene

What a bizarre Graham Greene novel, and surely one that, had it not been for the wonderful place that was Books for Free in Stratford, I would have never picked up…

Out of all the books by Greene that I have read, this is the first one to be set in England (yes, I know he wrote plenty of other novels set here, I just haven’t read them…). Despite being familiar with so many (almost all?) of the corners of London that he describes, I found these to be so far away from me because of their perceivable bleakness and eeriness.

It’s a Battlefield is an extremely interesting book, despite the fact that all the important characters are not just unlikable, but fundamentally plain awful (and rather miserable). However, it’s quite a shame that Greene never gives Drover a chance to speak ( after all the prisoner is by far the most enigmatic and interesting character in the novel, with his attempted suicide after avoiding a death sentence being one of the best plot-twists I’ve ever come across) 

The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

Having already seen (and loved) the movie, Ishiguro’s novel really had no surprises for me – but boy was it lovely…

From an historical point of view, Ishiguro does a remarkable job of highlighting how easy it is to be harsh on British appeasers in hindsight because of the consequences of their actions (personally, I think they were fools who thought they understood Hitler and his depravity, but they were also dealt a remarkably bad hand…). And, also, he describes how the patterns of international diplomacy (once the happy game of the chosen few who had moved in the same circles for centuries) changed between the wars as those positions became way more professionalized.

And as for Mr Stevens, much like Penny does with Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory (not the most cultural of references, I know), I wanted to hug him at times and try to explain things that are obscure to him (like banter…) in the simplest possible way.

Too bad that, yet again, I found myself thinking what those people would have voted for in the EU referendum…

Bagombo Snuff Box – Kurt Vonnegut

I don’t even know how I managed (or was it my wife that managed?) to get my hands on this collection of short stories, but I’m glad I did.

I was expecting science fiction, but what I got was a wide range of styles, with stories often about American suburban life (the joy!), and in which the American dream is, in one way or another, crushed time and again.

Vonnegut’s humour and irony are very much there, like in all his other works, and some of the stories (like The Package) would have given me a bit of faith in the future of mankind – too bad they were written 60 years ago and the world is still very much an awful place…