The Dwarves of Death – Jonathan Coe

The joys of walking into Fopp and finding that it has changed its stock of books quite considerably! This was a Christmas gift to myself (one of the very few I have ever felt entitled to) alongside Brighton Rock and Coe’s The Accidental Woman.

According to Jonathan Coe’s website this is his weakest novel, and according to a number of people on goodreads, the plot twists in the book are just implausible and the focus on music excessive. I disagree with all those accounts. Sure, The Dwarves of Death doesn’t even come remotely close to What a Carve Up! or The Rotters’ Club, but it was a great read on the plane (not to mention the fact that I am currently reading The Accidental Woman and I am finding that to be quite a bit weaker than this book). Also, sure, the plot twists are implausible, but so are the ones of Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels (to which the absurdity of the novel made me think more than once) and this is not a problem for me. Lastly, obviously there is a lot of focus on music, but this is not overpowering and it feels great to read of the inability of the protagonist’s drummer to keep a beat, much like me.

But surely I am biased, as the book is set in the same area of London where I live, although man it has changed over the last 30 years!

The Lost Language of Cranes – David Leavitt

After reading The Page Turner and quickly sending it to the charity shop, I was delighted to find this book and read something of literary significance written by Leavitt.

The Lost Language of Cranes is, without a doubt, one of the best books I read in 2016. What I liked so much about it is that it can be read as a gay novel just as easily as it can be read as a novel on generational divides, family crises, and so many other things. As a pretty straight-forward heterosexual white reader, I found that I could empathize and sympathize with all the Benjamins, while I suspect that a gay audience would be – understandably – more critical of Rose.

The book allows non-gay readers to reach a better (although by no means full, clearly!) understanding of the AIDS scare of the 1980s, of the problems homosexuals face when growing up and coming out, and also of the practical and physical aspects of gay sex – my mom told me Leavitt openly declared that he wanted to educate people in his books, and The Lost Language of Cranes clearly proves this.

Also, the story made me long for New York – a city that I am afraid I won’t get to visit again for a little while, with the baby and all…

Under the Greenwood Tree – Thomas Hardy

Just because, having lived in England for more than ten years, I figured I should have read some Hardy at some point (and this book came to me free of charge, courtesy of someone who moved out of our building). One day I’ll probably tackle Far From the Madding Crowd, but for now this is enough.

After struggling with Hardy’s prose for (and not really finding a meaning to) the first 50 pages or so, the pastoral atmosphere actually surprisingly started to grow on me. This is not a novel that I would consider as one of my favourites by any stretch of imagination, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. And sure, Fancy is a bit fickle, but I do hope her marriage to Dick is a long and happy one.

To be honest, though, I would probably have a much more elaborate view of pastoral literature had I ever read anything else by Hardy (or by George Eliot for that matter!)

Brighton Rock – Graham Greene

Probably the last Graham Greene book that I still wanted to read (I’ve read plenty of others, it’s time to move on). And, as it’s often the case, this one was a good buy at Fopp.

I actually think it was the Greene book that I enjoyed the least, and that’s chiefly because Pinkie is so purely nasty that it made me actually quite uncomfortable. It’s bizarre, I have no issues with violence (I love McCarthy!), or with evil characters, but nastiness is just a bit much for me. Ida is a great counterpart, but her desire to do good was just not enough to make up for the goosebumps that Pinkie gave me.

Had it not been written so well, I think this book would have ended up at the charity shop with American Psycho.

And I also could have done without all the comments on Catholicism – I’m Italian, I have a feeling I know quite well the moral contradictions of Catholic guilt and repentance.  

Il Caso Bramard – Davide Longo

I hadn’t read anything by Davide Longo – one of the most celebrated writers from my region – since my teenage years, and actually didn’t even know he was translated into English until I found this book of his at an Amnesty International book sale. Needless to say I made it mine.

Longo writes extremely well (too well, according to my mom, in order to be appreciated by the general public) and in this case the translator does quite a good job of preserving his beautiful prose. The book itself is a very dark crime story set between Turin and the Piedmontese Alps (it reminded me of Furttero&Lucentini’s La Donna della Domenica, but considerably gorier). I’ve read some reviews that criticized the author’s bleakness, but this worked just fine with me.

However, after saying that “the translator does quite a good job of preserving his beautiful prose”, I must also point out that in one case he took a sentence absolutely out of context and made me wanted to cry a bit: Bramard’s dad belonged to the Decima Mas, probably the most bloodthirsty faction of the Fascist military corps, but the translator calls them partisans (auch!) and translated the name using the roman numeral “X” – making it the X Mas, which is accurate in Italian, but sounds just way too festive in English.

Ah, and one of the Fascist thugs has got my surname, which stings a bit…