Heart of a Dog - Mikhail Bulgakov

 

A neighbour left a whole bunch of novels by some of my favourite authors in a box on a doorstep. When I saw it I was running back home. I stopped. I dove into the box. And I came out with this, with a bunch of books by Coetzee, some by Eugenides, some 19th century classics, and had a good backpack full of books (needless to say, that last 1 km back home was a tad bit slower than the previous ones...). 

Only thing: in my oxygen-deprived state my mind swapped Bulgakov and Nabokov (I can't be the first one, though that's no excuse). I had found The Master and Margarita to be ponderous and self-indulgent, but having got this book anyway I decided to read it (also because, in all honesty, it's very short...). 

Turns out, I don't particularly like dogs, I don't particularly like Bulgakov, and I don't particularly like mad doctors playing god with brain transplants. I also don't particularly like allegoric depictions of the Soviet Union characterized by a sense of humour that was probably dated already in the 1920s. 

So, guess what, I didn't particularly like this book...

The Notebook Trilogy - Ágota Kristóf

 

Yet another Hungarian book (well, a trilogy) and one that for two thirds was absolutely mind-blowing. 

The first book, with the twins' penchant for self-discipline, their unique view of the world and their twisted ethic, was an absolute work of art finishing with the most dramatic couple of lines I've read in a long, long time when one of them crosses the border. 

The second book was softer, but revealed unexpected elements of depth in the character of one of the twins, and also acted as a very interesting depiction of an unnamed country (well, Hungary) during the Cold War. 

But the revelation of the lie in the third book, instead of adding a further element of intrigue, it unfortunately made me lose interest in the trilogy, and actually left me rather disappointed after having been so enthralled by what I believed were the true elements of the first two books. 

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick

Well, I thought I was going to like the book because of its absolutely amazing title and because, after all, it is the one that inspired Blade Runner (though the decision of the publisher of my edition to even change the title into Blade Runner is just offensive).

But I didn't enjoy it all. I can live with the dramatic differences in Rachael's character and there are plenty of interesting things that the movie does not touch upon (the importance of animals, for instance), but can i say that the book is just not particularly well-written? Do I sound like an obnoxious snob if I say that Dick's prose is underdeveloped?

Expectations were high - despite my lack of interest in sci-fi I was more than happy to give one of its greatest authors a try, but said expectations were not met. Not even remotely.

Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

Having almost run out of books at home, I am now going back to the 18^th century.  And it’s actually better than I expected. Gulliver’s Travels surprised me by not just being about Lilliput (but then again, that’s solely due to my ignorance), by being written in a remarkably understandable English, and crucially by not being boring.

Not all travels are as interesting – the third one in particular gets to be fairly dull after a while, at least for me – and some of Swift’s comments just make you cringe (the depiction of women being one, but also the continuous praise of Britain and its empire).

But the irony and criticism are still fairly current, although one thing that I found really curious is that for all the things that Swift imagined, he never seemed to envisage a different political system other than a monarchy (at least for humans).

Gulliver’s Travels was a surprisingly pleasant read, but that’s probably also because at the end of it all he comes back to “his” (and also “my”) Rotherhithe. 

The Gambler (and other stories) – Fyodor Dostoevsky

When it comes to buying me books I have fundamentally four categories of friends (from the largest to the smallest): those who don’t even try because they are too scared (I feel your pain, and I apologize for being a snob!), those who try to buy me books and fail miserably, those who ask me what books I want or directly give me book vouchers (always very much appreciated), and those who just buy me books and don’t fail miserably (I salute you). This collection of stories comes from a friend belonging to the last category.

Some of the short stories in the collection I found quite boring (White Nights above all, despite being one of the most well-known works in this book), but others I found absolutely brilliant: A Nasty Story and The Meek One in particular not only don’t show any sign of ageing, but they are also so incredibly touching (I feel no sympathy for the protagonist of the former, and not that much for that of the latter, but plenty of sympathy for the celebrating family and the wife and servant respectively).

The Gambler itself is a wonderful novel(la?) about human weakness – when Dostoevsky describes the main character’s “system” it appears quite clearly that his own system mustn’t have been too different. The one issue I found, however, is that after the bombshell of grandmother’s arrival and her subsequent departure the pace of the novel slowed down too much and I lost a fair bit of interest, regained only in the last few pages with the summary of everyone’s lives given by Astley. So yeah, they probably should have kept on gambling instead of leaving Roulettenburg!!

The Humans – Matt Haig

And a second entry from my book club’s list (!) – it’s not that I loved this book, not even that I hated it like Norwegian Wood, it’s just that, unlike most of the books so far, it was actually quite enjoyable.

Other than many fairly trite observations about the weird ways of the humans, the novel is quite nice in its exploration of human bonds and emotions. If only Gulliver had actually killed himself there would probably be something more to say about the novel, but alas he didn’t (yes, I’m a horrible person…)

The Fifth Child – Doris Lessing

Not the book that most would pick as their first Doris Lessing read, but my wife found a surplus copy of The Fifth Child selling for 30p at the Barbican library and – understandably – just had to buy it. So one afternoon I read this novel, expecting it to be soft and romantic before grabbing it from the bookshelf, then actually reading the comments on the back-cover and realizing that it would have been darker than I had expected, and ending up being completely weirded out by it within a couple of hours.

The novel is about our identity (identities?), I suppose, about our darkest aspects and about our animalistic instincts, or, even more generally, about human nature (and also what constitutes a human, I guess). Yet, read as one half of a young married couple, to me it was more about the instability of even the most perfect love and family, about the affection and protective instincts a mother feels towards her children no matter what, and about the destructive power of every one of us.

Probably the novel had an even bigger impact on me because I read it shortly after watching We Need to Talk About Kevin. It’s a book that I’m really glad I’ve read, but maybe not one I would really recommend.

Il Visconte Dimezzato – Italo Calvino

My second favourite novel from Calvino’s Ancestors trilogy. I read it as a 13 year old who struggled to find any stimulus in literature, strongly pushed by my dad, much like he had been at the same age (and with the same set of books) by his best friend.

I’ve always thought, and I still do, that I didn’t really read the book the way it was meant to be read. Not liking allegoric and metaphoric works, I just read the novel as a funny short story about a viscount whose body gets split by a cannon ball and whose two halves have very different personalities.

I wonder how I would feel about re-reading the book now, and I also wonder whether I should have read all of Calvino’s books (in particular the ones I didn’t particularly like) using the approach highlighted above, since it definitely seemed to work.  

Lord of the Flies – William Golding

The daring teacher of my English B IB course (i.e. English for the linguistically impaired) had us read Golding’s book for her class. Granted, it did take most of us a couple of months to finish it, but we did manage to get some interesting class debates going – despite the fact that our English at the time left a lot to be desired.

The book has every right to be considered one of the greatest ones of the last century, it’s just not one of my favourites. I’m not a fan of allegories depicting the darkest aspects of human nature (I am pretty aware of the fact that mankind is awful without needing authors to tell me that). I am even less of a fan of works that seem to draw a bit too much inspiration from Christianity...

And, in all honesty, I would rather see a book like this end with total and utter destruction, rather than the – relatively speaking – happy ending.