The Bookshop - Penelope Fitzgerald

  

Well, this book was presented to me as a novel of female empowerment. For me, however, it was mostly about the hopelessness of the idea of setting up and running a bookshop (something that I was already largely aware of, thanks to Dylan Moran and Black Books) and the pettiness of people in a small village (something I had plenty of first-hand knowledge).

On the whole, though, I chiefly found it quite banal, and to the reviewer who, according to Wikipedia, talked about this book as coming out of "the Beryl Bainbridge school of anguished women's fiction" I'd tell that this novel has nothing to do with the best (or even the slightly above average) works of Bainbridge.

The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie

  

If I was to just write about this as, well, a book, I'd mention the wonderful opening scene and how it made me appreciate magical realism for the first time since I was a teenager. And then I'd talk about how that magical realism grows stale with the passing chapters. 

I'd also talk about how the novel is a sign of an author whose life and allegiance is deeply divided between countries and cultures. 

I'd also say that, ultimately, I don't consider the book a masterwork. 

Yet, one cannot talk about The Satanic Verses without talking about how the novel changed our world and, most of all, Rushdie's own world. This was true before 2022, and it has only become more true now. We are not talking about a tasteless Italian politician showing off his t-shirt with a cartoon of Muhammad. We are talking about an author who wrote (and wrote well) dream sequences in a novel, but that also happened to criticize Khomeini in the process. And we're talking about an author whose life was then turned upside-down and threatened time and again by people who most likely didn't even read his novel.

The End of the Affair - Graham Greene

Ok, at this point I may really stop reading Graham Greene novels. I just couldn't bring myself to do it after the mediocrity of Monsignor Quixote, but The End of the Affair is the real deal, and possibly the best Graham Greene I've ever read.

The twists of the plot are surprising and intriguing, the reader can sympathize with the main character without liking him (in my case the problem wasn't the affair, but his treatment of the private investigator), and the novel makes Clapham Common come alive in a remarkable way.

Also, the book is so good that I found, for once, that the frequent shifts of focus on Catholicism added to rather than detracted from the novel (something that, for instance, I found excessive in the case of Brighton Rock).

Burmese Days – George Orwell

I never thought I would get to write something like this, but having now read all of Orwell’s novels I can see why so many people think he was a genius. He’s still far from being my favourite writer ever, but 1984, Burmese Days, and Coming Up for Air are three really good novels (although Keep the Aspidistra Flying is remarkably bad, I only moderately liked A Clergyman’s Daughter, and I honestly can’t stand Animal Farm).

Burmese Days reminded me of some of the finest Graham Greene, but also of that wonderful thing that is Burgess’ Malayan Trilogy – it’s a beautiful portrayal of the pettiness of a colonial society that doesn’t really understand the reality of the land it inhabits, of its silly internal fights, and of the way in which locals try to ingratiate themselves with the Europeans.

Flory doesn’t possess the literary weight of Burgess’ Crabbe, but he is still a deeply fascinating character. And sure, the book was written by a person who quite clearly thought that British imperialism was dead by the 1930s (and history ultimately proved he wasn’t far wrong), but that doesn’t mean this book of fiction, if taken with a pinch of salt, isn’t historically accurate. 

The Human Stain – Philip Roth

A book that I picked up for a small donation from 1LoveCommunity in Canary Wharf – absolutely lovely place and a really, really, really good book. I saw the cinematic version of The Human Stain when I was still a teenager trying to woo my high-school crush with my intellectual profile. I thought the movie was average at best, and so was the high-school crush at the time.

The novel is objectively a very easy sell with me: an odd kind of “campus novel”, written by one of the greatest American Jewish writers of the 20^th century, with a fair bit of racial problems, Vietnam, family violence and mysterious pasts. It also has a lot of sex. Actually, a bit too much of that and of related overconfidence (or overcompensation?).

The Human Stain is probably as good an “American” novel as American Pastoral. At times Dean Silk appears a bit too eloquent and articulate, but then again he probably wouldn’t have been able to live a life like his without exceptional intellectual dexterity. The one thing that bothers me, though, is that I couldn’t picture Faunia as anyone other than Nicole Kidman (the actress who portrayed her in the movie) and I really don’t think she should have had her face. 

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.