The Porcupine - Julian Barnes

  

More enjoyable than Flaubert's Parrot, less enjoyable than most other books by Julian Barnes; for me, at the very least. 

This is another book with which there's nothing wrong: it's well-written, it's interesting (if not excessively original) and it's an easy (though perhaps verging too closely towards the effortless) read. 

But there are plenty of other books dealing with the Soviet bloc and its systems, often written by authors who were on the other side of the Iron Courtain for long parts of the Cold War, a I generally like them better (except for Kundera's novels, but I've already professed my dislike for him).

Patrimony – Philip Roth

I’ve traded a copy of Dubliners, Pride and Prejudice and Our Man in Havana (of which I had more than one, otherwise I would have never parted with it!) for a copy of this autobiographical work by Roth that had clearly been in contact with quite a lot of water. I did it because Simon, the legendary owner of LSE’s second-hand bookshop Alpha Books recommended this, and he was right.

Patrimony reminded me in many ways, and for obvious reasons, of Alan Bennett’s A Life Like Other People’s, but this book being written by a Jewish author and dealing with his relation with his dad in the American suburbs definitely gives it an edge over Bennett’s memoirs.

The book alternates between the drama of losing a father, the meaning (and emotional and physical cost) of suffering and undergoing surgery, growing old as a son as one’s father grows even older, and finding a way to settle the score on a number of decisions that marked Roth’s own upbringing.

This is a work of genius and brilliance, and something that appears remarkably honest (including Roth’s own admission of thinking of his father’s death in literary and editorial terms from the beginning of his ordeal).

Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt

I think I first got a copy of Angela's Ashes as a gift from one of my seniors in my Canadian high-school 12 years ago. I then handed it over to one of my juniors without reading it. And ever since I kept on finding it, unsurprisingly, in all sorts of second-hand bookshops. I think the copy I ended up reading was coming from the Stratford Books for Free, but I might be wrong. Anyway, as I am now finally running out of paperbacks so I decided it was time for me to read this.

And it was, well, alright. Some parts of it were positively interesting and entertaining, in particular when young Frank starts to find a way to make money, but the novelty of some others wore off rather quickly (I understand the author’s life was marked by his father’s alcoholism, but hundreds of pages of stories centred on various stages of drunkenness bored me a bit after a while).

I’ve read that a number of people questioned the truthfulness of the account, but I don’t really see the need for that. After all these are childhood memories, and if I think back to my own childhood I distinctly remember having tamed a lion in the mean streets of Bra, Italy, having arm-wrestled (and won) against Olympic athletes at the peak of their fitness, and having read the Odyssey in its original version when I was 5. But I might have got some of the details a bit wrong…

Winter Journal – Paul Auster

A book that I had often seen in bookshops but avoided because, let’s face it, I don’t really like self-celebrating memoirs/reflections on an author’s life etc. Like a child, I only read it because my mom said so. And clearly my mom knows best – sure, it’s a self-celebrating reflection on the author’s life, but if the author in question is Paul Auster, then the book is bound to be extremely well written and, at the very least, the mirror of a very interesting life.

What this book has left me with are chiefly two things: the love and profound respect Auster feels for his wife Siri Hustvedt, and the fact that that he is, or at least he portrays himself to be, rather happy at the prospect of growing old.

At times there are passages I didn’t feel particularly interested in (some stories about his youth, for instance, left me quite untouched), but overall the book is at the very least quite thought-provoking. I never thought Paul Auster would have played pick-up basketball growing up, as pretty much all of his sports references in his other books seem to be about baseball, but reading about that made me happy, as did seeing him go through all the houses he lived in and what these meant to 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. 

A Life Like Other People's - Alan Bennett

 

In many ways this is the book that inspired this project. Far from being my favourite Alan Bennett work, the author’s struggles with his mom’s dementia and depression nonetheless made me think of how even my own self-proclaimed prodigious memory is already (at 28) showing its fallacies. 

If someone asked me for my all-time 10 favourite books, one name I would definitely throw in there is Heinrich Böll’s The Clown. Yet, I now realize that – having read it more than a decade ago – I remember the way I felt when I was reading it, but I have no idea what its plot actually is. I have now decided to write down a few lines about pretty much every book I’ve read – despite the fact that, I’m afraid, I’ll probably have to use Wikipedia in order to remember what many of these books were about. This is more for me than for an audience, yet my wife suggested I make it a blog rather my usual spreadsheet.

Anyway, this book by Alan Bennett is about more than the depression and dementia of his author’s mother. Bennett raises a number of points that are crucial for everyone who has ever had to care for his (grand)parents: why do we do that? Shouldn’t they just be allowed to go? When their minds, or their capacity to express their emotions, appear to be lost, are they still the people we loved? Do we look after them for their own good, or simply to feel good (or at least ok) about ourselves? 

It’s not like these questions have never been asked, and Bennett’s answers (when he has them) are not exactly groundbreaking – but he just writes so beautifully.