4 3 2 1 - Paul Auster

 

Self-indulging. Obscenely long. Repetitive. 

And yet. 

Beautiful. (Not overly) ambitious. Surprisingly readable. 

After investing the classic £2.50 at Fopp, this book was used to stop any door in the flat (even the heaviest ones) from slamming. Then I was left with only this and some other long-unread tomes, and decided to give it a chance. 

Sure, 4321 is a stylstic exercise if there ever was one, but because Auster is such a superb writer, and because he has so much to write about, the countless pages actually flow quite seamlessly. The reader actually grows to like every single one of the Archies, and actually fall in love with every single version of Amy. 

If this was anybody without Auster's skills (or without the life-experience that he can draw upon for the autobiographical passages) this book would be absolutely unreadable. Or, actually, it just wouldn't get published. But it did, and hopefully enough readers have decided to give it a chance rather than using it as a door-stopper.

Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

And to think that there was a time when I thought very little of Orwell. That was because I had only read Animal Farm (and didn't exactly love it) and heard an old member of the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War label him a "fucking tourist" when asked about Orwell's contribution to the war (an absolutely priceless moment!).

Much like everyone, I'm not quite sure how much of what Orwell tells in this fictional work of non-fiction actually happened or not, but it surely is thought-provoking and compelling. It is also probably one of those books that won't leave a permanent mark on me, but one whose overall sense will remain memorable.

And I don't know why, but I have the feeling it will remain on my shelf for longer than the very similar The Road by Jack London will (disclaimer: I did like The Road, but it's now with a pile of other books parked in my wardrobe as they are looking for a new home - with the second child coming around I'm now more determined than ever to have books only on my IKEA Billy and nowhere else in the flat!)



My Name is Asher Lev – Chaim Potok

For all the love that I normally give to the farm, Halycon Books in Greenwich, with its current 1£ sale on all its books, might be my new favourite place in the world (and one that I discovered absolutely by chance after a disappointing trip to the Amnesty International book sale in Blackheath). Having had only a few minutes in the shop, I grabbed one of the first books that caught my eye, and man was I pleased.

My Name Is Asher Lev might be the best book I’ve read in 2017. It’s got everything, and a bit more. It’s Jewish (not “just” Philip Roth or Mordechai Richler Jewish – Chaim Potok was a rabbi!), it’s set in New York but with extensive sections in Paris, it’s about art but also about artists, about the perilous balance of an unstable family, and Asher Lev’s life is surrounded by wonderful secondary characters (for me Reb Yudel Krinsky is right up there with Melquiades, and that says a lot).

There is absolutely nothing I would ever dare to criticize about My Name Is Asher Lev – although sadly that means that I am really in no rush to read any other Potok books (and in particular not The Gift of Asher Lev) for fear of spoiling its memory.

The First Forty-Nine Stories – Ernest Hemingway

It is officially time to go back to blogging, at least a little bit, after almost two months. There are a number of reasons behind my disappearing acts: changing jobs, my daughter starting nursery (and me taking care of pick-ups and drop-offs in an attempt not to feel completely useless) and also the fact that I have been genuinely reading less, with most of my last month spent reading The Brothers Karamazov at a time that wasn’t ideal.

The First Forty-Nine Stories is a book that I actually read months ago, after it was given to my wife as a gift more than a decade ago. Much like other Hemingway books that I’ve read after my teenage years, some passages left me quite untouched, others made me positively shudder at their “manly man-ness”, and some just kind of blew my mind.

My two favourites were easily “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” – because in it I saw more than the standard Hemingway macho hunting story (for once I thought there was more than a hint of self-criticism and dark irony in the finale) – and “My Old Man” – a story that is often neglected but that I truly loved, possibly because that’s the way an only child is bound to feel about his father if he is perceived as being mistreated. 

The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway

This is one of the first “real” books I’ve read. I was 14 and I was moving my first tentative steps as a pseudo-intellectual. I picked it pretty much because I had heard of Hemingway, felt that if he was good enough to be a myth for my parents’ generation it was going to be good enough for me.

Fast forward another fourteen years and I now wonder whether this is one of those few books that I should re-read. I liked it back then, but I now wonder whether I liked it because I felt like I had to, or because that’s how I actually felt. I find it hard to believe that I could really understand, even vaguely, the dynamics between Jake and Brett Ashley let alone having actually ever felt any of the feelings and desires they were talking about (despite the fact that, having kissed three girls in middle-school I felt like I was a great expert in the field of women).

One thing that I surely did appreciate was the travelling aspects of the novel, and I think that quite a bit of my love for Paris, and for Spain and its traditions actually come from this book.   

The Legend of the Holy Drinker – Joseph Roth

At age 14 I was confused between The Legend of the Fisher King (the way in which the Terry Gilliam movie is titled in Italy) and The Legend of the Holy Drinker. So I watched both movies (the latter directed by Ermanno Olmi and with a masterful Rutger Hauer) and read Roth’s novella over the span of a few days – stealing it from my aunt’s bookshelf, although she had probably stolen it from ours years before.

I am unsure whether this book can be considered a masterpiece only because of its diminutive size, but it’s surely a work of absolute beauty and, surprisingly, not one of despair like I was expecting. I immediately came to care quite a lot about Andreas’s fortunes, but the way in which these develops – both at their highs and their lows – is pure poetry.

I can’t remember whether it’s the movie or the book (or actually, probably both) that ends with the line “May God grant us all, all of us drinkers, such a good and easy death!” but it’s probably one of the most remarkably memorable closing lines in the 20th century.

Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller

 

What was the incredible pull that France had on American writers in the early 20^th century? I’ve watched Midnight in Paris and read Tropic of Cancer and didn’t quite understand it: the first seemed to paint a world so perfect it probably never existed, the latter a world so grim that I wonder why Miller didn’t try to swim his way back to the US.

The prose is obviously innovative for its time, but that doesn’t mean that it’s particularly pleasant to read. At least the sections set in Paris manage to show a glimpse of hope for the author’s life, his future, and possibly the future of mankind. But the pages about his experience as a teacher in Dijon are some of the driest – and possibly rather useless – pages I have read lately.