Olive, Again - Elizabeth Strout

 

After the disappointment of My Name Is Lucy Barton I had fairly low expectations from this sequel to Olive Kitteridge. 

Turns out, if anything this book is actually better. As Olive ages, some traits of her character become sharper while others turn more mellow, chickens come home to roost in terms of her family relations and post (first) widowhood love life, and in general the anecdotes and stories that are intertwined in the book are always extremely profound (despite being covered over just a handful of pages). 

I actually had to remind myself multiple times that Strout was still (relatively) young when she wrote Olive, Again since she writes about the ageing process with such tact and credibility. And to be honest I probably enjoyed this book so much because Olive reminds me more and more of my cantankerous grandmother. 

Public Library and Other Stories - Ali Smith

 

This book made me realize that, perhaps, I should reduce my consumption of Ali Smith books (something that was bound to happen sooner or later anyway, as I've read most of them by now). 

The wordplay and critical observations that would have blown me away a couple of years ago have now lost their spark. 

And this short story collection to me felt haphazardly put together, while the idea of alternating the stories with short personal recollections of (often nostalgically long gone) libraries was probably one of the least original that Smith ever came up with. 

Still, we agree that libraries should play a crucial role in our society, but - having worked in one for the last six years - I definitely believe we should really revolutionize how we think of the spaces and their purpose. 

Life: A User's Manual - Georges Perec

 

One of my dad's favourite books, and one that he has re-read recently. 

While I can understand why it was popular "back then", I really don't think it has aged that well. The idea of short stories and anecdotes held together by a red thread (in this case the building itself and some of the people who live/have lived there) has been done a lot, and I find many contemporary authors' approaches (Strout above all) much better. 

Style above everything - much like with many French writers of the period - works wonders for many readers, just not me in this case. 

A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan

  

Until a few weeks ago I had never even heard of Jennifer Egan (bad me, she's a Pulitzer winner after all!). Then I met a colleague who is writing a PhD thesis on DeLillo, Auster, Whitehead and... Jennifer Egan, so, given the other three names, I figured I might as well read something by her before talking about literature around the office again. 

It's a pleasant read and a nice series of interwoven short stories, full of (not so) veiled criticism aimed at the music industry and our general society and humorous moments. At the same time, though, I can't quite bring myself to consider "pop-rock" literature as something of particular literary significance, probably because I read (and watched) a fair bit of similar things growing up. 

Entertaining, yes. Thought-provoking, relatively. Pulitzer-worthy, maybe not...

Olive Ketteridge - Elizabeth Strout

  

Before reading my first book by Elizabeth Strout, every time I looked at the cover page of one of her works I would immediately mentally dismiss it as "most likely well-written chick-lit". Yes, I'm a macho macho man, and like many of us I'm very often wrong. In this case, I terribly, hopelessly, so very deeply wrong...

Strout is not just good, she's great. The way in which her short stories combine to make a touching novel is superb. And the fact that she makes the reader grow fond of an idiosyncratic and in many ways unlikeable character like Olive is impressive. 

And whoever decided to cast Frances McDormand for the TV series is an absolute genius, as she was born to play that role.

Flights - Olga Tokarczuk

  

 

I try to use my Italian library subscription to read books originally written either in Italian or in a language that I don't speak. Having read dozens of Italian novels throughout 2022, I decided to start 2023 with something else, and opted for the 2018 Nobel Prize winner.

And I spent a few hundred pages wondering why she won a Nobel Prize.

Or why this book got published really.

I found a number of her pseudo-reflections on her approach to life and travels to be pretentiously and unoriginally new-agey.

I also repetedly found my mind wandering off as I read a 10-line "short story" and managed to retain a little less than zero of it by the following page.

To give credit where credit is due, I rather liked the story of Chopin's funeral, but that's about it.

At the end of the day though, it's probably a good thing I don't get to decide who wins the Nobel Prize, otherwise American authors would be even more over-represented...

 

London Observed - Doris Lessing

And this was the first book I read after we left the hospital with our baby daughter. 

It was ideal, London-based, touching and not dated at all despite being made up of stories published over a number of years (for that, I guess you have to thank London and it's ability to remain true to itself even in moments of dramatic change). 

A perfect read for a hectic time in my life, and one of the few collections of short stories to make it onto my bookshelf. 

Up the Junction - Nell Dunn

Just the quickest of posts to say that I really, really, really wanted to like this book. For the Squeeze song, and for the fact that it looked so very promising from its synopsis.

And instead I really didn't. Some stories were just not interesting enough for me (I'm probably a bad person, but the shallowness and uncouthness of some of the characters really got on my nerves), and others were just too much (the abortion one, for instance).

A shame. Possibly, given the expectations, the most disappointing book of the year so far.

A Universal History of Infamy - Jorge Luis Borges

At a time when I had virtually no books left to read at home, I started going back to my wonderful Meridiani (a collection of books presenting the complete, or at least the best, works of hundreds of authors in finely printed volumes) and picked up Borges.

Having only read a few of his short stories years ago (and having been left relatively unimpressed) I was happy to give him another chance, and so went for what is apparently considered as the first work of magical realism.

The short stories are curious and gripping, and knowing some of the characters discussed makes them more interesting. In the end I liked the book a lot more than I had expected, so much so that I decided to read another Borges straight afterwards - however, I limped through the first short story of the following book (The Aleph) and decided to put it back on the shelf, where it will probably remain for quite a while.

A Place I’ve Never Been – David Leavitt

After months of inactivity, let’s start a recap of the books that I’ve read in the last weeks of 2017 – and let’s make a solemn promise that I’ll update the blog more frequently. Or at least that I’ll try.

A Place I’ve Never Been is a typical book from the surprising second-hand book shelves of my loyal local farm – I’m not quite sure how many people read Leavitt in the first place, but I’m surprised that the few who do decide to part from one of his good books (then again, considering it’s the second Penguin edition of a Leavitt book that I find at the farm, maybe someone local is trying to educate the masses and instead, sadly for him/her, ends up educating me).

This collection of short stories doesn’t have the same literary weight of The Secret Language of Cranes, but it’s clearly enjoyable nonetheless. The problem is that short stories are probably not Leavitt’s forte – their characters aren’t as nicely nuanced as the ones from his novels, and the stories don’t seem as deep (a fairly obvious comment for short stories, but then again writers like Alice Munro manage to really make the most out of 20 pages).

Maybe, though, I’m just a bit annoyed at the romantic portrayal of the Italian countryside and the Italian language – I outgrew it all some 15 years ago. Or maybe it just drives me mad to see the number of misspelled Italian words thrown in there – although I suspect that in the early 1990s it really was a big deal to know what a machiato (sic) was.

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. 

Summer Book – Tove Jansson

A book that I’ve bought (again at the Blackheath Book Sale!) because my former English teacher recommended it to me.

The good things I can say of this are: it’s cute, it’s an easy and relaxing summer read, it reminded me of Pippi Longstocking, and it’s so much better than the Winter Book (then again, hardly the literary accomplishment of a lifetime).

And there are ultimately no bad things I can say about this book, other than the fact that it’s “cute” (which I earlier listed as a positive, but it’s undeniably also a big limitation) and that I really wish it had some sort of development rather than being ultimately a collection of free-standing short-stories. Or, yet again, maybe I’m just not deep and poetic (or, crucially in this case, a woman – as I believe a book like this appeals more to a female audience).

But one thing did blow my mind: back in the day those extremely sweet characters who lived in close contact with nature found it perfectly ok to dump their rubbish in the sea. Oh the times they-are-a-changing (very rightfully!)…

The Refugees – Viet Thanh Nguyen

The very last of the books one of my well-read colleagues gave me before changing jobs. Honestly, I hadn’t heard of Nguyen until then (and he’s a Pulitzer winner, which goes to show how much I know about literature probably!) – my bad…

I’m still not the biggest fan of short stories, but this book is one of the exceptions. What I particularly liked is that it mostly talks about South Vietnamese who were never happy with the actions of Ho Chi Minh, Giap and the Viet Cong.

Obviously, some of the stories are better than others. The meeting of the two half-sisters separated by Oceans, continents and culture is a bit bland, but the story of the old demented professor who confuses his wife and his past lover is pure gold, as is the opening one about the refugee and the gay couple in San Francisco.

At this point, too bad I missed Nguyen’s talk at Shakespeare and Co when I was in Paris last week!

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!!

On Chesil Beach and In Between the Sheets – Ian McEwan

This time I’m tackling two books at a time, and I can do that because a) I have already talked about McEwan more than enough, and b) put together, the two books barely get over 300 pages. As usual, I got the first of the two from the local farm, and the second was from a wonderful Amnesty International book-sale in Blackheath.

In short: reading the two books quite simply confirmed what I already knew/felt/thought about McEwan. His early stuff (in this case In Between the Sheets) remains dark, incestuous, pornographic and overall – when he doesn’t completely lose the plot (in all senses) – those short stories are frantically interesting and well-written. Most of the books he published recently (in this case On Chesil Beach) read like the author’s celebration of his own talent as a writer: sure, McEwan’s prose remains great, but his plots just bore me these days (and I do realize that the big surprise in the end is meant to make the reader reconsider everything he initially thought about the couple’s troubled wedding night – but is it really that much of a surprise?!?).

So yeah, only a couple more books and then I’ll stop reading McEwan. Well, only a couple more books and I’ll have read everything he actually wrote. 

A Winter Book – Tove Jannson

A book that one of my colleagues gave me because he was moving (or maybe because he had read it and found it awfully dull?).

Sure, these short stories are really well written, but have no appeal whatsoever to someone who doesn’t have a passionate love for the great North, or for sailing. I had never heard of Tove Jannson, but this book felt like a fairly pathetic attempt to put together a number of stories (and of fan letters – seriously?!?) just to make a quick buck (maybe to pay the medical bill for an 84-old author? Although I’m not really quite sure how many copies the book might have sold). 

Close Range – Annie Proulx

Typical collection of short stories for my lunch breaks.

Being Annie Proulx, typically well written and extremely interesting (kind of like Cormac McCarthy when he’s not too gruesome). The standout story is clearly Brokeback Mountain, but pretty much every single one of them is remarkable either for its humour, or for its gripping portrayal of life in the Mid-West, or even for its portrayal of attitudes towards mental illness in rural Wyoming.

I think this book would deserve something more than these two lines, but being short stories I’ve sort of ran out of insightful comments already…

Bagombo Snuff Box – Kurt Vonnegut

I don’t even know how I managed (or was it my wife that managed?) to get my hands on this collection of short stories, but I’m glad I did.

I was expecting science fiction, but what I got was a wide range of styles, with stories often about American suburban life (the joy!), and in which the American dream is, in one way or another, crushed time and again.

Vonnegut’s humour and irony are very much there, like in all his other works, and some of the stories (like The Package) would have given me a bit of faith in the future of mankind – too bad they were written 60 years ago and the world is still very much an awful place… 

Un Giorno di Fuoco – Beppe Fenoglio

And this is a collection of short stories that means a lot to me but, I have to recognize, probably will mean nothing to most non-Italian readers (save maybe a few people from Southern France whose experiences and family histories may have been rather similar).

But, refusing to leave my bias aside, I think that Fenoglio might have been the best Italian writer of the 20^th century (surely Il Partigiano Johnny and Una Questione Privata deserve to be considered among the 50 most significant Italian books published over the last 100 years). True, his characters smoke a lot and might have values that are at times anachronistic and at times awfully politically incorrect by today’s standard, but Fenoglio manages to bring to life the common wisdom of the peasantry and their daily problems like no other author, and the short stories of Un Giorno di Fuoco (many of which have nothing to do with Resistance and anti-fascism) are no exceptions. 

Dubliners – James Joyce

How I remember my high-school classmates spending months and months reading (?!?) this collection of short stories and pretending that it was the most meaningful book they had ever read. Having read it over a lazy weekend I have a couple of thoughts (both for them and for whoever happens to read this blog):

1.       I understand it was cool to say that one was reading Joyce as a teenager, but, seriously, spending 2 months carrying it around feels a bit excessive – maybe my classmates needed to show off?

2.       I understand it was cool to say Dubliners was the greatest book they had read (perhaps it was factually true, as for a number of them it could have been their first book not written by Roald Dahl), but, honestly, what’s the point?

I have the feeling this is something that you can only appreciate if you’re Irish (probably like you can only appreciate Fenoglio’s short stories if you’re Italian), but if you aren’t – well, to restate my thought above, what’s the point?