Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - Alan Sillitoe

  

I read this novel as I had obviously enjoyed Sillitoe's Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, liking its raw prose and its subject matter. 

The problem here is, clearly, that I still liked Sillitoe's raw prose, but the subject matter felt far less stimulating. The athletic exploits of a troubled teenager are much more interesting to me than the love troubles of a working-class young man whose life revolves aroud evenings at the pub. The fact that my already poor relationship with pub culture is now at an all-time low most likely didn't help. 

Still, I was glad to find a reference to bastards grinding you down that predated Margaret Atwood by almost three decades.

Cannery Row - John Steinbeck

 

 

In case I hadn't made it abundantly clear in the past, I am a sucker for American literature, and I am ultimately deeply in love with Steinbeck. Sure, deeply flawed macho macho man, and at times an ass to his friend Ed Ricketts (who is the not even remotely disguised Doc of the novel), but man was he a good writer. 

Cannery Row is in the mould of Tortilla Flat, perhaps a bit deeper and a bit less picaresque. It's one of those novels that - despite not being "great" - ultimately virtually everyone will like because of its sloppily well-intentioned characters, its stereotypically Californian setting, and the overall feeling that, one way or another, things will turn out alright and life will go on as usual.

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.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye - Muriel Spark

My wonderful employer gives us 100£ every year to spend on books that help us do our job - I argued that for my workshops on London I need to get ideas from books set in the city. Surprisingly, this long short worked (and thanks to Amazon I now have 20 extra books or so that should see me through the summer).

The Ballad of Peckham Rye made me really happy - it's not exactly great literature, but seeing the problems caused by immigrants (Scottish and Irish) that nowadays are no longer considered immigrants was truly interesting. Disclaimer - I'm an immigrant myself, though I have British nationality now because, you know, short-sighted policies, decisions, referenda etc.

Most of all, however, the book reminded me of how I love being able to visualize the places were a novel is set, and how wackily funny life can be in South London.

Germinal – Émile Zola

One of the books that I inherited from my grandparents, and one which my grandad had loved dearly (that is, before he started mashing all his 19^th century greats together and think of how badly Raskolnikov had behaved with the Karamazov brothers, but luckily Valjean had managed to sort everything out).

130 years after its publication, the prose of Germinal is not really cutting-edge (but was that ever the case for a feuilleton?), yet the content remains extremely poignant and, sadly, current (the story of the 33 Chilean miners hasn’t been completely forgotten, at least not by me). There is no need to point out how deep the book is, or how one cannot really understand the rise of the left in Europe without reading works like this – what struck me the most, however, was the wonderfully touching depiction of the daily lives of the French miners (I believe Beppe Fenoglio and Nuto Revelli would then follow in Zola’s footsteps when they looked at the Piedmontese poor in the 20^th century).

And the fact that, in my version of the book, all the names were Italianized was so very sweetly old-school…

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – Alan Sillitoe

This book found me rather than it being the other way around. Captivated by its title, I picked it up in the public library in Imperia, the town on the Italian Riviera where my family has a tiny flat (so tiny it’s actually a small room – not even classifiable as a studio).

In spite of all its anger, the book made me happy. Because the main story is about waking up early to go for a run, about competing, about training even when it’s so cold you can’t feel your fingers and it’s so dark you can barely see the ground you are stomping on. All that, in my case, chasing the dream of one day finally breaking 17 minutes on a 5k in a small park in South East London...

But the book is more than just that. The other short stories in the collection also deserve their due credit as they are probably the most credible portraits of the life of the working class in the Midlands and Northern England after the end of the Second World War that I have ever read.