Taras Bulba – Nicolaj Gogol

I had to read some Gogol at some point. But seriously, what the hell?

Sure, I’m not Russian so I can’t understand, but I’m normally all up for epic stories of national courage (even Russian courage, in the case of Michael Strogoff…) but isn’t Taras Bulba (not written in italics because I’m referring to the character and not to the novel) a bit much?

Sure, your son has switched sides (a bit too easily also), but killing him in battle without feeling at least a wee bit emotional sounds, well, heartless. At a certain point even his comrades tell Taras that he might want to take it down a notch but he continues to be an almost perfect killing machine.

One would hope that at least while he’s being burned he would stop. But he doesn’t. He keeps on yelling at his Cossacks. A true leader. And possibly an idiot. 

Forest of the Pygmies – Isabel Allende

Having read and loved Paula I thought I would give an absolutely different kind of Allende novel a chance. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.

It probably has to do with how old and boring I already am, but novels for young adults “these days” usually can’t match the quality and intensity of the old ones (Salgari beats Allende, Molnar beats Grossman, etc.). The three-headed monster is hopefully more a reference to Cerberus than to the Trinity, but its mystery is surely not particularly imaginative (anyone who has ever wondered why Clark Kent is never in the same room as Superman is bound to figure out the riddle quite soon).

Sure, Allende is commendable in her constant desire to point out that all cultures have to be not just respected but also appreciated, but in this book she says that crocodiles are amphibians and I just can’t take that! 

Fever Pitch – Nick Hornby

I had this book for years, read bits and pieces of it, and know the movie by heart, but I wanted to read it cover to cover at a time in which I was watching some hard-nosed yet inspirational football, and that’s exactly what’s happening with Italy at the Euros right now (that is, until Germany just totally destroys us on Saturday).

The book is undoubtedly well-written and humorous, and so many of the points that Hornby makes clearly echo with most football fans (even people who, like me, have been to the stadium only a few times). I loved reading of his mom leaving him post-it notes with the results of late games when he was a kid (my dad did the same with me, and I still remember his Juventus-Torino 5-0 with a Vialli hat-trick and goals by Ferrara and Ravanelli) and finding out that Attilio Lombardo was indeed also famous in England for his hairline (or lack thereof) more than for his – absolutely unquestionable – skills.

If only there was an actual plot (like there is in the movie) to join the anecdotes together, this would be an excellent novel (well, maybe that’s a stretch), but instead it just remains, erm, anecdotal – and I don’t really love this sort of books as more often than not they’re just way too easy to read and relate to (which is slightly counterintuitive, I do realize). And as a Juve supporter, I suffered every time Hornby described a hooligan charge in the 70’s and early 80’s, because I knew  that at some point it would end up with the Heysel disaster…

Freedom – Jonathan Franzen

One of those books that have been with me for quite some time – to be precise since June 2011, when a student living in my dorm left it behind.

Much like with The Corrections, Franzen does life in Minnesota (in particular the life of frantic women in Minnesota) oh so very well. The problem for me, however, is that I somewhat feel like he doesn’t do life in NY for a cool musician or life in DC for an environmentalist nearly as well.

The chapters authored by Patty are wonderful, the others slightly less so. But going back to Minnesota, the clash between most of the locals and the Berglunds reminded me of the Brexit debates that we are seeing pretty much all over England right now (except in London, because, you know, people kind of like us continentals over here!).

Maybe I wouldn’t have enjoyed reading about Patty so much had she not been a basketball player, but the hypothermia trick is pure genius and is something that I should definitely try out if I ever screw up quite badly with my adored wife. 

The Zone of Interest – Martin Amis

One of those extremely rare books that I borrowed from a library (actually two libraries, since I read half of it in its Italian translation in Bra – yes, my hometown has a funny name! – and half of it in its original version in London). I had somehow managed to avoid reading anything by both Kingsley and Martin Amis, but my mom told me I absolutely had to read The Zone of Interest, and for once I did as I was told straight away.

The Zone of Interest is hugely moving, despite the fact that a number of its characters occasionally read a bit too much like allegories of the German population of the time. Needless to say, of the three main narrators, the Jewish Szmul is the one who often provides the most interesting insight into the (fictionalized) life of the camp. Somehow, though, I have the feeling that the epilogue is a bit unnecessary (much like I felt no need for the final chapters of Group Portrait with Lady or the last book of The Tin Drum) and I feel like the novel would have had a more long-lasting impact on me without its final pages.

The book also made me think about artists telling the stories of people that are not their own. In particular I thought about the comments made by Spike Lee on Tarantino’s Django Unchained. To me, as long as you have class and tact (like Martin Amis in this case), you can tell anyone’s story – sadly two things that were lacking from Spike Lee’s Miracle at Sant’Anna.  

In the Country of Last Things – Paul Auster

I don’t even know how I got this book. A fairly typical Auster novel. And the issue with fairly typical Auster novels is that, well, they are a bit too typical. And when they’re not works of art (to me Sunset Park still tops the list, together with the slightly more atypical Mr Vertigo) they’re just more of the same. And when you have read a lot of them, well, you get the idea.

The entire book/letter reads like an extended introspective anecdote from one of Auster’s bigger novels, and while there is nothing wrong with that in itself, it just doesn’t excite me anymore.

Ah, and I think that McCarthy does American dystopia so much better (although the preparations for the final uncertain trip remind me of the tension of the final scene of The Birds). 

The Closed Circle – Jonathan Coe

And for once a book that my aunt gave me in 2001 and that it took me 15 years to read.

And for once a book by Jonathan Coe that I liked, but not so much.

Probably the events described by Coe were just too recent to be observed with his normally hilarious humour, but I found The Closed Circle to be a bit too sad and bleak. Also, too much of the action takes place in London (it’s just more interesting when Coe talks about the Midlands). And lastly, even though the book has a number of Coe’s customarily dramatic plot-twists, these are just a bid bland (if not stale) if compared to the ones of The Rotters’ Club and What a Carve Up!

The Closed Circle is ultimately an interesting portrayal of Britain’s recent history and the problems of Blair’s (and the former director of my school’s!) Third Way, but it’s just not Coe at his best (or maybe the 70s were a lot more fun than the 90s, or maybe 18-year olds are a lot more fun than 40-year olds, or all of the above!)

Julian – Gore Vidal

It’s not like I haven’t read a book in three weeks (I wouldn’t dare!), I just didn’t update the blog because we had an action-packed few days in Italy collecting second-hand baby stuff and taking my wife’s growing belly on tour for one last time.

Julian is a book that my mom gave me some 15 years ago and that, like all good sons, I kindly ignored for as long as I could (that is until I realized that having loved Memoirs of Hadrian so much I would have at least “liked” Julian). And, much to everyone’s surprise, I did like it.

Despite the fact that the reader can perceive Gore Vidal’s massive ego even through pages that are meant to have been written almost 2000 years ago, the book has a number of things going for it: the triple narrator makes it more dynamic than Memoirs of Hadrian, the frequent digs at early Christianity are just so much more fun than the ones at contemporary Christianity (seriously, too easy and boring!), and the historical descriptions and not-so-obvious-yet-obvious facts (like that one at that point could become Roman emperor without ever having been to Rome) make it a very interesting read.

Yet, I like a time when man was at the centre of things, between the disappearance of the gods and the appearance of God, better than a time after the appearance of God during which the gods tried to regain their lost territory. So, ultimately, Julian is no match for Hadrian, at least for me. 

Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

The first book from my office’s book club that I actually bother writing about. And why is that? Because over the years I’ve heard a few people too many talking about Murakami as if he was a writing god.

With every passing chapter of Norwegian Wood I kept on thinking about Irwin (from Alan Bennet’s The History Boys) handing essays back to his students: “Dull. Dull. Abysmally dull. A triumph… the dullest of the lot… I didn’t say it was wrong. I said it was dull. Its sheer competence was staggering. Interest nil. Oddity nil. Singularity nowhere.”

Seriously, despite a very impressive suicides/pages ratio, the book’s most noticeable characteristic is the author’s ability to express feelings, impressions, and thoughts with the vacuity (not to mention limited vocabulary, since at least in my translation everyone is “special” and has complex “issues”) of a teenager.

I’m also not quite sure why pretty much every cultural reference (with the exceptions of a few books, and one song) is actually linked to the Western world. Has Japan not produced a single musician or actor of note, does Murakami hate Japanese culture, or was he desperately trying to appeal to Western audiences? I can rule out the first option, not sure about the other two.

And for all the respect that the main character shows for the complex “issues” of the women he sleeps with, can I point out that the way in which he uses his roommate’s autistic traits as a conversation starter is just not funny?

But maybe Murakami is a genius (and if the book is even remotely autobiographical I’m impressed by the ease with which he used to get laid as a teenager!) and I’m hating on the book only because I’ve always liked The Rolling Stones so much better than the Beatles…

Sweet Tooth – Ian McEwan

This is my sixth McEwan novel. Two I thought were magnificent (The Cement Garden and The Child in Time), one was great but had a misleading title (in Atonement Briony doesn’t atone!), and three (Saturday, Amsterdam, and now Sweet Tooth) were just very mediocre.

And why is Sweet Tooth mediocre? Because McEwan has too much sympathy for an awful character (Serena is very much like Briony in Atonement), because it takes for freaking ever to get to the actual core of the plot, because the actual lives of interesting Cambridge spies (just ask Alan Bennett) unlike Serena’s are actually, well, interesting, and most of all because – unsurprisingly – everyone is again so posh that it gets to be really rather unnerving.

Like Briony, Serena is completely self-centred, and even in this case McEwan seems to defend her (the comments the narrator makes about the University of Sussex – where McEwan himself studied – are absolutely awful and yet appear to be justified even when they are unjustifiable). And the plot twist at the very end is just not that ground-breaking or mind-blowing (plus, the letter that constitutes the final chapter is simply way too long). 

The Russia House – John le Carré

On my very first trip to Books for Free I faced a dilemma: with Group Portrait with Lady and What a Carve Up! already in my bag I had to pick my third (and last) free book for the day. On the one hand I had The Russia House, on the other Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. Much like Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I chose poorly, picking up le Carré’s novel and leaving behind Greene’s (never to be seen again, at least not for free!).

The Russia House is actually ok, but that’s about it. I was expecting something as exciting as Gorky Park, but instead found a fairly slow book in which, ultimately, very little happens. It probably was thrilling back in the time of Glasnost and Perestroika, but for someone who has to teach about those times (and who has grown to take a number of the comments made by Goethe as rather obvious in the late stages of the Cold War) it just wasn’t that interesting.

The love-story behind the old washed-up anti-hero and the beautiful Russian is just a bit too cliché. And the most interesting character in the novel (Landau) just disappears after two chapters.

Also, can somebody explain to me how a spy (like the narrator) who has access to tapes but not to video recordings of the meetings described can know how the characters he is spying upon are sitting and how the light reflects in their eyes?!?

Suite Francaise - Irène Némirovsky

Bad historian (yet again) I had never read anything by Irène Némirovsky until my mother decided to invest a cheeky pound at Oxfam and buy me a copy of this novel.

Which, in my view, is actually two novels of extremely uneven quality. On the one hand, Tempête en Juin is an unusual portrayal of a defeated nation and its weaknesses, but on the other hand Dolce is a fairly boring and uneventful description of life in the countryside in occupied France with romantic overtones (seriously, ask Fenoglio how to write a novel about Nazi occupation and its impact on the countryside).

Of all the parallel plots that interlink in Tempête en Juin, the story of Philippe Péricands and “his” kids is breathtakingly beautiful in a way that only French stories about children of the 40s and 50s can be (Les Choristes, Au revoir les enfants), and is a reminder of how unstable the lives of troubled youth at the time could be, very much like in Les Quatre Cents Coups.

The one thing I struggle to understand though, is how Némirovsky managed to have an early draft of the two pieces of the Suite that was already so polished – had I been fighting against time like she was, I think I would have desperately tried to finish a very messy first draft of the whole book before allowing myself to re-read it even once. But then again, I’m not a great writer…

Master Georgie – Beryl Bainbridge

It’s always reassuring to know that, if I’m looking for a quick quality read, I can always find a book by Beryl Bainbridge (and all my key second-hand shops, Fopp, Books for Free etc. seem to have copies of them somehow). This one in particular was probably coming from Books for Free.

While I didn’t like it as much as An Awfully Big Adventure or Harriet Said… (which I’ve only just realized I never wrote about in this blog – silly me! As it’s an outstanding, thought-provoking and disturbing read) I still enjoyed Master Georgie. More than anything, I think Bainbridge deserves to be praised for looking at the Crimean War (a war about which I know next to nothing – in case anyone needed further proof that I’m a bad historian).

The one issue I had with this book, however, was that I found it rather “uneven”: of the six chapters narrated by three characters (but never by Georgie himself), Myrtle’s two are absolutely beautiful and touching (after all, Bainbridge has always been an absolute master at describing the lives of troubled girls with their hopes, fantasies, and realities), Pompey’s ones are cute and endearing in an Oliver Twistesque kind of way, but Potter’s ones are just a bit too plain (I do realize Bainbridge needed to have a more mature – although not necessarily reliable – narrator, in particular in Crimea, but I just didn’t find his chapters to be at the same level as the others’). 

The Casual Vacancy – J.K. Rowling

I’ve only read one Harry Potter. That makes me an awful human being in the eyes of many, but that also means that I’m not disappointed at the lack of magic in this book by J.K. Rowling.

The Casual Vacancy is daring but enjoyable. Its characters for one reason or another are mostly unlikable (maybe with the exception of the Walls and of Andrew?) but remain interesting. The plot is not something that leaves the reader on the edge of the seat – I mean, these are local elections after all… – but the novel is quite an acute portrayal of contemporary Britain.

So in all fairness I think J.K. Rowling should be given credit for writing this book (and for making a number of points that are surprisingly and commendably political). It was really quite good. Had it had a bit more irony or humour in it (nothing really brought a smile to my face, except maybe for old and drunken Samantha snogging teenage Andrew) perhaps it would have even been “really” good…

What a Carve Up! – Jonathan Coe

One of the many books I snatched from Books for Free in Stratford before it closed (the reserves, unfortunately, are starting to slowly run out…). A few months ago I read – and really enjoyed – The Rotters’ Club, but found this novel to be on another level.

What a Carve Up is a cross between epic family novels (Solomon Gursky Was Here is the first one that comes to mind, because of the nature of the Winshaw family and the mischievousness of some of its older members – often more interesting than their kids), cheesy mysteries (Ten Little Indians) and the most enjoyable and ironic Alan Bennett works.

The constant alternation of styles, narrators and registers is obviously yet again a display of Coe’s considerable talent. And the fact that so much of the novel is set in Northern England is again a welcome departure from London-centred British literature.

Much like in The Rotters’ Club with Malcolm, even in What a Carve Up Coe kills off one of my favourite characters (Fiona) relatively early (I mean, not super-early, but the writing is on the wall from the start, so I don’t feel like I’m spoiling too much). Yet I don’t hate him for that. Although I really wish I knew what happened to Phoebe and Graham…