The Marriage Plot – Jeffrey Eugenides

Despite having loved Middlesex I resisted the urge to buy this book when I found it selling for 2.50£ at Fopp. And well I did, since it appeared (untouched obviously, because why would people open a book?) on the shelves of the loyal local farm for 2£ less*…

The Marriage Plot is in so many ways one of the best campus novels ever: the confused characters, their witty exchanges (possibly a bit too witty at times? I definitely wasn’t that smart and quick back in the day), their frequent crises, their complex relationships with their families – it’s all there. Then the characters leave college (a Brown that at times is sneered upon by Eugenides himself, although not as much as Lisa Simpson does), and sadly their lives become just a lot less interesting. They seemed smart beyond their years in college, and when they enter the real world they appear not only completely unprepared, which would be fine and understandable, but also surprisingly dull and ordinary if compared to their younger selves.

Or probably I have seen a few too many students with mental breakdowns to be really shocked by the way in which the second half of the book develops.

*Considering I am one of the last few avid readers left in the world, I am quite aware of the fact that if everyone did what I do publishing houses would close even more quickly. But what can I do? I do love a bargain. And also, there are enough books that I still want to read to already last me a lifetime anyway…

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. 

Youth – J.M. Coetzee

50p. Local farm bookshelves. All that.

Now, I would buy pretty much anything written by Coetzee (and pretty much anything that sells for 50p for that matter) so I couldn’t resist the temptation to buy Youth, but, objectively, this is just a very well-written story of (what was then a) fairly average young man trying to find his way in big and scary London. Sure, Coetzee writes impeccably, and the sections of the story set in the IT company at the outskirts of London have got the traits of a bizarre coming-of-age story (his nerdy  colleague who can’t feed himself is probably the best part here), but that’s about it.

All in all, its literary weight is probably inferior to that of Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (which I found just about bearable a few months ago), but since I love Coetzee and I don’t really love Orwell, I’ll try to not say this too loudly…

Vino e Pane – Ignazio Silone

One of the books that I got from my grandparents’ shelves (my granddad – despite oddly still remembering most of the first book of the Iliad by heart – is, well, rather “forgetful” these days, and a couple of years ago my grandma has made the rather commendable decision to only read newspapers).

Vino e Pane is a good book about Fascism and its impact on small secluded Italian hamlets. It’s also a book about Catholic piety and communist resistance (I favour one of the two, you can guess which one…) that is probably at its best when the two intertwine, like in the figure of the old Don Benedetto.

While the success that the book has enjoyed, in particular outside of Italy, is perfectly understandable, the quality of this work doesn’t match that of Silone's Fontamara or, for someone who has spent years reading books about Fascist Italy, of most of the works of Fenoglio, Vittorini, Malaparte, Levi, Revelli… So while I’m glad I’ve read it, Vino e Pane doesn’t really crack the top-10 of my favourite novels about the Italian resistance.  

A Heart so White – Javier Marías

For once a book that I bought at full price! Scary, I know – but Javier Marías was coming to give a lecture at the LSE and I really needed to give him something to sign (being the first in line for an autograph after the lecture, he actually even wrote a line about the book and its secrets on my copy – yay!).

Much like Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, A Heart so White is clearly written by a literally genius. And as it was also clear during the lecture, this is a genius who knows he is a genius, and makes no attempt to even pretend to hide it (which is actually fair enough, although Paul Preston – the greatest historian of modern Spain – did put up a really good fight with Marías when he disagreed with him from the podium).

Dare I say, I actually loved A Heart so White, despite the smugness of both his author and of a number of his characters, and although I hope that Marías doesn’t treat women in the same way as his characters do. And the secrets of the book, the twist of Juan’s father’s past, and for once even the philosophical reflections in the final chapter are respectively intriguing and, for once, surprising and deep (and I am saying “for once” because I am usually not surprised by big surprises, and tend to find pseudo-philosophical conclusions to be borderline unreadable). 

The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

Yet another book from the local farm – having read and really enjoyed The Almost Moon I had absolutely no doubts about buying The Lovely Bones, in particular considering it was a not-so-exorbitant 50p…

This is overall a very enjoyable read, though predictably at times fairly heart-breaking for a young father. When its magic tones are kept (relatively) in check it is really rather endearing – after all it reads like the daydream of a teenager who wishes she could be invisible in order to see how others behave without her. And the description of heaven is, for want of a better term, really “cute”.

The problem, for me, is when the aforementioned magic tones unleash their full power – I saw no need for Susie to come back to earth thanks to Ruth’s “gift”. Or maybe I’m just too much of a manly man: cause I don’t care about Susie being re-united in one way or another with Ray (I actually would have preferred for that not to happen) and I am kind of bothered by this mellow and romantic  scene, but man do I love seeing Shoeless Joe Jackson and his teammates come out of the corn in Field of Dreams…

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

One of the many books that I have picked up from the local (very urban) farm. Yet another solid 50p investment!

Being ultimately ignorant, I always assumed that Ishiguro just wrote novels like The Remains of the Day. As most literate people will be able to confirm, however, that’s not the case. Throughout the book I felt as if Hailsham was actually Homerton College in Cambridge – something that probably says a lot about my memories of the place!

I honestly can’t say that I loved the novel – I really enjoyed the parts about the relations between the clones (this felt mostly like a very dark and fundamentally humour-less campus novel), but when Ishiguro turns too science-fictionesque he starts to lose me (and my interest) a little bit. Never Let Me Go is a very well-written dystopian novel, but so are countless others (not McCarthy’s The Road – that’s a work of art!) 

A Late Divorce – Abraham B. Yehoshua

Ah, the joy of Israeli literature! Well, actually it’s not as if I loved all Israeli writers, but I do have a soft spot for Yehoshua and Oz (not to mention the fact that this was another book that I got from my grandma’s “collection”…).

Much like most of Yehoshua’s works, this book is magisterially written. The clash between the expat patriarch and pretty much all his family members is both intriguing and ironic, and the confused (and at times confusing) sexuality of one of his sons is so well and carefully presented. I must say I was happy the book wasn’t just a 250-page long stream of consciousness from a young boy, as it looked like at the beginning – I felt like I had read one The Sound and the Fury too many already. And it’s just wonderful to read about fairly normal but fairly unlikable people constantly bickering and gossiping about each other.

The ending is very much clear from the start of the last chapter – I was really hoping that the imposing presence of the man who reminded me so much of Big Chief from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was just a red herring, but it wasn’t…

The Cat Specialist – Mo Yan

An extremely random book that we salvaged from my grandma’s shelves (together with other cheap but worthy newsagent tomes) once she was moved to a home – I think this is possibly a collection published in this form only in Italy, but the stories themselves should be available individually and translated worldwide.

Having never really read any Chinese literature (Pearl S. Buck doesn’t count, I suppose) this felt like as good an introduction to it as any, coming from a Nobel laureate and all (although we live in the times of Bob Dylan and the EU receiving Nobel prizes…). I’m normally not a big fan of short stories, but so many of them are so tragically well-written that I was immediately sold on this collection. I know some people might find it blasphemous, but I really thought that Mo Yan shares plenty of stylistic and thematic similarities with the Italian Fenoglio.

These stories of poverty, love, and small dramas are some of the most moving I’ever read – I clearly thought about reading the whole of Mo Yan’s bibliography after this, but the heap of unread books in my flat actually takes precedence for the time being. 

Immortality - Milan Kundera

Very slowly, and not particularly steadily, but I will try to catch-up on missed entries. A couple of months ago a colleague of mine dumped a few unwanted books on my desk – in there I found some greats reads (Peter Carey’s Bliss, for instance), and some not-so-great ones, like this one (although admittedly, it probably didn’t help that I had to read it intermittently during a time of sleepless nights and when my in-laws were around).

As I was reading Immortality I actually started wondering whether Kundera used a ghost-writer for The Unbearable Lightness of Being or whether he simply took himself too seriously after writing that book. Sure, Immortality does have some nice ideas (the first appearance of Agnes, the tyre-slashing, and the first few pages about Goethe – before these start to become rather boring), but I really could have done without hundreds of pages of pseudo-philosophical quibbles. 

And if you want pseudo-philosophical quibbles, the trajectory of the physical copy of the book I read actually represents the circle of life: someone probably once loved it, then my colleague picked it up, and dropped it on my desk after reading it, and after I finished it myself I brought it to the book exchange shelf of an urban farm next to my flat, where I am afraid it will sit for a rather long time (if not for ever). 

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Ok, so – as the handful of people who follow this blog will have probably figured out, something has happened. My wife and I are now the proud owners of an adorable little girl. As a result, my reading hours have gone down and my blogging hours have disappeared completely to be replaced by troubled nights and long staring contests with my daughter in the hope of a smile in return.

The week my wife went into labour, I decided that it was a good time to start reading Flaubert. Needless to say, I don’t think I have made the most of the passages that I read between contractions during the 72-hour labour. And after that it took me (unsurprisingly) a rather long time to finish the book as I learned to change nappies and to share my tiny little flat with a tiny little human being (and not-so-tiny grandparents for more than a month).

What I remember about this book is hazy, interesting chapters at the start before Emma actually appears, relatively boring ones as she quickly discovers the boredom of her own married life, and an ending that left me really quite satisfied (I wouldn’t use the word “happy” given what actually happens) and made me re-evaluate the strength of her character.

But the bottom line of all this is that I am back. Well. Sort of. 

A Passage to India - E.M. Forster

Ah, the relaxing joy of an E.M. Forster novel when your pregnant wife is overdue!

Seriously though, this novel was exactly what I needed - I considered reading Howards End, but I don't think I could have survived it emotionally...

Forster's subtle (or at times not so subtle) criticism of Western colonial attitudes is still remarkably relevant in today's world. As is his portrayal of mental illness. As is his description of class issues. As is his discussion of race.

Sure, Forster himself was a Westerner talking about India and was affected by all our (mis)perceptions and (mis)conceptions, but to me he remains fundamentally a genius.

Bliss – Peter Carey

And another book given to me by my colleague as he was moving flats (this time, however, one that I greatly enjoyed).

Bliss’s plot is hilarious (a term that I normally detest, but that I think describes the novel quite well) and its improbable twists all appear somehow believable. I just kind of wish the reader was told what happened to Lucy and her truck-driving boyfriend, but Carey’s novel remains for me a wonderfully entertaining and witty portrait of a clash between high-flying career-focused people and, erm, hippies.

And probably I also really enjoyed this because I know nothing about Australian literature (well, it depends on whether you consider Coetzee to be Australian…). 

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). 

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle

Yes, up until now I had never read an actual Sherlock Holmes novel (only a few of his short stories, but even there not many) and I’m about to say something awful: it’s alright. Not great. Not bad. Alright, which probably means I deserve to be kicked out of this country for many.

The thing is, a number of the surprises (like the mysterious second character found on the moor) are not excessively surprising, and one thing is being smug, but Sherlock Holmes is just a wee bit too smug.

Unfortunately I must say that as far as Sherlock Holmes is concerned, I like his 21^st century alter ego (Gregory House) a lot better. And as far as Conan Doyle creations go, I enjoyed The Lost World immensely more.