The Black Album – Hanif Kureishi

Yet another book from the farm. Yet another 50p I’m glad to have invested. Yet another read by Hanif Kureishi that is extremely enjoyable (so much so that it led me and my mom to debate on the author’s status as one of the 20th century great British all-around intellectuals). Yet another novel that ultimately left me only half satisfied though.

The Black Album has many fascinating characters, yet, at the same time, feels immature like the protagonist. With the exception of the main character, all the others in the book appear to me to be too monolithic and simply too representative of leftist intellectualism, Muslim dogmatism or junkie desperation (delete as appropriate).

That being said, to me The Black Album is in so many ways a precursor to White Teeth, and that’s no mean feat, as the delirious interactions between characters and races, the chaotic burning of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (which somehow made me think of the launch of FutureMouse), and clearly the peripheral London setting kept on reminding me of Zadie Smith’s masterwork.

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.

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 Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky

And finally here we are, the book that stayed with me for pretty much a month! In the words of Coldplay “Nobody said it was easy”, but it was in the end so very worth it. I honestly thought this was going to be one of those books that I would read just for the sake of saying that I have done so, but I was wrong.

The Brothers Karamazov ended up being way less philosophical than what I was fearing and just plain enjoyable – every single character is interesting, deep, and troubled in his/her own way and the fact that some of their ideas and feelings remain hidden for hundreds of pages adds to the interest of the novel. Well, I said every single character is interesting, but I actually meant “almost every single character” as I found Alyosha to be simply too saintly (even more so than his own spiritual father).

Maybe I’m just reading too much into it, but since there is a break in the narrative as Karamazov Sr gets killed (sorry for the spoiler, but also my own Wordsworth Classics edition mentioned the event on its back-cover!) are we sure that Dimitri is ultimately innocent and that Smerdyakov did the deed? I mean, can we really trust Smerdyakov’s own confession? Possibly I’m the one who’s being too philosophical now…

And again, speaking of me reading a bit too much into it, I actually wonder whether the fairly open finale means that Dostoevsky actually thought that at some point he might write something on the lives of the Karamazovs and their women after Dimitri’s “departure”. 

Mother’s Milk – Edward St Aubyn

I had never heard of this author until my mom just forced me to invest 50p in this book of his at Surrey Docks Farm. As we all know, my mom is very rarely wrong (at least when it comes to literature, when it comes to playing cards with me that’s an entirely different story).

The first section of the book details extremely well a number of feelings that I undeniably felt right after the birth of my daughter (minus the borderline psychic older son, and some of Patrick’s self-destructive tendencies), but what is just great is seeing the odd dilapidation of an impressive family fortune in the following sections (one dedicated to every summer holiday of the main character, which I found to be a wonderful idea).

If Patrick’s complex family situation at first runs the risk of reminding the reader a bit too much of the kind of McEwan novels that have come to bore me, its spiralling out of control is actually closer to a more serious version of Jonathan Coe’s Winshaws – and that’s one of the reason why this novel is ultimately so enjoyable. The other reason, although this is far from being politically correct, is its shrewd treatment of people who age badly – not something I necessarily disagree with. 

The Year of the Hare - Arto Paasilinna

I’ve only really read this book because my wife found a copy of it looking for a good home in our building’s lobby. Having read another book by Paasilinna (meh…) I decided to give his magnum opus a chance (and for once I use a Latin term, just because I find it funny to refer to a book like this in pseudo highbrow words).

This book somehow managed to be a best-seller in both Finland and the rest of Europe. And I really struggle to see why. As a funny book, it’s not funny (or at least not funny for me, but then again maybe I lack a sense of humour). As a deep book about discovering one’s true self, it’s really not deep. At most I can see it being reasonably cute for a cute book. But that’s about it. And I really don’t do cute.

And I am worried about the state of world literature if books like this are hailed as something that “will have you laughing and gasping by turns. . . . The writing is as spare and clean as the lines of Scandinavian design. . . . Of the many lines in this book that I cherished, the last is one of the most delicious: ‘Vatanen is a man to be reckoned with.’ So is this book.” The review came from Lonely Planet – I am afraid backpackers might be too worried about expanding their horizons to bother actually expanding their culture. 

Fragrant Harbour – John Lanchester

A book that I got from the book swap shelf at Stratford Station – the only one I’ve ever managed to pick up from there, but it was worth it! I originally grabbed it for my mom, as she had liked Capital more than I did, and only read it after she did and because of her very strong recommendations.

Fragrant Harbour has many of the traits of the standard best-seller: an “unusual” love story, international intrigue, a look at the blurred lines between orgranized crime and top-level impresarios and plenty of others. The thing for me was that, being set in Hong Kong, it was both interesting from an historical point of view and very different from a standard best-seller.

Predictably, the book’s bottom line is that there are colonialists with a heart (and also a sense of humour and self-criticism) and entrepreneurs who are far from being evil capitalists. This is not exactly the most unusual of messages, but it is delivered with grace. And the appearance of Tom’s nephew is something that really makes one hopeful that good people can overcome drunken British hooligans…

With Capital I had the feeling that Lanchester could have made so much more given the rough material he had at his disposal, but I think that with Fragrant Harbour he managed to get the most out of his plot and research – or maybe I’m just way less familiar with Hong Kong that I am with London!

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. 

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…

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 Body of Jonah Boyd – David Leavitt

A book that my mom got from the BookCrossing stand in Turin airport (such a nice idea, and yet, at least in that location, so neglected…) and that she left with me after her last trip.

Having only read particularly “gay” books by Leavitt, I was surprised by how “hetero” this one was. While not of the same literary calibre of The Secret Language of Cranes, The Body of Jonah Boyd is an extremely pleasant read.

I really liked it because it’s Jewish, it’s about academia, and most of all because it’s sub-urban. Yet, I didn’t find it mind-blowing chiefly because I think books about writers are often (even if indirectly) a bit too self-congratulatory – but the title, and the fact that Jonah Boyd is not murdered and left in a ditch as I assumed (or that his body is not sculpted like that of a Greek demi-god and the subject of the desire of the author), is pure genius. 

Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey

I had been waiting to read a “real” book by Peter Carey ever since reading his minor Bliss and absolutely loving it – luckily, as is often the case, the Amnesty International Book Sale in Blackheath had the solution to this problem (for 1 £…).

I liked the book, but in all honesty I’m not quite sure it’s Pulitzer-worthy (then again, reading the shortlisted titles, I’m also quite positive Chatwin’s Utz wouldn’t have been a good candidate either) – I found it a bit long (well, unsurprising given the size…), could have done without much of the background stories of Oscar and Lucinda’s families, probably the gambling world doesn’t attract me too much anyway, and I just didn’t get too excited by the big voyage of discovery in Australia.

The book does, however, have a number of great ideas, like the ways in which Oscar fights his phobia of the Ocean, the discovery (for me) of Prince Rupert’s Drops, and the transportation of the glass church, which reminded me of Fitzcarraldo and is a literary picture that many authors can spend an entire career waiting to develop. 

The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Malcolm X and Alex Haley

A book that was given to me as a Christmas gift by one of my closest friends and, despite my normal lack of enthusiasm for (auto)biographies (or even cinematic bio-pics), was actually a quality present.

Despite teaching 20^th century history, I didn’t know much about Malcolm X, so this book was quite eye-opening – I’m not going to debate up to what extent it truly reflects the man’s life (how could I?) but it surely does justice to his myth.

As I read it I kept thinking how much he would have despised me as a rich, white European who teaches on the history of Ghana or Pakistan by starting with the disclaimer “well, I’m a rich, white European” – would have I been the worse of the liberals? And would he have changed his mind after his Hajj

One thing that really struck me was the faith Malcolm X seemed to have in non-white leaders: Elijah Muhammad, Kwame Nkrumah, and even Mao are praised time and again, but, as far as I know, were quite far from being saints themselves (despite the fact that at the time of writing, in Nkrumah’s case, the temptation to identify him as the prototype of the enlightened African leader was quite clearly extremely tempting for everyone).

As I approached the autobiography, I expected its latter parts to be the most exciting ones, but I have to say the chapters I liked the most were probably the early ones, the ones on Detroit Red, the hustler, with his passion for jazz (and his encounters with all the big names of the time) and for swindling people.