Our narrator at age 15 falls off his bike. Commenting on the guy who’s teaching him to ride he says :
It was very hard under such circumstances to presOur narrator at age 15 falls off his bike. Commenting on the guy who’s teaching him to ride he says :
It was very hard under such circumstances to preserve the standoffishness befitting the vicar’s nephew with the son of Miss Wolfe’s bailiff
He is an appalling entitled supercilious snob who says stuff like
I did not like to run the risk of being seen with people whom they (his family) would not at all approve of
Or
They went to the grammar school at Haversham and of course I couldn’t possibly have anything to do with them
At one point the local coal merchant brazenly rings the front door bell at the vicarage where he lives. Panic!
My aunt…felt honestly embarrassed that anyone should put himself in such a false position
Because, you see, it was utterly ghastly and unheard of that a coal merchant � a coal merchant � should have the temerity � the barefaced effrontery � to ring the front door bell! What is this, the French Revolution? This grotesque bell-ringing even discombobulates the maid
Emily, who knew who should come to the front door, who should go to the side door, and who to the back
Well he is poking fun at himself and his family, we are glad to realise. Later he says
The reader cannot have failed to observe that I accepted the conventions of my class as if they were the laws of Nature
That said, he is the most worldly gentleman you have met in a long while. He knows everything about everything. He says
When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right
and
he had the peculiar manner of the country doctor, bluff, hearty, and unctuous
because he knows all about young people and country doctors and he knows all young people and country doctors are exactly like that. It is so. Sometimes his observations are not quite to be taken seriously
No one can have moved in the society of politicians without discovering that it requires little mental ability to rule a nation
- A contemptuous bon mot that I think many modern readers would swiftly agree with. (It also implies that he has, but of course, knocked around with many ministers of the government). But what about this one � it almost made me gasp aloud :
We know of course that women are habitually constipated, but to represent them in fiction as being altogether devoid of a back passage seems to me really an excess of chivalry.
Steady on, sir! This is 1930! Are you allowed to say that?
Unfortunately for Cakes and Ale it was one of those many novels that are about novelists, and I was sadly uninformed of this before I started, because I hate novels about novelists, what a tiresome genre. But Somerset Maugham is an almost funny constantly condescending avuncular hifalutin tale teller, and his portrait of a great-grandmother of today’s manic dream pixie girls was engaging. Imagine � a woman in a 1930 novel who enjoys sex with multiple men and doesn’t get punished for it! And is a thoroughly nice person!
This novel was plucked from the vast lucky dip bag of 1001 Books you should Read before Next Thursday. At this rate it will only take me another 135 years to finish the whole list....more
The story of a wild child who becomes a manic dream pixie girl who then becomes trapped in a nasty love/hate relationship with a typically sweet-one-mThe story of a wild child who becomes a manic dream pixie girl who then becomes trapped in a nasty love/hate relationship with a typically sweet-one-minute, vicious-the-next man, and then turns into a full-time moper. Frank Sinatra sings “Regrets? I’ve had a few/But then again, too few to mention�. This is not Maggie’s philosophy. After her relationship with Kurt goes bad she does nothing but mention her regrets, there are so many. Oh woe, her misspent life! I sound unkind, I know, I know.
In the middle of this love hate psychodrama the gigantic real life tragedy of the Scandinavian Star is dropped into this short novel like a big rock into a small pool. This happened on 7 April 1990, a terrible fire on board a car and passenger ferry which killed 159 people. It was probably an insurance scam gone dreadfully wrong. No one was ever convicted except one person who died in the fire.
So there is a connection between this miserable pair Maggie and Kurt and this disaster. It’s hinted at but that’s all.
Modern authors like to write novels exploring real life crimes � recently I read Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, about the opioid epidemic, and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (about the Magdalen Laundries scandal in Ireland). So this is one of those, kind of.
I know this is part one of a series of seven novels which will add up to a great modern epic, but this opening instalment did not leave me eagerly awaiting the next part. Asta Olivia Nordenhof skips about the story of Maggie and Kurt like a speedfreak grasshopper. And she has a tendency to quasimystical abstraction :
Maggie gets the sense it’s all supposed to suggest something, but she doesn’t know what it is. A sense that meanings are doubled, with a message that is closed off to her. She wants to lift the dreams out of the room and into herself
Other readers will like this a whole lot more than I did. ...more
Answer : no, but there are things that happen that could convince a person that there was.
Like this�
In 1959 Question : IS THERE SUCH A THING AS FATE?
Answer : no, but there are things that happen that could convince a person that there was.
Like this�
In 1959 two guys doing short stretches in Lansing (aka Kansas State Penitentiary) are sharing a cell and like all cons they talk about their lives and maybe cook up a plan or two for some future malfeasance. This one guy, Floyd, is telling Dick, the cellmate, about maybe the best job he ever had, which was working on a big old wheat farm in Kansas for a real rich farmer. He particularly remembers this farmer because he was such a kindly employer. Farm was way out in the middle of nowhere. Oh says Dick, rich? Oh yeah, maybe every week they did ten thousand dollars of business. Hey, says Dick, did you happen to see a safe in that farm house ever? Well, says Floyd, I kind of sort of remember there was something. All right, says Dick, I will rob this farmer, and I will shoot all the witnesses. Well, in jail, everybody brags on the great deeds they will do, what else is there to yap about. Floyd discounted this big talk.
In fact there was no safe at all, there was no cash kept in the farmhouse. Floyd got that part wrong, what a shame. So when Dick and his good friend Perry crept into the said farmhouse a few months later, all they found was thirty bucks. But they’d already agreed there would be no witnesses left, whatever happened, so they shot all four members of the Clutter family that night and left. And they were careful and there were no clues.
Imagine Floyd’s surprise when a couple of days later, him being still in the jail, he hears on the radio about this terrible crime. He about jumped out of his skin. Dick and his pal actually did it! At this point he realised that aside from the criminals he was the only person in the world who knew who’d done it. What to do? As every con knows, snitches get stiches. But on the other hand, there was a thousand dollar reward for information. Hmmm.
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WAITING IMPATIENTLY FOR THE HANGMAN
Truman Capote did more than interview the two killers once they were caught. He visited them dozens of times, spent many hours with them, particularly liked Perry Smith, sent them the maximum allowed letters and gifts of books and candy. The book was finished by 1963 � all except for the last chapter, when the death penalty would be finally applied.
He could not finish his book until he had an ending, but neither could he put it aside and go on with something else. …His frustration was made worse by his knowledge that, lying in front of him, missing only thirty or forty pages, was the best-seller that would alter his life irrevocably, that would make him rich� the success of In Cold Blood was as predictable as the future movements of the planets.
Imagine the bizarre mixture of hopeful anticipation and agonised disappointment as Perry and Hickock went through appeal after appeal, their damned busy lawyers petitioned for a new trial � this nearly gave TC a heart attack � he liked these miserable malformed murderers but why didn’t they just go ahead and hang them so he could get his book done and become rich and famous as was his destiny? Why are they torturing me like this with their endless appeals and delays? I’m only human!
A MASTERPIECE
This is a great but strange book, a non fiction novel, I can see where that odd phrase came from, it veers between reportage and entirely novelistic recreations of some scenes with dialogue and characters and all, in this way it’s the exact literary version of the “re-enactments� they do on some true crime shows � I hate those, but in Truman’s hands it never comes across as tacky.
Not everyone was attentive; one juror, as though poisoned by the numerous spring-fever yawns weighting the air, sat with drugged eyes and jaws so utterly ajar bees could have buzzed in and out.
So good is TC in this book that it becomes a real shame that this book made him and destroyed him at the same time. He spent the next 20 years dithering, writing bits and pieces, but there was never another novel or much of anything after this one. Then he died.
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IN COLDER BLOOD
Three movies :
In Cold Blood (1966) � the film of the book, really excellent
Capote (2005) Infamous (2006)
Both these biopics concentrate on TC’s weird relationship with Perry Smith, both are worth it
And Gerald Clarke’s biography of TC is really excellent....more
It ain’t easy to write a comic novel � your poison will be different to my poison for sure. I have myself hurled at the wall various beloved comedy noIt ain’t easy to write a comic novel � your poison will be different to my poison for sure. I have myself hurled at the wall various beloved comedy novels (A Confederacy of Dunces, White Noise, The Sellout) but I have loved some others (Trainspotting, Skippy Dies, The Slaves of Solitude, Eighty-Sixed). Charles Portis had a magical ability to write my kind of comedy � this is the 4th of his I have read. All recommended! He’s like � Charles who? Then you say � he wrote True Grit. Ah yes! Great film. Also � great book! Then he knocked out Norwood, The Dog of the South and this one - they're all great! Did I say that already? His last one was Gringos which I will save for a rainy day when I’ve got the low down shaking blues.
Masters of Atlantis has an eccentric subject � everyone has vaguely heard of the Rosicrucians, an esoteric cult devoted to the preservation of occult stuff from Egypt or wherever. So here we have the Gnomons, a truly hapless idiotic bunch who convince each other they have discovered the forgotten science of Atlantis. There is no plot, we are just bumbling through the decades with a loose constellation of earnest American eccentrics, some of which should be hogtied and throwed off the caboose if there was any justice, but there isn’t.
I can imagine this would not be everybody’s jalapeno popper but it was mine....more
I am a fan of Korean movies but I didn’t read a Korean novel before now. This one features two sisters, both with psychological problems caused by havI am a fan of Korean movies but I didn’t read a Korean novel before now. This one features two sisters, both with psychological problems caused by having to deal with three horrible men (two husbands and one father). South Korea is famous for having the lowest birth rate in the world and if you want to know why you could read this, it won’t take long. According to Han Kang, the less Korean women have to do with Korean men the better.
I want to read more translated fiction but sometimes I think the translations are strange and the language is stilted and kinda bland. I’ll give two examples.
As small children their young cheeks were frequently left throbbing by their heavy-handed father
I wouldn’t describe a father who slapped his kids on the cheek frequently as heavy-handed. Brutal, violent, abusive, but not heavy-handed, which means clumsy, insensitive or too forceful.
This next one might be all Han Kang and not the translator :
Had she ever really understood her husband’s true nature, bound up as it was with that seemingly impenetrable silence?
I have to ask do people really have a “true nature� which if they would only talk to you you could understand? I don’t think so. Really, who can understand anyone else? If you want to check out the total incomprehensibility of human beings, the recent Dominique Pelicot trial is a good place to start.
Korean movies � the ones that aren’t ultraviolent horror that is � are very often melancholy, as is a lot of this novel, but they have a sweet atmosphere that doesn’t rely on the lurid goings-on we find in The Vegetarian.
I know this book won the International Booker Prize and Han Kang just won the Nobel but when I reached into my sack of stars I could only find two in there.
SOME FAVOURITE KOREAN MOVIES
Oasis Spring Summer Autumn Winter…And Spring Secret Sunshine Breathless Poetry The Handmaiden Microhabitat House Of Hummingbird In Front Of Your Face Decision To Leave Return To Seoul Past Lives...more
Japanese culture goes from one extreme to the other � movies like Guinea Pig : The Devil’s Experiment, Tetsuo The Iron Man, Tumbling Doll Of Flesh, ViJapanese culture goes from one extreme to the other � movies like Guinea Pig : The Devil’s Experiment, Tetsuo The Iron Man, Tumbling Doll Of Flesh, Visitor Q and Tokyo Gore Police (watch these from behind your sofa or better don’t watch them at all); then books like Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami which is completely mad; then all those ones by Haruki the other Murakami, they are pretty weird; and then you get little novels like Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto and the (rightfully) beloved Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata where it’s all about alienated women gradually going mad and dissolving or managing to stay sane but only just. Extreme violence and extreme boredom. Nothing in between.
This little novel (novelette? no, I hate that word) is a not much good version of Convenience Store Woman. 20 year old Chizu goes to Tokyo to find work and lives with a 70 year old lady and footles and mooches around and gets stupid part time jobs and dislikes pretty much everything and can’t find any really solid reasons for stayin� alive and th-th-th-that’s all folks.
Random point : I don’t get how Japanese people aren’t all overweight � on every other page Chizu is going on about food
While the two of them picked away at a single plate of cabbage rolls, I silently devoured everything I’d ordered, beef tendon braised in black vinegar, veal Milanese, German potato salad, mackerel sushi wrapped in bamboo leaves, and an orange sorbet
(In every Asian movie I have seen there is a scene where they have a family meal about five minutes from the start but they are all slender. What is the secret.)
But the real problem here is that Chizu is mindnumbingly bland and uninteresting as she mopes about, and the old dame she lives with isn’t the most electric raconteur you ever came across either. At the moment of high drama when Chizu breaks up with her boyfriend this is what they say :
â€Ô¨ou like someone else, don’t you?â€� “No, it’s not like that.â€� “I know you do.â€� “It’s Ito-chan, isn’t it?â€� “No, I mean, I don’t know. Sorry.â€� â€Ô¨ou might as well come out and say it. How can you be so casual about this?â€� “About what?â€� “About everything.â€� “What’s everything?â€� “I don’t know, okay?â€�
Well not everything has to be Dostoyevsky but really.
Two stars not one because I still get a cool feeling when I read a novel in a day, even one like this....more
I have a naïve belief that a foreign novel must pretty hot stuff if it winds up being translated into English because far too few of them are � only tI have a naïve belief that a foreign novel must pretty hot stuff if it winds up being translated into English because far too few of them are � only three out of Christian Kracht’s eight novels have been so far and in Germany this guy is a big name. But alas my theory didn’t pan out and I’m scratching my head about what makes people like this. It’s very mildly funny. A full CT scan would show that 65% of Eurotrash is indeed comedy. The rest of it would be 16% namedropping high toned authors, ritzy destinations and designer fashion labels, 7% descriptions of meals and hotel rooms and the final 12% is rambling chat between this guy and his batty 80 year old alco-mom.
So this is a road trip story about a 50-something year old author called Christian Kracht visiting his wreck of a mother and taking her out for one last Big Adventure which, being Swiss, turns out to be rolling around Switzerland in a taxi. Not too much happens. The author ruminates for pages about his obnoxiously rich parents, his Nazi grandparent and his youthful obsession with David Bowie, particularly the Ziggy Stardust album (which by the way has not aged well, gawky songs and thin sound, one of Bowie’s worst. But I digress, as Christian himself very often does.)
Occasionally the mother-son dialogues flare into something approaching poignancy but mainly it’s two cartoony characters flouncing and preening and moaning on about the past, the past, you’re a terrible person, you’re worse, hand me the vodka.
One good thing though, you can read it in a day....more
Oh Miranda what did you do � I thought I was a fan but this was terrible.
Our two constant companions for this novel are Cringey and Icky. They never lOh Miranda what did you do � I thought I was a fan but this was terrible.
Our two constant companions for this novel are Cringey and Icky. They never leave our side. The “semi-famous artist� (think “Miranda July�) who narrates this body-fluid-drenched tale wafts around in a hyper-self-aware therapy-besessioned gym-bunnying frequently-massaged chi-centered spaced-out zone of Californian affluence where everyone is a creative but the pine-scented air is thick with that sinking feeling that you are not living your most authentic life. Boo hoo!
So our 45 year old semi-famous artist goes on a sexual quest. But being all about older women, menopause, anti-heteronormality and unfulfilled desire does not automatically translate into a novel anyone would should or could read.
Sample quotes :
Yin-yang and the whole thing. I wasn’t fatter or thinner; I’d incarnated.
I’d forgotten the nonlinear, open-plan quality of lesbian sex, but it came right back. Her orgasms made me think of a whale breaching out of the water
And then some detours into selfhelpery :
If there was anything meaningful about aging, it was tunnelling back in time together, holding memories as a couple so they made a kind of safe basket in a rough and arbitrary world.
I was smiling when I picked up this novel but my smile gradually turned upside down.
15 bucketfuls of brand names from the 1990s, mostly of sweeties and clothes
5 gallons of Scottish slang � sounds like a lRECIPE FOR ONLY HERE, ONLY NOW
15 bucketfuls of brand names from the 1990s, mostly of sweeties and clothes
5 gallons of Scottish slang � sounds like a lot but it isn’t. (Trainspotting � now that’s a lot. )
Stir in three or four stock characters � the ever optimistic workingclass mum; her feisty has-a-lot-to-cope-with Cora, the daughter; the thieving one eyed but basically decent step-dad, etc
Whisk in some dreams that don’t come true and some that do bittersweetly
Add one tragedy
Namedrops of 90s bands and records sprinkled in to taste
Bake with a chippy attitude and a heartful of hope
**
There was too much Shuggie Bain and The Death of Bees about this book. Everyone rattles on about the author’s grand sparkling new voice but it sounded like a BBC Radio 4 play to me and that is not a recommendation. I'd heard this rueful comical voice a thousand times before. I know a grown man writing as a 14 (through to 18) year old girl is a tough feat of ventriloquism but I didn’t believe the voice of Cora. She was too observant, too street-poetical, too cutesyquirky -
I pulled away from him and sooked up a string of slavers and tried to stop the blubbering. My face was roasty and damp.
I loved early mornings, when the moon was still about. It was a wee wet loo-roll moon up there, hardly seeable � like a finger smear on glass. You just wanted to reach up and squeak-squeak it away with your jumper cuff like
And much else in this manner. At page 127 I couldn’t take anymore. I wished Cora well and tiptoed away....more
Two Czech people who vamoosed to the West in 1969 return to their country in 1989 now that the Communists have gone. They bitterly, sorrowfully, painfTwo Czech people who vamoosed to the West in 1969 return to their country in 1989 now that the Communists have gone. They bitterly, sorrowfully, painfully, mournfully, regretfully, ruefully mull, ruminate, ponder, consider, reflect upon, contemplate, chew over, weigh up, meditate, muse, debate, question, cogitate, analyze, review, deliberate, wrestle with, pore over, reminisce, opine about, fixate on, fret, brood and obsess about their lives. If that sounds like your kind of thing, there’s 200 pages of it right here....more
A casual, chatty hop skip jumpy style that captivated me (but I can easily imagine would aggravate others) from page one, full of sardonic asides suchA casual, chatty hop skip jumpy style that captivated me (but I can easily imagine would aggravate others) from page one, full of sardonic asides such as
Yes, here it comes, the rain, like some cheap redemptive symbol in a story
Or, describing a priest �
Timothy Batty is in his sixties and has been in this game, beg your pardon, this calling since he was a young man.
He gives us the audience a few sly digs
If Salome’s home hasn’t been mentioned before it’s because you have not asked, you didn’t care to know.
And he not so much breaks the fourth wall as climbs through it to tease the reader
His long dark body is ridged with muscle, a pink scar zigzags across his back. Some private history there, don’t know him well enough to ask.
Or when he’s telling us about a down and out guy who occupies a couple of pages �
Can’t prove it to you, but he once had a high-paying job
Which reminds me that every time an author describes a character as “a man in his late thirties� or “a woman of middling years� I want to say wait, you invented these people, you should know exactly how old they are! Stop fobbing us off with this vagueness! Do your job! Here he is deliberately goading me -
This conversation takes place in the garden behind the church. No, more likely it happens inside the church itself, in one of the pews
Ha ha, Damon Galgut, you naughty author!
So here we have a wonderful hectic pell-mell slightly deranged narrator, the like of which I only once encountered before, in another favourite novel What I Lived For by Joyce Carol Oates.
As you know there are the Bad Bookers (Vernon God Little, The Sellout, The Sense of an Ending, so many others) and the Good Bookers (Troubles, The White Tiger, Sacred Hunger, not enough others) and this one is a Good Booker, in fact a Brilliant Booker. You might say the story is not so much (decline and fall of a white South African middle class family) and the main characters we have met before (arrogant son, narcissist elder daughter, withdrawn younger daughter, faithful family maid) but this just confirms my theory that a great author can take any threadbare old rope and Rumpelstiltskinishly spin it into gold, look at what Shakespeare did to all those tatty old tragedies that no one gave the time of day to.
Clearly a source for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, this is like someone telling a gripping and frankly mad over the top lurid bonkClearly a source for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, this is like someone telling a gripping and frankly mad over the top lurid bonkers tall tale of stowaways, pirates, cannibalism, unknown and homicidal tribespeople, water with the consistency of porridge, a disappearing dog and goodness knows what else, but in the most boring way so that you have to read it in an extremely uncomfortable position such as lying on one’s back in the kitchen with one’s feet in the fridge or leaning dangerously over a cliff edge to prevent yourself from lapsing into a coma. Edgar Allen was a genius of ideas who should have employed somebody else to write them down. ...more
You can summarise Moby Dick in ten words - Boy meets whale, boy loses whale, boy gets whale back. But that's a bit longwinded. You can summarise this You can summarise Moby Dick in ten words - Boy meets whale, boy loses whale, boy gets whale back. But that's a bit longwinded. You can summarise this novel in four words - all killer no filler.
There's a song by Jacques Brel in which the Devil, having stayed in Hell for a long time, decides to visit us here on earth to see what's going on, and he strolls around, and he smiles, and he says "Not bad.... not bad at all....". Which could be another way of describing this book....more
The James Joyce who wrote this chunk of ghastly autofiction is the same James Joyce who a few years latePORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A GARGANTUAN WETWIPE
The James Joyce who wrote this chunk of ghastly autofiction is the same James Joyce who a few years later wrote the stunning, beautiful masterpiece Ulysses; this is like someone playing you Chug-a-Lug, Ten Little Indians and Farmer’s Daughter by the Beach Boys and telling you that three years later they would make Pet Sounds and Smile. You would frankly think they were off their trolley. Not possible.
Jimmy Joyce must have had one of those odd head traumas that change a person’s personality because between this mournful bucket of sloshing emo and Ulysses he developed a canny sense of humour � about his pretentious younger self, for one thing.
So Portrait of the Artist as an Insufferable Plonker is the story of Stephen Dedalus up to age 17/18 and Ulysses picks up his story a few years later and skewers his previous Portrait self mercilessly :
Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? �. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?
That James Joyce is a funny guy, this Portrait one you would get rats to gnaw your leg off rather than spend a train journey stuck with him in the same compartment.
Well, I am being a little harsh. The first half of this autonovel is not bad at all. There are a couple of strong dramatic scenes, a famous one being a Christmas dinner where a huge political row bursts out between the family’s governess and the loudmouth father. That was great, I was looking forward to more good stuff. But no, then it went south.
SELF-LOVE IN ALL SENSES
Portrait got in big trouble with the censors in 1916 and you can kind of see why because by page 95 young Stephen has discovered the joy of onanism, which is described in the following terms :
He bore cynically with the shameful details of his secret riots in which he exulted to defile with patience whatever image had attracted his eyes. By day and by night he moved among distorted images of the outer world. A figure that had seemed to him by day demure and innocent came towards him by night through the winding darkness of sleep, her face transfigured by a lecherous cunning, her eyes bright with brutish joy. Only the morning pained him with its dim memory of dark orgiastic riot, its keen and humiliating sense of transgression.
Well, it isn’t Henry Miller or Letters to Penthouse but you get the idea. Eventually he decides his solitary habit is not enough so he prowls the street (at this point he is 16). His horniness is described like this �
He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its penetration.
Steady on, JJ ! Eventually he discovers the delights of Dublin’s hookers and his experiences are drowned in the same euphuistic, euphemistic flowerpot verbals. After that, he gets religion and things take a dark turn.
At his religious school each year there is a Retreat. This is not something I was familiar with. The boys all have to devote themselves to several days of nothing but religious contemplation and prayer. Cue pages of morose I-am-a-doomed-sinner, followed up by a famous hellfire sermon by a priest who has an Evil Dead 2 view of the afterlife �
In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.
Plus, it smells really bad, there’s no room service and it’s really hot, and devils come and insult you.
All this drives Stephen slightly doolally :
The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.
There are pages of tiresome tedious claptrap like this.
NOT JUST ME
In his short and sharp recommended introduction to Joyce, John Gross puts the boot into Stephen Dedalus as follows �
It is hard not to be repelled, or on occasion to be amused, by his posturing and his moist romanticism. He is utterly self-absorbed; his reveries are rendered in the over-exquisite accents of the House Beautiful…How exactly are we to take all this? If we assume that Joyce completely identifies himself with Stephen the final section of the book becomes an exercise in naïve self-glorification
So he says in trying to get Joyce off the hook many critics read the Portrait ironically � A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Insufferable Jerk
But hold on, Gross says
The portrait of the artist turns out to be the dissection of a second-rate aesthete.
If the Portrait was meant to be read as a hatchet job, why spend 300 pages doing it? The game is not worth the candle. The target is too mere. A short story in Dubliners would have done the job. So this makes us suspect JJ wanted us to take Stephen (=himself) seriously. It’s just not possible.
STRANGEST CAREER IN LITERATURE
He started off with the excellent short stories in Dubliners, following that with this mithering giant bore, then spent 7 years creating the magnificent Ulysses, 20th century’s greatest novel, then poured the rest of his life down the drain by taking seventeen (17) years to write the completely unreadable waste of time called Finnegans Wake. You couldn’t make it up....more
Melville’s style : Go to war against the reader, make every sentence an obstacle course, make it rebarbative, crabbed, recursive, stogged and clogged.Melville’s style : Go to war against the reader, make every sentence an obstacle course, make it rebarbative, crabbed, recursive, stogged and clogged. Make it like this (Melville describes some parts of Billy Budd) :
The ear, small and shapely, the arch of the foot, the curve in mouth and nostril, even the indurated hand dyed to the orange-tawny of the toucan's bill, a hand telling alike of the halyards and tar-bucket; but, above all, something in the mobile expression, and every chance attitude and movement, something suggestive of a mother eminently favored by Love and the Graces; all this strangely indicated a lineage in direct contradiction to his lot.
And here, one of the sailors decides to embellish some innocent gossip about Billy Budd to please his boss :
From his Chief's employing him as an implicit tool in laying little traps for the worriment of the Foretopman---for it was from the Master-at-arms that the petty persecutions heretofore adverted to had proceeded--the Corporal having naturally enough concluded that his master could have no love for the sailor, made it his business, faithful understrapper that he was, to foment the ill blood by perverting to his Chief certain innocent frolics of the goodnatured Foretopman, besides inventing for his mouth sundry contumelious epithets he claimed to have overheard him let fall.
My head! My head! My kingdom for an aspirin! Then there’s the ridiculous melodramatic ultravictorian moustache-twirling verbiage he comes out with when something actually happens (only four things actually happen in this novelette) :
He stood like one impaled and gagged. Meanwhile the accuser's eyes removing not as yet from the blue dilated ones, underwent a phenomenal change, their wonted rich violet color blurring into a muddy purple. Those lights of human intelligence losing human expression, gelidly protruding like the alien eyes of certain uncatalogued creatures of the deep.
Is this the Melville of Moby Dick which I read years and years ago and loved thoroughly? I can’t believe it.
The logic of the story of Billy Budd is tragic and perfect. The way it’s told is excruciating. Melville took a sad song and made it bitter....more
As I turned to the last page of this novel I emitted a groan. That was it?! Noooo�. Mr Portis, where’s the next 100 pages? It’s so short�.I was havingAs I turned to the last page of this novel I emitted a groan. That was it?! Noooo�. Mr Portis, where’s the next 100 pages? It’s so short�.I was having so much fun, what happened? Did you get kidnapped half way through? So this is a terrific deadpan tale of how Norwood Pratt, a man who knows all about car engines and their problems in great detail, tries and fails and stumbles and recovers and woozily lunges through a brief section of his life that involves hot cars, an intelligent chicken, an elegant person of restricted stature, a garrulous eccentric, an uncouth brother in law and an unceasing flow of wry comedy about low level American life in the late 50s, mostly rural but with an unhappy spell in New York.
Charles Portis is famous for True Grit which is a masterpiece and not so famous for his other four novels. So this is the third I have read, the other one being The Dog of the South, which is also great and also a road trip story featuring a man who knows about car engines and their problems in great detail, a garrulous eccentric�. Wait ! I now realise Charles Portis rewrote the same novel multiple times, like how Neil Young rewrites the same song a jillion times. But it’s okay, so long as the novel you keep rewriting is this funny and sweet and pure.
Recommended…but heck, it’s out of print. Amazon is only selling a French translation at the moment. But you can find it in the Library of America’s collected works volume, which is where I had to find it....more
Huh, who could be calling at this time ? Oh it’s one of my besties from work. “Hey, what’s up?â€� “Hey, something happened. I wonder if you could help.â€� â€Ô¨ Huh, who could be calling at this time ? Oh it’s one of my besties from work. “Hey, what’s up?â€� “Hey, something happened. I wonder if you could help.â€� â€Ô¨eah, what happened?â€� “I just strangled my husband.â€� “What, dead? Likeâ€�. Dead?â€� “Well yeah â€� silly! I wouldn’t call you up and say I just strangled my husband but he’s still alive!â€� “Well okay, no need to get tetchy.â€� “So I was just thinking maybe, you know, us being such good friends and all, you could get rid of the body for me.â€� “Oh sure. I’ll be right over.â€�
In my local Waterstones there is a “Cosy Crime� section featuring bodies that don’t bleed all over the Tetbury wool twist and sprightly elderly amateuIn my local Waterstones there is a “Cosy Crime� section featuring bodies that don’t bleed all over the Tetbury wool twist and sprightly elderly amateur sleuth types that know a thing or two about a thing or two with a twinkle in their still clearsighted eyes. This must be a reaction to the default viciously cynical choking atmosphere of used needles and grime and terminal bleakness of all other modern crime fiction.
I think it would have been funnier if Martin Amis had tried to write a cosy crime book instead of this pastiche hardboiled Night Train. I would have loved a Martin Amis version of Miss Marples. That would be something. This, not so much.
Detective Seen It All Nothing Shocks Me Former Alcoholic Mike Hoolihan, who is a woman with a man’s name, is assigned to investigate the apparent suicide of an old friend of hers, the perfect in body and mind Jennifer Rockwell, an astrophysicist doing (at the age of 28) some cutting edge work on The Universe (not any old universe, THE universe) up at the observatory on the hill. She’s been found in her apartment naked with three self inflicted bullets in the head, very flamboyant, two more than you would think was strictly necessary. So, well, might possibly not be suicide. She had everything to live for. It’s a whydunnit.
So Detective Mike rounds up the usual suspects for the usual shaggy dogging tale of woe. She interviews the professor boyfriend (get on up, he’s a sex machine), the father, the casual bar pickup, the medical examiner, her boss the astrophysicist, her old friend the manic depressive (so that’s where she got the lithium!). And the whole book is really her interviewing herself (neat!).
As you read you can hear Martin saying to himself “that James Ellroy, that Ed McBain, that Elmore Leonard � I can do that, I’ll show ‘em, it’s not that hard�. But it is that hard. Night Train is karaoke. It’s your auntie singing “Oops I Did It Again�. No offence to aunties. ...more
amateurish, moronic, thoughtless, sadistic, repetitive schlock with no redeeming value whatsoever. What enjoyment there isFrom Too Much Horror blog :
amateurish, moronic, thoughtless, sadistic, repetitive schlock with no redeeming value whatsoever. What enjoyment there is comes in the form of disbelief. You'll be amazed at the lack of any attempt at realism in any aspect. You'll be astounded at the depraved depths to which the author can descend!
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
I only just heard about this 1977 lunatic horror novel and it sounded like fun, so I thought I’d get a nice cheap sleazy looking hopefully stained copy and read it, but I couldn’t because it’s out of print and people are charging CRAZY SKY HIGH prices. But then I found that some kindly soul had done an audio book of it and put the whole thing on Youtube! Problem solved.
PRAYING MANTISES! THOUSANDS OF THEM! THE SIZE OF A MAN!
So here is a short summary of a book you will probably not read.
A man in a boat off a Columbian island observes an earthquake followed by a tsunami. Back on land he then can’t but notice that thousands of giant praying mantises are pouring forth from fissures in the very ground caused by the earthquake. And they are so hungry. So they are eating people.
Our hero is called Dyke and is 25 years old and he has an alarming back story. It seems he has been roaming the world committing all kinds of crimes, torturing people and so forth. He is no boy scout. And he had a disagreement with four of his shady chums and they beat him soundly and he was “robbed of his manhood� eleven years ago. Since then life has lost some of its sparkle. But now, Dyke feels excited and happy again, watching the mantises eat people. One of them even eats his only friend in Colombia � slowly! And it gets his juices flowing! So he decides to become King of the Mantises. That will show everybody.
He lures a mantis by offering it frozen sheep from his extraordinarily large boat refrigerator, then he captures it by using a steel reinforced net which he always carries because he is a tough hunter of wild beasts even though now he is without his manhood.
Dyke’s eyes had a molten steel stare that used to knuckle victims to their knees. His eyes compensate for the zigzag of awful scars all over his face and body. He had jet black shoulder length hair. "But he was a eunuch now. He could never marry". Not even a mantis. We will come to that sad episode.
THEY WERE A DEATH DEALING MANHOOD DESTROYING BOY BAND.
In a flashback we learn that the leader of this boy band was a boy who did not know what kindness was. Ryan Gout was the leader but Pete Stuart was the meanest, he gouged out people’s eyes and his favourite hobby was maiming children just for fun. He would laugh as he did so.
The gang was tired of kicking out old ladies� brains for fifty dollars. They wanted to steal a million dollars. Pete says he has a bottle of nitro so they can blow a safe. And he knows where one is. So off they go, to Old Man Shield’s place. Whoever he is. They’re going to ring his doorbell, roll him around on the ground and knife him a little. So they do all that and chop up the old man. There is a lot of chopping, two or three pages. “Zeb’s blood red knife followed Pete’s into the heart section.� The old geezer is well dead “yet the boys cut on�.
So they blow up the old geezer’s safe and find a fortune in dollar bills.
After some post-robbery contemplation Dyke decides to rob all the loot for himself. Unfortunately he is discovered by the gang who whip out their flick knives and begin slicing with glee. “I’ll pull his socks off so we can get at his toes�. But it’s not his toes Dyke worries about.
“No don’t cut me there, cut me anywhere, but leave me that!� he whimpers.
But they do cut him there and leave him to die like a dog in the desert.
But luckily some local vaqueros rescue him and patch him up, including blood transfusions.
I’LL CALL HIM SLAYER
I’ll teach this mantis who he is and to come when I call.. I’ll call him Slayer!
Dyke trains Slayer. He figures that it will take two months to fully train him, and also to make “some kind of potion� that will stop Slayer or any other mantis from eating him. At this point Dyke catches a local man stealing from his store of food. He feeds him to Slayer. Ten page description of the ensuing meal. Slayer loves eating people alive, what’s the fun in eating dead people right? And Dyke gets his jollies watching Slayer. It’s a match made in heaven. Dyke wonders what it would be like to be eaten by Slayer � for a long time. “His own death would not exhilarate him".
Dyke makes his repellent potion. Pages about this. Finally, after a long process in which an anteater dies, he smears his arm with this horrible stuff and forces his feet to walk to Slayer’s cage, thinking “What if Slayer bites off my arm and chews it up before my eyes?... I wonder what it’s like watching a beast eat part of your body while you are helpless to prevent the gruesome snack?�
I’m sure we all wonder that from time to time.
“As the mantis stopped to catch his breath� �. Wait a minute, even I know that insects don’t have lungs�. Oh anyway, this is nitpicking�. Dyke muses :
I think I could see Slayer swim in a sea of blood and I could swim in it with him, especially if it was the blood of people, of men, of the four men I hate with all my guts. An ocean of blood wouldn’t sicken me� I could spend my whole life seeing him eat men alive�
Enough! I think I can see where this is going. There will be pages about Slayer eating people and Dyke enjoying it. He will track down the boy band and Slayer will eat them one by one with mean Pete left till last. And finally the potion will wear off and Slayer will eat Dyke. If anybody finished this astonishingly ridiculous novel, written in the same English language that Henry James used to write The Golden Bowl, then maybe they will let me know.
I will never look at a six feet tall praying mantis in the same way again....more
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