Forfatter: Mirthful

Autobiography – Sylvia Beach

Mirthful

In which we are intellectual, possibly.

I found Sylvia Beach’s autobiography (in the Faber&Faber 1st ed.) at a second-hand bookshop last Saturday, so that’s been my main read this week. In case you don’t know who SB is, I’ll enlighten you. She was an American who came over to Paris after WW1 and sort of never left. She started a bookshop called Shakespeare & Company, to provide the French with a place to get hold of contemporary writing in English and to provide a similar service to the English-speaking writers in more or less voluntary exile in Paris at the time – the so-called «Lost Generation», Joyce, Pund, Hemingway and so on. In the process she also managed to publish Joyce’s «unpublishable» Ulysses (it was banned in the States and the UK already, due to some excerpts that had been published in literary magazines), and as such should get a posthumous medal for outstanding services to humanity.

The book is very interesting in its first half, which is properly autobiographical. Unfortunately, by about half-way through it turns into something so much like pure name-dropping that it gets excessively repetitive. The bookshop was the meeting point for so many intellectuals in Paris at the time, and in order to not leave anyone out, SB gives 1-3 pages to each person, which leaves room for little more than a variation on «X is a very good writer/painter/composer and I very much enjoyed his/her work NN. He/she first came to the shop in 19?? and we went to lunch at such’n’such with Y, Z and Joyce.»

To counter all this intellectualism, I spent a couple of very childish hours rereading the five Ole Alexander books by Norwegian children’s book writer Anne-Cath. Vestly. I haven’t read them since I was a kid, in fact, I don’t suppose I’ve ever actually read them, I probably had them read to me. I also remember occasionally listening in when my parents read them to my brother, who would have been 4-ish, so I’d have been 11-ish. Anyway, they made an excellent movie from the first two books about two years ago, and I’ve been eying the books on the shelf occasinally and thinking I’d reread them. So I did. They’re still brilliant, though a mite too much directed at four- to five-year-olds even for me.

Bears and monkeys? What next?

Mirthful

I have been immersing myself in Natural History, as Stephen would call it. Being an old-fashioned kind of girl, I don’t know what they call it nowadays. Anyway, as I said, immersing myself… I borrowed A Primate’s Memoirs from my father, he’d just finished reading it and it seemed like just the thing for me to sink my teeth into. Robert Sapolsky has spent years immemorial – or a lot, in any case – in Kenya observing baboons and doing research on their behaviour and how their stress-levels, and hence potential stress-related diseases, relate to who they are (e.g. which rank in the flock) and how they live. All of this could be interesting enough, but in addition the author is blessed with a splendid dry humour which has me chortling (and on the bus, too, what will people think). In fact, even the acknowledgements section is worth reading, or you may miss gems such as this: «Finally, a number of humans, and a number of baboons, represent composites of a few members of a species. This was done to keep down the cast of characters (…) I, to the best of my knowledge, am not a composite.»

I also fell upon the latest package from The English Bookclub with glee, it contained the new hardback Stephen Fry book, Rescuing the Spectacled Bear. The book is Stephen’s diary from the production of a programme to be aired (which has been aired?) on BBC, all about – you guessed it – the spectacled bear. You know how Paddington comes from Peru? This is not Bond’s poetic lisence, there are bears in Peru, and they have these odd pale markings round their eyes, hence the spectacle part. And since Peru isn’t exactly the most affluent country in the world, and since the ecological systems they have in their care are so immensly diverse that it goes beyond belief (83 out of the worlds 120 defined habitats, from rain forest to the driest desert in the world), you can imagine that the amount of attention the poor bears are getting, conservation-wise, is pretty minute. Which problem Stephen and the producer, Nick Green, amongst others, are now trying to remedy. You can learn more about the project at the Bear Rescue site – a charity has been set up and the proceeds from the book go to establishing safe habitats for the bears and other such useful measures. As for the book, well an evening with Stephen is always a pleasure, and the only objection I have to the book at all is that it was way too short. So what are you waiting for? Go out and buy yourself a copy (or click here to buy from amazon). While you’re at it, buy one for someone for Christmas, too. They’ll enjoy it, and so will the bears.

Babyville

Mirthful

In which we are reminded of candyfloss.

I picked up Jane Green’s Babyville in a charity shop in Glasgow and read it last week. It’s very much the sort of thing I’ve come to expect from Green, not great literature, but highly enjoyable candy for the brain. And everyone lived happily ever after. My main objection, in fact, was stylistic more than anything. The book is more a collection of three rather long short stories than a novel. It’s divided into three sections and each section centres on a different protagonist. The three are linked in various ways, and the stories intersect, but not quite enough for my liking. I’m not a great fan of short stories. What I like is nice loooong novels. With short stories I tend to find that just as I’m really getting interested in the characters the story ends. And that’s the sort of reaction I had to Babyville, too. Just as I was starting to feel personally involved with the ups and downs of one person, I was suddenly required to start all over again with a different person. I might have minded less if I’d been prepared, so consider yourself forewarned.

Garman og Worse

Mirthful

In Norwegian this time (the classics, not the post).

I recently bought Alexander Kielland’s collected works, and last week I reread Garman & Worse and Skipper Worse. I first read them both about ten years ago, and didn’t remember much beyond the fact that I thought they were wonderful, especially G&W. I thought they were pretty wonderful this time around, too. Lovely, evocative stories of an unnamed town in western Norway and the decline of the family business that has been the cornerstone of the community, how it affects the family and how it affects everyone in the town, directly or indirectly. Both times I’ve read the books in the order they were written (published), but chronologically, Skipper Worse comes first. This is slightly frustrating, as by the end of Garman & Worse you really want to know more about the characters, and therefore start Skipper Worse thinking you really couldn’t care less for all these «old» events. However, Kielland manages to engage quickly enough.

The nice thing about the collected works (apart from the fact that they look really good on the shelf in their leather half bindings) is that I can now read some more of Kielland’s work.

Sult

Mirthful

I finally managed to finish Hamsun’s Sult (Hunger). I started it months ago for a group read on the Scandlit list, but have been struggling to finish. Not because it’s not engaging, rather because it’s too engaging. It made me feel physically sick, and it was quite impossible to eat while I read it. As I tend to eat and read at the same time, it was therefore left on the side a lot. Very, very good. Very, very disturbing.

Hamsun, of course, is a complete embarrasment to any Norwegian. An extremely good author, but also extremely vocal in his support for the Nazis. Help! What do we do? Well, I admire his books and despise his political views and I really can’t see that there is much else you can do…

Evelina – and more

Mirthful

I have been chastised for writing about Norwegian books in Norwegian. Well, I suppose that’s fair enough, especially as it’s been slim pickings here recently. I’m back to English, now – partly because I’m also back to reading English.

Over the weekend I reread Fanny Burney’s Evelina. It’s well worth the trouble, and in parts it’s laugh out loud funny (though I wouldn’t be willing to bet on it always being intentional). I was intending to read it rather slowly and follow the group read on the Austen-List (the McGill Austen mailing list), but once I got started I somehow couldn’t put it down. I suppose I can still join in the discussions, I just need to remind myself which part we’re looking at each week. Well, anyway, what I wanted to comment on was that someone on that list «lamented» that Austen abandoned the epistolary form, reasoning that it would have been interesting to know what she would have made of it (that she had mastered it is plain from Lady Susan). I really can’t bring myself to agree. One of the things I missed most in Evelina was any sort of comment upon Evelina’s way of expressing herself. And what Austen excels at, more than anything else, is the narrative voice, and the way the narrative voice manipulates the reader into thinking and feeling exactly what the authour wants him/her to be thinking and feeling. In Evelina, I had to make up all the commentary myself. And, delightful as I find my own conversation, it’s not quite as satisfying.

Why do all the authors I like die young with too many books left to write? It is not fair.

I finished Evelina Saturday evening and found myself at a loose end. Somehow I had managed to pack just the one book. After a search through my grandparents’ bookshelves, I settled on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped – it’s a classic, I guess, and one has to read classics. The major drawback was that it was (naturally) a Norwegian translation, but I took my chances. It’s a quick read, at least. I can’t help suspect that it’s lost some weight in the translation, but maybe not. Not all classics are breeze blocks, after all. I’m not quite sure what to think of the story. It wasn’t what I expected, somehow, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It was riveting enough while I was reading it, but very easily forgotten afterwards. It also ended very abruptly, before the story had come to a satisfactory conclusion (satisfactory to me, that is). Does the original, I wonder? Does the protagonist still have the possibility of a trial and a hanging hanging (bad choice of words…) over him at the end of Stevenson’s unmeddled-with work? I guess I’ll have to have a peek at the last page of a «proper» edition just to check. If it does, I can’t help but feel that it’s a bit overrated, for the time being, though, I reserve my judgement.

Whodunnit?

Mirthful

Ok, so now I’ve raced through the Harriet Vane novels (Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night, Busman’s Honeymoon and Thrones, Dominations) but as I’ve talked about them before I don’t think I will bother you with them now (except to say they are still excellent). I had something less of an existential crisis this time around, no doubt being a mite prepared for what awaited me helped.

I then went on to a long-awaited book by a Norwegian author, and therefore the rest of this is in Norwegian…

Så kom det ENDELIG en ny Varg Veum bok! Trilogier er vel og bra Staalesen, men det er nå bøker som Som i et speil jeg helst vil ha da (men du skriver kanskje ikke bare for min fornøyelse, eller?).

Feilen med å «anmelde» krimbøker er selvsagt at det blir så vanskelig å si noe meningsfylt uten å røpe noe om handlingen. Skal vi se… Veum blir som vanlig hyret til noe som ser ut som en ganske harmløs, eller i hvert fall enkel, sak – men som viser seg både å ha røtter lengre tilbake i tid og å involvere flere mennesker enn det Veums klient gir inntrykk av. Nei, vet du hva. Du får stole på meg: Boka må du lese så det er meningsløst for meg å si noe mer om handlingen.

Addendum:
Ok, ok… Here’s a quick translation: «So there’s FINALLY a new Varg Veum novel! Trilogies are all well and good, Staalesen, but it’s books like «As in a mirror» I prefer (though possibly you don’t write for my pleasure only?).

The problem with writing about crime fiction is obviously that it is so hard to say something meaningful without giving the plot away. Let’s see… Veum is, as ususal, hired on a case that appears to be pretty harmless, or at least straightforward – but which turns out to have roots stretching further back and to involve more people than Veum’s client wants to let on. No, sorry. You’ll have to trust me: You need to read the book anyway, so it’s pointless for me to say anything more.»

I’ve also done a quick search and it seems at least one Staalesen book has been available in English, at least amazon.co.uk has a listing for At Night All Wolves are Grey. So I guess there’s hope for all you non-speakers, too. Or you could just learn Norwegian. Staalesen is worth it.

Breakfast in Brighton – Nigel Richardson

Mirthful

In which we go rambling.

I finished The Road to McCarthy last week. A somewhat more rambling account than the author’s previous book (McCarthy’s Bar), but none the worse for that. Not the sort of book I would advise for reading on the bus if you are at all shy about people staring, it is frequently laugh out loud funny.

I then picked up a book I found in a charity shop in Glasgow, Breakfast in Brighton, by Nigel Richardson (or Nicholas, whichever amazon entry you believe – very strange that). In rambling terms it gave Pete McCarthy a run for his money. I’m still not entirely sure what the book was all about. However, it was a very pleasant read. A little knowledge of Brighton and Sussex may be an advantage, but I suspect the book is quite as enjoyable if you’ve never been anywhere near the place.

I’m obviously into writing long and profound analyses of books at the moment…

«Pleasant read». Hmph.

Watermelon – Marian Keyes

Mirthful

Having a break in Middlemarch (because I couldn’t be bothered to carry it to Scotland with me), I reread My Family and Other Animals and The New Noah by Gerald Durrell, partly because they are both good, but mainly because I had spare copies which meant I could «lose» them along the way. Hopefully they’ll be picked up and enjoyed by someone else.

While on the last chapters of The New Noah, I conveniently found Marianne Keyes’ Watermelon in a PDSA charity shop in Helensburgh on the 26th and had read it by the 28th. It’s a very good read, entertaining and reasonably light (without being Mills-&-Boon-fluffy) and definitely of the feel-good variety. However, I don’t think it’s one I’ll want to reread (as opposed to Sushi for Beginners), so I left it in the B&B in Dufftown. My bags were stuffed in any case.

I came home to find The Road to McCarthy in the mailbox. I had completely forgotten that I ordered it from The English Bookclub to avoid receiving the editor’s choice, and so was A. pleasantly surprised and B. mightily relieved that I had not bought it while in Britain (despite looking at it in bookshops several times, I kept thinking «Nah, later»). Middlemarch will have to wait while I laugh my way through this on the bus.

The Prisoner of Zenda – Anthony Hope

Mirthful

In which we buckle our swash.

I’ve been listening to The Prisoner of Zenda getting to and from work this week. Very entertaining, and a good sort of book for listening to in a place where you may get distracted. Partly because there is nothing terribly complicated going on, but mostly because it’s so engaging that you’re less prone to distractions than you migh be with a slower-moving book. The latter is a bit of a nuisance when going to work, I have been hovering outside the door a couple of mornings, unwilling to step through and back to reality and wait hours and hours to see what happens next. But you can’t have everything.

(The Penguin edition available at amazon seems to have a sequel in the same book. Stupidly, I scrolled down to the reviews where someone, even more stupidly, gives the sequel’s plot away. Oh, well. Consider yourself warned. For my part, I still want to see if I the library might have it.)