I’m still reading O’Brian. I’ve got to The Far Side of the World, now, which is half-way though the canon and is the book Peter Weir has based the upcoming film on. I can see his point about it being filmable, however, considering how much they have reportedly changed the plot, I can’t quite see why they couldn’t just have started at the beginning and changed the plot of Master & Commander in order to make it filmable too. But then I’m not a film maker, maybe I’d see things differently if I were.
Kategori: Authors
Master & Commander
In which we’re back to Patrick again.
So, since Christmas, what have I been reading? Well, I’m afraid I started Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels again. It is unfortunate, in a way, because there are 20 of them, and it is quite impossible to stop once one has started. I say 20, I may have to make do with 19 as I seem to have mislaid HMS Surprise (mislaying a Frigate is quite impressive, really). I cannot imagine where it has gone to. It is highly annoying and I am quite put out about it.
Well, so far, then, I have read Master & Commander which is where Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin meet for the first time. It is the year 1800, Jack is in Mahon pining for a ship and Stephen has been left in rather difficult circumstances because the patient he was to accompany to the Mediterranean died mid-voyage and Stephen does not have any money to pay for a passage back home. After a first unfortunate meeting which nearly ends in a duel, Jack, in his joy over having been appointed Commander of the sloop Sophia, invites Stephen to dinner, and on discovering that he is a physician, suggests that he «join the navy», that is, become a naval surgeon. Stephen accepts, and that is the start of the delightful 20 books…
I’ve also finished Post Captain, which is why I’ve discovered that HMS Surprise has gone AWOL, it ought by rights to have been next. As it is, I have skipped on to The Mauritius Command.
I would like to know where the dear ship has gone, though. My flat isn’t that big. How can a novel simply disappear?
Jane Austen – a biography
Oops. More than a month since I made a report…
As you’ll know if you’ve been reading the diary, I had a bit of a draught period just before Christmas, which was solved by starting a reread of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon. Unfortunately, Bloom is of the kind to need concentration, which there is little to be had of at my grandparents. So over the Holidays I instead read Fay Weldon’s Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen and Elizabeth Jenkins’ Jane Austen biography. Both are intended to be useful once I get around to writing this thesis thing. The former is a delightful collection of letters to a fictional niece from Weldon’s fictional alter ego. It is, in it’s own way, a novel, but it is also literary critisism. Jenkins’ biography is a decent piece of scholarship, seemingly, the one thing that jarred with me this time around (I can’t remember even noticing last time I read it) was her harping on the class issues – as in how they relate to Austen’s writing but also just in general. It makes the biography seem very dated, much more dated than the novels it deals with, despite being more than a hundred years younger.
Ki and Vandien quartet
In which we thought we were safe.
I saw the fourth book in Megan Lindholm’s (also known as Robin Hobb) Ki and Vandien series in Scotland in September, so I figured I could start on the ones I have and get the fourth. Stupid, stupid. I read the first, started on the second, ordered the fourth from amazon, finished the second, and now I’ve finished the third. And there is no sign of the fourth.
I should have known better. There is a reason, after all, that, while I preordered The Fool’s Errand the last year and The Golden Fool – recently arrived – they are both on my shelf, unread. I am not even taking a peak until the third book comes out. Probable publication: November 2003. I can wait. Just so long as I don’t start the trilogy, I can wait just fine.
Well, back to Ki and Vandien…
In Book 1 – Harpy’s Flight – we meet Ki. Numb to everything but revenge following the death of her husband and children at the hands (claws?) of Harpies. She has a dangerous pass to get through and a few (!) grief issues to work though. Vandien appears on the scene, trying to steal one of her horses in order to get though the same pass. They join forces, somewhat reluctantly on both their parts.
Some summary… I guess a good novel should defy summarising. As usual, Lindholm weaves an enchanting tale, much as Vandien with his story string captivates his audience again and again, she makes the novel hard to put down, and hard to let go of.
Books 2 and 3, The Windsingers and The Limbreth Gate continue the story. We get to know a bit more about the world of Ki and Vandien, and of the various sentient beings who share it with them, however unwillingly. We learn more about Ki’s story, which is not as straightforward as it might seem at first glance. No doubt the fourth book – Luck of the Wheels – will bring more surprises.
Come to think of it, I don’t think amazon has dispatched it yet. Which means I could just cancel the order and get it in town tomorrow. I can deal with a 12-hour wait, but if I have to wait for amazon, it will be at least a week, as I’ll have to find the time to pick it up at the post office. Yes!
Bears and monkeys? What next?
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
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
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
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
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?
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.