Buying less

The TBR pile

Like many people who enjoy reading I have a TBR (to be read) pile. In my case it’s a large pile, even though when I moved home in December 2010 I got rid of an awful lot of excess stuff. I have several hundred books I haven’t yet read (though in fairness that’s counting some of my wife’s books that I’m unlikely to read, such as her Spanish literary fiction or scholastic titles about the Italian renaissance).

I also have trade paperback comics I haven’t read, DVDs I haven’t watched, RPGs and boardgames I haven’t played and computer games purchased through my Steam account that I haven’t played. The vast majority of them cost money (some are gifts or review copies), and they pretty much all take up space (though I’ll return to the space issue since increasingly they’re in electronic form).

For various reasons I’m not particularly happy about this. TBR piles aren’t entirely bad because a home library offers a world of potential books to explore, meaning whatever my mood I likely have something to suit, but there’s also an oppressive element in seeing past interests abandoned and the knowledge that some of it never will be read.

When I started blogging I started buying more books. It’s natural. Blogging is about sharing enthusiasms. Blogging isn’t broadcasting, it’s conversation and in comments on your own blog and reviews on other people’s you inevitably discovers new books that are genuinely exciting. Couple that with online shopping and soon books can be coming in faster than you’re reading them.

That’s either my TBR pile, or possibly the library at Trinity College in Dublin. Hard to say.

When I first moved in with my wife we lived in a one room studio. I had my own place, but I soon got rid of it, so everything I had was in that room along with her stuff. It was cramped, I don’t want to romanticise it, but it was possible. We now have vastly more space (our place isn’t huge, but it’s comfortably big enough for two) and of course more stuff. Some of that stuff genuinely adds to life, things like the bread maker and ice cream maker which let us do things we actually couldn’t before. The shelves of unread books though? Those don’t add so much.

The rules

As a result I’ve recently instituted some rules on how I buy books. In no particular order, here they are:

1. If I’ve not read anything by an author I don’t buy more than one book by that author as my first purchase.

This avoids my Joseph Rathbone experience where I thought his work sounded great, bought three of his novels, read the first and hated it and so ended up giving them all away (two unread).

2. If I have an unread book by an author, I don’t buy another book by that author.

This is sometimes tricky. I have an unread Echenoz, and keep reading reviews of other Echenoz novels which sound tremendous. It makes no sense though to buy them if I haven’t read the one I have. That kind of thinking led to my having everything Richard Yates has written (hardly a tragedy, but not really necessary given I read about one of his a year typically). It lead to my owning all Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels of which I’ve read the first five or so and then ground to a halt. Tastes change, and while at the time I bought them I was reading a Rankin a month it turns out that wasn’t a good predictor of how I’d carry on reading.

3. I can’t buy more books in a month than I’ve read or permanently removed from the house.

This isn’t working well for me. Not because I haven’t stuck to it, I largely have. It’s not working because if I read four books and buy four books then I now have four more books on the shelves, and the same number of unread books as I started the month with. I may need to institute a firmer one in-one physically out policy or change the ratio (one in for each two read say).

So, three rules but at least three fairly simple ones. Of course the much simpler one would be cold turkey. Just stop buying books for some (probably arbitrary) period. Absolute bars tend not to work well for me, but I can see the temptation.

Oddly enough with other media it’s been easier. I barely buy computer games now as I recognise that I have some seriously good ones yet unplayed. I no longer buy DVDs unless I plan to watch them pretty much as soon as they arrive (though even with that Star Trek sat around for nearly a year unwatched and Fish Tank still remains to be watched). Comics I mostly now buy on Comixology, an iPad app.

Dematerialisation and the ease of excess

That mention of my iPad neatly brings me back to the question of space. I have a Kindle, I have an iPad, I have various other electronic devices. A book bought on Kindle takes up no space. A comic on my iPad likewise. They do though still cost money, and they do still potentially sit there unread. They add to the TBR pile, even if they don’t take up shelf space while doing so.

When I first started buying fewer physical books I realised after a little while that I was buying more on my Kindle. I was, without realising it, still buying as much as before. I was just doing so in a less apparent way. The three rules above then need to not distinguish between physical and electronic books. If the goal is to reduce my TBR pile I’ve achieved nothing by merely dematerialising it.

There’s a danger in fact with ebooks and ecomics and so on. We can think we’ve decluttered (very much a buzz word that) our homes, but in fact we’ve done nothing of the kind. A hard drive full of unplayed RPGs in pdf format, a Kindle full of unread books, programmes bought on iTunes but unwatched, none of its obvious but it’s all still there. It’s all still cultural material which is being accumulated faster than it’s being experienced. It’s purchase in place of participation.

All of which leads me to that classic first world problem, too much stuff. How very hard it is to be Western and middle class. Still, whether a serious problem or not (not, clearly) it’s still there and the rules above are my attempt at the moment to fix it. Please feel free to share if you’ve had any similar thoughts, how you’ve addressed the hosepipe of culture we’re all trying to sip from and how it’s worked out for you.

Finally, by way of acknowledgement, the idea for this post by the way came from a blog post by an old mate of mine in which he asked the question of why people purchase cultural works that then just sit there. It’s a good post and I’ll be adding some thoughts of my own in his comments section. If you have thoughts which go more to his points than what I’ve written above I’d encourage you to post them over there so he can respond.

a case of chess poisoning

Chess, by Stefan Zweig and translated by Anthea Bell

I loved Stefan Zweig’s novella Burning Secret. It was melodramatic, but successfully so with Zweig painting a subtle but intense psychological portrait of obsession and desire. I agree with Michael Hofmann that Zweig’s no Arthur Schnitzler, but literature isn’t a competition.

Anthea Bell is among my favourite translators. In fact, seeing her name on a book makes me more likely to read it. She is extremely talented and chooses interesting works to translate.

Chess (also known as The Royal Game, and as Chess Story) is probably Zweig’s best known novella. It’s a study of obsession, it’s translated by Anthea Bell. It’s been generally well received in the blogosphere by bloggers whose recommendations I put a lot of weight on. What’s not to look forward to?

Well, for me the answer was the plot, psychology and characterisation none of which worked. On a more positive note the translation is of course excellent and it’s short. Brevity is generally a virtue, but it’s a particular virtue in bad books.

The narrator is a passenger on an ocean liner. He discovers that among his fellow passengers is Chess world champion Mirko Czentovic. Czentovic is a Slavonian peasant by background, utterly lacking in the slightest hint of intelligence or sophistication, but on the chessboard nobody can defeat him. Somehow this oaf has risen from remote obscurity to dominate his social and cultural superiors and to sweep all opponents before him.

For the moment he rose from the chessboard, where he was an incomparable master, Czentovic became a hopelessly grotesque and almost comic figure; despite his formal black suit, his ostentatious tie with its rather flashy tie-pin, and his carefully manicured fingers, in conduct and manner he was still the dull-witted country boy who used to sweep the priest’s living room in the village. To the amusement and annoyance of his chess-playing colleagues, he clumsily and with positively shameless impudence sought to make as much money as he could from his gift and his fame, displaying a petty and often vulgar greed.

…

… the knowledge that he had defeated all these clever, intellectual men, dazzling speakers and writers in their own field, and above all the tangible knowledge that he earned more than they did, turned his original insecurity into a cold and usually ostentatious pride.

What I find interesting in this passage is the extraordinary depth of snobbery it displays. I’m not immune to snobbery myself of course. My reaction might not be much different to the narrator’s (and obviously the narrator isn’t Zweig, though interestingly the text at times playfully implies it might be). Despite my own failings though the condescension is so dense here it suffocates.

As portrayed Czentovic is a peasant lacking any great abilities in life save one. Is it so blameworthy that he should seek to profit from that sole gift? Is it so praiseworthy that his socially superior opponents are more disdainful of money, a resource which unlike Czentovic they were born with? Czentovic’s real crime here is his “shameful impudence” in defeating men the narrator clearly considers his betters. The problem isn’t chess, it’s class.

The narrator is an amateur chessplayer himself and has an interest in obsessive personality types. He decides he wants to meet Czentovic, better yet play chess with him. Czentovic though only plays for money, his rates are high and he has no interest in small talk.

Luck strikes when the narrator discovers that he’s not the only one keen to see Czentovic play. In particular he meets a self-confident American engineer who wants to test his own ability against a master. A group of passengers forms, with the American paying Czentovic’s price, and a game is arranged.

On the one side then Czentovic, and on the other an alliance of players funded by the American and banded together to defeat this brute from Central Europe who scorns all values save victory. Obviously I’m not drawing any parallels here.

It’s no spoiler to say that Czentovic at first sweeps the board with them. The only obstacle to his relentless rise to domination comes from advice given to the allies by an onlooker who can’t hold himself back from commenting. When the allies follow this stranger’s suggestions they stop Czentovic’s advance and suddenly the allies have a fighting chance of holding him.

The onlooker is described in the text as Dr B, but who is he? How did he become so able at Chess that he can force a grandmaster to a draw, perhaps even defeat him, and yet nobody has heard of him? Can it be true this is the first time he has played in 20 years? These questions are the real book, to which all else so far has been just preparation. The narrator seeks out this anonymous master and discovers the terrible story of how he gained such extraordinary ability.

The line between terrible and silly can be a thin one. Here Dr B’s story involves confinement by Nazis, torture by way of sensory deprivation and chess as a means of intellectual escape. I won’t say more as to explain too much would risk damaging a future reader’s enjoyment of the book. I can say that it allows some nice ironies where chess with its constrained space comprised of set dimensions and permitted moves becomes a limitless domain of pure mind quite separate to the imprisoned self.

Zweig died in 1942. Chess was published posthumously. At the time of writing then he didn’t know that Hitler would be defeated. If one remembers that, this becomes a work of fevered despair. Czentovic is unstoppable, except by a man who is a psychological wreck. Dr B is in a sense the European intellectual (perhaps even more specifically the Jewish intellectual), able to outwit Czentovic but fragile against his stolid cruelty. That’s a lot of weight for a slight story though.

The parable is clever, but it hangs off the story, which rapidly becomes ludicrous. Dr B’s backstory seems initially improbable (were the Gestapo really so prone to subtly undermining their prisoners’ sense of self, rather than simply brutalising them?) and swiftly becomes quite incredible as chess becomes both linchpin and threat to Dr B’s sanity. Zweig’s writing depends heavily on both plot and characterisation, and I didn’t believe in Dr B and I didn’t believe in what happened to him.

That leaves just the writing. Zweig certainly can write, but this feels not quite finished and I wonder if he’d have polished it further had he lived. Certainly it would have helped avoid sentences like this: “And now, for the first time, such a phenomenon, such a strange genius, or such an enigmatic fool, was physically close to me for the first time …”

I’m in a distinct minority on this one. John Self of The Asylum liked it and found the plot ultimately plausible. Trevor of themookseandthegripes was taken by it, and so was Will of Just William’s Luck. Tom of A Common Reader liked it too (both Will and Tom’s reviews are particularly worth reading for their discussion of symbolic elements of the novella). The only blog I’ve found so far (though I’m sure I’ve missed some) that shared my concerns was Sarah’s at A Rat in the Book Pile. Links in this paragraph are to the various reviews mentioned.

So, Chess. It’s very short, most readers love it and you may do so too. For me though it crosses the line from tragedy to comedy, without being funny. If you disagree, and if you’ve read it you probably do from what I’ve seen of other reviews, I’d be delighted to hear why I’m wrong.

2011: That was the year that was

2011 was in many senses a frustrating reading year. I didn’t make the progress with Proust that I had hoped, and more than once I had to abandon good books not because I didn’t like them but because I was too busy to do them justice. So it goes.

Despite that rather gloomy assessment when I look back some gems do stand out. As I write this 2012 looks like it will be equally challenging in terms of reading opportunities, but if at the end of it I’ve read some books as good as these I won’t be doing entirely badly.

From a personal perspective, one interesting aspect of writing this kind of retrospective is the books that I wouldn’t have expected to be on it. I read a fair bit of modernist fiction in 2011, and I’m not at all surprised to find that at the end of the year several modernist titles have made my list. There are books here though that deserve their place but that I almost didn’t read because I didn’t expect to love them. I hope 2012 has a few surprises like that too.

First of the surprises is Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn, which I came late to as I always do to Booker novels. In many ways Toibin’s the antithesis of much of what I look for in fiction. There’s no experimentalism here, no playing with perspective or deconstructing of authorial authority. Instead there’s a quiet excellence. Quiet’s in fact the key word here. Brooklyn is a novel about a rather passive young woman who is more acted upon than acting, and her story is ultimately fairly ordinary. Many readers found it a bit dull. I didn’t, I increasingly doubt I could find anything Toibin writes dull.

Another book which surprised me is Maile Meloy’s short story collection Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It. I shouldn’t have been surprised, it was in Kevinfromcanada’s best of 2010 list and Trevor of themookseandthegripes 2010 list as well. Still, I’m not generally in the market for small tales of emotional revelation. As with the Toibin it’s the quality of the writing here that takes subject matter I fundamentally don’t particularly care about and raises it to excellence.

Less surprising was Tom McCarthy’s first novel, Remainder. The imagery in this has stuck with me through the year, particularly the incredibly apposite and well judged ending. This was a difficult novel in many ways, lacking the storytelling hooks of Toibin and Meloy’s writing. Still, I found it challenging and exciting and I’m looking forward to reading his second novel, Men in Space, later this year.

McCarthy reinvigorated my interest in modernism, which led in June to my reading Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism?. That isn’t of itself on my end of the year list (though I do recommend it), but it led me to read Josipovici’s own fiction to see to what extent he lived up to his own theories.

Josipovici I suspect will be a writer that many will simply not enjoy, but his Everything Passes: A Novel was easily one of my books of the year. Here Josipovici pares back the form of the novel until almost nothing is left. It’s a minimalist read which requires close attention, and for me repaid it. That said, it’s not where I’d suggest starting with modernism if you’re tempted. There’s more accessible reads out there which are equally good.

Returning from the wilder shores of fiction, another Kevin and Trevor joint recommendation makes my end of year list – JL Carr’s superb A Month in the Country. Like the Toibin and the Meloy this is simply a marvel of prose excellence. It’s as fine an example of why novellas deserve much more attention than they tend to receive. It’s clever, absorbing and beautifully crafted. A masterpiece really, and if I were hacking this list back to a top five it would still be present. Trevor included it in his 2009 best of list, though Kevin deserves just as much thanks for alerting me to it with his review which is here.

The other great novella of 2011 was Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. This is funny, disturbing, capable of a multitude of interpretations and is very short so there’s absolutely no reason not to read it. Preferring not to is not an option.

Another book that just leaps out as one of the stand out reads of the year is JG Farrell’s Troubles. First of a thematic trilogy (and I will definitely be reading the second and third) this is both bleak and hilarious. It’s a reviewing cliché to call a book savagely funny, and generally undeserved, but here it fits. This is laughter in the dark, laughter born of despair. Farrell writes an almost forensic examination of the loss of British Empire in Ireland (and by analogy elsewhere) and marries it to a narrative that is continually unexpected and rewarding. Brilliant, brilliant stuff and a great pairing with the Carr incidentally.

Right, we’re into the home stretch. It wouldn’t be an end of year list for me without some Pynchon. 2011’s was V. A delightful sprawl of a novel which it’s best just to give yourself up to. There’s no point trying to make sense of everything as you go along. This is novel as whitewater rafting. You throw yourself in and are swept along. The end result is exhilarating, even if some of the details perhaps remain a little blurry.

Best crime novel for me in 2011 is easily James Sallis’s Drive. Smooth and slick, but surprisingly sophisticated, it’s made me an instant Sallis fan. I have his The Killer is Dying which I now have very high hopes for.

Best book about Japanese toilets has to go to Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows. It’s an excellent study of aesthetics,, and very short which is always a plus. Best non-fiction work of the year though is Shen Fu’s heartbreaking and lovely Six Records of a Floating Life. You’ve probably never wanted to read the autobiography of an unsuccessful turn of the 19th Century Chinese scholar. You should. This is one of the finest books I’ve read in a very long time, and extremely affecting. There’s a reason it’s a classic.

Finally, standing in a category of his own is Proust. In 2011 I only managed to read one volume, Within a Budding Grove. It is quite simply extraordinary. A genuine masterpiece (the second time I’ve used that word in this roundup I notice). Proust is more accessible than people imagine, and incredibly rewarding. The length and the need to concentrate make him daunting, but he is absolutely worth it.

And that’s it. A disappointing year overall as I said at the beginning, but with some tremenous reads all the same. I’m a bit sad not to have found space above for Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, or Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, and there’s no SF at all this year (and very little crime). Still, any list has to leave some things out or it’s just my archive. Comments on the list are, as ever, welcome.

We thought he would enter from the right…

Comedy in a Minor Key, by Hans Keilson and translated by Damion Searls

The trouble with realism in fiction is that reality is often distinctly undramatic, and indifferent to the importance of consistent theme and genre. A cop show aiming for realism will usually be gritty, but life isn’t just grit. A war novel aiming for realism may focus on mud, pain and random death, but rarely on cleaning duties and dirty jokes.

Enter Hans Keilson, and Comedy in a Minor Key. This isn’t a realist novel. It’s far too real for that.

Isn’t that a marvellous cover by the way? Hesperus Press, which for me is pretty much a badge of quality in publishing.

Wim and Marie are a young Dutch couple living on the outskirts of Amsterdam. It’s World War II and each night the British planes fly overhead on their way to bomb Germany. The Netherlands are occupied, and in a small act of resistance Wim and Marie have hidden Nico, a Jew, in their home. The trouble is Nico’s just died of natural causes. Now Wim and Marie have a corpse in their house.

What follows is an exceptionally light and subtle novella. In just over a 100 pages Keilson explores the psychology of everyone involved (including Nico, much of the book looks back to what led them all to their current situation). It’s funny, in places, but the danger is very real. Nico’s death is anticlimactic for Wim and Marie, and inconvenient, but they can’t be found with a dead Jew any more than they could with a living one.

As Wim makes arrangements with the family doctor to dispose of Nico’s corpse under a nearby park bench, Marie looks through the dead man’s few possessions. She realises how difficult it must have been for Nico, condemned to living silently in a single room, and the narrative slips back to Nico’s own perspective. In the face of everyday tedium how long can one feel grateful to people, even if they have saved your life?

When he came here, to this house, he would have happily taken a place on a pile of coal in a barn and been satisfied. Now he slept in a bed, ate at a table, was treated as a human being.
But the longer it lasted, the greater his demands grew. Since he couldn’t demand anything of the outer world – what he did receive was freely offered, almost a gift – his demands turned inward and more and more excessive. But people were helping him, they were helping him, didn’t that mean anything? Yes, it meant a lot. But also nothing. He was turning into nothing. It was unbearable. It meant his annihilation, his human annihilation, even if it – maybe – saved his life. The little thorn that grows invisibly in anyone who lives on the help and pity of others grew to gigantic proportions, became a javelin lodged deep in his flesh and hurting terribly.

“The little thorn that grows invisibly in anyone who lives on the help and pity of others”. Beautiful. It’s that kind of quiet yet precise observation that makes this book so good.

In hiding a fugitive Wim and Marie are doing something brave, in a sense heroic, but nothing is ever purely from one motive. Their resistance contact, Jop, appeals to each household he wants to place someone with in a slightly different way. With Wim he appeals to patriotic duty, with someone else to their Christian charity, to another he portrays it as a “purely humane act”. We all sometimes need a little push, to help us do the right thing. There’s vanity too, of course, and the need to feel part of things:

She had secretly imagined what it would be like on liberation day, the three of them arm in arm walking out of their house. Everyone would see right away what he was from his pale face, the colour of a shut-in, which his appearance only emphasised even more. How the neighbours and everyone in the street would look when he suddenly walked out of their house and strolled up and down the street with them. It would give them a little sense of satisfaction, and everyone who makes a sacrifice needs a little sense of satisfaction. And then you’d feel that you, you personally, even if only just a little bit, had won the war.

Keilson takes familiar themes and stories, war, resistance, the tension of living in secrecy, but then gives them a light and human tweak which makes them fresh and powerful. The doctor, standing over Nico’s body, asks Wim and Marie what Nico did for a living. Nico, Nicodemus, wasn’t that the name of one of the ancient rabbis he asks? Nico though wasn’t a rabbi, he was just a perfume salesman. A rabbi would have been more romantic, more dramatically fitting perhaps, but perfume salesmen need saving too.

It was like a comedy where you expect the hero to emerge onstage, bringing resolution, from the right. And out he comes from the left. Later, though, the audience members go home surprised, delighted, and a little bit wiser for the experience. They feel that the play did turn out a bit sad after all, at the very end. We thought he would enter from the right…

Hans Keilson has received a reasonable amount of attention to the blogosphere. I first heard of him with John Self’s review, here, but it was Will Rycroft at Just William’s Luck here who really sold me and persuaded me to read this. Both have my thanks. I’m pretty sure that other bloggers I follow have also covered this, but can’t now recall which. Apologies to anyone whose review I’ve not linked to and if I have missed you please let me know in the comments and I’ll correct that.

On a slightly related note, since writing the first draft of this I’ve noticed that I picked almost exactly the same quotes as Will did. For some reason I always find that slightly reassuring. Validation that if I’ve utterly missed the point at least I’ve missed it in company I suppose.

It comes tight-packed

Sea Level, by Angela Leighton

Like most people who don’t read a lot of poetry I find it incredibly hard to write about. It’s so personal. The usual analogy, one I often make myself, is to say that poetry is a language. If so I barely speak it, and often find myself lost and hoping that I’ve picked up enough of the gist of what’s going on that I’ve managed to order a beer and not an offal platter.

I have in fact once mistakenly ordered an offal platter. I don’t recommend it.

Angela Leighton is a contemporary British poet. Sea Level is her second collection, and as the title suggests it’s shot through with images of the sea, and of nature more widely. The back of the book says too that it draws on the landscape of Yorkshire and East Riding, but knowing nothing of either I can’t speak to that.

Time I think for an example. Sea Level is a 68 page collection with the majority of poems fitting on a single page. I intend to quote three poems in full in this review, which I hope will give a good feel for her work. This first one is for me an excellent example of poem as condensed description. A capturing of a moment or place in language which while not always wholly comprehensible is nonetheless powerful:

Harbour

From creel-pots’ crochet, dumped networks of nets,
staggered crates, a trailer, bales of twine,
bits and knots and art and old sea stench
under the nightly floodlight’s yellow halo,

saints’ wrack, livings, rot, planking, buoys,
rounding guts of rope, oarlock, airlock,
with acquapac and VHF, and luck,
light, weather, balance, ebb, flow,

something draws us out beyond the jerry’s
throw, its sea-sliced steps and stop, its checked
halt, systoles of dulse, litter, scum,
to falls of sea-room falling wide as we come.

I have and always have had a great love of the sea, and so of ports. Real ports are of course deeply unromantic places, full of smell, mess and odd bits of slime. Even so, I’m drawn to them. This poem captures that for me. The opening paragraph (stanza? I lack the terminology here) captures the chaos of a port. The nets heaped up in piles. The crates and rusting boats (not that rusting boats are mentioned, still I see them when I read it).

With the second paragraph we’re into the territory where poetry can so easily lose us. What is saint’s wrack? Is that something real, or something Leighton made up? What’s an acquapac? VHF? I don’t know, and yet the sense of the language remains powerful and evocative. I no longer quite know what’s being said, but I still understand it (or at least feel that I do).

Then, with the third paragraph, there’s that sense of possibility that the sea always speaks to me of. Ports are of necessity prosaic and functional, but they lead to the sea and the sea leads to, well, to a myriad possibilities of places. That’s the draw, part of it anyway.

So, as I said, poetry is deeply personal For me this poem captures the ambivalence of a port, a harbour. The quotidian mess and dirt and beyond it the draw of something vast and strange. I also love of course little phrases like “sea-sliced steps” where the alliteration helps capture that sense of the sea sliding back and forth over the stone steps leading down to the boats.

Here’s another:

Peat

It comes tight-packed, unearthly heavy, fat
with itself, intact. Handled, it crumbles to bits.

I sift and slip a landscape through my fingers,
feeling the way of forests, sun and rain,

trees that lean with the wind, that breathe with it,
and shake a hair of needles to the ground-

a plan of rusty crosses sinking in,
the wood’s crossed fingers teasing out the sun.

Whose land is this? assorted, dry as dust,
evacuated of its light and rains,

yet springy still, as if just stepped-off, live,
on some bare hillside subject to nothing but weather.

Its crumbs fall through my hands. I own the stuff,
its solving composition, settled dross,

the earth grown poor from forests it has lost.
This bit of unsoiled land is on my hands:

the bog’s muck-sweat, hill-weathers’ heavy loads,
the ways of ownership, those famine roads.

Here it’s the physicality that draws me in. As with Harbour this is deeply sensual poetry. Not sensual as in erotic, but sensual as in visual and tactile. “Handled, it crumbles to bits.”. There’s a sense of solidity here that fits the subject matter.

Here poetry becomes an examination of something quite unexceptional: a handful of soil. Leighton leaps from the feel of the peat between her fingers to the landscape it came from, and then to the sorrows of that landscape (“famine roads”). I actually find this much harder to write about than Harbour, as there’s nothing particularly personal to me in this poem. Still, for all it has no personal resonance I still find it curiously intimate. Perhaps it’s that sensuality again.

A final example:

Hotel

I pay, then climb into the night’s room.
A number tells me where I am
at home. I’ll not remember soon.

Outside, there’s too much light to dream.
The city’s talkative. Sirens scream
in fifths, tuning. Here I’m clean

out of it, free. It lays no claim
to my, my unfound hiding, name,
the puff breath makes. I am the same,

but stranger, keen. I start to learn
my whereabouts by rote, short-term:
a bed, a room, a night, by turn.

Outside, the sky must save its skin.
It lets whatever the room keeps in
out in waves. The wall’s too thin.

This night my numbered door might win
a lottery, stop an angel, summon
what lies open out there to come in.

The sense here isn’t of hotel as holiday destination, but of business travel. The narrator is alone in the room, and there’s no sense of excitement or anticipation. Instead it captures that mix of insomnia, uncertainty and the knowledge of an unfamiliar place which could include who knows what, but which you’ll likely never get to really see. Perhaps I’m projecting, but then with poetry perhaps that’s the point.

Other poems that stood out for me included a very brief one titled Dusk Chorus capturing the underlying desperation, hunger and territoriality of bird song. Another, At the Vet’s, captures that terrible moment when one stands in a vet’s room as a loved cat is put to sleep. It’s again a very short poem, but for me devastating as I’ve had to do that (thankfully only once so far) and the poem captures the scene with an accuracy that made it unsuitable for quoting. If you own cats you’ll know why I didn’t put that up to be blundered across on a blog. It’s too painful.

Some poems later in the collection lost me, being too technical or too rooted in a terrain I know nothing of. I can relate to poetry without knowing what each word means, but as with any communication there comes a point where one understands so little that any resonance there might have been is lost. That’s ok though. The trick with poetry I’ve found is not to worry that not every poem makes sense. When I studied Italian some concepts came quickly, others took years of study. Why should this be different?

I’ve previously quoted another Angela Leighton poem, here, That poem is freely available online, but also appears in this collection. It’s the poem which made me want to read more by Leighton, so if you missed that post I’d suggest at least spending a couple of minutes with it.

“Death always doubles off”

The Crazy Kill, by Chester Himes

Over Christmas I read an article which quoted PD James. She talked about how the pleasure of crime fiction was the knowledge that by the end of the book order would be restored. Bad things happen, but good wins out. The world is, ultimately, just.

That’s true of some crime fiction, but not of any crime fiction I enjoy reading. It’s not true of Chester Himes. In the 1950s Harlem of Himes’ novels the bad guys generally do get punished, but so do several other people along the way and there’s no restoration of order because there was never any order to begin with.

Here’s the opening of The Crazy Kill:

It was four o’clock, Wednesday morning, July 14th, in Harlem, U.S.A. Seventh Avenue was as dark and lonely as haunted graves.
A colored man was stealing a bag of money.

The bag is full of change. It’s on the seat of a double-parked car, just near a cop on patrol and a grocery store manager who’s opening up and will be back in a moment to pick up the bag and take it inside. Problem is, a bag doesn’t have to be left alone long in Harlem to go missing.

Nearby at a wake Reverent Short is leaning out of a first-story window watching proceedings. He leans too far out, falls and ends up in a large basket of bread sitting outside the bakery below.

The Reverend’s fine, but when he returns to the wake he does so with what he claims to be a vision. He saw a dead man, and when the partygoers go outside they find right in that same bread basket the body of Valentine Haines, stabbed through the heart with the knife still jutting out.

Before long everyone’s wondering who killed Val. Was it Johnny, local gangster and Val’s business partner? Was it Dulcy, Johnny’s girl and Val’s sister? What about Chink Charlie? He’s got the hots for Dulcy and he owns a knife just like the one sticking out of the corpse. Everyone says Val had no real enemies, but there seem to be a lot of people who might be in the frame for his death.

The Reverend’s throwing out accusations and stirring up trouble; Dulcy doesn’t seem to mind Chink Charlie paying her a little attention; and Johnny’s a jealous man with a violent temper. If things carry on as they are Val’s body won’t be the only one with a knife sticking out of it. Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed are soon on the scene and applying pressure.

The questioning was conducted in a soundproof room without windows on the first floor. This room was known to the Harlem underworld as the “Pigeon Nest.” It was said that no matter how tough an egg was, if they kept him in there long enough he would hatch out a pigeon.

I won’t say more about the plot. It’s only there because without it nothing would happen. As ever with Himes the real substance is in the characters, and in the sense of Harlem life. Johnny is a successful gambler and gets a lot of respect, even from the police. He wears sharp suits and drives a fancy car. The Reverend says, and believes, that he’s sworn off all alcohol, but he drinks a nerve tonic of his own devising which is a mix of hard drugs and harder liquor.

This is a Harlem filled with gambling joints, whorehouses, the Holy Roller Church where the Reverend preaches and where the congregation roll around on the floor when the spirit moves them. It’s Summer, it’s hot as hell, and tempers are running high. The only place there’s any relief is in the bars and gambling joints where people like Johnny spend their time:

Inside it was cool, and so dark he had to take off his sun glasses on entering. The unforgettable scent of whisky, whores and perfume filled his nostrils, making him feel relaxed.

In a sense this is Damon Runyon territory. It’s a different decade, a different part of New York and everyone’s black, but otherwise he’d recognise a lot of this. Just look at the names some of the characters have: Chink Charlie, Baby Sis, Reverend Short, Valentine Haines, Deep South, Mamie Pullen, Dulcy, Johnny, Pigmeat, Poor Boy, Doll Baby, Alamena, and of course Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed themselves.

The difference though is that Chester Himes doesn’t write comic novels. His characters have none of the loveable nature of Runyon’s rogues. Take away Runyon’s humour, and his affection, and the milieu isn’t so different. Damon Runyon after all portrays a world in which people scheme, cheat, take crazy risks and kill. Runyon does it with a laugh. Himes’ books have plenty of laughs, but hollow ones, and you can smell his characters’ sweat.

There’s always a question with novels forming part of a series as to where one should start. With the Harlem cycle the answer has to be at the beginning with A Rage in Harlem. The answer definitely shouldn’t be The Crazy Kill. It’s solid, but probably the weakest of the three I’ve read so far.

Jones and Ed barely feature, which isn’t vastly problematic as Himes’ interest is always more in his criminals than his detectives, but their presence sets up expectations about the kind of novel this is which aren’t quite realised. The plot, clearly intentionally, makes very little sense which is fine as Himes is all about the atmosphere but does make what happens all a little random (which again is clearly intentional, but even so is a little unsatisfying).

Although The Crazy Kill features a crime, and detectives who solve that crime, it’s not really a detective novel. At the end I found myself wondering if it would have been better with a little more detecting, or with none at all. It’s messing with Mr. In-Between that causes the problems there are here.

In writing this I found two reviews online by other bloggers, here and here. That first link has two extremely well chosen quotes and so I’d strongly suggest at least following that to get a little more of a taste of Himes’ prose. Otherwise, if you’ve read the first two Himes and enjoyed them then you should absolutely read this, but if you’re not already a fan this won’t be the one to convert you.

The cover up above is from the Vintage Crime edition, which I don’t particularly recommend as it has absurdly large margin spaces. There’s a Penguin Modern Classics edition now available, and if I were buying this now that’s what I would get. For the curious there’s also apparently a biography of Himes written by James Sallis, which makes it rather fitting that this review follows my review of Drive.

On a very final note, I found two alternative covers for this online, which I thought I’d share because they’re just great examples of vintage cover art. Particularly the first.

I drive. That’s all I do.

Drive, by James Sallis

Readers often come to writers with expectations. Sometimes those are based on that writer’s previous work (and those expectations can be a straitjacket for a writer), sometimes they’re based on reviews or blog comments, sometimes they’re based on pure assumption (I have expectations about Danielle Steele, but truth be told I’ve very little to base them on).

When it came to reading James Sallis I expected competent crime writing. I expected solid thrillers with efficient prose and a well crafted plot; the sort of book I might read on a long journey or when tired. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of book, and plenty right with it. On the strength of Drive though James Sallis is a much more interesting animal.

Here’s the opening paragraph from Drive:

Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there’d be no doubt. But for now Driver is, as they say, in the moment. And the moment includes this blood lapping toward him, the pressure of dawn’s late light at windows and door, traffic sounds from the interstate nearby, the sound of someone weeping in the next room.

Firstly, that’s better than competent writing. Just seeing it again now it strikes me how clear it is. I’ve not yet seen the film version of Drive, but this unfolds in my head as I read it. I can see the blood and the light, hear the weeping and the sound of traffic. I even have an image of Motel 6. This is the kind of prose that often gets described as lean, taut, and much as I’d like to come up with something more original I find myself reaching for the same words. It is efficient prose, but it’s not merely efficient. It has style.

It’s immediately apparent that this paragraph is just a slice in time. Driver is sitting, not in movement. Blood is still lapping towards him though, and whoever is crying is still doing so, so it’s not a static scene. This is the immediate aftermath of violence. A brief moment of reflection, caught between the action just past and the time for regret later. The story’s already started, the reader is thrown in, in media res.

From there Sallis tells a fairly straightforward tale of a heist gone bad, a doublecross and a spiral of resulting revenge and murder. Classic Hollywood stuff, and this is very much a Hollywood narrative. The tricks here are cinematic.

Characters are iconic (none more so than Driver, a man with no name, but there’s also hired muscle out of Houston called Dave Strong, a blonde named Blanche and so on). The story is told in scenes, each of which is framed so neatly you can almost hear Sallis yelling cut. The narrative jumps backward and forward in time, not so much as to be confusing but so that I was pulled in and forward, so that I wanted to see how it would all fit together.

Driver is just that. He’s a Hollywood stunt driver and part time getaway driver. Sallis tells enough of his past to get a feel for his character, but never his name. Here as the classic Fitzgerald quote goes, action is character. We know Driver through what he does, how he does it. What he says is almost unimportant, and besides he doesn’t say much.

Up till the time Driver got his growth about twelve, he was small for his age, an attribute of which his father made full use. The boy could fit easily through small openings, bathroom windows, pet doors and so on, making him a considerable helpmate at his father’s trade, which happened to be burglary. When he did get his growth he got it all at once, shooting up from just below four feet to six-two almost overnight, it seemed. He’d been something of a stranger to and in his body ever since. When he walked, his arms flailed about and he shambled. If he tried to run, often as not he’d trip and fall over. One thing he could do, though, was drive. And he drove like a son of a bitch.

Drive is just as focused as Driver himself. It sets out to tell a classic story (the difference between a classic story and a clichéd story is mostly execution) and it does so like a son of a bitch. I thought it one of the best and most invigorating crime novels I’ve read in a while, even though in terms of plot and character there’s nothing original here at all.

I’ll end with one final quote. It’s here because I think it’s a thing of beauty, and because it captures the novel. It’s Hollywood in a sentence.

Throwing the duffel bag over the seat, he backed out of the garage, pulled up by the stop sign at the end of the street, and made a hard left to California.

Haven’t we all at times wanted to throw a duffel bag over the seat, pull up to the end of the street and make a hard left to California? I know I have, and I don’t even know how to drive.

Guy Savage reviewed Drive here: here and is pretty much responsible for bringing Sallis to my attention. My copy came as a review freebie from the publisher.

Human nature was just so much infinitely malleable putty

City of Heavenly Tranquility, by Jasper Becker

I don’t like abandoning books. I used to take it as a point of pride in fact that I never abandoned them. Those days are long past. Now I don’t hope a bad book will turn into Tolstoy on page 205.

What’s frustrating about Jasper Becker’s City of Heavenly Tranquility is that it shouldn’t be a bad book. It’s a non-fiction study of Beijing, it’s history and how that history is being lost today in a wave of new construction. It’s written by Jasper Becker, who wrote Hungry Ghosts – an excellent account of the horrific mass famine created by Mao’s policies in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Becker knows his material and he can write. What went wrong?

City of Heavenly Tranquility is essentially a form of travel writing. Becker visits places, interviews people, writes what he finds and gives it a historical context. It’s not quite reportage, but nor is it intended merely to entertain. Becker’s core thesis is that historic Beijing is being wilfully destroyed by a Chinese bureaucracy that is utterly indifferent, even hostile, to the priceless heritage it is annihilating.

Imagine the outcry if, in less than a decade, London underwent a similar transformation. If the West End, Notting Hill, Knightsbridge, Holland Park and the City of London were to be levelled and replaced by giant residential and commercial blocks. If every landmark – Oxford Street, Piccadilly, Pall Mall, Regent Street, Covent Garden, the courtyards of the Temple, the alleys of Soho – were to disappear at once. Imagine the outcry if in less than a decade New York underwent a similar transformation. If Wall Street, Central Park, Greenwich Village, SoHo, the Bronx, the Upper East Side were to be levelled and replaced by giant new residential towers and commercial office blocks. If every landmark – Times Square, Madison Square Gardens, Radio City – were to disappear at once.

That’s an absolutely valid subject for a book. The Chinese authorities, and probably a fair few of the Chinese public, would have counterarguments but there’s nothing wrong with a healthy debate. The trouble then isn’t the concept. It’s the execution.

In the first chapter Becker describes how he is shown round a housing development intended for the new urban rich:

‘I like it, especially the fake fireplace. This is real luxury,’ I said politely. ‘Later, I will show you the landscaped garden, the vast lawn, the children’s playground, the European fountains, the stylish sculptures, the beautiful flowers, and the underground car park,’ she said.

It’s a well written passage. As the conversation progressed though I found myself wondering how true it was. Becker is shown round because he’s pretending to be a prospective buyer. He isn’t openly there as a journalist. That’s of course normal, but his text purports to be what was said. Did he take contemporaneous notes? Write it up immediately afterwards? Or has he reconstructed it, written essentially what was said, if not the precise words?

The line between reportage and fiction can be a slippery one. That though is a reason to take extra care and to be clear with readers how you’ve drawn that line. I wasn’t far into the book, but already I had concerns about the accuracy of what I was reading (I also thought quietly satirising the vulgarity of new money a bit easy, but that’s a far lesser point).

Becker has little time for modern China, which he sees as brutal, vulgar and undemocratic. Against the brash present he places the fruits of 5,000 years of civilisation. What’s being lost, for him, is immense. What’s being gained in return is tawdry. Here he puts the special nature of Beijing in perspective:

in Beijing the two great strands of Asian history are united: the settled urban civilization, steeped in Confucianism, and the wilder world of the Huns, the Mongols, the Manchus and other nomadic peoples who roamed the steppes of Asia, living in felt tents.

The problem with all this is the question of alternatives. It’s easy to deride rapid development and its costs. I stayed in a hutong (traditional alley area) and I’d be sorry to see them all go (most are already demolished to make way for new apartment complexes). That said, I don’t have to live in one full time. If I did I might be a bit less keen on history and a bit more on good plumbing.

It’s clear that China’s modernisation has a cost. It’s clear too that decisions have been taken which future, richer, inhabitants of Beijing will sorely regret. Popular protests against demolition of beloved sites or buildings are brushed aside. The beautiful is being cast aside for a needlessly ugly pragmatism. Still, it’s important to remember that this isn’t just a tourist destination. People have to live there.

Far from Beijing’s ugly pretensions to modernity, one felt a little freer and in such a haunt of ancient peace could savour an unchanging China fixed for ever in a romantic decay.

I like romantic decay as much as the next man. Probably more than many since I am on occasion of a somewhat melancholic bent (despite being generally cheerful, I guess I’m cheerfully melancholic). That said, a tourist’s romantic decay can be a resident’s slum. China isn’t a theme park.

Were my only issue with Becker’s thesis (much of which I was persuaded by, just not the naive romanticism of quotes like the one above) then I wouldn’t call this a bad book. A book isn’t bad because I don’t agree with it. The much greater problem is the inescapable whiff of cut-and-paste.

My suspicion, though only that, is that this book is a collation of magazine articles edited together into one work. A chapter would mention Mongol rule, then another would mention it again as if for the first time (which if each chapter were a standalone article it would be of course). A section would talk of how the Mongol khans hid their tombs so well that they were never found, and then another would introduce the same factoid again without recognition of the previous reference.

Equally the quality of the chapters varied widely. Some are marvellous. The description of the Ming court eunuchs and their conflicts with the mandarins were absolutely fascinating:

It was only natural that the mandarins felt contempt towards eunuchs, whose chief qualification was a willingness to submit to castration, while they had to pass very competitive examinations.

So good were these sections that if Becker decided to write a book about the Chinese imperial court generally I’d buy it in a heartbeat. The following is just one, slightly salacious, example:

The sexual practices of the imperial court make for the oddest reading. Court astrologers were employed in determining the optimum hours for sex, based on cycles for yin and yang, in the belief that with the right timing the result would be a boy. Then, after the second meal of the day, a eunuch would present the emperor with a silver tray with bamboo slips, each with the name of one of the concubines. The emperor would turn over the name of his choice and she would then be brought at the correct time, wrapped in a blanket. It was the duty of the eunuch standing in the alcove to shout after a decent interval, ‘Time is up’, followed by the advice: ‘Preserve your imperial body, Sire!’ If there was silence after the third call, then the eunuch would step in to carry the woman out, only pausing to ask if the emperor wished her to bear a child. If the answer was yes, then he would record all relevant details in a notebook.

Becker also writes persuasively about the crimes of Lord Elgin, who ordered the burning of the Summer Palace and so robbed the Chinese people and humanity generally of a great treasure. Elgin was a barbarian, and Becker is right to condemn him. In another section though you get journalistic filler like this:

Many of the men – more than thirty, some said – who had helped Howard Carter open Tutankhamun’s tomb had died in mysterious circumstances. Some believe they succumbed after inhaling deadly bacteria trapped in the Egyptian tombs: could that happen here in China?

Against which I wrote a one word comment (it was “bollocks”, kindle preserved my notes on that passage for posterity).

The end result is a book that has great things with it, but that isn’t the sum of its parts. There’s two or three different books here, and they sit poorly together. It was that along with the repetition that made me wonder if it was cobbled together from assorted articles, some good and some less so.

Ultimately the origin of the book doesn’t matter. What does is that I got so irritated by it that I stopped reading it. It’s been over a year now since that decision, and I don’t see it changing at this point. I’ve had a part draft of this review kicking around since February and since I had a free moment it seemed a good time to post this one up.

I read City of Heavenly Tranquility on my kindle, as mentioned above. The kindle edition is unfortunately extremely badly formatted, containing many errors such as “sturdyirongates” being written as one word. If you are interested in the parts about the Imperial court and the eunuchs I’d strongly advise getting a physical copy. Also, for the record, the quote I’ve used as the title of this piece is a view Becker ascribes to the bureacrats, not one he at all supports.

all the more human

Flypaper, by Robert Musil and translated by Peter Wortsman

Robert Musil is famous (being a bit generous with that word there for a moment) for his unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities. By all accounts it’s an incredible work. I’m too fond of editors to ever welcome the idea of reading an interrupted book – one that not even the author finished polishing – but I’ve been told that for Musil I should put that prejudice to one side.

Fair enough, but The Man Without Qualities has another barrier besides being incomplete. It’s nearly 700 pages long. That’s a lot to launch into with an author I don’t know.

Enter Penguin Modern Classics with their pocket editions each coming in at around the 60 page mark. Flypaper is a collection of fueilletons, short essays, by Robert Musil. There’s nine of them in this tiny collection, and as an introduction to Musil it’s about as good as it could be. That’s the joy of these little Penguin editions. They cost almost nothing, they’re concise and they’re a tremendous way to try out an author who for one reason or another you might be unsure about investing in.

Each of the nine little pieces in this collection is a small marvel of mercilessly precise observation. The title narrative, Flypaper, consists of a description of a piece of flypaper and the slow death of the flies that land on it. It’s at times hard to read. Partly I admit because I had nightmares about flypaper as a child (someone unwisely left some above my bed at a relatives home, meaning I had a front line view of exactly what Musil describes here. Whether that caused the peculiar horror I still have of the sight of dying insects or whether that fear already existed and so made the flypaper terrible I have no way of knowing). Partly though because Musil takes something as insignificant as the death of a fly and by not looking away invests it with majesty and with a more universal significance.

Here’s Flypaper’s first paragraph, after which it gets much more disquieting:

Tangle-foot flypaper is approximately fourteen inches long and eight inches wide; it is coated with a yellow poison paste and comes from Canada. When a fly lands on it – not so eagerly, more out of convention, because so many others are already there – it gets stuck at first by only the outermost joints of all its legs. A very quiet, disconcerting sensation, as though while walking in the dark we were to step on something with our naked soles, nothing more than a soft, warm unavoidable obstruction, and yet something into which little by little the awesome human essence flows, recognised as a hand that just happens to be lying there, and with five ever more decipherable fingers holds us tight.

Musil then explores the flies ever tiring attempts to free themselves, each miring them more firmly to the paper. He talks of moments of furious struggle, of sudden exhaustion, of the slow despair and futility of a fight against inevitable disability (as wings and limbs become stuck fast) and death.

There is real empathy here, and it is the empathy which makes it so awful. The next, Monkey Island, examines a small island in the heart of Rome. A wide and deep ditch separates the island from the land around it, and on it is a tree and a colony of monkeys none of whom can quite jump or climb that ditch.

This then is the monkeys’ kingdom. Musil’s gaze sweeps over it, from the strongest monkeys who form the royal family of the island to the outcasts who live within the ditch itself. It is a microcosm of us, a point Musil has no need to underline but which cannot be avoided as he shows the social and literal gulf dividing those monkeys who have from those who feed from fallen crumbs.

I won’t describe each essay. They are superbly written. Some, like those first two, draw out uncomfortable truths about our own existence. Some, such as The Painstpreader or It’s Lovely Here are satires, of artistic mediocrity on the one hand and of tourists’ desire to encounter “something that is acknowledged by experts as beautiful” on the other.

The briefest piece, titled Sarcophagus Cover, is a touching description of two ancient Roman sarcophagi that have on them a couple still gazing affectionately at each other through the long centuries. The last, The Blackbird, is a sort of fable different in nature from all that has gone before. Not so much an essay as an example of his fiction, but no less finely crafted. Musil has range.

This next quote is an entire piece, albeit a very short one. I hesitated to quote it, since after discussing Flypaper and Monkey Island there’s a risk of giving the impression that Musil only focuses on the cruel. That’s not true of course. What Musil focuses on is the world.

Fishermen on the Baltic

On the beach they’ve dug out a little pit with their hands, and from a sack of black earth they’re pouring in fat earthworms, the loose black earth and the mass of worms make for an obscure, moldy, enticing ugliness in the clean white sand. Beside this they place a very tidy looking wooden chest. It looks like a long, not particularly wide drawer or counting board, and is full of clean yarn; and on the other side of the pit another such, but empty, drawer is placed.

The hundred hooks attached to the yarn in the one drawer are neatly arranged on the end of a small iron pole and are now being unfastened one after the other and laid in the empty drawer, the bottom of which is filled with nothing but clean wet sand. A very tidy operation. In the meantime, however, four long, lean and strong hands oversee the process as carefully as nurses to make sure that each hook gets a worm.

The men who do this crouch two by two on knees and heels, with mighty, bony backs, long, kindly faces, and pipes in their mouths. They exchange incomprehensible words that flow forth as softly as the motion of their hands. One of them takes up a fat earthworm with two fingers, tears it into three pieces with the same two fingers of the other hand, as easily and exactly as a shoemaker snips off the paper band after he’s taken the measurement; the other one then presses these squirming pieces calmly and carefully onto each hook. This having been accomplished, the worms are then doused with water and laid in neat, little beds, one next to the other, in the drawer with the soft sand, where they can die without immediately losing their freshness.

It is a quiet, delicate activity, whereby the coarse fishermen’s fingers step softly as on tiptoes. You have to pay close attention. In fair weather the dark blue sky arches above, and the seagulls circle high over the land like white swallows.

The phrases there. “A very tidy operation.” The fishermen with their “kindly faces” impaling the worms. The transition from fat life to “squirming pieces” and the tidy convenience of the sand-filled drawers. The fingers that “step softly as on tiptoes”. Marvellous imagery culminating in that final vision of freedom and beauty and utter indifference. To the fishermen the worms are no different to the hooks or the drawers; the gulls are part of their scenery, as they are to the gulls.

I’ve not commented on the translation. Obviously I’m not familiar enough with German to read the original (or I would have), so I can’t say how faithful this is. I can’t say that of any translation really. Still, the language is spare and precise and beautiful and I can’t believe but that Wortsman has done an excellent job here.

The point, as I understand it anyway, of the Penguin pocket editions is to tempt readers to try new writers. For me it’s worked. I’ve tried Musil, who I knew about but was daunted by, and I’m no longer daunted. I plan now to pick up a copy of his short novel The Confusions of Young Torless and that going well I think The Man Without Qualities is looking a lot more enticing than it once did. Well done Penguin.

It was like difficult music heard for the first time.

Murphy, by Samuel Beckett

Murphy has one of the most arresting opening sentences I’ve read.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

I’ve barely started the book and already there’s a sense of futility, of inevitability. It’s a jarring sentence, both in terms of content and structure. It left me immediately unsettled.

What follows is no more comforting. Here’s the entire first paragraph of Murphy:

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make other arrangements, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings.

Already Beckett is ignoring many of the customary rules of fiction. The paragraph is deeply repetitive. It takes a fairly long time to tell us very little in terms of solid information. Murphy lives in West Brompton in a condemned mews in a residential area. Shortly he will have to move. That’s it. You could pull out a little more, but in terms of bare fact there’s not a lot more to say.

Dig a little deeper though and there’s something more interesting. There is the phrase “Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free”. What does that mean? Is he not free? Is there something special in how he sits? When Murphy sits “out of it” is that just out of the sun or out of it in some wider sense?

Murphy lives “in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect.” The only distinction between one set of cages and another is Murphy’s presence in one and in the differing aspects. But who cares what aspects they have? As a reader what use is knowing an aspect?

Then too there is the sense of routine which is created by the words “eaten, drunk, slept and put his clothes on and off”. It’s a routine that’s shortly to be transplanted to “quite alien surroundings.” If though this mews is so indistinguishable from its surroundings what does it matter if Murphy is transplanted?

So many questions from just one paragraph. The book’s barely begun.

The story here is both notional and absurd. Murphy is an Irishman living in London. He is attractive to women, though there’s no reason he should be. He and various other characters pursue each other and are pursued while holding conversations of quite remarkable irreality. Incidents may make sense in isolation, but in combination give rise to a plot which is both simple and yet hard to follow. The characters are barely distinguishable and make no attempt at credibility.

Beckett delights in language. He delights too in playing with the reader. Early on Murphy is on his own, tied hand and foot to a rocking chair. He tied himself to it, naked, and he enjoys sitting and rocking until his mind becomes quite separated from his body.

If Murphy is tied hand and foot though, and tied himself, how did he tie his last hand? He couldn’t have. Someone else must have. But nobody else is present.

Of course that’s not true. Someone else is present. Two people in fact. Beckett and me. If Murphy’s hand is tied and he couldn’t have done it and I didn’t do it logically Beckett must have done it. The author is within the book, not explicitly but necessarily.

There wasn’t a page in Murphy that didn’t contain words I didn’t know. Most books don’t have any words I don’t know. I’m a lawyer. Words are my business. Here many were deeply obscure, but I came to realise some were also just plain made up. I could stop every few sentences and research what something meant, or I could just go with the flow and accept that the language would stream around me part understood and part bearing an implied meaning from context. Sometimes the meaning, if it existed, would be (was) wholly unclear.

So then, thin characters, a flimsy plot, frequently opaque language, events that couldn’t happen as described, it’s no surprise Beckett’s not topping the bestseller lists. The traditional novel is essentially realist, and this decidedly isn’t.

What it is though is well written. Beckett apparently did better later, but there’s plenty here to enjoy. By way of example, in one passage a woman runs out on to the street having discovered a violent suicide. Beckett reflects: “Her mind was so collected that she saw clearly the impropriety of letting it appear so.”

That’s tremendously astute and for me very funny. It’s absurd that it should matter how one reacts, that one should think of such a thing at all when someone has just died. As Meursault finds out in The Stranger though how one reacts to a death can be very important indeed.

As jokes go it’s a particularly tragic one. Beckett has a vicious sense of humour. It’s not so much that he’s cruel (though at times he does tip over into cruelty) as that existence is cruel and he’s laughing at it or at us (or both) and so the laughs become uncomfortable.

Murphy is full of humour. In fact that’s mostly what makes it ultimately enjoyable to read. Sometimes it’s mordant (I do love that word) observations such as in the quote above. Other times the comedy is less straightforward. I found the following paragraph again extremely funny, but I’ve read Plato. If I hadn’t I’m not sure I’d have got the joke:

Thus Murphy felt himself spit in two, a body and a mind. They had intercourse apparently, otherwise he could not have known that they had anything in common. But he felt his mind to be bodytight and did not understand through what channel the intercourse was effected nor how the two experiences came to overlap. He was satisfied that neither followed from the other. He neither thought a kick because he felt one nor felt a kick because he thought one. Perhaps the knowledge was related to the fact of the kick as two magnitudes to a third. Perhaps there was, outside space and time, a non-mental non-physical kick from all eternity, dimly revealed to Murphy in its correlated modes of consciousness and extension, the kick in intellectu and the kick in re. But where was the supreme caress?

Later there is a reference to the “beatific idols of [Murphy's] cave”, underlining the Platonic motif. Descartes is another frequent reference point here with his famed mind-body duality (which it’s fair to say Beckett here seems unpersuaded by). I’ve read too that Spinoza is referenced, but I’ve not read Spinoza so can’t speak to that.

I’m going to digress for a moment. Murphy is a book containing an awful lot of references. I got the ones to Plato and Descartes, I didn’t get the ones to Spinoza (if they’re there). I’ve no doubt there were some I didn’t even realise I wasn’t getting.

That’s obvious here, but it’s potentially true of any book. Apparently Lee Rourke’s The Canal on some views has references in it to Leda and the Swan. If you read my review you won’t find any mention of that – I didn’t notice them. So it goes. I like to see the currents beneath a book’s surface, but I have to accept I won’t always do so. That’s not a problem. It’s a good thing. If we saw everything what room would there be for rereading? For later consideration?

Beckett plays then with language, with propriety and with philosophy. He plays too with his own role as author and with the reader’s as reader:

Miss Counihan sat on Wylie’s knees, not in Wynn’s hotel lest an action for libel should lie, and oyster kisses passed between them. Wylie did not often kiss, but when he did it was a serious matter. He was not one of those lugubrious persons who insist on removing the clapper from the bell of passion. A kiss from Wylie was like a breve tied, in a long slow amorous phrase, over bars’ times its equivalent in demi-semiquavers. Miss Counihan had never enjoyed anything quite so much as this slowmotion osmosis of love’s spittle.
The above passage is carefully calculated to deprave the cultivated reader.

That last sentence breaks out of the fiction. The book becomes curiously self-aware. It recognises its own artificiality. It blocks the possibility of escape into the text because as reader you cannot pass through the text into the story. Even if you could get past the tied breve (no idea) and the bars’ times its equivalent in demi-semiquavers (seriously, no idea) that final sentence makes it quite apparent that none of this is real.

I wouldn’t call Murphy an easy read. I had to think about each paragraph, often each sentence. I had to pause to consider what words meant, or might mean here. Beckett uses intentional misspellings, created vocabulary, motives so alien as to be near horrific (Murphy becomes an attendant in an insane asylum and dreams of one day himself becoming a catatonic).

At times in fact Beckett rather overdoes all this. One conversation between three characters goes on for several pages (several too many) with everything almost making sense but none of it ever quite doing so (except apparently to them, but they don’t exist and the sense they make of nonsense underlines their impossibility). Pynchon pulls that sort of thing off well. I wasn’t wholly sure Beckett did. Often the book is a delight, but occasionally one has to eat some linguistic Brussels sprouts to get to the playful literary chocolate mousse.

As the novel continues Murphy seeks to separate the mental and the physical. To retreat from the shared world into his own internal world. There is though no lasting retreat possible. If you’ve seen Waiting for Godot you know the territory. There is literally nothing to wait for. There is literally nowhere to escape to.

I said above that I understand Beckett went on to write better books. Here there is still some recognisable version of our world. There are hospitals, cafes, parks. Beckett is at his best though when playing with language and thought alone. None of his characters are, or are intended to be, sympathetic but that doesn’t excuse his rather doubtful (distasteful even) observations on, and portrayals of, women. If Murphy were to be improved it would be by less contact with Beckett’s external reality. Ironically it is when it attempts to show our world that it is least convincing.

Murphy as a character is in a sense engaged in a quest for meaning, for self-realisation even. The problem is that there is no meaning to be found. The mind is not in fact separate from the body. The world of forms does not exist. There is nothing to be realised.

Murphy the book struggles to break free from the inherent constraints of its own form (as Murphy the character tries to break free from his). The author’s invisible hand implied in tying Murphy to the chair, the asides direct to the reader, the made-up words, all of it acts to tear the novel down from within. Perhaps the last joke of Murphy though is on Beckett.

Murphy tries to undermine its own authority as a text, but ultimately it can’t do so because it relies on that very authority to make the attempt. Perhaps in the end Murphy says too much to be able to talk about nothing. Godot says less, and so more.