Arukiyomi

This is on the 1001 Books list simply because it is a Hungarian classic chronicling the successful defence of Eger Castle from the Ottoman Turks by a vastly outnumbered army.

My main interest in it was the siege itself as I’ve visited Eger, which is a lovely town with some stunning Baroque architecture, and remember well our visit to the castle and the tales we heard there of its defence.

But Gardonyi is no Max Hastings. Anyone coming here looking for historical accuracy is going to have to find another book to reference in order to sort the fact from the fiction. The novel was written by a Hungarian, for Hungarians, about Hungary. As anyone knows who has ever travelled there or spent much time talking to people from that lovely and unique nation, if Hungarians like to talk about anything, it’s Hungary.

Absolutely fantastic book. Just one of those that you come across and know immediately that you’re going to end up buying someone a copy because you just want to share the wonderful experience of reading it. You’re disappointed when you reach the end which is saying something for a book which comes to over 700 pages.

I found it utterly captivating, a fantastic insight into the establishment of the Cape Colony in what is now South Africa by the Dutch in the 18th century. It’s just replete with historical detail with beautifully recreated details about clothing, society, relationships, maritime travel, industry and so much more.

It’s a historical novel; you’re not reading non-fiction here. But Sleigh, a history teacher himself, has done a wonderful job in taking historical characters who you can look up online and fleshing out their lives with details that, although imaginary, are entirely plausible given what we do know.

Nothing to see here people. Move along.

At least, if you’ve read any Sterne (1759) or later Joyce or Tristram Shandy (review forthcoming) or Ulysses (1904) in particular, you will find all this (1967) has been done long, long before, and it will start to pale on you very shortly after you begin the novel.

Worse, though, is that it hails from Latin America, an area of the world I’ve long had no literary inspiration from, with one minor exception. That only compounded my misery.

In fact, I’m betting the only reason it’s on the 1001 books list is its Cuban origin, as if to say, “Look, they finally figured out how to write copy crazy stuff over there, too.”

What a beautiful novel is Trevor’s paean to loss, regret and life itself. I can’t tell you how it cleansed the palate after the first three books of Updike’s Rabbit series. It restored my faith in the novel as a vehicle for the expression of human sensitivity.

Lucy is young when her parents, fearful of the turning political tide, make plans to leave the only home she has known on the beautiful Irish coast. But tragedy strikes, and the novel enters a period of mourning, separation and loss which William Trevor’s prose paints perfectly.

In fact, it is a testament to Trevor’s skill as a writer that the novel does not descend into utter melodrama, such is the tragedy you are faced with. I’m not sure anyone but an Irish writer could have portrayed such depth of loss with such subtle prose. It’s enchanting.

More of the same from Updike with two exceptions: less happens and there’s more graphic sex. Quite why this novel, of the three Rabbit novels so far, won the most awards including the Pulitzer is beyond me.

My conclusions that Rabbit and his ilk are a complete waste of human space were confirmed by this. How many people are there out there whose lives are of no benefit to anyone except themselves and to the detriment of everyone around them?

No one in this novel is capable of loving anyone around them or even aware that they lack the ability. Instead, they carry on with facade and distortion as if life really is all about their petty concerns.

Rabbit has grown fat, in more ways than one, on the proceeds of the Toyota showroom inherited from his now deceased father-in-law. He is estranged from his son, emotionally estranged from his wife, and still beset by fantasies of the sexual grass being greener. [continue reading…]

After Rabbit, Run comes this. Rabbit’s now settled down but he’s definitely not put the past behind him. He’s in a real dead end job instead of a pretend one, and the woman he felt he couldn’t face in the first book is tired of facing him and gives him some of his own medicine. His son is old enough to know but not old enough to understand.

Once she’s left him, Rabbit starts hanging out with pretty much anyone, and this results in him inviting a couple of strangers to live with him. At this point, Updike finds his philosophical muse in the character of Skeeter and the novel started to bog down a bit for me.

It all comes crashing down in misery towards the end before coming to what, for Rabbit, is something of a happy ending, i.e. mediocrity resumed.

What I became more convinced of through this novel (and the third [continue reading…]

It is the mark of genius that most of the world doesn’t get what you are trying to do at all. Such is the case with Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a novel which isn’t really a novel unless you understand that novels exist only because people pushed the boundaries of an art form that, at one time, didn’t exist.

This is no easy read. You start off with a 999-line poem and then move on to a commentary on it which starts focussed and then ends up ranging into the political intrigues of a fictitious nation and an assassination. Whether any of it relates to any of it is open to question, and better minds than mine have been wrecked upon its shores.

What I do know is that I have no clue what it’s about, what Nabokov intended by it, nor what it’s place may or may not be in the literary canon. All I can say is that I read it, I thought the poem had shades of genius, and that the commentary ranged from mildly interesting to downright tedious. [continue reading…]

Recently added to the 1001 Books list in the new October 2018 edition, this title was worthy of its inclusion capturing, as it does, the state of race in a nation founded on racism. I listened to the audio book read by Adjoa Andoh and she did a superb job of bringing all the African accents to life. Highly recommended.

Now, before I get into this, I just have to add an explanatory note for any USAnian readers who may be confused as to why there may be a need for such a book.

Prior to the arrival of the British, other people lived in what is now the USA, and the new people, who subsequently, and with no claim to the title, called themselves Americans, carried out a deliberate and very much orchestrated campaign of genocide against them. There may be some for whom this comes as a revelation. If so, please stop reading my review and immediately pick yourselves up a copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. When you’ve finished that, come back here and carry on.
[continue reading…]

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, I was given a copy of Rabbit is Rich by mistake for a birthday present. I’d asked for Pulitzer Prize winning NON-fiction and received five fiction titles instead. At the time, I didn’t read fiction because no one had published 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. How times, and reading habits, have changed.

I digress. I got about halfway through Rabbit is Rich and it pretty much appalled me. I can’t really remember why, something to do with the sex I think, and I simply gave up and never finished it. So, it comes as a nice surprise that Rabbit, Run, the first in the series, turns out to actually be a well-crafted novel exploring the crises that occur in the minds of men who are too old to have earned a mid-life crisis.

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is our eponymous runner. Well, actually, he’s a basketball player. Well, he was. Now he feels trapped in a [continue reading…]

Tartt’s debut novel of a small college clique deciding to knock off one of their own rambles on a bit but is generally an easy read. It suffers from readers having to suspend belief that anyone can remember events years ago in anything like the detail depicted. And it would have been made better had the weaknesses of memory been a central theme.

As it is, it’s not so much a whodunit as a whydunit. You know from the start that Bunny is going to die. You just don’t know why they decide to kill him. In the end, there’s not really a satisfactory motive for this either as the group’s meagre inertia becomes just enough to overcome individual reluctance.

Along the way, there’s an accurate portrayal of the vicissitudes of college relationships, the student struggle and a whole host of characters who are very well-developed. In fact, this is probably the strength of the novel and plays out well as guilt and regret come to [continue reading…]

Context: Swapped this for Hunger at a cafe book swap in Manchester.

My second Ali Smith, and I’m starting to get the idea now. Ask questions about who people are by rotating the point of view to show us that, as many of us are already aware, we all see each other differently.

While this is a pretty enjoyable read for the most part, it doesn’t really do anything she hasn’t already done before in The Accidental which is a more engaging read. The plot (although that seems too strong a word) revolves around a guy deciding to lock himself in the spare bedroom of his hosts somewhere towards the end of a dinner party. For me, this works as a good plot device and I give credit to Smith for coming up with it and the very entertaining long dinner party conversation that leads up to it.

What I take issue with is what she does with the novel as a whole. Quite naturally of course, this crisis raises two questions in the [continue reading…]

Context: Read this while property hunting near the duck pond in Norton.

Last summer’s The Master had me wanting more of Tóibín’s writing. So, this summer, I picked up a copy of Brooklyn to see if he could transport me back to the dreamlike interior of someone’s mind in the way that he had done with Henry James and Eamon Redmond in The Heather Blazing.

Not quite. I can see how this is perhaps his most popular work and why it was made into a film unlike his other works, but it doesn’t quite go as deep as the others in terms of character development. There’s more plot and less musing.

For some, this might be just what they like. Personally, I prefer to get inside the mind of someone. There’s enough in anyone’s mind to keep me occupied without anything significant actually happening in their lives. After all, it’s our minds that lend significance to anything. [continue reading…]

If you’ve not read Crime and Punishment, then this is a good place to start. Far, far shorter, it is nevertheless cram packed with the fevered wanderings of a protagonist whose own fate he fumbles daily. However, in Crime, although you can’t really sympathise with the motive, you can with Raskolnikov’s tortured mental outcome. In Hunger, you are constantly questioning why the narrotor doesn’t avail himself of the opportunities he obviously has to better himself.

But perhaps that’s the point. Hunger, pure persistent hunger, can reduce people to cycles of confusion and dependency that can be hard to break out of. Time and again, he’s offered a helping hand but he refuses, preferring instead to take advantage only of funds or food which aren’t, by rights, his. These only serve to add pangs of conscience to those of the stomach.

Every other character is ephemeral. None are fleshed out, and all seem phantom and dreamlike. Even the mysterious woman he names [continue reading…]

20 pages into this, you’d be forgiven for thinking Will Self was a meaningful pseudonym. Pretty much from the get go, this seems to be all about convincing us how clever the author is. As Lyn Gardner writes in her Guardian review of the Great Apes stage play,

… the show always seems keener on showcasing its larky cleverness than on creating real feeling.

Replace “the show” with “the novel” and my job here is done.

But for those of you expecting some sort of synopsis, Simon Dykes wakes up from what is effectively a Self-ian version of life to find that he is, not a beetle (cf Kafka), but a chimpanzee.

Or at least everyone else thinks he is. Simon remains convinced for pretty much the rest of our tedious literary journey that he is human. This is quite patently not the case at least from his affinity [continue reading…]

Yes, finally, finally, finally, October 2018 will see a new edition of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.

As usual, Arukiyomi will be updating the 1001 Books App for iPhone and the 1001 Books Excel Spreadsheet for fans of the list. You can expect those out at the same time as the new edition is published, give or take any intervention by the deity I serve.

Judging from the cover, is this the first time that one title has appeared both on the 1001 Books cover and the 1001 Movies cover? I think it is.

In the meantime, what can we expect from the list? Did you just finish A Remembrance of Things Past only to find that it’s been removed from the list? Well, here’s the moment of truth, the lowdown on what’s in and what’s out:

For movie fans, the 1001 Movies list will also see a new edition (as usual). The app and spreadsheet will also be updated for that too.

Many regard Portrait as James’ greatest novel. What they mean by this, of course, is that it’s the easiest to read. Written before James went off on the subordinate clause bender that was only derailed by his death, this is in fact a sensitive if somewhat contradictory portrayal of Isabel Archer, a young woman who, choosing freedom, finds that the ties of tradition are inescapable.

The contradiction I’m referring to is, for me, the most unsatisfactory aspect of the work and spoiled the novel for me. In rejecting the early proposals of marriage in the novel, Isabel is kicking against the goads. Add the epithet of wealthy heiress to those of already being young, free and single and you have a character set up to defy all the Victorian mores that can be thrown at her.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, she accepts a proposal of marriage which every reader knows is completely inappropriate. While James has [continue reading…]

Britain has The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. The US has The Jungle. France has Germinal. It falls somewhere between the two in terms of its readability, but it is far, far ahead in terms of both its influence and the esteem with which it is (still) held in its home country.

I don’t know for sure, but I bet if you find your nearest Frenchie and ask them, they will have heard of this novel. Try doing that with your nearest Brit or USAnian for their respective novels. I’d be surprised if you got more than a questioning grunt in response from the latter two. France isn’t my favourite country on earth, but for worker’s rights, they have to be given credit and that’s why novels like this one are remembered there.

Written more than 20 years before The Jungle, Germinal is the moving story of the brutal consequences of a miners’ strike in northern France. Zola, a contemporary of and equivalent to Dickens in terms of literary influence and sheer storytelling, can spin a yarn. [continue reading…]