A Canto a Day 7 Edmund Spenser again

Amoretti 78, 1595

Lackyng my love I go from place to place,
lyke a young fawne that late hath lost the hynd:
and seeke each where, where last I sawe her face,
whose ymage yet I carry fresh in mynd.
I seeke the fields with her late footing synd,
I seeke her bowre with her late presence deckt,
yet nor in field nor bowre I her can fynd:
yet field and bowre are full of her aspect,
But when myne eyes I thereunto direct,
they ydly back returne to me agayne,
and when I hope to see theyr trew obiecct,
I fynd my selfe but fed with fancies vayne.
Ceasse then myne eyes, to seeke her selfe to see,
and let my thoughts behold her selfe in mee.

Fawns and hinds again but this time the poet casts himself in the role of lost fawn and his beloved as his lost mother. Nothing weird about that at all. The heavy repetition is also remarkable and highlights the artifice of the poem. The transformation of real events into literature finds a new form here: the loved one disappears and is re-embodied in the change she has brought about in the lover.

A Canto a Day 6: Samuel Daniel

Samuel Daniel: Delia 38 (1592)

When men shall find thy flower, thy glory pass,
And thou with careful brow sitting alone
Receiv'd hast this message from thy glass,
That tells the truth, and says that all is gone;
Fresh shalt thou see in me the wounds thou madest
Though spent thy flame, in me the heat remaining:
I that hath lov'd thee thus before thou fadest,
My faith shall waxe, while thou art in thy waning.
The world shall find this miracle in me,
That fire can burn, when all the matter's spent:
Then what my faith hath been thy self shalt see,
And that thou was unkind thou mayst repent.
Thou mayst repent that thou hast scorn'd my tears,
When winter snows upon thy golden hairs.

I had never heard of Samuel Daniel before. This sonnet is so Shakepearian in themes and diction that it's surprising to find that it predates the better known - and obviously better - works. The editors of The Art of the Sonnet are kind to this poem, finding more subtlety in it that I do. They argue that the poem ends in kindness towards the ungrateful beloved, and so rises above the more usual game of blame and defensiveness. I'm not convinced.

A Canto a Day 5 Spenser: Ruines of Rome

Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome here seekest,
And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv'st at all,
These same olde walls, olde arches, which thou seest,
Olde Palaces, is that which Rome men call.
Behold what wreake, what ruine and what wast,
And how that she, which with her mightie powre
Tam'd all the world, hath tam'd herself at last,
The pray of time, which all things doth devoure.
Rome now of Rome is th'onely funerall,
And only Rome of Rome hath victorie;
Ne ought save Tyber hastning to his fall
Remaines of alll: O world's inconstancie.
That which is firme doth flit and fall away,
And that is flitting, doth abide and stay.

This is a translation by Edmund Spenser of poem 3 of Les Antiquitez by Joachim Du Bellay, and one of the best translations of anything there's ever been, I would say.

There's little to be said about it: the intent and structure of the poem go together so well, and although the theme of impermanence is familiar it's never been quite so well expressed. Well done, Mr Spenser. 

Nouveau venu qui cherches Rome en Rome
Et rien de Rome en Rome n’apperçois,
Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcs que tu vois,
Et ces vieux murs, c’est ce que Rome on nomme.
Voy quel orgueil, quelle ruine, et comme
Celle qui mist le monde sous ses lois
Pour donter tout, se donta quelquefois,
Et devint proye au temps qui tout consomme.
Rome de Rome est le seul monument,
Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement.
Le Tybre seul, qui vers la mer s’enfuit,
Reste de Rome, ô mondaine inconstance !
Ce qui est ferme est par le temps destruit,
Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait resistance.

A Canto a Day 4 Sidney

Astrophel and Stella 45

Stella oft sees the very face of woe
Painted in my beclouded stormy face,
But cannot skill to pity my disgrace,
Not though thereof the herself she know.
Yet hearing late a fable, which did show
Of lovers never known, a grievous case,
Pity thereof gate in her breast such place,
That from that sea deriv'd tears' spring did flow.
Alas, if Fancy, drawn by imag'd things
Though false, yet with free scope, more grace doth breed
Than servant's wrack, where new doubts honour brings,
Then think, my dear, that you in me do read
Of lover's ruin some sad tragedy:
I am not I: pity the tale of me.  

One thing that seems to come up a lot in sonnets is a comparison between love lived and love in literature. In this sonnet, Stella is able to respond to the sufferings of (at a guess) Paolo and Francesca in Dante's Inferno, but can't be moved by the suffering evident in Astrophel's face. It's an accusation, of course, and that "my dear" in line 12 sounds as patronising as it would today. The shortness of the last two lines suggests a sulk. 

I don't have any evidence to support the Paolo and Francesca link but it's very tempting. It's a double reference because they were also affected by reading literature: in their case the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. But in their case, the story acted as an aphrodisiac. Maybe Astrophel is peeved and frustrated that whereas Francesca was softened in the physical world of their relationship, Stella's reaction is spiritual, not bodily. He's spared the second circle of hell but that's not on his mind just now.

We'll come back to this, I'm sure: the notion that the real flesh and blood lover doesn't - can't - match the fictional lover in the sonnet itself or in some external work, and this may be a cause for sadness or anger. 

A Sonnet a Day 3

That self same tongue which first did thee entreat
To link thy liking with my lucky love:
That trusty tongue must now these words repeat,
I love thee still, my fancy cannot move.
That dreadless heart which durst attempt the thought
To win thy will with mine for to consent,
Maintains that vow which love in me first wrought,
I love thee still and never shall repent.
That happy hand which hardely did touch
Thy tender body, to my deep delight:
Shall serve with sword to prove my passion such
As loves thee still, much more than it can write.
Thus love I still with tongue, hand, hart and all,
And when I chaunge, let vengeance on me fall.

This is by George Gascoigne, dated 1573. It's another one I can't really warm to. The technical expertise is obvious: the repetition and variation is well controlled while the use of alliteration is a bit over the top. Unlike many sonnets it's fairly clear in its intentions: it's a compliment to the beloved and an advertisement for the lover. I've tried hard to find double entendres and I think the "sword" in line 11 may obviously be one but it's a bit limp.

A Sonnet a Day - 2

Norfolk sprang thee, Lambeth holds thee dead,
Clere, of the County of Cleremont, though hight,
Within the womb of Ormond's race thou bred,
And saw'st thy cousin crowned in thy sight.
Shelton for love, Surrey for Lord thou chase;
Aye, me! whilst life did last that league was tender.
Tracing whose steps thou sawest Kelsall blaze,
Laundersey burnt, and batter'd Bullen render.
At Muttrel gates, hopeless of all recure,
Thine Earl, half dead, gave in thy hand his will;
Which cause did thee this pining death procure,
Ere summers four times seven thou couldst fulfill.
Ah, Clere! if love had booted, care, or cost,
Heaven had not won, nor earth so timely lost.

This, of necessity, heavily notated poem is by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey from the mid-16th century, and is a tribute to one of his soldiers, Thomas Clere. Even after getting past all the references and the englished placenames (Bullen = Boulogne, for example), I find it hard to warm to this. I imagine it spoke better to an age when brotherhood in arms was more important and the list of military triumphs was enough to evoke the love two comrades would have developed. We're given a list of experiences rather than personal qualities. We have to infer a lot. What I find most interesting is that Anne Boleyn turns up again: she was the "cousin crowned in thy sight". She was also often known as Anna Bullen, I believe, something that the editors seem to have missed.

A Sonnet a Day - introduction and no 1

As the lockdown continues, I've decided to pick up a book that's been lying on my floor for quite a while: The Art of the Sonnet by Stephen Burt and David Mikics, in which they look at one hundred "exemplary sonnets of the English language (and a few sonnets in translation)" and blog one of them a day. If I were Patrick Stewart I'd be reading them. Be thankful I'm not doing that. I'll stick to the ones in English and in the public domain (ie old). All comments welcome. 

"Whoso list to hunt" by Thomas Wyatt 

Whoso list to hunt: I know where is an hind,
But, as for me, helas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them, that farthest cometh behind
Yet, may I by no means, my wearied mind
Draw from the deer; but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind. 

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
"Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."

There is a plausible autobiographical reading of the sonnet. Wyatt was suspected of being a lover of Anne Boleyn. He seems to have been lucky not to have been executed as a result. In the poem, if we see Boleyn as the beloved, it's clear that the speaker accepts his love is pointless (in vain) and indeed dangerous. Acknowledging his own also-ran status in the first eight lines, the final six sound a warning to others: this woman is "wild for to hold" or as we might say, if we were a 50s film noir, the dame is too hot to handle.

This poem was the Guardian's Poem of the Week in August 2009 and the thoughts of Carol Rumens are well worth reading. 

Skipping, skipping, skipping

I'm now skipping over three Nobel winners because of the "read it already" rule.

Camilo José Cela (1989) is perhaps an answer to those who think the Prize only ever favours lefties, or those who have been persecuted by their own government. Although his novel La Colmena was banned, he otherwise seems to have been - at least - comfortable in Franco's Spain. The wikipedia entry suggests he informed on fellow writers, and he seems in general to have been fairly unpleasant. I've read some of La Colmena and some of his travel writing. He'll continue to be useful as a reminder of how drab isolationism can be.

Naguib Mahfouz (1988) is more worth a look. His novels are anti-drab: sprawling stories of life in Cairo, written in what I presume is an Arabic style of extravagantly flowery description. He seems to have negotiated the pressures of writing in an Egypt undergoing transformation and the challenges of nationalism and fundamentalism quite gracefully but not without personal danger. Of these three writers he's the one I'd recommend. Try Adrift on the Nile, if only because the translator is Frances Liardet. I met her once. She was lovely.

Joseph Brodsky (1987) was a Russian-American poet and essayist. His poems seemed to feature quite regularly in the magazine Encounter, which I used to see in our school library. It was financed by the CIA. Anyway, the poems seemed quite dull, and as they were, it seems, self-translations from the Russian, he qualifies for that exemption too. Also, and I can't stress enough how trivial this point is, how could anyone want to read the poetry of a man who looks like this?

So I can happily go back to 1986 and Wole Soyinka, even though I fear that this is another one who'll suffer from being a playwright.

Nobels: 1990: Octavio Paz

I think I had heard of Octavio Paz before I started this project but I certainly hadn't read anything by him. I've been reading rather randomly through this selection of his poetry, in a parallel text with translations by various people (and of varying quality - I'll come back to this).

My Spanish reading level is just about good enough to read poetry, but the translations help with some of the obscure words. I'm enjoying the book very much, eventually. As with Walcott, the real quality seems to be in the longer works but his style is completely different. Heavily influenced by Eliot in his early works, the ones that enchant me most are those that were influenced by visits to India. There's a kind of extended imagism about them, where time is slowed down and non-linear while the language spins around the subjects. These poems need many readings and I think I'll be carrying this book around for some time.

In this project I'm largely ignoring poetry in languages I don't know, largely because with poetry I don't trust translations (I'll come back to this). But it's also struck me that so much understanding of poetry depends upon familiarity with the tradition it lives in. So for example you'd miss a lot in Bret Harte if you weren't familiar with Walt Whitman. The only other Spanish poet I've read in any depth is Pedro Salinas but even that connection is useful and helpful here: there's a similar kind of music in the language, even though Paz's style is much looser and (as it happens) Whitmanesque. Conversely, it can be instructive to see the ways in which non-anglophone poets adopt and adapt the influences of people like Whitman and Eliot.

But let's turn to the translations. There are some very odd choices made by the translators here and since I haven't banged on about translation theory for a while, I'll give a few examples. The poem Viento Entero (translated as Wind from all Compass Points) begins with the phrase El presente es perpetuo - a phrase that acts as a kind of refrain through the poem. Paul Blackburn translates this as The present is motionless, for some reason avoiding the obvious perpetual (and the alliteration that goes with it). Maybe he thinks this is a more evocative concept. Maybe he thinks the alliteration is clunky. Maybe he's right (he isn't) but it's not a translator's job to improve a text.

The poem, like many of Paz's, is formally loose. There's certainly no rhyming scheme and no fixed metre. Lines are indented at will presumably with the intention of highlighting key words. Blackburn generally respects and preserves that, but again feels the need to add something. One line reads [los ninos] Rezan orinan meditan. He gives this as [the boys] Pray       pee       meditate  and those extra spaces are completely unnecessary.

But that's my theory of translation: translations should be as close as poss to the original, losing as little as poss but adding nothing. Maintaining strangeness, even if that might mean keeping infelicities. I know many disagree. But if a translator-poet feels the original work needs improving the better strategy is to write your own poems, write them better.

Nobels: 1991: Nadine Gordimer

Another book from South Africa, this one written (1974) and set in apartheid times, although there's a continuous sense here that time is running out for the white minority. Like J M Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer is one of those writers where the Booker meets the Nobel (a good thing to remember if you ever go on Pointless).

This was a much more difficult read than Disgrace: more modernist in its structure, with varying points of view and narrators and a much more elliptical timeline. Also there's a lot of loving description of the landscape. The protagonist, Mehring, owns a farm and seems generally devoted to it, but hidden in the title is the sense that he wants to keep it just as it is. For example, he rebukes his son for wanting to throw rubbish out of the car window. This goes with a political conservatism too: while the situation of his black workers is lightly described - there's very little "look how appalling this is!" commentary - the separation of white and black society is stark. Interspersed through the book are quotations from a book on The Religious System of the Amazulu and hints of a kind of mystical bond between the Africans and the land, which Europeans like Mehring (and presumably Gordimer) can't share. His ownership of the farm is time-limited.

I don't really know why it took me so long to finish this book. Mehring isn't an attractive character - and neither is anyone else in the book - and it's hard to care about him. Other characters flit in and out of the story and you hardly get the chance to know them. For example, Terry, Mehring's son, who is probably gay - which would have been shocking in that society - but Mehring pushes that aside, as does the book. There seem to be a lot of issues that are raised in the book but not fully worked through.

There's enough here, though, to make it clear that Gordimer was a very gifted writer. She died in 2014 and is largely forgotten now, I think. With apartheid gone, we don't need to read about it anymore may be the thinking. But I suspect we shouldn't forget apartheid as a system, an extreme example of a dehumanising approach to others which is still thriving in many parts of the world.

Nobels: 1992: Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott, born in St Lucia in 1930, won the award for

a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment

and that all makes perfect sense. He was obviously astoundingly well-read in English poetry from an early age and, perhaps more importantly, had the drive and determination to pursue his career outside what I imagine must have been a very limited cultural scene in his homeland. His poems show that he learned from his contemporaries, particularly in USA and alongside the somewhat stiff diction, there's the influence of more conversational, even confessional poets. They are, I suppose, key works for anyone considering post-colonial literature and the way writers negotiate the use of an imperial language to resist imperialism.

Here's an extract from "The Schooner Flight" from the 1980 collection, The Star-Apple Kingdom which is Walcott at, for me, his best.

Unlike with Seamus Heaney, I haven't attempted to read this book straight through. It's particularly inappropriate because Walcott wrote lots of very long works (eg Homeros) which are only extracted here. Those are the books that should be read like novels. And perhaps that experience would be better. I wasn't often entranced by the shorter poems, despite the enormous craft in them. Maybe in reading the longer works, the flow is more seductive - Bruckner rather than Mendelssohn, let's say. But I didn't get the simple, irrational pleasure that poetry can give to encourage me to read more.

The selection I have been reading is an ex-library book from Northern Ireland, and has the beautiful soft plastic covering that librarians love. It was only borrowed four times and is almost pristine. Every time I pick it up I get that old familiar feeling of wondering if it's overdue for return yet.

Nobels: 1993: Toni Morrison

My excuse would be that I don't read much contemporary fiction. Why haven't you read anything by this black, American woman?

It's a fair question and I don't want to be hard on myself or you. There is an understandable reluctance to read something that has so little connectedness with one's own life, and a fear that it won't make much sense. How can I possibly relate to the life of a pre-teenage black girl living in desperate poverty in small-town, racially divided America in the 1940s?

On the other hand, it's precisely for those reasons that a book like this can be so enjoyable. I asked the good people of Twitter to suggest which book by Toni Morrison I should read. This was the winner. It's her first book, and although I had some doubts about the technique (which, I'm glad to say, she retrospectively shares in the afterword to this edition) once I'd started it there was no stopping me.

It combines, like novels should, a heartfelt personal story with complicated ideas about racial and sexual identity. These are experiences and ways of thinking that would never come to me. It's good to reach out for them, and Toni Morrison goes right to the top of that list of writers I want to read more of, once I've finally got past Sully Prudhomme.

Nobels: 1994: Kenzaburo Oe

Kenzaburō Ōe, the 1994 winner, wrote in the extraordinarily fast-changing post-war Japan. He's clearly a forebear of Murakami but, on the evidence of this book, so much better. The Silent Cry was published in 1967 in Japan and the translation came 21 years later.

The title of the translation, although presumably approved by Ōe, is terrible (more suited to a Channel 5 afternoon telemovie); another example of titles losing their idiosyncrasy in translation. (The Japanese title, 万延元年のフットボール (Man'en gan'nen no futtobōru), translates as Football in the first year of Man'en - which needs a decent knowledge of Japanese history to make any sense.)

That title and an alarmingly overwritten (or overtranslated) opening paragraph hardly disposed me to this book.

But, dear reader, I pressed on and as the temperature of the prose dropped I found myself increasingly drawn in to what is a weird and strange story - precisely the kind of encounter I have hoped 
for from this Nobel exercise.

The narrative format isn't anything outlandish. An unreliable first person (these days there is no other kind) pushes the story along and helpfully the novel is divided into chapters of about 20 pages each.

There's a decent page about the book on Wikipedia but it does retell the plot in detail so don't go there if you don't want to spoil the plot. It would have helped me, however, to know something about Japanese history from 1860 to 1960. Literary translators seem to think footnotes are admissions of defeat, but some would help here. If they are acceptable in classic English novels to explain references that most current readers won't get, why not in translations?

But I'm grateful that the book has led me to learn more about Japan's history. And it was, above all, an engrossing read. I can't help feeling it would be more so if I knew more about the cultural background. I also think this book would strongly reward a second reading, but there's no time for that now. Off I go to a book whose title rhymes with this one.

Nobels: 1995: Seamus Heaney

I have skipped over the 1996 winner, Wisława Szymborska, on my "no lyric poetry in translation" rule and I could have claimed exemption on this one. Of course I've read some of Heaney's poems, and his translation of Beowulf which didn't excite me greatly. But instead I took the chance to read en masse this 1990 collection.


It's a generous selection from a huge body of work, and makes apparent that Heaney's work was incredibly varied both in subject matter and in form. Reading the poems in sequence isn't something I'd normally do, but at times it felt like a running commentary on the recent history of Northern Ireland was weaving in and out of the other concerns - nature, memory, language - more or less strongly as the times demanded.

Those times aren't so far away and his clear, undogmatic approach must have been hard to maintain among the clashing certainties.

As with Beowulf I don't find myself intimately drawn to the poetry, despite fully accepting the enormous skill and artistry. That's just one of those things: just something that doesn't quite click with me. Heaney and Derek Walcott are the only English language poets to have won the Nobel in recent years: are they really the best there has been? The question itself seems ridiculous.

This one, from his first collection, for its topicality.

Blackberry-Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

Nobels: 1997: Dario Fo

I'm admitting defeat on this. It's like poetry in translation only worse. These are plays and written by someone with an obvious relish for slang and dialect. In performance in translation I understand that Fo allowed and encouraged liberties to be taken to localise the plays. Within this collection there's a short example of this, in which part of Mistero Buffo is translated into Lallans, but mostly these are straight translations: to be read rather than to be performed.

And they don't work as such. Mistero Buffo, for example, is a series of short dramas based on the way minstrels (giullari) would have performed them and there's also a lot of reference to puppetry. In English terms we'd be looking at mystery plays made into pantos  with bits of Punch and Judy thrown in. The cultural gap is too big, and so stagings would have to use the text as a starting point. Even more than usual with theatre the productions would be a shared endeavour. No doubt Fo's own stagings were terrific - he enjoyed great popular success - but his ability in that is simply not available to me.

It's a similar, but less serious situation with the best known play in this collection, Accidental Death of an Anarchist. As a good playwright, Fo leaves a lot for the actors to do. So much so that I can't form an opinion on how good a playwright he is.

He's another example of the Academy's tendency to give the prize to writers who have suffered persecution and censorship. As I've said before, I don't have a problem with that: it's entirely legitimate to use the prize as a plea for freedom of speech. The Wikipedia article on Fo is long and detailed about this.

Fo seems to be somewhat forgotten now but his concern about the hidden power of right wing politicians may become horribly fashionable again.

Dario Fo, Plays 1 Methuen 1992

Nobels: 1998: Jose Saramago

The rules of my game are that I don't revisit Nobel winners whose work I already know. This definitely includes Jose Saramago, the 1998 winner. I've read many of his novels and it's a case where I owe a lot to the Nobel panel for making me aware of a writer whose books I admire and enjoy so much.

The pinnacle of his work, I guess, is Blindness but read some other books by him before that. Among the horrors of that story you need to trust the author implicitly, so get to know him and his highly individual style on something less stressful: The Stone Raft, in which the Iberian peninsular detaches itself from Europe and sails out into the Atlantic, might suit these times.

Nobels: 1999: Günter Grass

Another short book read slowly, Cat and Mouse by 1999 winner Günter Grass is a fictionalised memoir of adolescent life in Germany early in the second world war.

It wasn't, by any means, a difficult read and I don't really know why it took me so long. The narrative content is quite slight: young men  crossing over into adulthood, a transition that in this case has the consequence of inevitable involvement in killing and risking being killed (along with the usual sexual and social problems). The restraint of the book is in how unspoken that consequence is; although the material effects of being at war are always present - scarcities of many kinds - it's not something the narrator (Pilenz) and his antihero (Mahlke) talk about much. It's a kind of banality: behaviour and destiny that would have seemed absurd in peacetime become rapidly normalised.

I see that this book is part of a "Danzig Trilogy", of which the first part is the much better known Tin Drum, and I suspect that across the three books there's a kind of mythology established, in which the wider significance of the Cat and Mouse references find a place. Clearly Grass is saying something about what Germany was like then, but I'm not sure I can detect what he's saying about what Germany was like at the time he wrote (1961).

If I were not on this self-inflicted quest to trainspot Nobel winners I'd take time to read more by Grass and I can't say that about all the writers I've discovered so far.

Günter Grass, trans Ralph Manheim Cat and Mouse Penguin 1966

Nobels: 2000: Gao Xingjian

I've taken a shamefully long time to read this very short book, a collection of narratively inconsequential short stories. I suspect I have the same problem here as I have with lyric poetry: the translation can only hint at how the language works with a sentence like this:

"What" is not to understand and "what" is to understand or not is not to understand that even when "what" is understood, it is not understood, for "what" is to understand and "what" is not to understand, "what" is "what" and "is not" is "is not", and so is not to understand not wanting to understand or simply not understanding why "what" needs to be understood  or whether "what" can be understood ... 

The Nobel citation talks of "an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity" but I really didn't find bitter insights; and "universal validity" seems to be another way of saying that the stories cover unexceptional events.

So, to put it kindly, I didn't love this and have no urge to read any of his novels (the fact that they are called Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible doesn't help much either).

On we go, to someone I really should have read before.

Nobels: 2001: V S Naipaul

Finally a rainy, thundery day (there was no possibility of riding a bike this day) gave me the perfect chance to finish Naipaul's breakthrough novel A House for Mr Biswas. According to Wikipedia it took him three years to complete it, and it sometimes felt it would take me that long to read it.

It's a long (600+ pages) and detailed account of the life of Mr Biswas, set in relation to all the generally ramshackle and overcrowded places he inhabited - to say he called them home would be inaccurate.

You've probably gained the correct impression I found this a bit of a slog. What kept me going, apart from a sense of duty to this blog and its handful of readers, was the occasional insight into the character of Biswas and his family, and into Trinidadian society, a dazzling mixture of cultures on the verge of decolonisation as the second world war presaged the collapse of the British empire. I suppose I can't avoid the word Dickensian, in that respect, but the plot is too linear to be gripping. There are no twists, just a procession of episodes, while Biswas's social and economic status remains more or less static. Perhaps that's the subversive point: we expect the hero of a novel (of this size) to develop and change, and Biswas just doesn't.  The novel is peopled Dickensianly with a bewildering array of extended relatives, so much so that a list of characters would have been helpful. (I don't know why novelists don't do this. I suppose they think it's an insult to their story-telling prowess, or an insult to the reader's reading memory.) Naipaul has said "there was a short period, towards the end of the writing, when I do believe I knew all or much of the book by heart", and that shows. He doesn't give the little reminders of who's who that a more considerate writer would.

It's often funny, although very soon you realise the underlying bleakness isn't going to go away. The laughter is bittersweet. Linguistically it's sharp, with  an enjoyable mix of  registers and languages of the characters - sometimes Hindi, sometimes English (sometimes colonial, sometimes colloquial, gradually becoming more American) - giving some glimpse of the excitement and possibilities of a multi-lingual society and making the surface of the prose glittering and fun.

I'm not tempted to read any more fiction by Naipaul on the basis of this, though. I'm interested in the comments about his non-fiction and travel writing in that Wikipedia article and someday maybe I'll look into them.

Nobels: 2002: Imre Kertész

A writer of whom I am sure I had never heard before, Imre Kertész was and wrote in Hungarian. As far as I can tell this book, Fateless, fairly closely follows his own history. A secular Jew in Hungary as the Second World War was nearing its end, he was taken away one day to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald. The book describes the treatment a similar boy, Gyuri, received in the camps and his final liberation in 1945.

It's a sparsely-told account. Gyuri is deadpan, with a touch of autism about him in the way he affectlessly describes what happens and strives to discern some logic in it. Ultimately, and especially in the final chapter after his return to Budapest, Gyuri is making the case that life stories aren't demonstrations of fate or destiny at work, but are just sequences of events. (The original title, Sorstalanság, means fatelessness, which gives a better sense of the rejection of implied meaning in narrative.) Whether we can assume that the book is saying that the holocaust has made meaningful narrative obsolete is another question.

Unusually, with this book I noticed the typeface. It's not typical of faces used for novels and is more reminiscent of, say, French poetry. Here's a sample. It's a smart choice by the publisher: it suggests a coolness that's inherent in the text.

This was a good, enthralling read, something that I would never have picked up but for the project I've undertaken and I'm so glad to have read it.

Next up is the longest book I've tackled here so far. I'm already disposed against it for that reason, and it may be some time before you find out what it is and whether I overcome my bias.