The James Joyce who wrote this chunk of ghastly autofiction is the same James Joyce who a few years latePORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A GARGANTUAN WETWIPE
The James Joyce who wrote this chunk of ghastly autofiction is the same James Joyce who a few years later wrote the stunning, beautiful masterpiece Ulysses; this is like someone playing you Chug-a-Lug, Ten Little Indians and Farmer’s Daughter by the Beach Boys and telling you that three years later they would make Pet Sounds and Smile. You would frankly think they were off their trolley. Not possible.
Jimmy Joyce must have had one of those odd head traumas that change a person’s personality because between this mournful bucket of sloshing emo and Ulysses he developed a canny sense of humour – about his pretentious younger self, for one thing.
So Portrait of the Artist as an Insufferable Plonker is the story of Stephen Dedalus up to age 17/18 and Ulysses picks up his story a few years later and skewers his previous Portrait self mercilessly :
Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? …. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?
That James Joyce is a funny guy, this Portrait one you would get rats to gnaw your leg off rather than spend a train journey stuck with him in the same compartment.
Well, I am being a little harsh. The first half of this autonovel is not bad at all. There are a couple of strong dramatic scenes, a famous one being a Christmas dinner where a huge political row bursts out between the family’s governess and the loudmouth father. That was great, I was looking forward to more good stuff. But no, then it went south.
SELF-LOVE IN ALL SENSES
Portrait got in big trouble with the censors in 1916 and you can kind of see why because by page 95 young Stephen has discovered the joy of onanism, which is described in the following terms :
He bore cynically with the shameful details of his secret riots in which he exulted to defile with patience whatever image had attracted his eyes. By day and by night he moved among distorted images of the outer world. A figure that had seemed to him by day demure and innocent came towards him by night through the winding darkness of sleep, her face transfigured by a lecherous cunning, her eyes bright with brutish joy. Only the morning pained him with its dim memory of dark orgiastic riot, its keen and humiliating sense of transgression.
Well, it isn’t Henry Miller or Letters to Penthouse but you get the idea. Eventually he decides his solitary habit is not enough so he prowls the street (at this point he is 16). His horniness is described like this –
He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its penetration.
Steady on, JJ ! Eventually he discovers the delights of Dublin’s hookers and his experiences are drowned in the same euphuistic, euphemistic flowerpot verbals. After that, he gets religion and things take a dark turn.
At his religious school each year there is a Retreat. This is not something I was familiar with. The boys all have to devote themselves to several days of nothing but religious contemplation and prayer. Cue pages of morose I-am-a-doomed-sinner, followed up by a famous hellfire sermon by a priest who has an Evil Dead 2 view of the afterlife –
In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.
Plus, it smells really bad, there’s no room service and it’s really hot, and devils come and insult you.
All this drives Stephen slightly doolally :
The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.
There are pages of tiresome tedious claptrap like this.
NOT JUST ME
In his short and sharp recommended introduction to Joyce, John Gross puts the boot into Stephen Dedalus as follows –
It is hard not to be repelled, or on occasion to be amused, by his posturing and his moist romanticism. He is utterly self-absorbed; his reveries are rendered in the over-exquisite accents of the House Beautiful…How exactly are we to take all this? If we assume that Joyce completely identifies himself with Stephen the final section of the book becomes an exercise in naïve self-glorification
So he says in trying to get Joyce off the hook many critics read the Portrait ironically – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Insufferable Jerk
But hold on, Gross says
The portrait of the artist turns out to be the dissection of a second-rate aesthete.
If the Portrait was meant to be read as a hatchet job, why spend 300 pages doing it? The game is not worth the candle. The target is too mere. A short story in Dubliners would have done the job. So this makes us suspect JJ wanted us to take Stephen (=himself) seriously. It’s just not possible.
STRANGEST CAREER IN LITERATURE
He started off with the excellent short stories in Dubliners, following that with this mithering giant bore, then spent 7 years creating the magnificent Ulysses, 20th century’s greatest novel, then poured the rest of his life down the drain by taking seventeen (17) years to write the completely unreadable waste of time called Finnegans Wake. You couldn’t make it up....more
Melville’s style : Go to war against the reader, make every sentence an obstacle course, make it rebarbative, crabbed, recursive, stogged and clogged.Melville’s style : Go to war against the reader, make every sentence an obstacle course, make it rebarbative, crabbed, recursive, stogged and clogged. Make it like this (Melville describes some parts of Billy Budd) :
The ear, small and shapely, the arch of the foot, the curve in mouth and nostril, even the indurated hand dyed to the orange-tawny of the toucan's bill, a hand telling alike of the halyards and tar-bucket; but, above all, something in the mobile expression, and every chance attitude and movement, something suggestive of a mother eminently favored by Love and the Graces; all this strangely indicated a lineage in direct contradiction to his lot.
And here, one of the sailors decides to embellish some innocent gossip about Billy Budd to please his boss :
From his Chief's employing him as an implicit tool in laying little traps for the worriment of the Foretopman---for it was from the Master-at-arms that the petty persecutions heretofore adverted to had proceeded--the Corporal having naturally enough concluded that his master could have no love for the sailor, made it his business, faithful understrapper that he was, to foment the ill blood by perverting to his Chief certain innocent frolics of the goodnatured Foretopman, besides inventing for his mouth sundry contumelious epithets he claimed to have overheard him let fall.
My head! My head! My kingdom for an aspirin! Then there’s the ridiculous melodramatic ultravictorian moustache-twirling verbiage he comes out with when something actually happens (only four things actually happen in this novelette) :
He stood like one impaled and gagged. Meanwhile the accuser's eyes removing not as yet from the blue dilated ones, underwent a phenomenal change, their wonted rich violet color blurring into a muddy purple. Those lights of human intelligence losing human expression, gelidly protruding like the alien eyes of certain uncatalogued creatures of the deep.
Is this the Melville of Moby Dick which I read years and years ago and loved thoroughly? I can’t believe it.
The logic of the story of Billy Budd is tragic and perfect. The way it’s told is excruciating. Melville took a sad song and made it bitter....more
As I turned to the last page of this novel I emitted a groan. That was it?! Noooo…. Mr Portis, where’s the next 100 pages? It’s so short….I was havingAs I turned to the last page of this novel I emitted a groan. That was it?! Noooo…. Mr Portis, where’s the next 100 pages? It’s so short….I was having so much fun, what happened? Did you get kidnapped half way through? So this is a terrific deadpan tale of how Norwood Pratt, a man who knows all about car engines and their problems in great detail, tries and fails and stumbles and recovers and woozily lunges through a brief section of his life that involves hot cars, an intelligent chicken, an elegant person of restricted stature, a garrulous eccentric, an uncouth brother in law and an unceasing flow of wry comedy about low level American life in the late 50s, mostly rural but with an unhappy spell in New York.
Charles Portis is famous for True Grit which is a masterpiece and not so famous for his other four novels. So this is the third I have read, the other one being The Dog of the South, which is also great and also a road trip story featuring a man who knows about car engines and their problems in great detail, a garrulous eccentric…. Wait ! I now realise Charles Portis rewrote the same novel multiple times, like how Neil Young rewrites the same song a jillion times. But it’s okay, so long as the novel you keep rewriting is this funny and sweet and pure.
Recommended…but heck, it’s out of print. Amazon is only selling a French translation at the moment. But you can find it in the Library of America’s collected works volume, which is where I had to find it....more
Huh, who could be calling at this time ? Oh it’s one of my besties from work. “Hey, what’s up?” “Hey, something happened. I wonder if you could help.” “Y Huh, who could be calling at this time ? Oh it’s one of my besties from work. “Hey, what’s up?” “Hey, something happened. I wonder if you could help.” “Yeah, what happened?” “I just strangled my husband.” “What, dead? Like…. Dead?” “Well yeah – silly! I wouldn’t call you up and say I just strangled my husband but he’s still alive!” “Well okay, no need to get tetchy.” “So I was just thinking maybe, you know, us being such good friends and all, you could get rid of the body for me.” “Oh sure. I’ll be right over.”
In my local Waterstones there is a “Cosy Crime” section featuring bodies that don’t bleed all over the Tetbury wool twist and sprightly elderly amateuIn my local Waterstones there is a “Cosy Crime” section featuring bodies that don’t bleed all over the Tetbury wool twist and sprightly elderly amateur sleuth types that know a thing or two about a thing or two with a twinkle in their still clearsighted eyes. This must be a reaction to the default viciously cynical choking atmosphere of used needles and grime and terminal bleakness of all other modern crime fiction.
I think it would have been funnier if Martin Amis had tried to write a cosy crime book instead of this pastiche hardboiled Night Train. I would have loved a Martin Amis version of Miss Marples. That would be something. This, not so much.
Detective Seen It All Nothing Shocks Me Former Alcoholic Mike Hoolihan, who is a woman with a man’s name, is assigned to investigate the apparent suicide of an old friend of hers, the perfect in body and mind Jennifer Rockwell, an astrophysicist doing (at the age of 28) some cutting edge work on The Universe (not any old universe, THE universe) up at the observatory on the hill. She’s been found in her apartment naked with three self inflicted bullets in the head, very flamboyant, two more than you would think was strictly necessary. So, well, might possibly not be suicide. She had everything to live for. It’s a whydunnit.
So Detective Mike rounds up the usual suspects for the usual shaggy dogging tale of woe. She interviews the professor boyfriend (get on up, he’s a sex machine), the father, the casual bar pickup, the medical examiner, her boss the astrophysicist, her old friend the manic depressive (so that’s where she got the lithium!). And the whole book is really her interviewing herself (neat!).
As you read you can hear Martin saying to himself “that James Ellroy, that Ed McBain, that Elmore Leonard – I can do that, I’ll show ‘em, it’s not that hard”. But it is that hard. Night Train is karaoke. It’s your auntie singing “Oops I Did It Again”. No offence to aunties. ...more
amateurish, moronic, thoughtless, sadistic, repetitive schlock with no redeeming value whatsoever. What enjoyment there isFrom Too Much Horror blog :
amateurish, moronic, thoughtless, sadistic, repetitive schlock with no redeeming value whatsoever. What enjoyment there is comes in the form of disbelief. You'll be amazed at the lack of any attempt at realism in any aspect. You'll be astounded at the depraved depths to which the author can descend!
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
I only just heard about this 1977 lunatic horror novel and it sounded like fun, so I thought I’d get a nice cheap sleazy looking hopefully stained copy and read it, but I couldn’t because it’s out of print and people are charging CRAZY SKY HIGH prices. But then I found that some kindly soul had done an audio book of it and put the whole thing on Youtube! Problem solved.
PRAYING MANTISES! THOUSANDS OF THEM! THE SIZE OF A MAN!
So here is a short summary of a book you will probably not read.
A man in a boat off a Columbian island observes an earthquake followed by a tsunami. Back on land he then can’t but notice that thousands of giant praying mantises are pouring forth from fissures in the very ground caused by the earthquake. And they are so hungry. So they are eating people.
Our hero is called Dyke and is 25 years old and he has an alarming back story. It seems he has been roaming the world committing all kinds of crimes, torturing people and so forth. He is no boy scout. And he had a disagreement with four of his shady chums and they beat him soundly and he was “robbed of his manhood” eleven years ago. Since then life has lost some of its sparkle. But now, Dyke feels excited and happy again, watching the mantises eat people. One of them even eats his only friend in Colombia – slowly! And it gets his juices flowing! So he decides to become King of the Mantises. That will show everybody.
He lures a mantis by offering it frozen sheep from his extraordinarily large boat refrigerator, then he captures it by using a steel reinforced net which he always carries because he is a tough hunter of wild beasts even though now he is without his manhood.
Dyke’s eyes had a molten steel stare that used to knuckle victims to their knees. His eyes compensate for the zigzag of awful scars all over his face and body. He had jet black shoulder length hair. "But he was a eunuch now. He could never marry". Not even a mantis. We will come to that sad episode.
THEY WERE A DEATH DEALING MANHOOD DESTROYING BOY BAND.
In a flashback we learn that the leader of this boy band was a boy who did not know what kindness was. Ryan Gout was the leader but Pete Stuart was the meanest, he gouged out people’s eyes and his favourite hobby was maiming children just for fun. He would laugh as he did so.
The gang was tired of kicking out old ladies’ brains for fifty dollars. They wanted to steal a million dollars. Pete says he has a bottle of nitro so they can blow a safe. And he knows where one is. So off they go, to Old Man Shield’s place. Whoever he is. They’re going to ring his doorbell, roll him around on the ground and knife him a little. So they do all that and chop up the old man. There is a lot of chopping, two or three pages. “Zeb’s blood red knife followed Pete’s into the heart section.” The old geezer is well dead “yet the boys cut on”.
So they blow up the old geezer’s safe and find a fortune in dollar bills.
After some post-robbery contemplation Dyke decides to rob all the loot for himself. Unfortunately he is discovered by the gang who whip out their flick knives and begin slicing with glee. “I’ll pull his socks off so we can get at his toes”. But it’s not his toes Dyke worries about.
“No don’t cut me there, cut me anywhere, but leave me that!” he whimpers.
But they do cut him there and leave him to die like a dog in the desert.
But luckily some local vaqueros rescue him and patch him up, including blood transfusions.
I’LL CALL HIM SLAYER
I’ll teach this mantis who he is and to come when I call.. I’ll call him Slayer!
Dyke trains Slayer. He figures that it will take two months to fully train him, and also to make “some kind of potion” that will stop Slayer or any other mantis from eating him. At this point Dyke catches a local man stealing from his store of food. He feeds him to Slayer. Ten page description of the ensuing meal. Slayer loves eating people alive, what’s the fun in eating dead people right? And Dyke gets his jollies watching Slayer. It’s a match made in heaven. Dyke wonders what it would be like to be eaten by Slayer – for a long time. “His own death would not exhilarate him".
Dyke makes his repellent potion. Pages about this. Finally, after a long process in which an anteater dies, he smears his arm with this horrible stuff and forces his feet to walk to Slayer’s cage, thinking “What if Slayer bites off my arm and chews it up before my eyes?... I wonder what it’s like watching a beast eat part of your body while you are helpless to prevent the gruesome snack?”
I’m sure we all wonder that from time to time.
“As the mantis stopped to catch his breath” …. Wait a minute, even I know that insects don’t have lungs…. Oh anyway, this is nitpicking…. Dyke muses :
I think I could see Slayer swim in a sea of blood and I could swim in it with him, especially if it was the blood of people, of men, of the four men I hate with all my guts. An ocean of blood wouldn’t sicken me… I could spend my whole life seeing him eat men alive…
Enough! I think I can see where this is going. There will be pages about Slayer eating people and Dyke enjoying it. He will track down the boy band and Slayer will eat them one by one with mean Pete left till last. And finally the potion will wear off and Slayer will eat Dyke. If anybody finished this astonishingly ridiculous novel, written in the same English language that Henry James used to write The Golden Bowl, then maybe they will let me know.
I will never look at a six feet tall praying mantis in the same way again....more
A curious and kind of heartwarming story – now and then I watch the videos of a booktuber named Criminolly and at some point he got dragHOW I GOT HERE
A curious and kind of heartwarming story – now and then I watch the videos of a booktuber named Criminolly and at some point he got dragged into reading The Most Disturbing Books Ever. He would do a video about one of these every now and then. The titles were suggested to him by his booktube followers and friends, and you can imagine they were mostly the usual suspects. One must-read on this list was Notice by Heather Lewis. He discovered it was out of print & shelled out for a second hand copy. Then he read it and was mightily impressed and contacted Serpent’s Tail, the original publishers, asking why they’d let it go out of print. Lots of back and forth later, and lo! Because of his enthusiasm and encouragement they republished Notice in February this year.
How nice – it’s like finding out that us book fans actually count for something! Power to the people!
THE MOST DISTURBING BOOKS
Olly read Cows by Matthew Stokoe and quite rightly called it The Least Disturbing Book Ever – that was great (I agree). Anyway, after all this extreme reading he nominated Notice as The Most Disturbing – much worse than American Psycho, The Wasp Factory, We Need to Talk About Kevin, etc etc. (BTW Lolita was on the list, quite rightly.) So naturally my curiosity was somewhat piqued.
Why do we read disturbing books anyway? Same reason as we watch horror films. Which is? Well, sometimes I think it’s just a macho thing – do you dare to watch The Human Centipede Full Sequence? (Answer : no!!!) Like – do you dare to ride the great big scary rollercoaster? (Answer – no!!!!)
I’ve read a bundle of these Disturbing Books and there’s another bundle I would never ever read – 120 Days of Sodom by de Sade, Hogg by Samuel Delaney, anything by Peter Sotos, My Absolute Darling….
CONNECTIONS
Heather Lewis writes somewhat like Dennis Cooper and Mary Gaitskell, the subject matter is ghastly, awful, horrendous, but it’s recounted in a lacksadaisical, lacklustre, affectless zoned-out style, quite appropriate for the first person narration, because this first person is severely traumatised and gets retraumatised at least twice.
And Notice can be filed next to some other narratives of female self-immolation, like Story of O and The Piano Teacher. It’s in that unhappy orbit.
WAS IT ANY GOOD
Well it was strange – nothing like the vortex of horror I was expecting. This is the story of a self-destructive woman who drifts in and out of prostitution and runs into a couple of horribly sadistic clients; but mainly it’s the story of her lesbian relationships with two women, and these take up the great majority of the book, and are written about very tenderly, but also in a blank ghastly can’t-escape-from-my-own-head kind of way. The language is distant, desiccated, debilitated, and frankly very wearing :
I glanced at Beth because I hadn’t been keeping an eye on her and had just now noticed it. She was looking right at me. This put me further off base because until then I thought maybe she hadn’t been paying attention. Realizing she was confused me all the more because I’d been both wanting her to and not. Or I’d been wanting her to but at the same time was afraid of it.
There are pages of this kind of mad waffley sub-psychobabble. It was like Henry James if Henry James was a 14 year old girl strung out on quaaludes.
As I say, an appropriate voice for the character, but for me a turgid not great read, sorry to say....more
This is the original What Would Jesus Do? novel. It has a curious history. In 1896 this preacher Charles Sheldon thought up the famous challenge and hThis is the original What Would Jesus Do? novel. It has a curious history. In 1896 this preacher Charles Sheldon thought up the famous challenge and had the lightbulb idea of incorporating it into his sermon in the form of an ongoing story – come back next week for part two, everybody! See what happens when our characters try to live their lives asking WWJD all the time! The idea was a huge hit, his church was packed, and at the end of it he wrote it up as a novel and serialised it in a religious magazine and tried to get it published. The publishers turned him down flat. So the magazine decided to publish it as a novel themselves, and they sent off the manuscript to be copyrighted but they didn’t send the whole manuscript and the copyright office said their application was invalid. So the magazine version sold out immediately – 100,000 copies, apparently, and of course other respectable publishers spotted this phenomenon and also saw that it was out of copyright and pirated it and sold millions, and poor Charles Sheldon didn’t get a dime. How sad. But it was God’s will, you know!
I read all this in the preface, which also tells me In His Steps has been
carefully edited and updated for modern readers.
Hmmm…. What could that mean? I don’t think they did a great job because quite soon we have Rev Sheldon introducing a young female character like this :
A statuesque blonde of attractive proportions, Virginia had an appealing face. The spectacles she wore simply emphasised her gifted intellect.
Well anyhow, the story is located in the town of Raymond and focuses on the big cheeses in the church who take the WWJD pledge, such as the editor of one of the main local papers. He immediately decides to stop publishing accounts of prize fighting and he cancels all adverts for alcohol and tobacco, much to his manager’s consternation, who loudly proclaims they will go bust within the month.
Transposing the moral teachings of first century rural Judea onto late 19th century middle America throws up some bizarre questions, which Rev Sheldon acknowledges :
It is a different age. There are many perplexing questions in our civilisation that are not mentioned in the teachings of Jesus. How am I going to tell what he would do?
Apparently if you feel that’s what Jesus would do, then that’s enough. So we get some ludicrous stuff like :
The three agreed that, whatever Jesus might do in detail as editor of a daily paper, He would be guided by the same general principles that directed His conduct as the Saviour of the world….Jesus would not issue a Sunday edition.
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The big idea is actually most interesting – what would happen if Christians actually took the teachings of Jesus seriously? The characters are convinced they are at the beginning of a social revolution. And yes, you can see that could very well be. But the novel fritters the big idea away, and its band of well-meaning wealthy types spend their time and money improving the lives of the poor by singing beautifully to them and closing down saloons. There are cringe-makingly pat scenes such as the one where it is discovered that a member of the church is the owner of some slum tenements – he immediately weeps and promises to fix all the plumbing. (In fact there is a whole ocean of religious weeping here, the pages are wringing with it. )
But I will give the Rev Sheldon credit for one scene, in which a bunch of working men let the do-gooders know what the real solutions are, as opposed to the weeping, singing and nourishing soup. One guy frankly says that revolutionary socialism is the only way forward, none of this mystical nonsense.
And indeed there is a lot of Christian self-criticism in here :
The bishop was appalled to discover how few of his wealthy friends would really suffer any genuine inconvenience for the sake of humanity.
Well, as a novel this is hopeless, the reverend was no writer, his characters are thin puppets, and he has no idea of a plot, but we can’t complain about that, it’s all about the Big Idea; and I don’t think he worked it out well enough or went as far as he could with it.
A brief, gleefully bleak horror comedy that begins with three pretty funny jokes. Our Mormon protagonist finds himself in a room being administered byA brief, gleefully bleak horror comedy that begins with three pretty funny jokes. Our Mormon protagonist finds himself in a room being administered by an 8 foot demon complete with horns. Demon is trying to figure out which hell he should go to. What? But I shouldn’t be here at all! I’m a good Mormon! I believe in God and Jesus and everything! Demon explains well, kiddo, you picked the wrong religion. The real true religion is Zoroastrianism. Our Mormon is indignant – why was this not made clear? “Bit of bad luck there,” says the demon, in a don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules kind of way.
So anyway, he gets zapped off to one particular Hell and he’s reading the rules on a big helpful board :
Welcome to Hell. This Hell is based upon a short story by Jorge Luis Borges from your world called “The Library of Babel”. Here you will find all the books that can possibly be written.
And after listing nine rules, it concludes
We hope you enjoy your stay here. We have done all we can to make your stay a pleasant and instructive one.
Kind of counterfactual, you may think. But really this Hell is pretty pleasant, you get to eat delicious food all the time, you get to have your 25 year old body which never gets sick, and wonder of wonders you get to meet people and have sex, should you so desire. What could be so bad about Hell, then?
For the answer, you should read this funny and excruciating little book.
Note : In case you were wondering how many books are in this library of hell, there is an answer. The combination of letters and words are confined to those found on a Roman alphabet keyboard, and include all the punctuation too, alas, so the number is quite high, it’s 95 to the power of 1,312,000 which is way way more than the number of electrons in our present universe.
A sharp glinting sliver of horror not confronted, glanced at and shuddered away from, then finally grasped. Sometimes the things that are closest to yA sharp glinting sliver of horror not confronted, glanced at and shuddered away from, then finally grasped. Sometimes the things that are closest to you are hardest to see. Now I have to know more. This tiny novel is not to be missed. It will only take you 90 minutes, or less. ...more
Was ever a good deed punished like this one….. Teacher in 1950s Glasgow has a slum kid in his class, already on probation for stealing, and the targetWas ever a good deed punished like this one….. Teacher in 1950s Glasgow has a slum kid in his class, already on probation for stealing, and the target of revulsion and mockery by the other kids. But Tom the slum kid is the smartest one in the class. So benignly selfregardingly wellmeaning teacher Charles decides it would be a great idea to introduce Tom to the finer things in life & open up his cramped horizons by taking him with his family off to the seaside cottage they rent every year for a fortnight. How great-hearted! How misguided! How disastrous!
It's a strong tale and the psychology of everyone is scored like a late quartet by Beethoven : the sceptical wife, the jealous but fascinated daughter, the oblivious son, the battleaxe mother-in-law, and most complicatedly, frantically virtue-signalling (to himself as much as anyone else) Charles and Tom, who wasn’t ever waving but always drowning. Leading us to the gloomy inevitability of the final chord.
In a little would-be posh prep school the head and his few lowly teachers politely snipe at the boys and at each other until the shark tank is positivIn a little would-be posh prep school the head and his few lowly teachers politely snipe at the boys and at each other until the shark tank is positively boiling with repressed hatreds. Doesn’t this sound like fun! And especially when Mr Merry, the master who does most of the donkey work, sounds exactly like Alistair Sim in such classic comedies as The Happiest Days of Your Life
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But no, it isn’t fun. Ivy Compton-Burnett famously wrote her short novels almost entirely in dialogue - nothing wrong with that - but I just didn’t get half of the oblique inferences buried in each studied line. They went whizzing over my head. It was like late-Henry-James-lite.
“Well, well, we might begin,” said Herrick.
” Yes, yes, begin, Herrick,” said Bumpus.
“ Yes, it is your business, dear,” said Emily. ” Dickie is a relative, and has to be put last in everything. It would be presuming upon your intimacy with the house to hold back.”
“It is so nice to help in any way,” said Miss Lydia.
“ I said that Lydia did not admire you nearly enough,” said Emily.
“ She really admires us terribly little,” said Bumpus.
“ Well, she has killed any desire in me, but to do my simple best in anything I may undertake,” said Herrick, opening his papers.
“Yes, we must keep Lydia here. She will put the right spirit into it,” said Bumpus.
“ Oh, no, no, I can’t be here. But it is so nice to be wanted, thank you, thank you. So nice to go off to what calls me most, feeling that I should be welcome at what calls me less, calls me too, though it does not need me. For it does call me. It does call me. But I must go to the need.”
It turned out that Ivy Compton-Burnett’s family was much more interesting than her writing. She was the seventh of twelve children of a well-known homeopathic physician. After university she went back home to teach four of her younger sisters. However her stepmother was allegedly an ogre and sent of all the children to boarding school as soon as possible. Later her favourite brother died of pneumonia and another was killed on the Somme. Oh, and her two youngest sisters died in a suicide pact by poison in their locked bedroom on Christmas Day, 1917. And, what about this, none of the twelve siblings had children, and all eight girls remained unmarried....more
In the middle of this delightful ultra-English country house satire written in 1921, I got a jolt. One of the pompous old geezers is lecturing our limIn the middle of this delightful ultra-English country house satire written in 1921, I got a jolt. One of the pompous old geezers is lecturing our limp-as-a-lettuce-leaf young Denis the would-be poet about what the world is really like (they do this quite a lot) :
People are quite ready to listen to the philosophers for a little amusement as they would listen to a fiddler or a mountebank. But as to acting on the advice of the men of reason – never. Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts…
At that exact moment, in 1921, there was a guy just starting his political career in an obscure minuscule laughably unpopular political party over in Germany. Of course, he was Hitler, and he was a madman. It gave me a shudder.
That was an unintentional serious note - this is a sweet, funny book. When you start it you might groan and think hasn’t this eccentric aristocratic and artistic types all lined up to be executed by gentle mockery been done to death? And it has. But this young man Aldous Huxley could really turn out lovely sentences, unexpected anecdotes and lashings of charm.
Such a nice novel to end the year with. 3.5 stars....more
The problem with Goodreads (well, there are so many problems, where do we begin? take the app, for instance - it’s got enough bugs to delight a thousaThe problem with Goodreads (well, there are so many problems, where do we begin? take the app, for instance - it’s got enough bugs to delight a thousand entomologists) is that you can find inspiring five star reviews and equally horrifying one star reviews for every book ever – well, of course, readers are nothing if not heterogeneous – so where does that leave you when you pick up your next novel? It’s confusing.
In this case I shoulda believed the reviewers who said they wouldn’t put this book out if it was on fire. The thing is that you can tell this novel is a comedy and you can see which bits are intended to be hilarious but that’s as far as it goes.
Can’t remember why I got this in the first place. I thought it was one of the 1001 Books You Must Read In The Next Week Or The Dog Will Die but it isn’t. Comedies about the awkward sex lives of practising Catholics in the 1960s aren’t immediately obvious must-reads. There must have been a reason. Maybe some nasty burglar broke in and left his copy on my shelf....more
1. A guy will spend years writing a long book about sexual h(Note – this may be a little tiny bit spoilerish)
THE WAY THINGS WERE IN INDIA IN THE 1940s
1. A guy will spend years writing a long book about sexual health in marriage, knowing that it will be a big hit when published, and when he meets a total stranger one day he will whimsically sell him his manuscript for whatever cash the guy has in his pockets (a few rupees) and the total stranger will take the manuscript and get it published and become rich and the author will never ask for any royalties, not even when he meets the random guy again later on. And no one will ever mention the total unfairness or borderline insanity of such an occurrence.
2. A 15 year old son will run away from his family because of a fight with his annoying father, and the parents, realising he has gone, will fall into despair, weeping and wailing, but they will never think of asking the police to find their son. In fact they will not make even the feeblest attempt to trace him. It seems registering a teenager as a missing person is not something anyone would do.
3. After the income from the sex book dies down, the guy thinks hmmm I need a job, I know, I will become a financial expert and get everyone to lend me their cash. How can I do this? Of course! I will offer my customers 25% interest when the bank only offers 5%! So this is an offer the whole town of Malgudi cannot refuse and they shower our guy with all their stashed cash caches and lo! they get their 25% and everything is peachy. How this guy is able to do such a thing, what he does with all the money to be able to afford such a Himalayan altitude of interest, is not explained. Maybe it was only ever a Ponzi scheme. Who knows. Maybe R K Narayan didn’t quite know either.
4. Everybody’s fortunes randomly rise and fall as if they were the playthings of gods who were high as kites on lsd.
This is the 6th RK Narayan novel I have read and I think that’s enough. The two best ones were The Dark Room and The Painter of Signs. I have concluded that he is a little bit hit or miss. But he is a very affable, friendly writer....more
Fans of Eleanor Oliphant is Perfectly All Right, Thanks for Asking will instantly recognise our central character Angel Deverell as another Eleanor, aFans of Eleanor Oliphant is Perfectly All Right, Thanks for Asking will instantly recognise our central character Angel Deverell as another Eleanor, an Edwardian version. But this one has a whole other dramatic fate. In trouble at school for incessantly lying about absolutely everything, she adamantly refuses ever to go back, and her poor single parent doormat mother can do nothing with this unloving unlovely granite-willed teenager who sits in bed all day scribbling in a notebook, writing a novel. She is one of those writers who never read, she writes entirely out of her wildly ill-informed imagination. Having finished her novel, aged 16, she expects it to be published, so she looks in one of her school books at the title page, and finds an address, and wraps all the notebooks up and sends them to the Oxford University Press.
She is shocked when they all come back without even a courteous note. Shocked but undaunted. Finds another random publisher and repeats the exercise. This time she’s in luck – on a whim they decide to take a chance. It’s wild, incoherent, makes very little sense, but it has a certain swing to it. When she visits them they are frankly stunned to find she is a teenager from a dingy part of a dingy Midlands town.
Anyway, there are many half-educated, ill-informed, incoherent, easily impressed readers out there who are just waiting for rubbish like this, so her first novel is a giant hit. And so are all the others. All the critics, of course, hate her stuff like poison.
This would never happen today. Modern readers are so much more discerning. Blatant nonsense would never be bought in vast quantities today, of that I am quite sure.
So we follow the rise and fall of this woman with zero insight, zero social skills and zero sense of humour. Some of it is sad, some funny, most of it is predictable.
Elizabeth Taylor later wrote Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. Now that one is terrific.
SOUNDTRACK
Thank you for Sending me an Angel : Talking Heads Tin Angel : Joni Mitchell Blue Angel : Roy Orbison Earth Angel : The Penguins Infamous Angel : Iris DeMent Misguided Angel : Cowboy Junkies Angel Baby : Rosie and the Originals My Guardian Angel : The Monorails My Special Angel : Bobby Helms Angel of the Morning : Billie Davis...more
Back in the early 19th century the idea was to bung as many clauses as possible into your sentences – if you could interrupt yourself twelve times befBack in the early 19th century the idea was to bung as many clauses as possible into your sentences – if you could interrupt yourself twelve times before the full stop, that was style. Mostly I enjoy the sclerosis of early Victorian prose, it’s like wading through barb-wired treacle but you knew what you were in for and like spelunking it can be an invigorating challenge.
But Nathaniel Hawthorne - really, this guy is too much. Here he is talking about a little kid who’s already bought some gingerbread from the shop and now he’s returned :
Phœbe, on entering the shop, beheld there the already familiar face of the little devourer—if we can reckon his mighty deeds aright—of Jim Crow, the elephant, the camel, the dromedaries, and the locomotive. Having expended his private fortune, on the two preceding days, in the purchase of the above unheard-of luxuries, the young gentleman’s present errand was on the part of his mother, in quest of three eggs and half a pound of raisins.
This is sickly simpering stuff indeed. “The little devourer”….”his mighty deeds”…”his private fortune”…”unheard-of luxuries”… he is beating this spoofiness to death, it dies horribly long before he gets to the half pound of raisins. He thinks he’s being kindly-funny when he’s being revolting. Well, of course, that was the taste in polite humour back then – patronising little children mercilessly. And he doesn’t stop laying it on with a trowel :
These articles Phœbe accordingly supplied, and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him.
We are taking the whole first page of chapter 8 to hack through all this arch blathering about a gingerbread whale and the fun stuff about Jonah and the red pathway. And he will not stop wringing every last morsel of hilarity from the small boy.
This remarkable urchin, in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, both in respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because he, as well as Time, after ingulfing thus much of creation, looked almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made.
Finally the kid leaves – phew, maybe we can get back on track now.
As the child went down the steps, a gentleman ascended them, and made his entrance into the shop.
Okay – a new character. Ah, wait – in 1850 that meant that you had to spend a page describing what he’s wearing because no one in those days knew what anything looked like.
It was the portly, and, had it possessed the advantage of a little more height, would have been the stately figure of a man considerably in the decline of life, dressed in a black suit of some thin stuff, resembling broadcloth as closely as possible. A gold-headed cane, of rare Oriental wood, added materially to the high respectability of his aspect, as did also a neckcloth of the utmost snowy purity, and the conscientious polish of his boots. His dark, square countenance, with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows, was naturally impressive, and would, perhaps, have been rather stern, had not the gentleman considerately taken upon himself to mitigate the harsh effect by a look of exceeding good-humor and benevolence. Owing, however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about the lower region of his face, the look was, perhaps, unctuous rather than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshly effulgence, not altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be. A susceptible observer, at any rate, might have regarded it as affording very little evidence of the general benignity of soul whereof it purported to be the outward reflection. And if the observer chanced to be ill-natured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably suspect that the smile on the gentleman’s face was a good deal akin to the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his boot-black, respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and preserve them.
My dear fellow goodreaders, this was page 116 and I could take it no more. Congratulations to the steelier readers who finished this novel with their sanity intact. I decamped for the austere pages of Wikipedia where I read the Plot Summary. And ugh, what thin gruel it was. All that for this?
The DNFs come thick and fast. Will I actually finish a novel this year?
This was fiercely original and intriguing, but also boring and plotless, and even worse, convinced me that like a dim-witted person at a comedy club, This was fiercely original and intriguing, but also boring and plotless, and even worse, convinced me that like a dim-witted person at a comedy club, I just wasn’t getting it and why are all these people laughing. You get a series of episodes, like short stories, about people who you then realise are insects, so that even though they’re wearing a slinky dress and high heels, they also fly and have a proboscis and wanna suck your blood, like a literal metaphor. This novel is a Satire About Post-Soviet Russia, so maybe not surprisingly mosquitos and dung beetles feature a lot. One insect blatantly says “We’ve been sold down the river, every one of us. Along with the rockets and the fleet. They’ve sucked us dry.” Okay, that was straightforward. But there was a lot of hoho Russian humour that went over my head.
He set the glasses on the grass, filled them to the brim, and raised his own. “Whose is it?” inquired Arthur. “It’s a cocktail,” answered Archibald. “Turkmenian second group and Moscow region engineer with negative rhesus factor. Cheers!”
Insect/humans (whatever they are) says stuff like “I killed the conceptual artist in myself long ago.”
Ah well, for me it was a miss but the more esoteric Goodreaders will love it....more
There are some novels that seem to exist mainly to give the author the excuse to indulge in some classic rants, some hilarious – the wonderful “95 TheThere are some novels that seem to exist mainly to give the author the excuse to indulge in some classic rants, some hilarious – the wonderful “95 Theses 95” section in Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor and the various hair-raising direct addresses to the reader in How to Kidnap the Rich by Rahut Raina – and some horrific like the spinetingling Grand Inquisitor chapter in The Brothers Karamazov; I bet you can think of many more.
Philip Roth is rantmeister supreme, and Operation Shylock is stuffed full of them, some truly sublime in their utter offensiveness; in fact this novel is like he woke up and thought huh, I’ve become a safe cosy prize winning A list candidate for Greatest Living Novelist, I’ll show the bastards I can still rock, I’m gonna offend EVERYBODY! Just watch me!
So he starts off with the insane idea that one day, he, Philip Roth, gets a call from his cousin who lives in Jerusalem who says hey Philip, I didn’t know you were already here and he says what? No, I’m still in New York – and thus he discovers that a) there’s a lookalike running around in Jerusalem pretending to be Philip Roth; and b) this other Roth is holding a series of lectures on the exciting new concept of Diasporism.
This concept says : Jews why are you putting yourselves in danger by still living here in Israel? Now your enemies will always know where you are! Israel is the most dangerous place for you! Avoid a second Holocaust! Get back to the diaspora! Get back to Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine – they will welcome you with open arms, you’ll be so much safer there! They feel so guilty about the Holocaust!
As you can see, this is a serious jest, the irony is as thick as an elephant’s hide, you can hear Philip Roth chortling as he elaborates this lunatic idea of this lunatic double. The language he puts into the mouth of his crazy double is so inflammatory I can’t quote it.
But he is bent on being fair to everybody – all will get their chance to spew fort their hatreds! As the real Philip Roth arrives in Jerusalem to confront and denounce the fake Philip Roth, he runs into an old grad school chum George Ziad, a Palestinian American who relocated to the West Bank. George is chock full of the bile of daily life under the occupation and he gets a ten page rant in which Philip Roth allows himself to say the antisemitic Unsayable uninterrupted and at full volume. Here’s how Philip now describes his old friend :
As we drove, embittered analysis streamed forth unabated, of Jewish history, Jewish mythology, Jewish psychosis and sociology, each sentence delivered with an alarming air of intellectual wantonness, the whole a pungent ideological mulch of overstatement and lucidity, of insight and stupidity, of precise historical data and wilful historical ignorance; a loose array of observations as disjointed as it was coherent and as shallow as it was deep – the shrewd and vacuous diatribe of a man whose brain, once as good as anyone else’s, was now as much of a menace to him as the anger and loathing that, by 1988, after twenty years of the occupation and forty years of the Jewish state, had corroded everything moderate in him…by the time his ideas wormed their way through all that emotion, they had been so distorted and intensified as only barely to resemble human thought… despite the thin veneer of professorial brilliance, which gave even his most dubious and bungled ideas a certain intellectual gloss, now at the core of everything was hatred and the great disabling fantasy of revenge.
Naturally some chapters later we get the anti-antisemitic diatribe from another character :
There are antisemites who are like alcoholics who actually want to stop but don’t know how. …there are occasional antisemites who engage in nothing more than a little antisemitism as a social lubricant at parties and business lunches; moderate antisemites who can control their antisemitism and even keep it a secret when they have to; and then there are all-out antisemites, the real career haters…
I wanted to reread this in many ways appalling novel now, at this ghastly time. In some ways it’s so crazy, such a ripe slab of too-knowing too-smirky metafiction (the “real” Philip Roth gets to shag the “fake” Philip Roth’s sexy girlfriend) that many readers might perform the wall-hurl and scream No More, Please! This time round I was horrified and couldn’t look away at about half of it and thought the last third dribbled away in nonsense.
Four head-banging stars. I do not recommend this novel! It’s upsetting. ...more
The frustrated librarian within me sometimes categorises novels into categories such as Novels Which Are Really Memoirs*, Female Self-Loathing As An AThe frustrated librarian within me sometimes categorises novels into categories such as Novels Which Are Really Memoirs*, Female Self-Loathing As An Art Form** or Isolated Miserable Women Spiralling Down Down Ever Downwards***. This one easily slotted into the category Old Farts At Play which already includes
House Mother Normal by BS Johnson Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard Greybeard by Brian Aldiss A Five Year Sentence by Bernice Rubens Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia marquez The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
Muriel Spark has gleeful gruesome fun with this cast of dodderers. Early on we are at a cremation. The former boyfriend of the crematee is there :
“Madam,” said Percy, baring his sparse green teeth in a smile, “the ashes of Lisa Brooke will always be sacred to me. I desire to see them, kiss them if they are cool enough.”
And we frequently visit a ward for (less well-heeled) elderly women at a local hospital where the inhabitants are divided into the semi-gaga and the totally-gaga :
The senile cases were grouped around the television and so were less noisy than usual, but still emitting, from time to time, a variety of dental and guttural sounds
Or, later,
Some of the geriatrics were still eating or doing various things with their slice of cake.
So as you see this is a black comedy. The posh old ladies that won’t be crammed into the geriatric ward but will eventually expire in a leafy nursing home in Surrey totter about the plot, conniving with or blackmailing each other. Much sad but true humour is derived from an ancient couple who are both petrified that their 40 year old affairs will be revealed when, in fact, each is well aware of the other’s indiscretions. I wonder how many couples just like that are in the real world.
There is a terrible MacGuffin in the plot, and this lost it a few points. An anonymous man (or men) phones up these old ladies and gentlemen and informs them “Remember that you will die”. They all slightly panic and try to get the police involved. I wish I would have been around in London in 1958 and told Muriel Spark to ditch that part, it’s tiresome. The real meat of this short novel is the cringemaking you-can’t-say-that slagging off of farty upper-middle-class old relics. She is merciless. Go, Muriel! I should add that there are a few glimmers of compassion here and there.
And she can produce some lovely zingers, too :
Her words depressed him. They were like spilt sugar; however much you swept it up, some grains would keep grinding under your feet.
*******
* A Question of Upbringing, The Wallcreeper, The Adventures of Augie March, The Naked and the Dead, Voyage in the Dark… the list could go on and on, too many to list
**Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek A Day Off by Storm Jameson Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill Dietland by Sarai Walker All of Jean Rhys’ novels except Wide Sargasso Sea
***The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore Skylark by Deszo Kosztolayni The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark* The Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman...more
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