The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life
Page 25
God save the Kinks.
Finally, my wife Tina and son Alex are the not-so-secret heroes of this book and the saga on which it is based, my life. They have to go through it with me, the whole lot, in real time, without any of the funny bits. Without their humour, patience, company and love, neither book nor life would be worth persevering with. Thank you.
AM
Exclusive Excerpts from the Personal Blog of ‘Leonard Bast’
15 April.
Hello, and welcome to my blog – the List of Betterment!
My name is Leonard Bast. I live in the south of England with my wife and son in a house.
Likes: books, jam doughnuts, The Kinks.
Dislikes: football, cars, the novels of W. Somerset Maugham.
In November last year, I began a small but ambitious experiment: to work my way through a dozen or so books I had always meant to read but had never got round to, owing to idleness, apathy or lack of confidence. Not that this ever stopped me from pretending to have read them! LOL!!!
Anyway, here is that original list:
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Post Office – Charles Bukowski
The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists – Robert Tressell
The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky – Patrick Hamilton
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Of Human Bondage – W. Somerset Maugham
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
I finished that lot in about three months, quite an achievement when you are holding down a full-time job and trying to raise a young family, like what I do. I enjoyed the experience so much that I decided to extend the list to fifty books and give myself until 24 November this year to read them all – one year to the day since I embarked on the original List of Betterment. I have started this blog so I can share my thoughts on all the books I read this year, plus anything else that springs to mind. I hope you’ll join me!
18 April.
Today is Day 1 of reading: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
‘God is a woman, and she wants me to read.’
Jane Eyre
Last week, I finished Vanity Fair by Thackeray and was wondering where to go next. There was an article in the paper about reading habits and Jane Eyre was mentioned as many women’s favourite book. (Men nominated The Outsider by Camus and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Márquez.) Then, on Saturday, my friend Penny asked if I was going to attempt Jane Eyre, because it was one of her favourite books and her (all-female) book group had just done it. So I was flicking through Jane Eyre, umm-ing and err-ing, when I noticed that Charlotte Brontë dedicates the book to . . . William Makepeace Thackeray. So mote it be!
19 April.
Today is Day 2 of reading: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
Children in mortal peril, beatings and punishments, strict religious dogma: based on the first hundred pages, Jane Eyre is a period misery memoir, although in all likelihood Dave Pelzer never uses words like ‘hierophant’, ‘deglutition’ or ‘contumelious’, i.e. ‘he pushed her away with some contumelious epithet.’ This reminds me of a true story about the British girls’ comic Tammy in the 1970s. Their most popular serial ever was called ‘Slaves of War Orphan Farm’ because, according to the editor, it was exactly what the comic’s young female readers wanted to read – tales of orphans who were kept as slaves on a farm during a war. Some things you never grow out of.
20 April.
Today is Day 3 of reading: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
What would happen to the Brontë sisters today on the evidence of their novels alone? Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall make a compelling case for a dawn raid on Haworth Parsonage by West Yorkshire social services.
21 April.
Today is Day 4 of reading: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
Today is Charlotte Brontë’s 193rd birthday. Had she lived, she would have been very old.
25 April.
Today is Day 8 of reading: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
Finished Jane Eyre this morning. A dramatic, elemental and weird book which still has the power to shock. I wish to draw your attention to the character of Mr Rochester, one of the great romantic heroes of English literature. What type of a man is he?
Edward Rochester is generally arrogant, surly, foul-tempered and strikingly ‘ugly’ – not my word but that of Jane Eyre, who cannot stop going on about it. At the time the events of the book take place, Jane is barely eighteen; Rochester is nearly forty. He has had a string of mistresses, of which he says he repents (but he would say that, wouldn’t he?). He may or may not have had a child, Adele, with one of them. He leads another local woman, Blanche Ingram, to believe he is seeking to marry her, without having any intention of doing so. Such caddishness is just for starters.
Rochester keeps his first wife, Bertha – who is clinically insane – locked in a room in his attic, in the care of a negligent and alcoholic nurse. In order to uncover Jane’s true feelings for him, he dresses up in women’s clothing as a gypsy and pretends to tell her fortune. He withholds all the stuff about the mistresses and the crazy woman in the attic, even when the crazy woman a) tries to burn him alive in his bed, b) stabs her own brother and c) creeps into Jane’s room with the intention of attacking her. Still he says nothing. Instead, after the attempted fratricide, he makes Jane mop up the blood. Rochester then attempts to lead this same ignorant and sheltered eighteen-year-old into bigamy. On her wedding day, the ceremony is disrupted in the most humiliating manner imaginable. Only at this point does Rochester see fit to disclose to her the truth about the mistresses, the brother-in-law, the locked-up lunatic wife, etc. He then suggests that instead of getting married, they abscond to the continent and live together in sin. When Jane bravely says no, he threatens her with violence.
They decide to spend some time apart.
Happily for all concerned, Bertha breaks free of the attic again, starts another fire and leaps to her death. It is implied that the mad woman was syphilitic all along. So maybe Rochester is too. After the fire and his first wife’s suicide, one of the great romantic heroes of English literature ends the novel as a broken, one-armed blind man with undiagnosed syphilis and an innocent new wife, i.e. Jane Rochester, née Eyre.
These are just some of the qualities that have commended this total contumelious epithet to generations of female readers.
26 April.
Philip Roth: an apology
I am reading Everyman, a novella by Philip Roth. This will be the fifth of Roth’s books I have read in full. However, there are several acquaintances of mine who are under the impression I have read every word the great man has written since Sabbath’s Theater in 1995. They are under this impression because I LIED to them.
The worst example of this LYING would be to my friend Alan. I recommended American Pastoral to him despite having got no further than page 50 or thereabouts. Alan took me at my word. He read American Pastoral from cover to cover and thought it was superb. Then he read I Married a Communist and thought that was superb too. What did you think? he asked. Oh yes, I replied, magnificent. But I had not managed more than fifty pages of I Married a Communist either. The relentless excellence of the prose was exhausting.
As time has gone on, I have compounded the original offence over and over again. Every time Philip Roth publishes a new novel, Alan and I discuss it. Sometimes I have read the book, sometimes not. On the occasions when I have, I remind myself to compare it only with the books I have actually read, for fear of being caught out in my shameful LIES, not wanting Alan to find out either that I bullshitted him about American Pastoral and I Married a Communist o
r that I am still bullshitting him a bit even when telling the truth, and so I overcompensate by extravagantly praising Roth’s every paragraph, semi-colon and full stop. Gosh, I think as I hear myself enthuse and dissemble, I love Philip Roth!
Alan, I am sorry. Today the LYING stops.
(And sorry to Paul for making you read all 650 pages of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, which I believe I said was ‘incredible’, despite not having read even one of those pages – although in my defence I had read the cover. Fortunately you liked the book. At least you said you did. Maybe you hated it and didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Or maybe you were lying too. I understand. It is a very long book.)
So, for the record, here are the Philip Roth books I usually say I’ve read, followed by the TRUTH.
Portnoy’s Complaint – yes. In 1990. Didn’t really understand it.
Sabbath’s Theater – no. But Mrs Bast has read it. I base my opinion on hers.
American Pastoral – first 50 pages. Incredible.
I Married a Communist – first 50 pages. Incredible, monotonous.
The Human Stain – yes. This actually is one of the finest novels I have read in recent years, perhaps the best. The confrontation on the frozen lake near the end of the book is exemplary in its craft, unpredictable five pages before it occurs, yet thematically inevitable and utterly satisfying once it has happened, and I am not just saying that to prove I finished The Human Stain. But I did, and it is.
The Dying Animal – very short, so polished this one off no trouble. Can’t remember anything about it though.
The Plot Against America – curate’s egg, but one I consumed whole. Essentially a highbrow’s episode of The Outer Limits. Told people I liked it more than I actually did in order to appear consistent.
Exit Ghost – no. Definitely will though.
I do love Philip Roth. But as Jane Eyre will tell you, love can be ugly.
Also, must try and keep these entries shorter.
26 April.
Philip Roth: another apology
I would like to apologise for the appalling narcissism of the previous post, unless that’s what blogs are for and why people like them. I’m really not sure.
27 April.
Today is Day 2 of reading: Everyman by Philip Roth.
Everyman – yes. A great book? No. A small book by a great writer.
No one constructs sentences like Roth. They need to be read and re-read for their rhythm and their absolute confidence. I say this with the oft-expressed misgivings about his characters’ view of women. There is an outrageous line in this book about there being little more to the protagonist’s third wife than her asshole, the asshole she gladly offers him for sex; less, in fact. Less to her than her own asshole! But if you took out the streak of misogyny and the unquenchable libido, you wouldn’t have Philip Roth – a recklessly honest, semantically fastidious and unrepentantly dirty old genius.
Note to self: when this is all over, finish American Pastoral.
Next: Absolute Beginners, followed by One Hundred Years of Solitude. Looking forward to it.
10 May.
Today is Day 3 of reading: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.
Today is my 39th birthday. If I live another year, I shall be very old.
8 June.
The opposite of word-of-mouth recommendation.
After Don Quixote and Beyond Black, I had been planning to try Lampedusa’s The Leopard. But this morning some over-opinionated fathead in the newspaper – a regular columnist – announced that he will be taking The Leopard to the beach this year, as he does ‘every summer’. ‘One of the most evocative, poignant, elegiac and melancholic portraits of lost love and lost values, and much shorter than Anna Karenina,’ notes this paid-by-the-adjective windbag. This has put me right off The Leopard. Am I the only one who gets infuriated by this sort of self-regarding culture-bragging?
Decide to read The Epic of Gilgamesh instead.
I am aware there is some irony at work here but I prefer not to put my finger on it.
9 June.
Today is Day 1 of reading: The Epic of Gilgamesh.
‘Gilgamesh is the first work of world literature and remains one of the most important. Written in ancient Mesopotamia in the second millennium BC, it predates The Iliad by roughly 1000 years. Lost for almost two millennia, the eleven clay tables [sic. This is a misprint; they mean ‘tablets’] on which the epic was inscribed were discovered in 1850 in the ruins of Nineveh, and the text was not deciphered and fully translated until the end of the century.’
The historical importance of Gilgamesh is obvious, but that is not why I wanted to read it. It was the favourite book of a man I used to work with at a bookshop in Earl’s Court in London. His name was David and he was, and still is, an artist; I heard him on the radio recently discussing his latest sound-piece. He answered James Naughtie’s questions with the same seething politeness with which he handled customers in the shop and also most of his colleagues. He acquired titles for the Art section; other than that, he preferred to stay off the shop floor and spend his time in the stock room, unpacking new books and, three months later, returning those same books to their publishers – our branch was more an outpost of Empire than a going concern. David was both charismatic and intimidating. In addition to Gilgamesh, he was also an advocate of, variously: expensive black t-shirts from stylish boutiques (as opposed to the cheap ones from Camden market that I wore); vintage medical slides of hermaphrodites, amputees, etc., which he would flick through during tea-breaks, laughing quietly to himself; the concept albums of Laurie Anderson; photographic portraits by Joel-Peter Witkin, decadent tableaux composed of severed body parts, fat women knocking nails into their own heads, etc.; drinking beer in the pub after work; Polaroid photographs of ironing boards, in use or propped up in repose, which he intended to publish in a book, a high-quality cloth-bound limited edition of one (I hope he did this); and the novel Moby-Dick.
David liked Moby-Dick a lot. Did I first try to read it to get in with him? Probably. Of course I never finished it; it was only recently, at the fourth attempt, I made it past the first few chapters (see blog entry for 15 April for confirmation). But I nodded along in the pub and got my round in.
At this time, one of our co-workers was a chap called Mike, the singer in a band called The Becketts. At David’s urging, Mike read Moby-Dick straight through, no trouble. In fact, he was so taken with the book, The Becketts recorded a song about it on their second album, Myth. The song was called ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’ and it ingeniously condensed 600 pages of Melville’s prose-poetry and cetological symbolism into three and a half indie-rockin’ minutes. The chorus went:
‘Ship to shore!
What Ahab saw
Before it drooowned him!’
Ingenious, and catchy too.
Anyway, Gilgamesh. I don’t remember exactly what it was David – never Dave – liked so much about Gilgamesh but I know it was the first time I had ever heard of the book; reading it now, fifteen years later, is probably another belated attempt to get in with him. David, I am actually reading it: I owe you a pint, it’s astonishing. If I were to condense it in song, the chorus would go like this:
‘Gilgamesh!
God or flesh
You’re only huuuuman!’
(Which, if you don’t know what happens in Gilgamesh, is really ingenious, believe me.)
10 June.
Today is Day 2 of reading: The Epic of Gilgamesh.
From Gilgamesh, the key to happiness, the meaning of life:
‘Humans are born, they live, then they die, this is the order that the gods have decreed. But until the end comes, enjoy your life, spend it in happiness, not despair. Savour your food, make each of your days a delight, bathe and anoint yourself, wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean, let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand, and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.’
Tho
se words were written four thousand years ago. Is this the wisdom of the ancients? Or the sort of self-help guff you get on the back of a packet of herbal remedy? Try Gilgamesh – now available in tablets.
Thinking about heading over to Broadstairs next weekend for the Dickens Festival. Anyone going?
1 July.
Today is Day 1 of reading: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.
Another novel about poverty: the effects of poverty and the fear of falling into poverty. Of the thirty-two books so far completed on the List of Betterment, nearly half have had poverty as a central or significant theme.
The modern novel, by which I mean the post-war Western intellectual novel, is shaped therefore as much by the development of ideas, modernism, post-modernism etc. as by finally not having to worry where the next meal is coming from – arguably for the first time in history, or at least in the history of the novel. And freed from the burden of debt, hardship, hunger etc., what, who, does the modern novel produce?
Ignatius J. Reilly.
15 July.
Today is Day 15 of reading: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.
Philip Roth: ‘To read a novel requires a certain amount of devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really.’