The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life
Page 26
21 July.
Today is Day 21 of reading: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.
‘High summer can be pitiless to the low-spirited.’ I Capture the Castle
I’m back.
First, let me apologise for the break in communications. A stressful family holiday and an employment crisis intervened, both resolved amicably. Plus, it has been hot. If it isn’t raining I find it hard to concentrate.
So it took me three weeks to finish I Capture the Castle, which diluted the pleasure I was able to take in the book; a shame, I probably should have waited for a less turbulent moment.
The story follows a girl’s progress from late childhood to the woebegone world of grown-ups, 1930s bohemia on its uppers, stately homes without heating or much food. The tone lies somewhere between Noel Streatfeild and Nancy Mitford – waspishly jolly, with little jolts of sadness. Funny too. Cassandra’s stepmother Topaz is melodramatic and flighty but we are allowed to see that she is also perceptive and caring; her father is shown to be in the grip of a devastating writers’ block, an all-encroaching failure of nerve which has lasted for years. He is both irresponsible and helpless. Actually, I cannot recall ever reading such a compassionate and adult depiction of writers’ block in a novel. Cassandra’s solution may be childish but it does capture the castle. She locks her father in his tower; he is furious with her; but once he starts to write, he does not want to come down.
Many women read I Capture the Castle at an impressionable age and never forget it. Says J. K. Rowling: ‘This book has one of the most charismatic narrators I’ve ever met.’ Dodie Smith’s best-known work is One Hundred and One Dalmatians, so it wasn’t long ago that I Capture the Castle sat alongside that book in the children’s section. However, now grown-ups openly read children’s books in public – Harry Potter, Philip Pullman, Tove Jansson – I surmise that the Rowling quote has been put on the front cover to appeal to adult readers, not children. A marketing department using its powers for good for once; this is a fully grown novel which should be read by fully grown women. And even men.
Picking up the pace tomorrow.
22 July.
Today is Day 1 of reading: The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.
Sped through The Leopard in a day. Enjoyed it. If pushed, I would describe it as melancholic, elegiac, poignant and evocative. Might read it every summer, if only to find out if any of it has sunk in.
23 July.
Today is Day 1 of reading: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.
From the back cover: ‘It is the fiesta Day of Death in Mexico and Geoffrey Firmin – ex-consul, ex-husband, an alcoholic and a ruined man – is living out the last day of his life. Drowning himself in mescal while his former wife and half-brother look on, powerless to help him, the consul is an enduring tragic figure and his story, the image of one man’s agonized journey towards Calvary.’
Not a comedy, then; need I say I am looking forward to this one?
3 August.
Today is Day 12 of reading: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.
‘Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.’
So we bid farewell to the picturesque Mexican town of Parián and its dipsomaniac expats, murdering banditos and symbolic dead dogs, where the tropical firmament is always tempestuous and the mescal flows like the blood of Christ at Golgotha. Haste ye back!
10 August.
A date at the book fête.
Charlotte Square, Edinburgh. The Edinburgh International Book Festival. Someone once said that compared to the electrifying carnival of the Fringe, the Book Festival is a coconut shy. Gardens and marquees throng with the sort of people who feel guilty when they watch TV. All ages represented, gentlemen and ladies in equal number, though few black or Asian faces.
On Saturday morning, I attend a sell-out performance by Albanian dissident novelist Ismail Kadare and his translator David Bellos. Although the event is billed as a discussion, it is obviously rehearsed; they seem to be reading from a script. Five different company logos are visible on or around the stage where the gurus sat. ‘How does a book make you feel?’ enquires a Royal Bank of Scotland banner. ‘Heartbroken. Moved. Spellbound. Captivated. Inspired. Angry! Sad. Happy :). Nervous. Shocked!’
On this occasion, none of the above. It is a curiously unenlightening hour and lousy theatre as well. Kadare seems content to offer a précis of himself in line with what the crowd has paid to see: an important man, earnest, wry, modest in assessment of his own achievements. Really, though, he gives nothing away. Bellos feeds him the prompts and Kadare delivers his lines and does his best impersonation – himself. On the Fringe, their act would die on its arse.
I cannot blame Kadare. All writers need strategies when it comes to doing promotion, even those in line for the Nobel Prize in Literature. And there is no doubt ticket-holders went away satisfied, delighted to have passed an hour in the presence of a great man. It reminded me of the high point of a Kraftwerk concert – I like Kraftwerk – when the audience roars its approval for the robot dummies the group has sent out in its place. Perhaps the real Kadare was at home in Albania, working, while this Kadare went out on a European tour to meet its public; perhaps David Bellos needed to be there to operate the controls. Alternatively, perhaps Ismail Kadare, the real one, likes being applauded. Perhaps he’s only human.
Mrs Bast: ‘It’s all right, you’re allowed to be melodramatic on the blog.’
I know I said this before but I really do need to keep these entries shorter. Don’t know how Pooter kept it up.
12 August.
Today is Day 2 of reading: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.
An amazing book; the story of the woman who becomes Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, the madwoman Mr Rochester keeps locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall, told both from her perspective and from his. Fortunately, Jane Eyre is still fresh in my mind. If Wide Sargasso Sea only functioned as a prelude, it would be a considerable technical achievement: the narrative voices are forceful and convincing. But there seems to be so much more to it than that. It is about colonialism and Empire, gender and power; it is also about the way those subjects find expression in literature. It is oblique, experimental and deeply felt. It is so beautifully written and so full of pain.
I hesitate to say any more about Wide Sargasso Sea. It is such a deep book that, actually, I don’t want to write about it all, at least not here; I simply want to soak in it a little longer. This is the limit of the blog process for me. It took Jean Rhys twenty-five years to form an appropriate response to Jane Eyre, and when she did, it was not as a first impression or a string of jokes. What can I add in a day?
Note to self and others: read Wide Sargasso Sea but please keep your opinions to yourself until you know what they are.
22 August.
Today is Day 6 of reading: On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
‘We don’t have to drive across America to achieve our inner self.’ Julian Cope
‘Cult’ books again. As you may have noticed, I am down in the cult ghetto at the moment. I just finished On the Road and before that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. After a break for Paradise Lost, it’s American Psycho and The Dice Man next. I am methodically corrupting myself, twenty years too late.
As I’ve noted here before, there is a big pile of teenage books I never bothered with when I was a teenager because they seemed too obvious and too prescribed. This would include a lot of American writing, e.g. Bukowski, Heller, Thompson, Burroughs and especially Kerouac. What did these famous junkies, Death-dwarves and Americans have to say to straight-assed English me? Not much, I suspected. On the evidence of On the Road, my instincts were correct. It started off OK but after Day 1, the Road got rough and led nowhere.
‘“It’s not my fault! It’s not my fault!” I told him. “Nothing in this lousy world is my fault, don’t you see that? I don’t want it to be and it can’t be and it won’t be.”’
On the Road
On the Road is a paea
n to unfettered selfishness and male ego, suffused with toddlerish petulance and a love of cars and fear of women which would embarrass a Top Gear presenter. Some neat-o riffs and percussionistic prose but mostly just a lot of driving and drinking and repetition and drinking. In the course of the novel, Dean Moriarty sires four children and marries three women, and every one of these broken lives supposedly represents a defeat for poor old Dean, who only ever wants to be free, man, yass, yass, yass. Several times we are told he moves around a room ‘like Groucho Marx’; I’d have liked him more if he made like Harpo and SHUT UP, YOU TEDIOUS PRICK.
I saw a documentary on TV a while ago about Andy Warhol. Warhol’s work was presented as a provocatively fey and truly rebellious response to the suffocating expressionist conformity of the art scene of the 1950s, the sweaty, grunting muscularity of Pollock, Johns, etc. Art need not be torn from the soul or the hetero libido, said Warhol; art can be merely pretty or mass-produced or all surface. It need not be a monument to its maker’s ego. On the Road is the literary equivalent of the stuff Warhol was trying to get away from, Johnny Cash to his Velvet Underground.
You know, this is a whole lot more fun when you don’t like the book. How depressing.
This is not another book about poverty; it is a snapshot of a society that has more than it can handle. My copy has this William Burroughs quote on the back cover: ‘On the Road sold a trillion Levi’s and a million espresso machines . . . the alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.’ That’s not a ringing endorsement, is it? But it is accurate. What this book did was substitute one myth of American freedom for another. It bred a new generation of consumers, fit and able to take over from their frustratingly thrifty parents, who had had to combat an economic depression and a real war, rather than choose to impose a simulacrum of those conditions on themselves for ‘kicks’. Their alienation, restlessness and dissatisfaction were soothed, contained, by Levi’s and espresso machines and an image of rebellion which has endured for fifty years – Dean Moriarty, James Dean, Holden Caulfield, Bob Dylan, Kurt Cobain, Spider-Man – and been profitably exported across the globe in comics, cinema, rock’n’roll and ‘cult’ books, the same ‘cult’ books your grandparents read.
Time for something NEU!
23 August.
Today is Day 1 of reading: Paradise Lost by John Milton.
This is getting ridiculous. Paradise Lost is clearly going to be a challenge. After work and family, there is so little time. I can utilise it to read Paradise Lost or write about it, but not both. What I need is another me to update this blog. Maybe I could hire the Kadare-bot.
I am going to exercise some restraint and keep these entries much shorter, otherwise I won’t finish all the reading I still have to do. Will you miss me? Moi non plus.
4 September.
Today is Day 12 of reading: Paradise Lost by John Milton.
Mostly harmless.
8 September.
Today is Day 4 of reading: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.
Mostly harmful.
9 September.
Today is Day 1 of reading: The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart.
Mostly dreadful. Ugh.
11 September.
Today is Day 3 of reading: The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart.
The Worst Sentence from the Worst Paragraph from the Worst Book on the List of Betterment, so far:
‘Three feet from me rocked two young men engaged in a passionate, deep-throated kiss. I felt as if I had been half-slammed, half-caressed in the belly with a slippery bagful of wet cunts.’
The Dice Man: please, please make it stop.
About the Author
ANDY MILLER is a reader, author, and editor of books. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Esquire, and Mojo. He lives in the United Kingdom with his wife and son.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Copyright
Originally published in Great Britain in 2014 by Fourth Estate.
THE YEAR OF READING DANGEROUSLY. Copyright © 2014 by Itzy. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ISBN 978-0-06-144618-4
EPub Edition December 2014 ISBN 9780062100627
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1 ‘Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.’ Alan Bennett, Independent on Sunday, January 1991.
2 Andy Burnham, former Culture Secretary, from a speech to the Public Libraries Association, 9 October 2008.
3 San Jose Mercury News, 7 June 2009.
4 While the mug is blue, the cat itself is ginger.
5 In the interests of full, Patrick Bateman-like disclosure, here are the brands which make up this breakfast. Grapefruit: Jaffa, pink, organic. Orange juice: Grove Fresh Pure, organic. Bread: Kingsmill, wholemeal, medium-sliced. Low-fat spread: Flora Light. Marmite: n/a. Coffee: Percol Americano filter coffee, fairtrade, organic, strength: 4. Sundays – All-butter croissants: Sainsbury’s, ‘Taste the Difference’. Jam: Bonne Maman Conserve, strawberry. I drink the orange juice from a type of Ikea glass called Svepa which, through a process of trial and error, I have determined is the perfect size for consuming a carton of orange juice in equal measures over four successive mornings. Then I go out and disembowel a dog.
6 ‘I sometimes feel like Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, feeling it appropriate to give an account of his dietary habits, like his taste for “thick oil-free cocoa”, convinced that nothing that concerns him could be entirely without interest.’ Michel Houellebecq, Public Enemies.
7 I am aware The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was published long before The Da Vinci Code. The Albion Bookshop has since closed down.
8 The book is orange, the cat is black.
9 ‘Good Heavens!’
10 ‘I need a smoke!’
11 ‘Elena, my love, there is something we need to discuss . . .’
1 Formerly Hancock’s Half Hour, and nothing to do with the Will Smith movie Hancock, though no less hilarious. The title changed in 1961 after the departure of Sid James.
2 A knowing transposition? The correct title of Russell’s book is Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits.
3 George Eliot was a woman, real name Mary Ann Evans. For minor comic effect, however, I have left Hancock’s words unaltered, thus giving you, the reader, the impression that he, Hancock, thinks George Eliot is a man. Ha ha! Sorry for these nit-p
icking footnotes, by the way, I know they disrupt the flow, but fans of George Eliot, Tony Hancock, Bertrand Russell et al. are an unforgiving lot and it is necessary to reassure them that what they are reading is unimpeachably correct, to the extent that I have compromised, even ruined, the opening of this chapter in order to secure their trust, solely to prevent the wholesale dismissal of a book it has taken me almost five years to write, simply because they, the so-called experts, might mistakenly assume that I don’t realise George Eliot was a woman. Of course George Eliot was a woman! But where experts are concerned, it goes without saying that nothing goes without saying.
4 Our university may have considered itself progressive but these eleven words earned him an F (for TELLING THE TRUTH).
5 If one were to plot a graph where the ‘x’ axis is ‘high culture’ and the ‘y’ axis is ‘low culture’, with Mozart at the top of the former and The Muppet Show at the far end of the latter, Ian McEwan’s corpus would perfectly bisect the two – the Bonne Maman Conserve in a Wonderloaf baguette.
6 In a neat QED, I have stolen the phrase ‘endless, numbered days’ from the title of the best Iron & Wine album Our Endless Numbered Days.