Monthly Archives: July 2011

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg

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Having resided as a virtual component only of my TBR (for several years) a copy of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (henceforth Confessions) recently fell into my hands. It was not as big and scary as expected. Not big anyway. The slim volume begins thus:

‘It appears from tradition, as well as some parish registers still extant, that the lands of Dalcastle (or Dalchastel, as it is often spelled) were possessed by a family of the name of Colwan, about one hundred and fifty years ago, and for at least a century previous to that period.’

Ouch.
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My Ántonia – Willa Cather

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Jim Burden is a young pioneer. Orphaned, he must travel from East to West to join his grandparents in Nebraska. To the frontier, where the plains are untamed, land where only random outbreaks of cultivation are in evidence, and the roads twist wildly where they will later be confined to straight lines.

My first thoughts tended towards the less than generous, and may have featured the word ‘bland.’
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We – Yevgeny Zamyatin

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Translated from the Russian by Natasha Randall

We predates 1984 by some twenty years. Zamyatin’s dystopian account was greatly admired by Orwell, but received with less enthusisam in Soviet Russia, where it was not be to be published for another sixty years.

Contrasting the two dystopias there are similarities in the depiction of the nature and means of state control, but the differences are more illuminating. The most interesting disparity is in the reactions of the protagonists, perhaps reflecting the authors’ respectively theoretical and empirical treatments of the subject.
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Life’s Little Ironies – Thomas Hardy

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I grabbed for this in the excess of enthusiasm which followed the exhilaration of the Jude reading experience. Don’t know what I was expecting exactly, but the quality of the intensity that can be created in the short story is quite different to the pervasive intensity of a chunky novel. In other words, it would make little sense to contrast Life’s Little Ironies with Jude the Obscure. Which I will strive to bear in mind.

The clue is pretty much in the title. In common with Jude, Hardy looks at themes of maritally forced compromise, and infidelity, but otherwise this is a very different proposition. This is whimsical Hardy. Ironic, yes, but his exposure of and antagonism towards Victorian hypocrisy is by no means humourless.
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God’s Bits of Wood – Sembène Ousmane

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Translated from the French by Francis Price


Although the sense of the title is easily justified it is phonically horrible. Les Bouts de Bois de Dieux is the original and superior title.

Complaining about the title might sound like a petty quibble, but it reflects my experience with the novel. There can be no argument with the justice of Ousmane’s themes but his sentences, paragraphs and sequences sometimes grated.

Les Bouts de Bois de Dieux is an historical novel which reconstructs the rail workers’ strike in late 1940s French-colonised Senegal. Through his fictional account Ousmane examines themes of African unity, class struggle, the effects of colonialism and the emancipation of women. He also excoriates religious and political corruption.
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The Tiger’s Wife – Téa Obreht

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Téa Obreht hails from Serbia, and if we must label I suppose ‘American-Serbian’ is as good a label as any. Her cultural background significantly informs this novel. The Tiger’s Wife won the 2011 Orange Prize for the remarkably young Obreht.

The Tiger’s Wife is comprised firstly of a framing story: a young woman inoculating children over the border, as part of a reconciliation mission. In one of several sub-plots she is also investigating the last moments of her grandfather’s not unexpected, but circumstantially strange, death. Framed within the story, Natalia and her grandfather’s shared back story, and two stories the grandfather told of his past to the young Natalia. (And a further layer of back story, for good measure.)
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Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

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I’m not sure that Jude needs much of an introduction. The novel relates in bleak detail the life of Jude. Unhappy marriages, academic ambition thwarted, a disastrously unhealthy life as a stone mason, child suicide, infanticide and miscarriage. I hadn’t read the book before but I was expecting all of those things, and I had a vague mental image of the Job of biblical fame.
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Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust

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Translated by Moncrieff and Kilmartin, revised by Enright

As a reader, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time raises two fundamental concerns. The first, the challenge of making it through to the end, and the second, that the end will not be attained before the beginning has faded. In a book which dwells on memories and the mechanism of memory there is surely some irony there.

As a blogger, In Search of Lost Time is likely to constitute one of those huge epic reads that defy description. (She says optimistically.) Beginning discretely with Swann’s Way, volume one of six (physical volumes), does not render the task of description markedly easier, although I almost feel it would be worth the effort as an aide memoire for my future edification.
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