A cool thing would be to load the books into an old shopping trolley... No, maybe not.

Alison Flood of The Guardian, is, like myself, participating for the first time this year, but not without a qualm:

It doesn’t help that I’ve ended up with my second choice, Let the Right One In, rather than my first, I Capture the Castle. I would have been happy foisting Dodie Smith onto practically anybody – no one could possibly be offended by her charming story of growing up in a crumbling castle.

Alison envisages herself giving out John Ajvide Lindqvist’s “gruesome and disturbing” novel in a park with her daughter, which she feels might not be “quite appropriate for toddler-chasing mums.”

My story touches Alison’s tale at some points, and diverges wildly at others.

I Capture the Castle was my third choice, chosen at a time before I had actually read it. I am sorry to inform Ms Flood that there are indeed crotchety, despicable people who will be offended by this “charming story.” Having identified in myself one such curmudgeon I have lived since in a constant dread of having to hand out this sweet little offering. My chosen venue is a railway station and in my mind the hardened commuters are going home to wreak serious X-Box/Play Station damage on a host of enemy combatants, aliens, mutant insects, zombies etc. They are not going to be putting on their fluffy kitten slippers and getting out a pipe.

Happily, I will not be called upon to inflict Dodie Smith on anyone. My first choice, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (also gruesome and disturbing) will be just the thing for my imaginary commuters.

What I do have in common with Alison Flood is the child thing. My kids are very keen to help (although there has been one dissenting voice: “Mummy, they won’t be chunksters, will they?” Very practical, my middle daughter) but I have some reservations about associating my kids with such a dark novel.

The other thing Alison and I have in common is our absurd (and surely tongue in cheek?) notion that we can stereotype the reading tastes of any given group of people. Some of those mums are going to love Lindqvist and I would have found takers for Dodie Smith. We may be saying more about how we would wish our taste in books to reflect ourselves.

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (June 24, 1842 – last seen December 26, 1913) was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist and satirist. Today, he is best known for his short story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and his satirical lexicon, The Devil’s Dictionary. The sardonic view of human nature that informed his work; along with his vehemence as a critic, with his motto “nothing matters”; earned him
the nickname “Bitter Bierce.”

In 1913, Bierce traveled to Mexico to gain a first-hand perspective on
that country’s ongoing revolution. While traveling with rebel troops, the
elderly writer disappeared and was never seen again.

The full Wikipedia article on Bierce is worth a look.

To date I have read only one of Bierce’ short stories, the uniquely atmospheric and innovative Chickamauga. That piece alone would ensure a continued interest in this intriguing writer. Bierce was certainly a fervent exponent of the short story form. Here he is, in his Dictionary, on the subject of the novel:

‘Novel, n. A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the panorama. Unity, totality of effect, is impossible; for besides the few pages last read all that is carried in mind is the mere plot of what has gone before.’

I don’t think that’s irony. I think he means it. (For the record, I strongly disagree!)

A writer who is going to extol the virtues of the short story at the expense of the novel had better be sure that he can deliver. I think Bierce was proselytising from a firm foundation of accomplishment and I have high expectations of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge which, earlier this week, fell fortuitously into my hands.

It is a book to dip into, but I am worried that an undisciplined regime of this kind may result in my missing a masterpiece of Bierce’s scathing causticity. I don’t believe that I have ever read a dictionary from cover to cover, not even a modestly paged ‘comedy’ dictionary of this sort. There is a first time for everything.

This wasn’t intended to be a post as such, I just can’t resist quoting this guy.

In painfully satirical vein…

Aborigines, n. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.

…and on the same subject:

Incumbent, n. A person of the liveliest interest to the outcumbents.

A clever little aphorism…

Injustice, n. A burden which of all those that we load upon others and carry ourselves is lightest in the hands and heaviest upon the back.

…and just funny:

Incompatibility, n. In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination. Incompatibility may, however, consist of a meek-eyed matron living just around the corner. It has even been known to wear a moustache.

Did I mention that Bierce could, on occasion, sound a tad bitter? Cynical, even?

Philanthropist, n. A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.

Fair warning: I see more Bierce quotes looming on the horizon…

While musing on accelerated life spans I was reminded of the many novels which employ skewed time effects to create discomfort and disorientation. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife, Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow and Gabrielle Zevin’s YA novel Elsewhere, not to mention traditional fairylore, the primary feature of which is a disconcerting incoherence in the rate of passage of time.

It has always seemed to me that the distressing aspect of these stories is the subversion of our chronological certainty that time is constant and predictable, but fairytale isn’t scary unless it mirrors truth. The passing of small creatures illuminates the relativity of time, and it is perhaps the familiarity behind these concepts, not the strangeness, which is troubling.

Until I inserted the image below I hadn’t even registered that my daughter was reading Tanglewreck by Jeannette Winterson. A YA/children’s novel: featuring fluctuations in time.

My Gravity’s Rainbow Companion has arrived today. It’s the literary equivalent of limbering up, filling me not so much with pleasure as dread. A further resource that was not available on the last attempt, Daryl is implementing a WTF? page, at Infinite Zombies, for those frequent moments of ‘huh?’ Yes, I remember those well.

Still, I think this might be considered the best of all possible beginnings. In a serendipitous moment of almost supernatural pertinence Weisenberger, in his Introduction, addresses (and perhaps exorcises) my personal GR spectre. It was “the gut-wrenching act of urolagnia and coprophagia” that wrenched my gut to such an extent that I was unable to pick the book up again without inducing a similar physical reaction each time. A phenomenon that, for entirely practical reasons, finally induced me to give up.

(In an aside of almost spectacular irrelevance it occurs to me that Weisenberger has provided a vocabulary for acts which, without that vocabulary, can be rendered in the reader’s head only visually. Therefore, in this context, vocabulary acts as euphemism and serves to cloud rather than clarify. Which can only be a thoroughly Good Thing.)

Weisenburger speculates that it was this very scene that turned judges against trustees and brought down the Pulitzer Prize in 1974, with the result that no prize was awarded. Aligning myself with the literary refuseniks does not strike me as a very commendable position, so I am grateful to Weisenburger for providing an elegant (and distancing) approach to the passage in question:

‘As the annotations show, Pynchon has brought together two mythologies (the Teutonic and the Kabbalistic) in this episode to produce a satiric inversion of the Kabbalistic ascent to the Merkabah, or divine throne, a narrative technique that is in fact characteristic of many other moments in the book and whose success hinges here as elsewhere on the means by which a person’s profoundest nightmares are colonised and used for purposes of control.’

Understand it? Well, no. But does the glimpse of the bigger picture go some way to ameliorate the revulsion? That remains to be seen.

It becomes immediately clear, even on the first page of this novella, that sparse and economical does not equate to flat and colourless.

A compact paragraph, but beautiful and rich, emphasising the man’s age, hinting at great strength (physical and mental) and leaving no doubt about his close relationship with a harsh environment. It also tells something of his current circumstances, his scars as ‘old as erosion in a fishless desert,’ a phrase which contrives to imply quite different things about the sea and the man, uniting and separating them simultaneously. And the final, genius ‘desert.’ The right word, but so startling in this context.

Santiago, the eponymous old man, is the main character of the novella. He is a fisherman living on the coast of Cuba, who hasn’t caught a fish in eighty-four days. His young acolyte, a devoted boy who has learnt much and would learn more, has been relocated at his parents’ command to a ‘luckier’ boat.

So it is that Santiago embarks on his fishing trip alone. What follows is pure existentialism. Santiago rejects the safety of the herd. He goes further than others go, and takes up the fight alone. But Santiago’s existential awareness is paired with a paradoxical kind of humility. As he enters battle with the marlin, a fish which he suspects to be bigger than any he has fished before, the odds pile up against him. Santiago is driven onward by what might, in another, constitute stubborn pride, but in Santiago it is clear that he has no expectation of a benevolent universe which rewards good works. Is is humility, a willingness to fail, which allows him to retain his equanimity in the face of existential absurdity. It is a genuine humility on the part of Santiago which is also a species of simple pride of the best kind.

I don’t know enough about existentialism to do justice to the case I would like to make. But it seems to me that Hemingway brushes existential angst aside as an irrelevance. In the life of Santiago it would be a luxury which he could ill-afford.

The tension in this short novella is brilliantly maintained (yeah, of course there’s a pun there) and there are further themes that I haven’t touched upon. Besides the allegorical connection between fishing and life’s existential struggle (picked up also in the baseball references?) a further theme touches upon youth and experience, as indicated by the moving assocation between the old man and the boy, and Santiago’s dreams of lions, from his youth in Africa. ( A nice Hemingwayesque touch.)

Don’t forget the presence of the sea. Put this alongside Steinbeck’s The Pearl Fishers and Yosimura’s Shipwrecks and you would have a hell of a powerful sea-themed tryptych.

Translated from the French by John Butts

Written in the 18th century the writing is surprisingly fluid and lively, although it seems reasonable to assume that, in the translation from the French, archaic terms and usage have not been reintroduced. Translation or not, Voltaire’s command of irony and black humour is strongly evident.

‘Those who have never seen two well-trained armies drawn up for battle, can have no idea of the beauty and brilliance of the display. Bugles, fifes, oboes, drums, and salvos of artillery produced such a harmony as Hell itself could not rival. The opening barrage destroyed about six thousand men on each side. Rifle-fire which followed rid this best of worlds of about nine or ten thousand villains who infested its surface. Finally, the bayonet provided ‘sufficient reason’ for the death of several thousand more. The total casualties amounted to about thirty thousand. Candide trembled like a philosopher, and hid himself as best he could during this heroic butchery.’

Candide and Pangloss respectively represent innocence and optimism, while Cunégonde and most of the remaining small cast of improbably recurring characters might be considered representative of resignation to suffering.

As the action bounds from continent to continent and the hapless protagonists defy debilitating tortures, and incredibly refuse to die, it is not unlike the familiar screen violence of modernity, from which heroes step unscathed; but Voltaire tends carefully to our reactions and never allows the suspension of disbelief. The author maintains a delicate balance, himself complicit in fantasist optimism, but thrusting the reader into conflict with the narrative authority, hence inciting the rebellion against complacency which was Voltaire’s objective.

The echoes of Don Quixote are found in the interior stories within a story, and the similarities between the main protagonists, although Candide is a true ingénue with a capacity to change where we must suspect Don Quixote of disingenuousness and a propensity to avoid the truth. Both characters serve to satirise their environment.

Candide might also be seen as the antidote to Bunyan’s Pilgrim, rejecting the religious orthodoxy and patriotic mores he encounters on his travels, in favour of what seems to amount to a sort of socially-aware self-determinism.

Voltaire was not enthusiastic about illustration. "Useless" and "bauble" were words that he used, while observing that Virgil was never subjected to such indiginity. Moreau illustrated Candide none the less.

My history with Oates has not been, to date, spectacularly successful. The one novel I have read did not convince me unequivocally of its literary worth. A non-fiction work on boxing caught my eye on one occasion and, while finding it to be beautifully written, the subject matter was an effective if perhaps erroneous deterrent.

Arguably, Oates does not express herself as eloquently on the subject of writing as she does on boxing. The objective of the work is also not entirely clear. Is it aimed at the aspiring writer, the generally curious reader, or is it intended to gratify the voracious Oates fan who will always want more? However, she makes interesting points, talks convincingly about writers as diverse as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Flannery O’Connor, and immediately put several additions on my TBR, a short story by Henry James, Loon Lake by EL Doctorow and this by Dickens:

“My favorite prose on the subject is Charles Dickens’s “Night Walks,” which Dickens wrote some years after having suffered extreme insomnia that propelled him out into the London streets at night. [...] this haunting essay seems to hint at more than its words reveal [...] No one has captured the romance of desolation, the ecstasy of near-madness, more forcibly than Dickens, so wrongly interpreted as a dispenser of popular, soft-hearted tales.”

Still on the subject of writers and walking this (unfair?) but amusing indictment of James:

“[...] it may be surprising to learn that Henry James, who for all his prose style more resembles the fussy intricacies of crocheting than the fluidity of movement, also loved to walk for miles in London.”

Some quite obvious remarks such as write your heart out and the observation that a good writer must first be an avid reader are less entertaining, but Oates also has personal and passionate beliefs about writing. The first is that good writing involves both artistic vision and an element of craft. Oates distinguishes clearly between the two, but interestingly suggests that to ‘the ordinary reader’ (as opposed to the writerly reader) the application, the ‘how does it work’, of the writer’s craft may be of little account. Which might explain the lack of explicit narrative theory in this book!

Her second, and very personal, concern touches upon the concept of ‘the writer.’ Oates does not like to describe herself as a writer, and in a rather metaphysical explanation which she reiterates several times, tries to sublimate the writer, the alter-ego ‘JCO’ into a presence that exists only within the texts. Which leads her in the final essay to question the identity of said essay’s writer… It might seem a trifle disingenuous (and since the majority of this discourse appears in a piece entitled “JCO” and I (after Borges) it might be reasonable to assume that she isn’t entirely serious) but for me the concept makes a rather charming conclusion.

Why celebrate two hundred years of Dickens?

Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to George Sand, commented “The author’s life is nothing; it’s the work that matters.”

7th February, 2012, marks the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens.  I’m with Flaubert on this, and Dickens’ life interests me very little.  I guess it’ll be another twenty years or so before I can justifiably celebrate his writing in the shape of a bicentennial milestone.  This is a date that will probably pass with less fanfare.  The construct seems altogether arbitrary, and the suspicion arises that the mystical pronouncements of the calendar owe a lot of their power to economic opportunism.

There is, of course, every reason to read Dickens, and it would be wonderful to think that the flash in the pan of his anniversary will not merely flare and die.   Having said that, Dickens is arguably recognised as the greatest British writer of the 19th century, and his star remains in the ascendancy.  It seems reasonable to suggest that he is in no great need of our literary philanthropy.  In my idealised but not very practical world I would like to see the championing of fine writers who, if not long deceased, would be starving in garrets.  Happily, there are readers who are doing just that. (Championing, that is, not starving.)

Spare a thought for William Makepeace Thackeray, the bicentenary of whom passed, largely unremarked, in 2011.

The worst and most depressing aspect of the phenomenon of the anniversary is the cheap proliferation/regurgitation of biographical material. Is it fair to say that in this context ‘human interest’ is an oxymoron? For me, the literary biography holds no more interest than a tabloid exposé.

I am led to understand that the coverage in the media has been extensive while lacking depth, but I can’t speak with any authority having generally avoided the Dickens frenzy. The impression received is that of a concentration on the life and times, puerile at best and prurient at worst, (Dickens committed suicide?!) avoiding worthy but less marketable literary analyses. Any slight merit in the argument that an understanding of Dickens’ life gives insight into his writing is thoroughly discredited when the incident that seems to exercise people the most is the immediate aftermath of his death. Something in that equation doesn’t add up.

As a modest reader of Dickens, past, present and, I trust, future, there are aspects of this circus which I find distasteful and oddly disrespectful, in which view I am apparently not alone. Jenny Diski in The Guardian expresses a similar disquiet.

The recent BBC adaptation of Edwin Drood has inspired me to seek out the original, and I may even consider composing some trifling testimonial beatifying Bleak House, a novel which I credit with causing the literary scales to fall from my eyes.  These intentions may or may not constitute a celebration of Dickens but they will in no sense mark my Dickens apotheosis.

First three words: “Commander Adam Dalgliesh.” Besides the obvious appeal to the dyed in the wool crime fic aficionado, who will instantly recognise his name (even I recognise the name), the formal introduction of the protagonist is also a warning to expect some initial exposition. The sentence ends with the promise of a dead body, assuaging reader fears: take the exposition on the chin, the good stuff is definitely on the way.

Halfway down the page:

‘It was rather that unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realisation that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.’

That will be the statement of authorial intent, which also defines character motivation. One rather suspects that control of some kind will ultimately triumph over disorder.

None of which is bad per se, except that I already think that I am going to be bored. An effect intensified by several worrying phrases. “Dalgliesh was surprised” and “He liked Conistone.” Ouch. I absolutely want to be shown surprise and liking, not told.

If I had much faith in my first page impressions I would not read any further. But I don’t and I will. Although this experiment isn’t likely to prove anything except perhaps the irrevocability of my pre-judgements.