Michael Johnston's Blog, page 11

The Beautiful and Damned – by F Scott Fitzgerald: a moral tale with a twist in the tail

The Beautiful and Damned is F Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel. His modest output, with only four of the five published in his lifetime, is dominated by the justly famous The Great Gatsby which everyone has either read or seen on screen, but all of them deserve more than one reading. It is said, by some, that this novel is something of a roman à clef with the principal characters Anthony Patch and his wife Gloria being modelled on himself and his wife, Zelda, and their troubled marriage. It could be so: authors do not write in a vacuum. However, the sad story stands up to scrutiny in its own right without needing any external rationale.

Anthony Patch is a young, well-to-do New York ‘drone’ living on his private income and enjoying working on the question of whether or not he should do something and, as a corollary, what that something should be. Meantime, what about another cocktail?

This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch – not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward – a man who was aware there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet, was brave.

What gave him the additional degree of confidence in his position, his standing, and his security was that he seemed likely to be the beneficial heir of his grandfather, Adam J Patch, worth seventy-five million dollars and who presently used his wealth to inveigh against ‘liquor, literature, vice, art, patent medicines, and Sunday theatres’.

Anthony led his fairly stress-free life until the age of twenty-five, in 1913 winging his way from one watering hole to the next and enjoying the company of many woman of various ages relative to his until, in that fateful year, he came across his perfect partner, Gloria Gilbert. The sybaritic Gloria was born and raised with the sole purpose of making an excellent marriage with a wealthy man. Anthony came to think he should be that man and, not without some setbacks, convinced Gloria.

Alas, together they were more destructive of each other than they had been apart. Grandfather Adam does offer Anthony the chance to go to Europe as a war correspondent but that came too perilously close to having to work for a living and he passes up on this. Meantime, the pair of them live the life of the idle rich, wintering in California, taking a house out on Long Island for the summer months when New York was too hot, and spending more than their income which means eating into their capital, selling the bonds that yielded their income. On top of this, they entertain relentlessly and drink cocktails copiously. Never mind, they tell themselves; when old ‘Cross’ Patch dies, their finances will be well and truly sorted out.

From time to time, Fitzgerald gives the opinionated Gloria a voice that is more articulate than seems credible for such an airhead but this allows him to convey a point of view that is archetypical of someone of her background. For example, when they are looking over the house of American Civil War hero, General Lee near Washington, Gloria vents her snobbery and limited intelligence.

But you can’t [preserve old things]. Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they’re preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. That graveyard at Tarrytown, for instance. The asses who give money to preserve things have spoiled that too. Sleepy Hollow’s gone; Washinton Irving’s dead and his books are rotting in our estimation year by year – then let the graveyard rot too, as it should, as all things should. Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.

Trying to come to terms with their finances, they give up their summer rented cottage and, eventually, move to a smaller, less fashionable apartment in New York. But they keep on spending. Then, three years into their marriage, Anthony is drafted into the Army and has to travel south to his training camp; and Adam J Patch dies and appears to have cut Anthony out of his will. Since the principal beneficiary is the man servant who has managed old Adam for many years there are grounds for contesting the will but the law suit grinds on forever, at great cost. Anthony becomes an alcoholic and seems destined for an early and penurious death.

And there, to avoid a plot spoiler, this review must stop. The book is worth reading to the end for the ironic humour of the author and his gift for language, and for the fascinating conclusion. If it gives you a taste for the other Fitzgerald novels then so much the better. He is up there with Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway as a wonderful chronicler of twentieth century America.

The post The Beautiful and Damned – by F Scott Fitzgerald: a moral tale with a twist in the tail appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

An Englishman in Madrid: hunting for a lost Velázquez

The hunt for the missing Velázquez begins … and ends! In between, however, several very exciting events overtake this particular Englishman, Anthony Whitelands, described in the blurb as a ‘gentleman, libertine, [and] art historian’. He sounds very much like my kind of fellow, don’t you think? Reviewers are allowed, on suitable occasions, to work in shameless plugs for their own work and so you may discount the next few words if you wish. Having written about an art historian of questionable morality and considerable ambition in my own novel Rembrandt Sings, I am always interested to read about the adventures of similar characters. Whitelands, the creation of Spanish writer Eduardo Mendoza, is called to Madrid in March 1936; that fraught and fractious period prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. His ostensible mission is to evaluate paintings owned by a nobleman who, it might appear, wants to sell them and bank the proceeds abroad to provide for his family should they have to flee the coming crisis.

But, as thriller readers are entitled to expect, nothing is exactly as it seems. Whitelands is not without courage but is also susceptible to (female) temptation. For someone who has made himself an expert in Spanish painting, especially the work of Velázquez; speaks excellent Spanish and has been a regular visitor to the country, he does seem remarkably naïve regarding the conflicting currents in Spanish politics of the period. However, his various experiences and the roles played by some real-life characters in the story, fill in many of the gaps for the reader. The book has the cinematic quality of revealing what is happening among the various groups of interested players; the republican government, the security police, the Falangists, the ultra-royalist Catholics, the Communists, and the poor and downtrodden Spaniards caught in the middle of all of this, and carrying all their intertwining story lines along together. For English readers, this owes a great deal to the quality of the translation by Nick Caistor.

Although the story comes to a tense and dramatic climax, perhaps the dénouement shows signs of a pair of scissors being used rather than patient unravelling of the knot, but maybe that is a more accurate portrayal of real life than fiction writers often tend to create. Wit and humour, crafty characterisation and a page-turning pace are all to be commended in his prize-winning novel.

The post An Englishman in Madrid: hunting for a lost Velázquez appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

Lively Ammonites and Leaping Fish – Discuss

When I was reading Penelope Lively’s novel Moon Tiger recently, I enjoyed the delightfully bitchy voice of the narrator, beautiful-but-dying, famous writer, Claudia Hampton and noted her passing reference to ‘ammonites and leaping fish’. Then, reading about real author Penelope Lively; not nearly as bitchy but equally witty and thought-provoking; I discovered she had recently written this memoir which she calls Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time. I simply had to read it and I was not disappointed.

A lively mind in a less lively body, Dame Penelope writes now about old age from the perspective of a resident of that part of town; something she had to imagine in the earlier novel. The evidence suggests she got it fairly right. Her first long essay on old age is part literary memoir, recalling books on related topics and other authors views, and part a very literate account of what it is like to have arrived there.

“One of the few advantages of writing fiction in old age is that you have been there, done it all, experienced every decade. I can remember worrying when I was writing at forty, at fifty, that I didn’t know what it was like to be seventy, eighty, if I wanted to include an older character. [It] is certainly a help to have acquired that long backward view; not only do you know (even if it is getting a bit hazy) what it felt like to be in your twenties, or thirties, but you remember also the relative unconcern about what was to come.”

After her essay on ‘Old Age’ she writes about her ‘Life and Times’ and this may be the nearest we shall get to an autobiography. The childhood in Egypt, with a brief visit to her grandmother in Somerset which was dramatically interrupted by the outbreak of war; the culture shock of England in the final month of the war, with V2 rockets still falling, compared and contrasted with her Egyptian experiences; for example Chilprufe vests, liberty bodices and navy blue knickers for the first time in her life; are grist for the mill that serves up her earliest recollections. However, writing with the hindsight of old age, she can also describe:

“Wartime Cairo [which] steamed with poets. Bernard Spencer, Robin Fedden, Terence Tiller, John Gawsworth, John Cromer, Gwyn Williams, Robert Liddell – none of these names would be familiar today to anyone outside the arcane world of mid-twentieth-century poetry studies. […] Lawrence Durrell is known now as a novelist, for the Alexandria Quartet, but was working mainly as a poet in the early 1940s, and was one of the Alexandria gang of poets …”

The hidden treasure of these reminiscences is that they can trigger off one’s own memories and remind one of literary places it might be pleasant to visit or revisit and explore in greater depth. Already, I have moved Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet into my bedside pile. Lively discusses ‘Memory’; what it is to have it, not to have it and what a resource it is to writers. She goes on to consider ‘Reading and Writing’ before opening a window on her personal archive of objects with as much, if not more, potency as Proust’s madeleines.

All in all, a satisfying and stimulating read that whets one’s appetite for more of Lady Lively’s work.

The post Lively Ammonites and Leaping Fish – Discuss appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

The Hundred-Year-Old Man who climbed out of the window and disappeared – by Jonas Jonasson

Brought up on a sombre diet of Strindberg plays, the films of Ingmar Bergman, and Wallender on TV, I’d be hard pressed to name a Swedish comedian – until now. Author Jonas Jonasson must be a contender with his light-hearted caprice about The Hundred-Year-Old Man who climbed out of the window and disappeared.

Centenarian Allan Karlsson seems a bit like a Swedish Forrest Gump in the way he encounters and bamboozles the world’s leaders and is able to call in the odd favour from them later on when it is most useful. He lacks the intelligence and good fortune of Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd, another character who led a charmed life across a series of novels between the wars and met everyone who was anyone. Perhaps the best comparison would be Don Quixote accompanied by a whole regiment of Sancho Panzas. And I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I say that Rosenante is an elephant! If, like me, you reckon that cock-up is responsible for twenty times the number of conspiracies, then this book could be for you.

While the book opens in this century with the slightly disgruntled Allan Karlsson deciding he did not want all the fuss of a celebration of his 100th birthday in his care home, it soon begins to tell the back story of Allan’s fascinating life. In successive chapters, current times news and past times recollection gradually converge and, at the end, some of the characters look like they are going to live happily for some time, if not forever, after. Great holiday reading.

The post The Hundred-Year-Old Man who climbed out of the window and disappeared – by Jonas Jonasson appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

Literature from A(lbania) to B(razil): Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones; Nowhere People by Paulo Scott

Enterprising publisher & Other Stories continues its excellent work in bringing novels from all parts of the world to our attention in first-class translations. Latest offerings include Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones, translated from the original Italian by Clarissa Botsford; and Nowhere People by Paulo Scott, translated from the original Portuguese by Daniel Hahn. Both books are highly commended.

The first novel opens in rural Albania when the country was still a Communist dictatorship and ‘emigrates’ to America after the collapse of the regime in Tirana. Quoting from the very helpful foreword to Sworn Virgin written by Ismail Kaldare, “Her novel takes an apparently exotic subject, but one drawing on literature’s oldest archetypes: the creation of a double, and the transformation of a human being. Hana, the attractive young woman who is the protagonist of this novel, agrees of her own free will to ‘turn into a man’.

 “The story refers to an ancient if rare Albanian custom that has been preserved into the modern era, according to which, for various reasons – such as the absence of a man in the household or, as in Hana’s case, the fear of rape – a ‘conversion’ was permitted and a woman could change her status from female to male. She would gain all a man’s rights and freedoms, adopt male behaviour and dress, take part in assemblies of elders, and go out to cafés to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes, with the sole condition that she preserve her virginity.

“This apparently paradoxical and anomalous custom also has a surreal dimension: it presents a loss as a privilege, and offers subjection in the guise of freedom. The protagonist of this novel passes through all the tribulations of this frightening transformation like the actor in some extraordinary role in a classical drama that hurtle towards its dénouement.”

From the outset the novel reveals a young Albanian woman, dressed as and acting as a man flying to Washington DC to be reunited with family who have long since emigrated there. In a series of flashbacks, the reader begins to understand the reasons why an attractive young woman, a college student with excellent prospects, could, of her own volition, return to the very rural village in Albania to nurse her dying grandfather and decide, again without obvious coercion, to ‘become a man’. Inevitably, the societal pressures of such a closed community; a community that few readers will ever encounter; can lead her to take what might have been an irrevocable step. How Hana/Mark takes her/his decision and what transpires more than a decade later when she travels to meet her relatives make fascinating reading. The word pictures of people and of those repressive climates; dictatorship, rural isolation and patriarchy; that condition them are set out in very compelling prose. If you have never been to rural Albania, reading this novel will transport you there and bring you back again safely. It would be well worth the journey.

At a time when, for not very literary reasons, we have been focussing on Brazil, it has been a satisfying alternative to read Nowhere People by Paulo Scott in its English translation by Daniel Hahn. Protagonist of the novel, also called Paulo, is driving along a rain-drenched stretch of highway, the BR-116, and notices as he passes a soaked indigenous girl sitting on

the verge. After driving on for a while, his conscience makes him turn round, drive back and offer her dry clothes.

They have difficulty communicating. She is a fourteen-year-old dispossessed Guarani Indian and he is a 21-year-old Portuguese speaking law student. They are clearly two incompatible people thrown together (in this case by the novelist) and the story relates, in a non-linear manner, the consequences.

The novel moves backwards and forwards in time and a few of the chapters are in a smaller typeface as if they are footnotes to the story. The major achievement is the creation of the character and voice of Maína, the young girl who is deracinated by her encounters with ‘Western’ civilisation. The other achievement is that skill with which Scott retains our attention and interest in the two, across decades and continents against a background of post-dictatorship Brazil and Thatcher-ruled London. It is the ultimate expression of everyone’s need for a real home.

The post Literature from A(lbania) to B(razil): Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones; Nowhere People by Paulo Scott appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

Moon Tiger is my Lively introduction to a talented novelist

One can’t read them all, alas. The number of good books is almost infinite and one’s own time is not. I cannot be like Mallarmé and say La chair est triste, hélas ! et j’ai lu tous les livres. This is why I am always grateful when I trip over a book I might not otherwise have read. I’m talking about Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively which won the Booker Prize in 1987. Moon Tiger has a provocative opening.

‘I’m writing a history of the world,’ she says. And the hands of the nurse are arrested for a moment; she looks down at this old woman, this old ill woman. ‘Well, my goodness,’ the nurse says. ‘That’s quite a thing to be doing, isn’t it?’ And then she becomes busy again, she heaves and tucks and smooths – ‘Upsy a bit dear, that’s a good girl – then we’ll get you a cup of tea.’

But then the narration changes from the third person to the first as we go straight into the still internally lucid mind of Claudia Hampton who has become a writer of popular histories, widely read if not academically approved, after a wartime career as a journalist in the Middle East. And from that interesting (one tries hard not to say ‘lively’ but it would be a good word) opening, the author takes the reader into the different minds and points of view of several of the main characters in Claudia’s own life story; sometimes the same incident seen from more than one perspective and more than one voice. Claudia describes herself and her writing:

My beginnings; the universal beginning. From the mud to the stars, I said. So . . . the primordial soup. Now since I have never been a conventional historian, never the expected archetypal chronicler, never like that dried-up bone of a woman who taught me about the Papacy at Oxford time out of mind ago, since I’m known for my maverick line, since I’ve infuriated more colleagues than you’ve had hot dinners, we’ll set out to shock. Tell it from the point of view of the soup, maybe? […] Or an ammonite? Yes, an ammonite, I think. An ammonite with a sense of destiny.

Which is an interesting line to find in her 1987 novel since, twenty-five years on, her very recently published memoir has the title Ammonites & Leaping Fish: A Life in Time of which the blurb says This is not quite a memoir. Rather it is the view from old age. And a view of old age itself, this place at which we arrive with a certain surprise – ambushed or so it can seem. One of the advantages of age is that you can report on it with a certain authority; you are a native now and know what goes on here.

Moon Tiger takes its title from the coil of mosquito repellent that burns itself to ash outside the net that covers the bed in which Claudia conduct the most significant of her several affairs; this one with army Captain Tom Southern in Egypt, where he is a tank commander and she one of the rare women war correspondents. The significance of the title, I feel, is that she, Claudia, has almost burned out now and is recalling and reviewing her life as it draws closer to being ashes.

There is a long but well-selected list of supporting characters to Claudia’s story. First, her brother, Gordon, to whom she was very close even though they always seemed to quarrel. He has gone on to be an economics professor, much in demand internationally, but has acquired Sylvia, a less than brilliant wife who is often the butt of the siblings’ behaviour. Claudia’s early lover, the FO diplomat Jasper, is the father of her daughter Lisa. Jasper and Lisa have views about Claudia which the narrative explores surprisingly and provocatively. One of the immediate pleasures of the book is this swift juxtaposition of the same event described by its different participants. One of the lasting pleasures is the delightfully bitchy tone of Claudia’s recollections and descriptions.

The mainspring of the book is her wonderful wartime affair with Tom. He helps her to get closer to the front than many women correspondents had before. Then, sadly but rather inevitably, Tom and his tank sustain a direct hit, and thus, in consequence, does Claudia. She recuperates through her ‘on/off/on/in abeyance’ affair with Jasper. She becomes a well-paid roving correspondent for a political weekly; the sort that is subsidised for reasons unclear by someone with wealth. She writes her very personal histories, one of which about the Aztecs is actually filmed, but in Spain, not Mexico. She lunches with the leading man who urges his chauffeur to speed up as they have lingered over the lunch and he is due on set. This leads to a tragic accident but one which renews and strengthens the bond between Claudia and Gordon.

Her survival reinvogirates her appetite for life and she makes one of her periodic efforts to be more of a mother to her eight-year old daughter and to involve Jasper.

Claudia, Jasper and Lisa walk along one of the wide avenues of London Zoo. It is Lisa’s eight birthday. The Zoo is Lisa’s choice; she has been offered the whole of the city – the Tower, Madame Tussaud’s, Battersea Fun Fair, a boat trip to Greenwich – and has opted for the Zoo, partly because she observed Jasper flinch at the suggestion. Power does not often come Lisa’s way. So here they are; one family amid many. And who would know? Thinks Claudia. Other superficial conformities of man, woman and child; she wonders what other histories are concealed beneath appearance.

But that year of Lisa’s eighth birthday was 1956; also the year of Suez and Hungary. Claudia’s phone rings and on a crackly line from Budapest a complete stranger begs her to persuade his son, studying in Wimbledon, not, under any circumstances, to return to Hungary but to make his future in the free West.

Thus came Laszlo, washed into my life by the Kremlin. I remember feeling a curious satisfaction, as though one had been enabled to frustrate Fate. Hubris, of course; I too was Laszlo’s fate. And what did I – forty-six-year-old busy committed Claudia – want with a disturbed artistically inclined adolescent boy speaking fractured English?

For the next ten years Laszo drifts in and out of her life and her spare room; sometimes away for weeks on end without calling and by the time he becomes thirty he is an unsuccessful artist living in Camden Town with an older man – an up-market antique dealer. Which is how Laszlo comes to be visiting the near-unto-death Claudia. The various characters orbit round her hospital bed in reality and in her recollections.

We all act as hinges – fortuitous links between other people. I link Sylvia to Laszlo, Lisa to Laszlo; Gordon links me to Sylvia. Sylvia always retreated from Laszlo by saying he was rather a difficult boy and Claudia was awfully good with him. Laszlo, in his frenetic twenties, used to imitate Sylvia, cruelly and accurately. Gordon found him interesting but exasperating; Laszlo has always allowed his soul to hang out like his shirt-tails and Gordon found this uncongenial. He did not object to people having souls but preferred them tucked away out of sight where they ought to be. But he took Laszlo on, in his way. He left Laszlo a small legacy.

With the skill of a master craftswoman, Penelope Lively creates a group of very different characters, not inherently compatible with each other, and rubs them together to let us watch the sparks fly. And that is what makes the novel even more exciting. Perhaps it changes focus and tone slightly at the moment, towards the end, when Tom Southern’s sister discovers her late brother’s wartime diary and, correctly identifying the ‘C’ he refers to, sends it to Claudia in hospital and we read a long extract. As Claudia afterwards reminisces about Tom, about her life and several loves, about fate in general and particular, the book draws to a satisfying close.

But this is not the end. I am going out to buy Ammonites & Leaping Fish!

The post Moon Tiger is my Lively introduction to a talented novelist appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

Roberto Bolaño’s long last novel 2666 repays the reader for staying the course

When reaching down a novel from the shelf and finding that it runs to nearly 900 pages, it prompts in me the silent prayer that it had better be good to justify the investment of time – time in which one could read four or five other books. In point of fact, 2666 might very well have been published as five separate books forming a series of interrelated stories. However, as a result of the author’s untimely death, aged only 50, and the courageous decision of his heirs and literary executor to countermand Bolaño’s wishes and go for literary integrity rather than possible financial benefit, the book appeared in its present form a year or so later. I have been reading the excellent English translation by Natasha Wimmer.

Bolaño specified the order in which the five stories should appear and therefore be read. The final section, ‘The Part about Archimboldi’, spans the whole range of time of the other four books, but the earlier parts set the reader up to enjoy the full richness of the final story as well as each being fascinating and satisfying in its own right. So, we first read ‘The Part about the Critics’. It might sound like the beginning of a shaggy dog story but it opens in the 1980s with a Frenchman, an Italian, a Spaniard and an Englishwoman discovering, as part of their studies of German literature, the works of an obscure, yet highly regarded, German writer with the fanciful nom de plume of Benno von Archimboldi.

All four go on to academic careers and, as specialists tend to do in those circles, meet up at conferences and seminars: and, as people sometimes do at international conferences, finish up in bed with the attractive Englishwoman. All of them try, as their appreciation and admiration for Archimboldi grows, to find out all about him and to track him down. Each translates some of their hero’s novels into their own languages and this involves contact with the Hamburg publisher, Bubis, now run by the elderly widow of its founder and only patron of Archimboldi. They discover that the author, though getting on in years, is still alive but forever on the move. Towards the end of the part about the critics, they receive seemingly convincing evidence that Archimboldi is currently in the fictional Santa Teresa, a Mexican city on the American border (mirroring the factual Ciudad Juárez) and so they all travel there. They are welcomed there by the local university and by a book-loving pharmacist; a Chilean (like Bolaño); called Óscar Amalfitano. They feel sure that Archimboldi is in Santa Teresa but their search is fruitless. The story is told by peeling of layer after layer off the literary onion but occaisonally the narrator slices deep. The style is discursive and, irresistibly reminds one of Proust, not least in length.

In the second part, ‘The Part about Amalfitano’, we meet the book-loving pharmacist again, this time as the central character.

I don’t know what I am doing in Santa Teresa, Amalfitano said to himself after he had been living in the city for about a week. Don’t you? Don’t you really? Really I don’t, he said to himself, and that was as eloquent as he could be.

This part is mostly narrated from the perspective of Amalfitano and his various book-related obsessions and dreams. He likes doodling and often cannot quite recall what prompted him to draw the shapes in his notebook and label them with, for example, the names of nine different philosophers. But this is also the section where we find more detailed mention of the seemingly endless series of murders of young women whose bodies keep turning up on waste ground. They are often workers in the mostly American-owned maquiladoras, factories or assembly plants, that use the cheap Mexican labour on the border with the USA. Poor, sad Amaltifano has vivid nightmares which are recounted in detail.

Then Boris Yeltsin looked at Amalfitano with curiosity, as if it were Amalfitano who had invaded his dream, not the other way round. […] And then he disappeared, swallowed up by the crater streaked with red or by the latrine streaked by red, and Amalfitano was left alone and didn’t dare look down the hole, which meant he had no choice but to wake.

In ‘The Part about Fate’ we meet not Fate itself but Fate himself; a black American journalist, who starts off this ‘part’ called Quincy Williams but everybody at work knows him as Oscar Fate. His editor calls him in to say their regular sports writer has been killed in Chicago and the magazine wants him to fly to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match; not his normal beat. This leads Fate, as a by-product of being in the city to cover the match and interview the protagonists, to discover the gruesome story of the many murders of young women that, in the main, are unsolved. This becomes the story he really wants to write about but his editor is not interested and his rejection of the project is couched in blatantly racist terms. The story of the fight and the narrative of the murders intertwine as ‘The Part about Fate’ progresses. Rosa, the errant daughter of Amalfitano from the previous part, has a role to play and makes another link between the five texts. For a while, she becomes the central character, carrying the story forward; and still the murders continue. Fate is allowed into the prison to talk with the current chief suspect, a giant of a man who speaks English, Spanish and German; which is where that story ends.

The next part is ‘The Story about the Crimes’ and at its core is a seemingly relentless catalogue of the murders of women in and around Santa Teresa together with the ineffectual investigations and that air of indifference to suffering that such an excess of it can generate. Sometimes the murders are swiftly and justly resolved by the various detectives allocated to the cases but the reader senses that they solve the easy crimes and stay away from anything politically complicated. The local politicos and the police chief seem to be in cahoots; no surprise there. A mysterious man starts desecrating the city’s churches and, for a while, this achieves more notoriety than the murders. A mysterious American, Harry Magaña, shows up trying to track down a suspect and using violence where persuasion fails to work quickly enough. A dubious medium starts making predictions on a local TV show.

The relentless catalogue of murders seems to provide the unifying theme for these disparate strands of the story. One of the policemen begins to suspect a tall gringo with canary yellow hair who runs a computer store and is known as Klaus Haas. He is soon arrested and taken to the local jail but is of sufficient ‘importance’ to be put in a private cell from where he maintains cell-phone contact with the outside world; even holding a press conference! Despite having a principal suspect in custody, the murders of women continue. [I hope you are following this because I had to read the whole book to be able to tell you this.] Finally, the Santa Teresa authorities invite a former FBI agent, Albert Kessler, an expert in profiling serial killers and an internationally reputed consultant and lecturer, to come to Mexico and investigate. But, by the end of this long part, we are no nearer a resolution than we were at the beginning. However, we have reached the final part of the book, ‘The Part about Archimboldi’.

To say too much about this part would be like a plot-spoiler. Suffice to say, we start to read the life story of a young German, Hans Reiter, with a one-eyed mother and a one-legged father, who eventually is sent to fight on the Russian Front during the Second World War. The fascinating account of his war, his survival, and his connections with the Baroness von Zumpe which extend over the whole of his life, are all part of a completely engrossing novel which not only comes to its natural conclusion but manages at the same time to unify all five parts into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

If you have the stamina, and if you have a yen for Latin American fiction of the highest calibre, then I do recommend you tackle 2666.

The post Roberto Bolaño’s long last novel 2666 repays the reader for staying the course appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

Video blog – Michael Johnston reviews L’Argent (Money) by Émile Zola

Michael reviews and summarises a new English translation (the first for over 100 years!) of Émile Zola’s L’Argent (Money) by Valerie Minogue.

Here a text blog by Michael about L’Argent.

 

The post Video blog – Michael Johnston reviews L’Argent (Money) by Émile Zola appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).

Émile Zola is on the Money and Valerie Minogue is spot on too!

Never one to shirk a challenge, nineteenth-century French novelist and crusader Émile Zola (1840 – 1902) declared his intention to write what became a twenty volume Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire, itself a 20-year phenomenon from the coup d’état in 1851 to its collapse as a result of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. Zola planned to follow the fortunes of the Rougon-Macquart family. Their personal good fortune came as a result of Napoleon III’s seizure of power, as Zola related in the first book, The Fortune of the Rougons (1871). Many of these novels have become masterpieces of French literature and well-read and respected in translation. Think of Germinal, Thérèse Raquin, La Bête Humaine, L’Oeuvre, Au Bonheur des Dames (Ladies’ Paradise), La Terre and now L’Argent (Money). But why do I say now when it was published in 1891 and an English translation appeared in 1894?

The first English translation of Money was by E A Vizetelly in 1894 (if one ignores some American versions pirated from the serialisation in Gil Blas and all of which have, mercifully, disappeared without trace). However, such was the Victorian climate of self-censorship, Vizetelly felt he had to bowdlerise great parts of the book or even omit them; and he committed the translator’s one crime of inventing whole passages to bridge the gaps. Essentially, the expurgations are to remove anything that is explicitly sexual. The total surprise to me, who had not read this novel before, is that there had been no translation since Vizetelly’s, over one hundred years ago. We are all in debt to Valerie Minogue, Emeritus Professor of French of the University of Wales and current President of London Émile Zola Society. Chapeau bas, Madame!

Money brings back the crooked financier, Saccard, who had appeared in La Fortune des Rougons and then changed his name to Saccard in La Curée. A villanous hero, he seems to have fascinated his creator. Saccard has once more been ruined as a result of his shady financial dealings but, completely self-delusional, he says it will all be different this time. Diminutive in stature, he is perfectly cast as a would-be Napoleon of finance. He has fairly basic sexual appetites and believes he is irresistible. There is no doubting his ability to organise others in pursuit of his goals but it never seems to occur to him that sharp practice and blatant dishonesty are not desirable. Indeed, his constant justification to Madame Caroline, the novel’s heroine, is that everybody else is doing it, so he would be at a competitive disadvantage. The early passages of the book picture Saccard prowling round the outside of the Bourse in streets that are there to this day, seeing the successful brokers going in and enviously watching the kerb market trading. He needs a scheme that will allow him to round up subscribers and let him get back into the market again. In the visionary plans of Madame Caroline’s brother, Hamelin, for development of the Near East – shipping monopolies, silver mines, railway companies, the Bank of Turkey – Saccard sees the sort of ‘prospectus’ he needs.

As Valerie Minogue, the brilliant translator, writes in her comprehensive Introduction, “It is Saccard’s energy that produces what he later calls ‘the pickaxe of progress’, his Universal Bank, to sponsor these vast enterprises and at the same time satisfy what seems at times almost a physical, fetishistic need to see ‘heaps of gold’ and ‘hear their music’. His recklessness manifests itself as soon as the Universal is launched, and illegality follows illegality.” But Saccard’s motivation to make money is coloured by his rampant antisemitism. Zola cannot avoid this issue in a novel of the period and shows how Saccard’s detestation of the very successful Jewish banker Gundermann undermines his whole enterprise as it drives him to all-or-nothing risks. Nor is Saccard’s sexual appetite ignored. It is desire for the mercenary Baroness Sandorff and the secrets he reveals to her that lead to his final downfall. At a point in the drama, even Madame Caroline, a young widow, succumbs but finds that her relationship to Saccard is not enough to deflect him from his goals or to protect her brother who has been made figurehead chairman of the Universal Bank and packed off to the Middle East to get the projects going on the ground.

The enduring power of the twin forces of greed and fear are shown by Zola as everyone from the vulgarly rich to the classic widows and orphans are caught up in the seeming unstoppable rise of the Universal’s share price. A few are brave enough to take their profit but the majority lock themselves in and go down in the final ruin. And yet, such is the power of self-delusion, even when Saccard is in jail awaiting trial, he still believes he was within an ace of defeating Gundermann and that all it would have taken was for everyone to hold their nerve and, of course, give him many more millions to throw into the struggle he could never win.

Zola writes meaty prose, putting himself into the minds of his various key characters and describes event, emotions and places in wonderful detail. His research was vast and his ability to marshal the details to create realism has seldom been equalled. If, as is possible, you have not yet read Money now is the time and this is the edition to put that right.

However, Money should be read not just for its exposition of the crooked financial dealers and dealings of that epoch. It is an enduring fable with 21st century relevance. The naïvety of politicians who proclaim the end of boom and bust and the misplaced trust of regulators who went to the same schools as the bankers, ought to mean that Zola’s Money should be required reading for all MBA students. Trouble is, for the successors to Saccard, it might well be read as an instruction manual.

 

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Video blog – Michael Johnston reviews Mantel’s Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies – novels and adapted plays

A review and summary of Hilary Mantel’s two novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and the stage versions recently performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. These plays are to transfer to London’s Aldwych Theatre (1 May – 6 Sept 2014, http://www.rsc.org.uk), and are also being dramatised for television broadcast by the BBC in 2015.

I have also recently written blogs about the novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.

 

The post Video blog – Michael Johnston reviews Mantel’s Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies – novels and adapted plays appeared first on Michael Johnston's blog/website (akanos.co.uk).