Zina Rohan's Blog, page 5
December 29, 2011
Wharton Treasury
It's like Christmas in waiting. I have just read The House of Mirth - and what a fine, subtle, ironic but also understanding writer of character Wharton was. She unpeeled motive, conscious and unconscious through more layers than I think I have ever read before. Meanwhile, the rest of her oeuvre lies in my Kindle for me to pick up whenever I want. What a joy!
Meanwhile, I am reading Slavenka Drakulic's Frida's Bed
Meanwhile, I am reading Slavenka Drakulic's Frida's Bed
December 18, 2011
Multi-Wharton
I have just bought the complete Edith Wharton for my Kindle. I'm reading The House of Mirth. Prefer her to Henry James, I think. At times almost Austenian asperity.
The Sense of an Ending
The Sense of an Ending by Julian BarnesMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I remember when this first came out. Reviewers made nice noises but questioned whether it could be called a novel because it was so short. It then went on to win the Man-Booker against, it has to be said, a pretty light list. No matter.
In two parts, first person narrator: educated mild-mannered man with few ambitions who has lived a quiet life. He's approaching late middle age or early old age, depending on your degree of optimism, living not in but also not far from London. He is divorced, gets on amicably with his quietly efficient ex-wife with whom he has lunch from time to time. His relations with his adult daughter are distant but ok. All nothing special. But he keeps harking back to his school and college days, specifically to three friends, one of whom, Adrian, was an unusually brilliant boy and then student, a natural intellectual. Our narrator, Tony, idolised Adrian, as did everyone.
Tony also goes over his strange relationship with his first girlfriend, Veronica, described as enigmatic and unknowable, who comes from a different stratum of society. On a visit to her parents' home he feels he has been mocked by Veronica, and by her sneering brother and bluff father.
Years have passed. He gets the news that Adrian has killed himself but has left Tony his diary in his will. However, Veronica who had moved over to Adrian once she and Tony had broken up, refuses to hand over this diary. Tony engages a solicitor to help him get it back and bombards Veronica with emails to wear her down so that she will give it to him.
Part II goes over the same ground but from a startling new angle, thereby releasing new information. No more detail here without risking a spoiler. This is a book about memory suppressed above all, written with extraordinary precision - hence the brevity. But it's also oddly old-fashioned, or the first part is. For me the problem lies in the character of Veronica. I cannot find it in me to believe in her, and her obdurate reticence seems to me to be more necessary to the unfolding of the plot than to the integrity of the charcterisation. I would like someone else to tell me what they thought.
View all my reviews
December 9, 2011
The Way it Goes
I heard an item on the radio today (BBC) about how people are tending to go into bookshops, browse, ask advice, chat to knowledgeable staff - and then go home and buy the book they've been researching online. Yes? No?
I am increasingly reading fiction on my Kindle, if only because of lack of shelf space and because the weight on the device is so much less than the pages. But being an author, am I ultimately spiting myself and my writerly colleagues?
I am increasingly reading fiction on my Kindle, if only because of lack of shelf space and because the weight on the device is so much less than the pages. But being an author, am I ultimately spiting myself and my writerly colleagues?
November 27, 2011
P.D.James Shouldn't
Oh dear. I wish P.D. James hadn't written this. The plot is so-so, strained. And she starts out in sub-Austen tones to get us in the mood, the times. But inevitably, as pure story takes over, the language reverts to the mundane - and it doesn't work. Beware the writer who would attempt Austen irony without the touch. Best not try. Please don't do this again!
November 20, 2011
Putin in his Comfort Zone
‘Putin and his inner circle have no ideology,’ says one of Luke Harding’s useful informants in Mafia State. ‘They are simply interested in making money. They are, in short, kleptocrats.’ This is the central line of this book, written in 2011 and published in 2011. It bears the marks of hurried writing and rushed publication – typos, clumsy phrasing, cliché...Although, it has to be said, that clichés also abound in the quoted excerpts of articles that Harding printed in the pages of the UK newspaper, The Guardian, that employed him as their Moscow correspondent from 2007-2011.
In terms of the story Harding has to tell, of an amoral, kleptocratic Kremlin and its strong arm security services, the FSB (heir to the KGB), Mafia State is compelling. We believe it. Putin is determined to hang onto power because he has made a mint and wants to keep it. He has allowed his henchmen to amass their fortunes as well so the circle of people for whom remaining in power is crucial is large enough. What happens to the benighted Russian populace is, at it ever was, an irrelevance to those at the top. Let them just not get in the way.
The trouble is that Luke Harding himself gets in the way of his thesis. Because the FSB set about a campaign of psychological terror in an attempt (that finally succeeds) to get him to shut up or leave, he has written a revenge, which is fair enough. The FSB bump off Russian journalists but not yet western ones. Instead, they break into your house at will, and make no effort to conceal the fact. On the contrary, that’s the point: you should know that you have been broken into, and by whom, but what has been done is petty and deniable and therefore impossible to report. And anyway, to whom would you report it? Your things are moved around; your phone is left off the hook; your house is comprehensively bugged; your children’s bedroom windows are left open where you had carefully locked them because after all you do live on the fifth floor; people have shat in your toilet and not flushed. Time after time...It’s enough to unsettle anyone, and everyone knows they do it. The British embassy staff sigh in weary recognition, and other journalists do too. Beware the young men in leather jackets and carrying man bags who persist in sitting right next to you in otherwise empty coffee bars, their microphones in their bags. Harding sloppily characterises this as a ‘morally repugnant form of terror’ – as if there were a form of terror that is not morally repugnant.
Unfortunately he displays an oversimplifying them-and-us view of the world, reminiscent of Bush’s with-us-or-against-us stance: Russia is currently a nasty place, ergo those who also say so must be the good guys. ‘Putin – and the FSB – became convinced that Ukraine’s “orange revolution” had been triggered not by popular street protests but by CIA spies carrying bagfuls of dollars.’ But there is something to be said for that conviction. As there is for Putin’s assertion that the USA also fomented the revolution in Georgia, which is not say that there was not popular protest as well. But just because one state or system or administration is perverse and vile does not mean that those who oppose it are by definition always trustworthy and on the side of the angels. You do not need to support without question, as Harding seems to do, every enterprise taken by the USA with regard to Russia simply because what Russia under Putin does is undemocratic, violent and self-serving.
Much of this book uses American diplomatic telegrammes, released by Wikileaks, to bolster his arguments, and indeed, as evidence for his characterisation of Putin’s Russia as a Mafia state. I wouldn’t disagree with his thesis, but the leaked opinions of US diplomats, or of any diplomats for that matter, are just that – opinions, not proven facts. We should distinguish between them or we undermine the argument.
Harding litters his narrative with sceptical adjectives when he relates the suspicions harboured by the Russians, while cheerfully recycling the views of westerners unchallenged. ‘In January 2006 Russian state television broadcasts footage supposedly showed (sic) British intelligence officers retrieving information from an artificial “rock” concealed in a Moscow park...The FSB alleged that Moscow-based UK diplomats used the rock to communicate with Russian “agents”’. I remember at the time talking to a friend, now deceased, who had been a big player in MI6. He said that this rock could well have been, ridiculous as it might seem, a ‘drop’ , set up and used by British agents.
What is surprising at times is this author’s naivety. Harding has come back to Moscow after a home visit to London. He has brought with him a video recorded off TV in the UK of a programme about Litvinenko, one-time KGB/FSB agent who was murdered by the FSB, it is believed by the world outside Russia, for having defected and blown the FSB story. Harding is apparently astonished that bringing this video back with him in his baggage should be a reason for the FSB to step up their interference in his life: ‘I have a growing sense that we live in two opposing mental realities. In one, the Litvinenko tape is a harmless home recording from a friend. But in another, it’s evidence of a dark conspiracy to defame the Russian state.’ But Harding is a journalist for an established broadsheet. He is highly educated. He presumably has read up on the Soviet Union and its neuroses.
Can he really have been such an innocent as to suppose that there would no objection to bringing into a country the video of a programme that that country considers defamatory? What does he think would be the response to a journalist from, say, Pakistan who brought with him an Islamist video recorded at home about the infamies of the British or American governments? Not, perhaps, the tactics of the FSB, but not nothing either.
Similarly Harding raises incredulous eyebrows at Russian insularity: ‘All of them share an institutional phobia of the west, a place as remote for them as Europe must have been for Japan.’ But it doesn’t seem to cross his mind that Europe may not have been the centre of the world when Japan considered it remote; nor does it cross his mind that Japan may have seemed remote to Europe, or indeed that there may be institutional phobias among westerners for some things Russian. I repeat – not necessarily undeserved, but this is sloppy thinking nonetheless.
‘It’s not hard to admire the thoroughness of our FSB intruders. These guys are professionals.’ Well, duh! Of course these guys are professionals. It’s their job, isn’t it? Then we have, ‘I later discover that leaving pornographic material in the bedroom of a target was one of the KBG’s more extraordinary tactics, used frequently earlier in the cold war.’ Come on, man. So wide-eyed, yet so self-congratulatory as an investigative journalist, who prides himself – somewhat at the top of his voice – on being more courageous and dogged in pursuit of the Mafia state than any of his colleagues. In fact, as far as I can tell, the FSB were initially interested in Harding because The Guardian, his newspaper, had carried an interview with Boris Berezovsky, one of the oligarchs who had fled to London and is anathema to Putin. This association was enough to tarnish Harding in FSB eyes. The stain was, however, subsequently re-evalued. Then later, when The Guardian became the UK paper to carry the Wikileaks stories (until it lost patience with Julian Assange’s own self-aggrandizement), obviously Harding would be the man to write up the Russia-based stories, so equally obviously he would be the target of FSB ire. Another journo in his shoes would have found himself, well, in his shoes. But Harding is certain that it is he, as an individual, who has been uniquely targeted and is uniquely courageous.
All this is irritating and distracting because actually the information in the book is very interesting and persuasive much of the time. One can sympathise with the vengeful tone too. Which journalist wouldn’t let off writerly steam at a regime that has just deported him? I only wish the writer had not got so much in the way of his message and his evidence.
In terms of the story Harding has to tell, of an amoral, kleptocratic Kremlin and its strong arm security services, the FSB (heir to the KGB), Mafia State is compelling. We believe it. Putin is determined to hang onto power because he has made a mint and wants to keep it. He has allowed his henchmen to amass their fortunes as well so the circle of people for whom remaining in power is crucial is large enough. What happens to the benighted Russian populace is, at it ever was, an irrelevance to those at the top. Let them just not get in the way.
The trouble is that Luke Harding himself gets in the way of his thesis. Because the FSB set about a campaign of psychological terror in an attempt (that finally succeeds) to get him to shut up or leave, he has written a revenge, which is fair enough. The FSB bump off Russian journalists but not yet western ones. Instead, they break into your house at will, and make no effort to conceal the fact. On the contrary, that’s the point: you should know that you have been broken into, and by whom, but what has been done is petty and deniable and therefore impossible to report. And anyway, to whom would you report it? Your things are moved around; your phone is left off the hook; your house is comprehensively bugged; your children’s bedroom windows are left open where you had carefully locked them because after all you do live on the fifth floor; people have shat in your toilet and not flushed. Time after time...It’s enough to unsettle anyone, and everyone knows they do it. The British embassy staff sigh in weary recognition, and other journalists do too. Beware the young men in leather jackets and carrying man bags who persist in sitting right next to you in otherwise empty coffee bars, their microphones in their bags. Harding sloppily characterises this as a ‘morally repugnant form of terror’ – as if there were a form of terror that is not morally repugnant.
Unfortunately he displays an oversimplifying them-and-us view of the world, reminiscent of Bush’s with-us-or-against-us stance: Russia is currently a nasty place, ergo those who also say so must be the good guys. ‘Putin – and the FSB – became convinced that Ukraine’s “orange revolution” had been triggered not by popular street protests but by CIA spies carrying bagfuls of dollars.’ But there is something to be said for that conviction. As there is for Putin’s assertion that the USA also fomented the revolution in Georgia, which is not say that there was not popular protest as well. But just because one state or system or administration is perverse and vile does not mean that those who oppose it are by definition always trustworthy and on the side of the angels. You do not need to support without question, as Harding seems to do, every enterprise taken by the USA with regard to Russia simply because what Russia under Putin does is undemocratic, violent and self-serving.
Much of this book uses American diplomatic telegrammes, released by Wikileaks, to bolster his arguments, and indeed, as evidence for his characterisation of Putin’s Russia as a Mafia state. I wouldn’t disagree with his thesis, but the leaked opinions of US diplomats, or of any diplomats for that matter, are just that – opinions, not proven facts. We should distinguish between them or we undermine the argument.
Harding litters his narrative with sceptical adjectives when he relates the suspicions harboured by the Russians, while cheerfully recycling the views of westerners unchallenged. ‘In January 2006 Russian state television broadcasts footage supposedly showed (sic) British intelligence officers retrieving information from an artificial “rock” concealed in a Moscow park...The FSB alleged that Moscow-based UK diplomats used the rock to communicate with Russian “agents”’. I remember at the time talking to a friend, now deceased, who had been a big player in MI6. He said that this rock could well have been, ridiculous as it might seem, a ‘drop’ , set up and used by British agents.
What is surprising at times is this author’s naivety. Harding has come back to Moscow after a home visit to London. He has brought with him a video recorded off TV in the UK of a programme about Litvinenko, one-time KGB/FSB agent who was murdered by the FSB, it is believed by the world outside Russia, for having defected and blown the FSB story. Harding is apparently astonished that bringing this video back with him in his baggage should be a reason for the FSB to step up their interference in his life: ‘I have a growing sense that we live in two opposing mental realities. In one, the Litvinenko tape is a harmless home recording from a friend. But in another, it’s evidence of a dark conspiracy to defame the Russian state.’ But Harding is a journalist for an established broadsheet. He is highly educated. He presumably has read up on the Soviet Union and its neuroses.
Can he really have been such an innocent as to suppose that there would no objection to bringing into a country the video of a programme that that country considers defamatory? What does he think would be the response to a journalist from, say, Pakistan who brought with him an Islamist video recorded at home about the infamies of the British or American governments? Not, perhaps, the tactics of the FSB, but not nothing either.
Similarly Harding raises incredulous eyebrows at Russian insularity: ‘All of them share an institutional phobia of the west, a place as remote for them as Europe must have been for Japan.’ But it doesn’t seem to cross his mind that Europe may not have been the centre of the world when Japan considered it remote; nor does it cross his mind that Japan may have seemed remote to Europe, or indeed that there may be institutional phobias among westerners for some things Russian. I repeat – not necessarily undeserved, but this is sloppy thinking nonetheless.
‘It’s not hard to admire the thoroughness of our FSB intruders. These guys are professionals.’ Well, duh! Of course these guys are professionals. It’s their job, isn’t it? Then we have, ‘I later discover that leaving pornographic material in the bedroom of a target was one of the KBG’s more extraordinary tactics, used frequently earlier in the cold war.’ Come on, man. So wide-eyed, yet so self-congratulatory as an investigative journalist, who prides himself – somewhat at the top of his voice – on being more courageous and dogged in pursuit of the Mafia state than any of his colleagues. In fact, as far as I can tell, the FSB were initially interested in Harding because The Guardian, his newspaper, had carried an interview with Boris Berezovsky, one of the oligarchs who had fled to London and is anathema to Putin. This association was enough to tarnish Harding in FSB eyes. The stain was, however, subsequently re-evalued. Then later, when The Guardian became the UK paper to carry the Wikileaks stories (until it lost patience with Julian Assange’s own self-aggrandizement), obviously Harding would be the man to write up the Russia-based stories, so equally obviously he would be the target of FSB ire. Another journo in his shoes would have found himself, well, in his shoes. But Harding is certain that it is he, as an individual, who has been uniquely targeted and is uniquely courageous.
All this is irritating and distracting because actually the information in the book is very interesting and persuasive much of the time. One can sympathise with the vengeful tone too. Which journalist wouldn’t let off writerly steam at a regime that has just deported him? I only wish the writer had not got so much in the way of his message and his evidence.
November 8, 2011
There But for the...
Ali Smith revels in language and why it matters. God help a translator! At the centre of this multi-layered story is the appearance at a dinner party of a young man whom nobody really knows (he has been brought along by a man he has only once met, a man who didn't want to come in the first place). Miles Garth gets up between the main course and the dessert and goes upstairs. Everyone assumes he has gone to the bathroom. Instead he has locked himself into the guest-room and doesn't come out again for months. At first his complacent and philistine bourgeois hostess Genevieve Lee is distraught. Later she capitalises on his presence having told, or sold, her story to the press. Crowds gather; the gardens outside that back bedroom window become a focal point for a sort of perpetual fairground, T-shirt vendors, spiritualists, food stalls...
No one, least of all the reader, knows Miles Garth and nor should we because that is not Ali Smith's point. She leaves a lot out - look at the title, after all. We never learn why he locked himself in to begin with nor why he decides to leave when finally he does. This is not his story. He is the catalyst for snatches of other people's stories - the man who inveigled him to the dinner party, a precocious nine year old girl, an old woman with dementia...
The impermanence of any moment of existence, its meaning within the flow of time, people's relations with and to one another against time, what history is and is for, what people are and are for, and how truly awful some of them turn out to be...all these are subjects of this book. It is gripping; thought-provoking; delighting in its wit and cleverness - not least in its consideration of cleverness, something that tends to be a fraught matter in the UK where it doesn't do to be too clever. It is moving. If there is a weakness it is in the central scene - that dinner party up to which and from which all that emerges moves: Ali Smith so enjoys herself writing her savage satire of certain contemporary attitudes and manners of expression that she can't let go, and the scene slides into stereotype, losing rather than deepening its bite. But I shall now read more of her all the same.
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No one, least of all the reader, knows Miles Garth and nor should we because that is not Ali Smith's point. She leaves a lot out - look at the title, after all. We never learn why he locked himself in to begin with nor why he decides to leave when finally he does. This is not his story. He is the catalyst for snatches of other people's stories - the man who inveigled him to the dinner party, a precocious nine year old girl, an old woman with dementia...
The impermanence of any moment of existence, its meaning within the flow of time, people's relations with and to one another against time, what history is and is for, what people are and are for, and how truly awful some of them turn out to be...all these are subjects of this book. It is gripping; thought-provoking; delighting in its wit and cleverness - not least in its consideration of cleverness, something that tends to be a fraught matter in the UK where it doesn't do to be too clever. It is moving. If there is a weakness it is in the central scene - that dinner party up to which and from which all that emerges moves: Ali Smith so enjoys herself writing her savage satire of certain contemporary attitudes and manners of expression that she can't let go, and the scene slides into stereotype, losing rather than deepening its bite. But I shall now read more of her all the same.
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November 4, 2011
Ants and Grasshoppers
Anyone remember the fable of the ant and the grasshopper? The ant, industrious and bursting with forward planning, spends all summer gathering in provender against the cold of the winter that – although unimaginably far away – it knows will come soon enough. The grasshopper meanwhile hops and sings and has a merry time, entertaining itself and others (whom does the ant entertain?) with not a thought for tomorrow, never mind December.
But when the weather turns cold and all good insects have to be indoors the grasshopper finds itself with nothing to eat. Then it remembers that boring old ant, who is bound to have storerooms stacked to the ceiling with yumminesses. Off he goes and taps wistfully on the door of the ant. Be off, commands the ant. You are idle and improvident. Where were you when I was working all summer, hm?
Somehow I feel the north European states see themselves as hard-working ants, now called upon by their south European cousins to help them out of their corner – they, Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese – who have not paid their taxes but wish to be rescued by the taxes dutifully handed over in the north.
I wonder how the south sees it.
And I wonder, if our economies all collapse, what will happen to publishing. Least of the world's worries, of course.
But when the weather turns cold and all good insects have to be indoors the grasshopper finds itself with nothing to eat. Then it remembers that boring old ant, who is bound to have storerooms stacked to the ceiling with yumminesses. Off he goes and taps wistfully on the door of the ant. Be off, commands the ant. You are idle and improvident. Where were you when I was working all summer, hm?
Somehow I feel the north European states see themselves as hard-working ants, now called upon by their south European cousins to help them out of their corner – they, Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese – who have not paid their taxes but wish to be rescued by the taxes dutifully handed over in the north.
I wonder how the south sees it.
And I wonder, if our economies all collapse, what will happen to publishing. Least of the world's worries, of course.
October 16, 2011
Man without a Camera
I've been reading a book a friend recommended which is about photography, almost entirely devoted to the work of American photographers. The author is the novelist Geoff Dyer, who doesn't own and never has owned a camera. He doesn't know what it is like to choose a shot, select the aperture or the speed, decide on methods of printing. But he knows how to look, how to interpret, how to place in context, how to understand. He is, after all, a novelist.
I am entranced. I don't own a camera either, and have begun to realise why I have so few pictures of my children as they were growing up. It was their voices that captured me more than their appearance - working in radio may have been the root of this - but to read what another novelist has to say about photographs is magic. I wish I had come across this before I wrote The Small Book because one of the main protagonists in it is a photographer. Do read this: The Ongoing Moment
I am entranced. I don't own a camera either, and have begun to realise why I have so few pictures of my children as they were growing up. It was their voices that captured me more than their appearance - working in radio may have been the root of this - but to read what another novelist has to say about photographs is magic. I wish I had come across this before I wrote The Small Book because one of the main protagonists in it is a photographer. Do read this: The Ongoing Moment
October 6, 2011
One Day
I just read it, for a bit of light relief after Life and Fate. Very nice idea. Brilliant dialogue. Some small idiocies to do with place and fact, but never mind. Funny and moving....BUT: what did she ever see in him? Can't get my head round that. Banter and good looks surely not enough. Hm.
