Review Post 18 - Bits and Bobs

I'm rather busy at the moment (things to do, people to see, you know how it is), so after finishing Cloud Atlas, I decided to take it easy and not plunge straight into another long book which might take me a long time to finish.

Instead, naturally, I went through three short ones in five days. I really should learn not to kid myself that I'm not going to read... Anyway, the books in this post, unlike those in some of my recent reviews, have very little in common, other than the fact that they live in my study, and I've been vaguely meaning to read them for a while. Enjoy ;)

*****

As you may have noticed, my preference is for long, involved novels, so short stories are not really my thing (I find them a little frustrating at times, to tell the truth). However, there is something more frustrating than a short story, and that's an unfinished short story - and that's where we'll start today. You may have read my first and second reviews of Katherine Mansfield's Collected Stories, and this week I finally managed to polish off the last parts of the monster, consisting of her last (posthumously) published collection, The Doves Nest and Other Stories, plus a bunch of fragments which remained incomplete at the time of her death.

Again, there were some lovely pieces; I particularly liked The Doll's House, a moving story involving Kezia and her family (the stars of a couple of earlier stories), and A Cup of Tea, an interesting tale of a random act of kindness between social classes. However, once through the few complete stories and into the fragments, I just lost it. I simply couldn't engage with four pages of build up towards a denouement which had never been written and never will. I'm sure academics specialising in Mansfield find these morsels fascinating; I was just glad to get them out of the way.

I know. It's my own fault. Short stories aren't meant to be devoured by the plateful, and I have behaved like a little boy at a wedding, stealing a plateful of fairy cakes and stuffing them all into my mouth as quickly as possible (before regurgitating them outside the toilets). There were some amazing stories in the collection, but there were also several weaker efforts, and the problem with reading them in such a large bundle is that they blur into one big mess after a while. I promise that the collection will be revisited at some point: one. book. at. a. time.

*****

When I was a teenager, Neverwhere, a short series written by Neil Gaiman, was shown on the BBC, but it was one of those things I never got around to watching. Even though I read Good Omens, Gaiman's collaboration with Terry Pratchett, I had somehow neglected to read any of his books until now (which is strange because: a) I've read plenty of Pratchett books in my time and b) I loved the concept behind Neverwhere). Finally, this week, I got around to reading the book behind the show, and pretty damn entertaining it was too.

The story follows Richard Mayhew, a young Scottish office worker living in London who, after a random act of kindness towards a woman he finds bleeding in the street, finds his world turned upside down. Ignored by the people around him, he finds his way into a world beneath the city he knows, a parallel, twisted version of the metropolis above. Welcome to London Below...

Richard finds himself involved in a quest to help Door (the woman whose aid he came to) find out who killed her family and is initially all at sea in a dark world of fantastic and sinister characters. Accompanied by the enigmatic Marquis de Carabas and the sultry bodyguard Hunter, Richard and Door traipse the byways of London Below, seeking help from some of its denizens and avoiding others. Mind the Gap indeed...

It's a marvellous read, reminiscent (naturally) of Pratchett but slightly more measured and less frantic (I often feel that a Discworld novel rushes you through it as if it has somewhere else to be, and you're holding it up). It does have the feel of an adaptation - a lot of 'scenes' and not as much characterisation or description as one might have hoped -, but it does have some interesting twists and turns which most readers will be fairly surprised by.

Of course, like many people, I was most amused by the twists on the city above. Richard encounters such people as the Black Friars, Old Bailey, the Angel Islington and Lady Serpentine (one of the Seven Sisters) and visits both the Earl's Court and (K)Night's Bridge. Believe me, after reading this book, you'll never look at a tube map the same way again.

The special edition I have is padded out with some book club questions (something I'm not really fond of) which allude to serious themes of reflecting the lost souls of the real London, but I doubt that the average reader is thinking much about social issues when Richard is trying to avoid having his liver cut out by a variety of underground ne'er-do-wells. This is an entertaining book, and that's how I read it. American Gods next? Don't mind if I do...

*****

Short stories, a novel and now a play; it certainly has been a varied week so far. Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt is an old favourite of mine, and even though I'm not really one for drama, I'm happy to make an exception for him. Der Besuch der alten Dame (usually translated into English as The Visit) is a short play describing a visit by the titular lady, Claire Zachanassian, to her hometown of Güllen. Claire, through a series of well-judged marriages, has become fabulously wealthy while Güllen has gone the other way, so poor that the whole town has been mortgaged. When she decides to come back and visit, the town is counting on Alfred Ill, Claire's childhood sweetheart, to persuade her to restore its fortunes. It turns out that she is prepared to do so, but only at a price. She will give the town of Güllen one billion dollars on one condition: namely, on receipt of Alfred Ill's dead body...

You see, Claire's past is anything but happy, and Alfred's is anything but as flawless as people think. Woman, scorned, revenge, dish, cold, laugh, last longest... Cliches are wonderful, but this is no joke; when the richest woman in the world wants something, she is used to getting it. The Gülleners close ranks initially, the mayor declining her offer amid loud cheers from the citizens of Güllen, but Claire's ominous reply "Ich warte" ("I'll wait"), hints that this may not be the final answer, as much as the townspeople believe that they stand behind Ill.

The crux of the story is temptation, personified in the figure of the old, seemingly unkillable, Zachanassian. The artificial limbs fitted after numerous crashes and air disasters (of which she was always the only survivor) serve to make her seem more sinister and inhuman, a hideous goddess straight out of a Greek play. The townspeople, despite professing to support Ill, mysteriously begin to appear richer, buying new clothes, drinking more expensive beer, smoking more refined cigars - all on credit. It becomes clear that they are all speculating that someone may just take up Claire's offer, and Ill quickly begins to fear for his life. While denial is rife, the more responsible members of the community do let their facade crack at times: the priest begs Ill to flee; the teacher threatens to make the truth known to the outside world in a drunken rant; the mayor and the policeman visit Claire to beg her to change her mind. All to no avail.

It sounds very dark, but it's actually just as much of a farce as a tragedy. The stage directions are absurd, as is Dürrenmatt's wont, with actors pretending to be trees, and four chairs serving as a car. Claire is a monster and brings a bizarre court with her, including a couple of muscly ex-con stretcher bearers and two blind eunuchs who speak in unison (not to mention the three husbands she goes through whilst in Güllen, all to be played by the same actor).

When it comes to the crunch though, the writer knows how to pare away the comedic elements and leave a stark truth facing the protagonists: either Ill's body is placed in the coffin the old lady has brought with her, and taken away to buried in Capri, or he lives, Claire leaves, and Güllen rots in poverty. We all suspect we know the outcome, but it is still painful to watch. In another work, the writer talks of his Swiss countrymen as being "spared and not tempted", a response to Swiss moral superiority over the actions of Germans in World War II. Here, we see what it is to be tempted and hope fervently that it never happens to us.

Review Post 10 - News from the Colonies

It's been a long time since I last went to the library (and, if you read this post, you'll know why!), but I steeled myself a couple of weeks ago and finally got a few books out. The first was The Woman who Walked into Doors; the third is waiting to be read. The second is Nobel prize winner V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas. And a lovely book it is too.

I'd never read a Caribbean book before (in fact, the closest connection I have to that part of the world is a Trinidad & Tobago football shirt I bought cheaply after the last World Cup and a love for cricket which confuses and infuriates my wife in equal measures), and it definitely wasn't what I'd expected. Naipaul is of Indian heritage, and the book, set in Trinidad, focuses on the lives of an extended clan, and wider society, of expatriate Indians, the principal of whom being (of course) the titular Mr. Biswas. His full name is Mohun Biswas; however, right from the start, the writer gives him this rather unusual address whenever he is mentioned outside direct speech. Curious?

Not really. This emphasis on his name is part of the point of the book. Living sporadically, from a fairly young age, with relatives and then in-laws, Mr. Biswas's name is part of his identity and the way the writer lifts him up above the hordes (and there are hordes) of other family members living in the same house. It is this desire to be different, not to be more successful or richer, just to live his own life, which leads him to ruffle feathers and make plenty of mistakes in his quest for the ultimate in achievements: a house of his own.

I live in a country where home ownership is seen as a right - and where increasing house prices and interest rates are viewed as unfair and (the most negative of adjectives) 'unaustralian'. However, in WW2-era Trinidad, just having a roof over your head (even if it is shared with a few other families) is seen as a luxury. Mr. Biswas, however, cannot be content with residing in a cacophony of chanting, impromptu school lessons and squawking in-laws; at every opportunity, he attempts, in the face of derision and incredulity from both his relatives and his own wife, to build or buy himself a house: a house of his own.

From the first page we know that Mr. Biswas is, paradoxically, a success story and a tragedy. He will die young, but in a house of his own. The house is shoddy and rickety, but it is his. He has put his ambitions ahead of his family interests, but he is master of his own abode. At the end of the book, there is a tinge of sadness, regret, in contrast with the feelings of pride and success Mr. Biswas radiates in the prelude to his life story. The reader, at the end of 600+ pages of wonderfully-told family drama, is left to answer the question posed by the writer: was Mr. Biswas' life worth it? I won't answer that, but I can say that the book certainly was...

*****

One event I recall from Mr. Biswas' slow social ascent was an invitation to a writers' group where he was asked to read something he'd written. After toiling for a while, he had something, but he couldn't find an ending. Having read plenty of post-modernist literature, however, he didn't see that being a problem...

...which brings me neatly to the second part of my trawl through Katherine Mansfield's Collected Stories. Following on from reading her earliest works, I worked my way through Bliss and Other Stories and The Garden Party and Other Stories last week; to be perfectly honest, 300 pages of short stories, even in sporadic doses was a bit much for my constitution.

These two collections were, as Mansfield herself thought, much more developed than the earlier stories. Aside from the two title stories, I greatly enjoyed Prelude and At the Bay, two longer tales featuring the same Wellington family, and Je ne Parle pas Francais, a wonderfully moody story featuring an enigmatic Englishman, his long-suffering partner and a Parisian narrator who is everything a literary Parisian should be. Some of the twists in the writing in these collections were breathtaking: one particular example was Bliss where the palpable joie de vivre of the main character is frozen in a heartbeat by one simple act. Class tension, domestic drudgery, social roleplaying, repressed homosexuality... all in a handful of wonderful pages.

I suppose it's my own fault for reading the two collections one after the other, but it did become a bit of a chore towards the end. I found myself wanting to get it over and done with, and the pile of gleaming, unread books on my bookshelf caught my eye more than ever before. Still, Mansfield is not completely innocent in all this. I really do not want to read about anyone with 'weak nerves' for the rest of the year, and while stories about spinsters may be all well and good in moderation, they are as bad for you as any drug if you overdose on them.

I suppose the main problem with reading a collection of short stories is that yes, they are great to read - while you are reading them -, but when you are between stories, and you're not currently reading one, there is nothing to draw you back, nothing to tear you away from your i-Pod, your computer, your television. In short, there is little motivation to return to the book as you are, in effect, starting from the beginning.

Please don't think that I am criticising these collections (far from it; as short stories go, they are excellent). It's just that when people describe Katherine Mansfield as the inventor of the modern short story, I'm not sure whether it's meant as praise or blame. At any rate, the final part of the collection will have to wait for a good while; I'm off to immerse myself in a voluminous Victorian novel, and I won't be out for a week or so...

Review Post 5 - Short and Sweet

I'm sorry, but I really don't get short stories. I'm the sort of person who wants to engage in a story and with the characters, and I find that ten pages really doesn't do it for me. Even with my favourite authors, it feels all wrong. Spread over 400 pages, Haruki Murakami's juxtaposition of the bizarre and the utterly ordinary works wonders. In a short story, however, it just seems weird. Full stop.

So what am I to do with someone who is regarded as the forerunner of modern short-story tellers, the writer from just across the Tasman sea, Katherine Mansfield? Mansfield only wrote short stories (nary a novel, or even novella, in sight) and yet is still known and loved today. Well, I'll give it a go...

As you can see to the left, I have acquired a big brick containing all Mansfield's stories (and unfinished fragments), which I am planning to read a bit at a time in chronological order of writing. So I started on page 586 (I felt very strange for a while there).

In a German Pension was Mansfield's first publication, one she later wished she could disown owing to its alleged immaturity. The sketches of life in a typically German spa town are cutting and accurate: the linguistic structures she uses to indicate German thought patterns and cultural behaviour work very well, and the strange, almost scientific curiosity with which the locals regard the foreign intruder is wittily sketched out. Mansfield refused to allow a republication just before the first World War as she was ashamed by both the immaturity and stereotyping of the stories.

Something Childish and Other Stories is a posthumous collection of stories written between Mansfield's first and second published collections. In this (longer) collection, the writer continues with her wry observations of foreign manners and sympathetic portrayals of lonely women in dreary boarding rooms. There are also, however, some shorter (and stranger) morsels to be found.

I liked most of the stories, but my preference was for the first-person tales, where Mansfield's cool, wry Down Under persona is contrasted with self-confident European behaviour. These tales are witty and cutting, and I could well empathise with the writer's desire to be left alone by the tour guides and tourists of European travel spots.

Verdict? The jury's still out on this one. As promised, short and sweet; more on this in the coming months...