Book Review - The Magician by Colm Toibin

 The Magician by Colm Toibin

Sydney: Picador, 2021                 ISBN 9781760984113

I've never read any Colm Toibin* before this book, and as I read I came to the realisation that I have not read any Thomas Mann either, although I thought I had. After finishing this book, I will be sure to read more of both.

Toibin has written a considered fictional life of Mann, focussing particularly on the dynamics of his large extended family, Mann's political views, his confused sexuality and, more broadly, the politics of Twentieth Century Europe and America.

In some ways The Magician is a novel of manners: the first section to do with the middle-class mores of Lubeck, then the cosmopolitanism of  wealthy Munich, then the internationalism of the inter-war period, of the politics of exile, and of the United States during the War. Mann is pitted first against his parent's generation, then battles with his contemporaries, before becoming a legend in his own lifetime who was increasingly losing touch with current moods in politics and manners.

While Mann is seen by others in this novel as patrician, stiff, and materialistic, the reader sees that he was actually never sure of himself in any situation. He initially believes in the power of German culture, and tries to cling to that ideal even as Hitler comes to power. It is not until the War is well underway that he begins to realise that "...Goethe had dreamed of many things, but he had never imagined Buchenwald. No poems about love, or nature, or man, would ever serve to rescue this place from the curse that had descended on it."

This is the central tragedy in the list of disasters that occurred in Mann's life - that he was an integral part of the culture that brought forth not only Goethe and Beethoven, but also the Nazis and the Holocaust. The thought that Hitler listened to the same music that Mann enjoyed was horrific to him.

This is also a novel of family relationships. Mann's siblings and his children are all treated as the different characters that they were in real life. Thomas' problematic relationship with his brother Heinrich is delicately delineated as a series of mis-apprehensions and lack of understanding of each other's life choices and work. His relationship with his wife and children show a father who was too busy to notice his children growing up, and then being surprised to realise that he had produced adults who were so diverse, opinionated, and unconcerned with what their father might think of them, or the world. After fifty years of marriage he is depicted as still unsure what his wife Katia might think after the suicide of their son Klaus.

Katia is the character in the novel who seems to understand not only the political situations that Mann found himself in, but also her children, and the confused sexuality of Thomas that Toibin explores during his life as represented in this book. It could be that Toibin has used Mann's bi-sexualism as the source of his indecisiveness and sense at times of being an imposter. Toibin catalogues a series of trysts, where Mann does not initiate any physical contact: in fact it is more voyeurism and anticipation of physicality that he found exciting. Katia understood Mann's foibles and allowed it, as Toibin has her state to one of the children - "My father was a philanderer. He could not stop himself. He wanted any woman he saw. I have not had that problem with your father."

Toibin is a fine writer, who can evoke different characters, scenes and sub-plots with skill and a seamless style that brings the reader straight to a time and place. He evokes the mind of a writer well - thinking of the next chapter, unsure of whether they are on the right path, trying always to get to "the hard and hidden place where a subject was lured towards the light in a process that was like alchemy."

At the end of the novel Mann returns to post-war Lubeck to receive the keys to the city - a city that spurned him after he had written Buddenbrooks. "In his speech, he spoke about coming full circle... Later... he was almost disappointed, depressed... He had not come full circle at all, he saw, but had merely stumbled along."

So do all of us, doing the best we can with the resources given to us. The Magician is a wonderful evocation of that.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

* For some reason, I am unable to give Toibin the diacritics that his name requires without completely wrecking the formatting of this post. I blame blogger, and apologise for the omission.

Book Review - The Rat by Gunter Grass

 The Rat by Gunter Grass, translated by Ralph Manheim

London: Secker & Warburg, 1987 (first published in German in 1986)    ISBN 0436187728

It's been a very long time since I've read any of Gunter Grass's fiction - in fact it might even be about thirty years ago that I read in quick succession The Flounder and The Tin Drum, in that order. Having recently read the first volume of his memoirs, Peeling the Onion, I was motivated to pick up something else of his, and The Rat was to hand...

I must admit it took me some time to get in to this book - is it a dystopian novel about the end of the world? Is it a sci-fi fantasy of genetic mutation gone wrong? Is it an homage to the fairy tales of the German forest? Is it the rebirth of The Flounder and Oskar Matzerath? The answer is yes to all, with the landscape of Baltic Prussia and Danzig once again taking centre stage throughout the book.

The Rat is a vehicle for Grass to comment on environmental degradation, the arms race, the destruction of history and tradition in the chase for capitalist success and, as in many of his novels, a mourning for the loss of what once was - a Kashubian way of life that he knew as a child.

The book flits between multiple realities - the here-and-now, where Grass gets a pet rat for Christmas, and listens to the Third Programme on the radio while writing The Rat. He writes about Damroka, his beloved, who is on a ship running a scientific programme to measure jellyfish numbers in the Baltic: the ship is crewed with all the women Grass has been involved with romantically. He writes also about Oskar Matzerath, who is now a successful video producer - Grass discusses with him the production of a video about the death of the forests, and of the fraudster Malskat, while also reporting on his visit to Poland for his Grandmother's 107th birthday.

There are also the "other" realities... one where famous fairy tale characters try and take over the German government to stop the destruction of the environment, only to be destroyed by a combination of capital, military force and organised religion, and the other, where rats have organised the mutually assured destruction of the human race by atomic warfare, so they rule the world. There is a brief interregnum by human-rat hybrids (Manippels) that escaped from a laboratory, but the book ends with Grass, trapped in a spacecraft orbiting the human-less earth, being unable to decide if he was being dreamed by his interlocutor (the "she-rat"), or whether he was dreaming her. 

Depending on which reality we the reader are inhabiting at the time, the women on the ship might be speaking to The Flounder and trying to find the sunken city of Vineta, where women rule, and Oskar's shrivelled corpse is worshipped by the new rat society, that begins to develop in disturbingly similar ways to the human society it replaced.

Once the reader has oriented themselves to this book, it is a rollicking read, full of false bombast, and continually deflating the importance of all around us, poking the bear in a particularly Grassian way. Written before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is perhaps a little dated in it's references, but none the worse for that. A good book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Last Temptation by Nikos Kazantzakis

 The Last Temptation a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis

(Translated from the Greek with a note on the Author and his Language by P.A. Bien)

London: Faber and Faber, 1983 (first published in English 1961)   ISBN 0571114342

I first became aware of this novel when the film The Last Temptation of Christ came out in the late 1980s. I've never seen the film, but had always been interested in fishing out the book to read. After the pleasure I got from reading Zorba the Greek, which showed me that Kazantzakis was a deep thinker about life and how it is led, I felt it was finally time to find a copy of this book and read it.

In this fictional re-telling of the life of Jesus, Kazantzakis is concerned with how the physical and spiritual intersect in human life. He hews fairly closely to the Gospels for his inspiration, but uses their sometimes conflicting stories and themes to advantage in depicting Jesus as a man tormented by God and by his fate as saviour of the World. Over the course of the novel Jesus comes to realise that while love is the answer, it cannot be achieved without pain and sacrifice.

One of Kazantzakis' strengths as a novelist is his characterization, and that is certainly a strong point in The Last Temptation. The figures of Judas, Zebedee, and Mary Magdalene are wonderfully created, and through them Kazantzakis explores greed, hard-headedness, repentance and love. The other disciples are wonderfully human, both in their failure to understand Jesus' parables, in their vain boasts of bravery in the face of death, and lustful thoughts of the treasures awaiting them in the Kingdom of Heaven.

But it is the figure of Jesus that is the main character in the book. Kazantzakis portrays him as a man wishing to deny his destiny, initially by denying that God was calling him, and then by thinking that the Kingdom of Heaven would come simply by preaching a gospel of loving one another. God drags him reluctantly to the conclusion that the human race can only be saved by the ultimate sacrifice, that he is a human version of the scapegoat Jesus encounters in the desert, therefore he must take the path of pain and death so that we can all live again in God.

Even to the last Jesus is reluctant. The last temptation of the title sees Jesus imagining a different life, of marriage and children, only to realise that this dream is in fact the work of Satan, and that he has indeed fulfilled his earthly mission by dying on the Cross.

One of the beauties of this book is that while it is clear that Jesus' life is one lived in service of the spirit and the spiritual, at no stage is the physical life looked upon with scorn. Kazantzakis revels in the mundane and the everyday, and often has Jesus espousing that God is everywhere and in everything, from ants to rocks, and even sinful men if only they would let God's light shine in their hearts.

Kazantzakis' exploration of the foment of Jewish society at the time of Jesus gives the novel an air of authenticity. The depiction of Judas and Barabbas as Zealots and of John as an ascetic allows Kazantzakis to explore the differing avenues the Jewish religion was travelling down at the time, and to cast into greater relief the radical nature of Jesus' teaching. While (in this novel) Judas was looking for a rebellion that would crush the Roman occupation and enable a Jewish state, Philip and Nathaniel were looking for thrones, gold and silken clothing. None of the disciples could grasp the true meaning of Jesus' parables, and could not understand why Jesus was not happy about the idea that his life would be recorded and a church created over him - his encounter with Paul during his last temptation is an excoriation of the established church, in a scene that is horrifying and edifying at the same time.

This translation reads very well (although in an afterword the translator explains how it is not really possible to convey the Demotic Greek of Kazantzakis into English), and even though most who begin to read this book will know how it ends, the story it tells is compelling and self-contained. Kazantzakis doesn't explain away any of the miracles, but in the milieu he creates in this book they seem like natural events.

There is no doubt that Kazantzakis has thought long and deeply about the life of Jesus, and about the message of Christianity and, in the (not coincidentally) thirty three chapters of The Last Temptation, he has written a very good novel.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Watt by Samuel Beckett

 Watt by Samuel Beckett

London: Calder & Boyars, 1963 (first published Paris 1953)  ISBN 0714506109

Like most people, my exposure to Beckett has been limited to his drama. I've seen a few variants of Waiting for Godot, and I was peripherally involved in a production of Krapp's Last Tape. Having seen Godot a few times I felt like I started to understand what Beckett was trying to say about life, and became interested in his other works. Over the years I've purchased copies of his prose, with a view to reading them, but have always been slightly intimidated by the prospect of doing so. On the basis that Watt is an entree to his "major" prose works, I've finally taken the leap into the world of Beckett prose.

There is no doubt that Beckett is not easy to understand, but, in the case of Watt at least, he is actually enjoyable to read! It would be no surprise to learn that, in the course of the book, not much happens. Watt finds employment with Mr. Knott, and we then see him at an institution, and finally at a railway station taking a journey, which is where we met him at the start of the "story".

Watt is about perception more than anything else. How an event is perceived, and the various permutations of events that can be construed, the combinations that can be construed from an event; how we perceive things that happen, how they can happen in a certain way, how if you only see the result of an event (a person with shoes on) you can never know exactly how that event occurred (which shoe was put on first). Beckett, through writing out all the permutations of how an event might occur, brings our attention to how many ways life can move forward, and the relentless boringness of most activity we undertake.

Watt spends much of his time in the book pondering simple things - how Mr. Knott lived, what he ate, what did he do with his left-over food, how did he dress. The absurdity of the characters and events and the basicness and simplicity of the events create a comic pathos that is truly unique. 

What was Beckett trying to say in this novel? I'm not sure that I'm intelligent enough to work that out. Nothing of import happens, there isn't a character that seems to develop in any meaningful way. So is it a nihilist work? I'm not sure I'd go that far. In a strange way, this absurd story is a reflection on real life and on how people think, and the absurdity of much of what we do.

I'm not sure what to make of Watt, but I do hope that is have given me some mental tools and ability to move on to Molloy, which is my next Beckett target.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

 Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis, translated by Carl Wildman

London: Faber & Faber, 2016 (First published in Greek 1946, in English 1952)   ISBN 9780571323272

My wife is a huge fan of this book, and the movie that sprang from it. As I understand it, she had to read Zorba at school, and the experience turned her into a lover of literature. We were talking about Zorba a couple of weeks ago, and she was flabbergasted that I hadn't read the book, and could barely remember the movie (which I saw decades ago). So, I decided to pick up a copy, and I'm glad that I did.

Zorba the Greek is a meditation on life: on living life rather than looking at it from the outside, on jumping into experiences rather than missing out through fear or doubt, and about looking into the future, rather than dwelling on the past. These opposites are drawn out via the relationship between Zorba and the narrator of the novel, who as a writer is grappling with these very problems. Zorba is the everyman we wish to be: fighter, worker, lover, enjoyer of the gifts life has to offer. The narrator is all of the rest of us: full of fear and doubt, afraid to jump into life to be taken along by the current, and forever searching for something greater that we are never sure actually exists.

Zorba knows and understands the venality and corruption of the human race, and yet loves all in spite of that. He has worked through his passions and come to the realisation that all humanity is worthy of our love, especially those that are impinged upon by religion and class. He states that he has learned that there is no nationality and no religion, just good or bad people, and to take those people as they come. While the narrator works hard on his book about the Buddha and questions earthly activities, Zorba has accepted that the life he has is the one he must live to the fullest.

The life the narrator and Zorba share on Crete is by turns funny, heart-warming, and tragic. While the narrator has gone to Crete to both live a "real" life and to eschew his normal writerly existence, Zorba can't help but to take on everything with gusto, from digging in a mine, loving the roué Bouboulina, to eating a freshly cooked lamb and drinking wine. He has an inexhaustible energy, and a capability to see everything with the wonder of a first encounter, that entrances both the narrator and us as readers.

In the end, the money-making ventures all turn to dust, and Zorba and the narrator part, both to continue living in their own separate ways, and to be dragged along by the vicissitudes of history. This final section of the novel is almost unbearable, as we see that together the narrator and Zorba were vibrant, and apart, less so.

This book went much deeper than I thought it would - highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, with a foreword by Andre Gide, translated by Stuart Gilbert

New York: Signet Classic, copyright 1942 (first published in French 1931)

This is my first time reading Saint-Exupery (yes, I haven't even read The Little Prince!). Night Flight was not his first novel, but was his first success. The story is straightforward - a night flight of mail 'planes in South America, one of which is lost. Yet the story is not about that at all - it is about the power of human will, and the courage it takes to not only risk one's life, but to send other people to risk theirs.

Riviere, the driver of what was then a new idea - night air mail flights - spends his evening musing over what he makes other men do. Is it right to risk their lives for such a task? Is it right that he takes them from their wives and children to try and prove a point? Is it right to be the first to try something, and to keep pushing through disasters?

Saint-Exupery believes that it is - that human progress is more important than individual human life. It is something that humans have always done. His description of the bravery of individual pilots, of the tension of those in the head office, and the beauty and terror of night-flying in the 1930s are transcendent. This is such a short novel (125 paperback pages), and yet grapples with age-old human emotions, hopes and fears.

This might be the first of Saint-Exupery's works that I have read, but it won't be the last.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

 

Book Review - The Joke by Milan Kundera

 The Joke by Milan Kundera, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim

London: Faber and Faber, 1983 (original Czech publication 1967)   ISBN 0571130194

Milan Kundera is probably best-known for his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but The Joke - his first novel - certainly made him well-known not just in his native Czechoslovakia, but also in the West. In fact in an author's note inserted in this particular edition of the book he explains how previous editions of his work in English were not only unauthorized, but bowdlerized by those who wished to use his book as a propaganda tool when, as he claims - "The Joke is a love story!"

Well yes, it is a love story, but it is also much more than that. It is a brutal satire on the Communist system as it existed in Czechoslovakia, an exploration of hatred and revenge, and of love and forgiveness. Told in an episodic fashion, it is the story (mainly) of Ludvik and Lucie, their love story, the story of how they came together and split apart, and the story of how life led them in the directions it did, and how "a person's destiny often ends before his death".

We see that for Lucie, the one thing the Ludvik wanted from her to seal their love was the one thing she couldn't give him, and the one thing that Ludvik was too self-absorbed to understand. Ludvik's betrayal by his party comrades sent him to a penal battalion and a totally different life to the one he had been expecting. His burning desire for revenge spectacularly backfires when he commits adultery with his oppressor Zemanek's wife, only to find out they were no longer living together. Ludvik's journey through the novel not only shows the reader the dangers of going against the cultural norms of any time (and how those norms change through Ludvik's journey - at the end of the book he finds Zemanek espousing the very views which sent Ludvik off to the mines), but the dangers of looking for revenge after the moment; Kundera, - through Ludvik - explains that once time has passed the people or institutions one wants to have revenge on have changed - they are no longer what they were. And so revenge becomes hollow.

Lucie's story is one of trying to find love, and instead finding sex and violence. After being traumatized by gang-rape in her youth, her reaction to Ludvik's demands is more than understandable, except for Ludvik, who in his state of incarceration did not think of Lucie at all in his desire for physical release. Lucie eventually finds some sort of solace in religion, the forgiveness of God, and a new life in a new town.

While we can believe Kundera's assertion that The Joke is a love story, it is a love story conditioned by the regime that Czechs were living under at the time he wrote it. It is depressing to read of a society where conformity or prison were the only options, and that love becomes just another thing that is controlled by the State and its minions. When the simple joy of music is corralled, controlled and used to indoctrinate, what life can truly flourish? At the end of the book, when Ludvik comes full circle playing his treasured folk music with his oldest friend to an unfeeling crowd, Jaroslav's heart attack while playing sums up the themes of constriction and repression that course through this book.

The one thing I'm still not sure I understand, pampered bourgeois that I am, was whether The Joke was intended to be funny.....I'll leave that to wiser heads than mine.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Whatever by Michel Houellebecq

 Whatever by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Paul Hammond

London: Serpent's Tail, 1998 (original French publication 1994)     ISBN 1852425849

Events conspire - I had no intention of reading this book now (or perhaps ever), but serendipity brought it about. I had just read a review of Houellebecq's new novel Aneantir which also described Houellebecq's writing career and I became intrigued. Not long after I acquired his first three novels (in translation, I am an unfortunately mono-lingual) and so set about reading Whatever for two immediate reasons - it is the first novel Houellebecq wrote, and it is short, at 155 paperback pages.

What did I think? Well, I'm assuming his later novels are better and carry more weight, as I found Whatever quite disappointing. I've been thinking about it a while, and I'm still not really sure what this novel was about, or what it was trying to say.

Is it a critique on modern life and the consumerism that has invaded every corner, including sexual? Or is it poking fun at that critique? The main protagonist, a 30 year old programmer, takes us through his life, his boring job, his lack of love-life and his ennui, which spirals into depression. The other characters in this novel are figures of scorn (Tisserand, the work colleague, fat, virginal and hopeless), or to be derided because they have modern life worked out and are going to be successful.

The narrative is interspersed with excerpts from the stories that the narrator writes, which are dialogues between animals, and are full of pseudo-psychological insights into behaviour. Is Houellebecq making fun of such theories by putting them into the mouths of dogs and cows, or is he trying to tell us that animals are smarter than humans? Again, I'm not sure.

One thing our narrator does have is a Swiftean disgust with the human body and what it exudes. He is particularly disgusted by the vagina, and refers to it more than once as a "veal escalope". He is not only a misogynist, but a misanthrope, both in the physical and on the mental planes.

I'm not sure (again!) whether Houellebecq intends for his narrator to be an example of someone trapped in the modern consumerist nightmare and unable to get out. The problem in the book if this is indeed the case is that the narrator is intelligent enough to see what the modern nightmare is, and yet does nothing at all to try and free himself from it before succumbing. He sinks to the bottom quickly, and the reader is not given enough information to understand why he does, or to be sympathetic to his plight.

It's obvious, if you have read this far into this review, that I struggled to like this book. It doesn't speak to me at all, and in fact I think it is indulgent and takes the reader for granted, which is never a good thing.

There is such a fuss about Houellebecq that I feel that perhaps this novel is not a good place to start with him - but after reading it I'm not sure I'd want to continue.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Clown by Heinrich Boll

 The Clown by Heinrich Boll, translated from the German by Leila Vennewitz

London: Calder and Boyars, 1972 (originally published in English 1965, original publication in German, under the title Ansichten Eines Clowns in 1963)        ISBN 0714501689

I have reviewed Boll's Billiards at Half Past Nine previously, and found it an interesting and at times strange book. The Clown has had a similar effect on me. Although this book is less overtly about World War II than Billiards at Half Past Nine, it is still the over-arching shadow that hangs over everything that happens, which was the state of affairs in Germany in the Sixties. Those that can adapt themselves do, and we see those people doing as well in democratic Germany as they did in Nazi Germany, while the small acts of heroism that took place during the war are forgotten, along with everything else.

But the The Clown is not really about the war. It is a story of the developing society of Germany after the war, and the interactions between rich and poor, Protestant and Catholic, particularly the machinations of Catholic society, and the hypocrisy that lay at the heart of much of what they did in Germany at that time.

The plot revolves around Hans Schnier, son of a wealthy industrialist (mainly involved in coal mining, but with a finger in many pies). He eschews family, seduces Marie, the daughter of a local storekeeper, and runs away with her. Marie is Catholic, Hans a Protestant. Hans has developed a moderately successful career as a clown, but as the novel opens he is returning to his apartment in Bonn in the knowledge that his career is in tatters, and that Marie has left him for Zupfner, a Catholic, and part of the Catholic discussion group that Marie was a part of before she and Hans eloped.

Hans wanders around his apartment with a sore knee, a bottle of cognac and some cigarettes, he is down to his last Mark, and sets out to ring relatives friends and enemies in search of money, Marie's location, and revenge. Through the phone calls he makes, and the flashbacks that intersperse them, Hans takes us through not only his and Marie's history, but lays open the clubbishness, snobbishness and sense of superiority that was part of Catholic society and politics at that time.

Hans's devotion to Marie was absolute - he fails to understand why the outward forms of devotion, such as a marriage certificate or wedding in church are important, and how they could change how people feel. Boll, through Hans, has much to say about the institution of marriage and was ahead of his time to see it as bondage for a woman. His Catholic philosophizers are all men, and the women involved are seen only as followers. Hans is bereft without Marie - to him, even though they weren't married, her leaving him to marry Zupfner is adulterous, and Hans thinks marriage and Church teachings destroy more lives than they save.

The Clown is a also a story about theory versus real life. The Catholics theorize about things, discuss things interminably, while Hans is busy living. He balks at being labelled one way or another, and yet everywhere he goes and everything he sees is trying to put him in a box, to label him, to see if he is acceptable or not according to doctrine. Hans rejects that utterly. When his father comes to visit him, we learn that his father too may have felt that way, but has been ground down by expectations and his wife to do what was expected. Hans muses on his father's heroism in standing up to Nazi thugs in the final days of the War, and realizes that he is loved by him, even as his father leaves without offering him any money, as Hans won't work for it in any way.

Perhaps that is the main theme of The Clown: the danger of dogma. The death of Hans's sister Henrietta in the last days of the war, after her parents allowed her to join a Flak regiment to save the "sacred" soil of Germany from the "Jewish Yankees" broke Hans, and the failure of German society to move on (replacing Nazi dogma for democratic dogma, replacing racism with performative non-racist activities for consumption by everyone except Germans) disgust him. His decision to paint his face and show no emotion as he performs his transgressive skits is his way of coping with the trauma of the War, and the hypocrisy of 1960s German politics and culture.

This is a good novel, but it is a novel of its place and time, and it has dated a little. Sectarianism, as described in The Clown, no longer exists in the same way. Yet some of the things Boll writes about Catholics still hold - their sense of different-ness, a kind of pity for those who are not of the One True Church, and yet also a kind of persecution complex when discussing their faith. No group of believers finds it easy to dissect the more illogical and strange aspects of their belief, so I was surprised to learn that Boll was actually a committed Catholic. I imagine this book caused him some trouble when he went to church after it was published.

This book, while it covers the life-time of Hans, spans only one night in time, and finishes with Hans accepting his lack of money and of Marie, painting up and going out to busk. His life has collapsed, as Germany collapsed, and we the reader cannot be sure if he can rebuild it. 

Heinrich Boll won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972 for his body of work. He is an important figure in post-war German fiction, and The Clown is worth reading not only as an insight into his writing, but also as an insight into a re-building Germany.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood

 Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955  (first published 1935, first published in Penguin 1942)

For me, Christopher Isherwood has become defined in my mind with the movie Cabaret, and by his work translating Indian mystical texts such as Patanjali's yoga aphorisms. I was aware that Goodbye Berlin is considered a modern classic, but had never actually read any of his work - now that I have, I won't be stopping at one. Published in 1935, when Isherwood was only 31, Mr. Norris Changes Trains seems the work of a much more mature writer. With his sure command of language and tone, Isherwood weaves a mysterious story around the upheavals in Germany that led to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.

In Arthur Norris, Isherwood has created a great literary character - shifty, untrustworthy, and yet loyal and in some ways lovable. With his peccadilloes and perversions, the reader does not know how to take him - the narrator William Bradshaw wants to trust him, and does so, right up until the end of the book. Norris is evasive, and that evasiveness is woven into the text, with the reader - like Bradshaw - left groping through the story for answers, and anchors. The sense of drifting fits well with the times in which the book is set, where from one day to the next the political situation could change, and where people were not necessarily what they seemed.

Mr. Norris himself is not a man who is easy to decipher. Some call him a con-man, some a spy: what is certain is that he is a man that lives by his wits. Bradshaw finds him in turns, odd, exasperating, intriguing, and devious. With his vanities (make-up, a wig) and nervousness, Norris seems ill-suited to the role of communist sympathizer, or, as he turns out to be, dealer in secrets.

Isherwood's strength in this novel is his characterization: Norris himself, Bayer the leader of the communists, Otto, the Baron, and Frau Schroeder are all wonderfully drawn, and even the minor characters sparkle in the melange Isherwood has created.

Apparently Mr. Norris Changes Trains was planned originally to be part of a longer work, and (for me anyway) this is revealed by the ending, which finds Norris being followed around the world by his secretary/nemesis Schmidt - who, it seems, blackmails Norris into blackmailing others. After all the intrigue built up by Isherwood, the ending is in some ways a bit of a damp squib.

I suppose it is the sign of a good book that the reader is left wanting more: this, then must be a good book, for I find myself unfulfilled, wanting more, wanting to know what happens to Norris and where his story takes him.

I will now go and hunt up Goodbye to Berlin, and continue my journey with Isherwood.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia

 To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciascia, Translated by Adrienne Foulke, with and Introduction by W.S. Di Piero

New York: New York Review Books, 2000                 ISBN 9780940322523

I very much like the writing of Leonardo Sciascia, and have reviewed other works of his here over the years. To Each His Own is yet again a little literary insight into the mindset of Sicily - an ancient mindset that comes from a time before governments, and even before nation-states in the sense that we know them. A mindset of unspoken bonds, of deeds seen by everyone but at the same time unseen, and of silence and words chosen carefully.

The story revolves around Professor Laurana, the friend of Roscio the doctor, and the Pharmacist, who have both been found murdered. The Pharmacist had received, a few days before, a threatening letter, and the assumption of the town is that Roscio was killed merely because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Laurana notices something odd about the threatening letter - the cutout words from the newspaper on the letter were from a very particular newspaper that only a few people in the town subscribe to. 

Laurana, initially as nothing more really than an intellectual exercise, follows this clue, trying to make sense of a senseless crime. The police and authorities, naturally, are following leads to do with the pharmacist, following every rumour. Laurana begins to suspect that Roscio was actually the target, and a few chance discoveries confirm his suspicions. He begins to wonder if Roscio was murdered so that someone could take his very beautiful wife for themself.

Unfortunately for Laurana he is too honest and too free with his words, and too trusting. When Roscio's wife suggests his suspicions might be true, he is blinded by her beauty, which leads to his eventual doom. The cruel irony Sciascia creates at the end of the book, when the reader discovers that many other men in the town had worked out what really happened (that Rosello, the lawyer, had been having an affair with Roscio's wife for many years, and organised the killing so he could marry her), sums up his Sicily: be careful talking about what you know, to whom, and know when it is safe to do so.

The beauty of Sciascia's work (and kudos to his translators is due here) is the way his language evokes Sicily. His short pithy sentences gives the reader a feeling of being there, of trying to navigate a course that keeps one safe, but still relevant and in the know, and how difficult it is to live and be true to oneself. How some people just go with the flow and forget the deeper life, and those who can't are at risk.

A short book, a very readable book, and an insight into another world. Recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Ulysses by James Joyce

Ulysses by James Joyce - the corrected text edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior and with a new preface by Richard Ellman - Student's edition

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986    (First published 1922)                        ISBN 0140084274


Ulysses.... that monument of twentieth-century literature in English; a monument that has spawned hundreds of books, many academic careers, and no doubt sold many copies that have sat in bookshelves as unread signifiers of the owners intelligence. Which in many ways is a shame, because it is just a book, a novel: yes, a difficult and at times obscure novel, but also a funny, moving, and exciting one.

This is the second time I have read this book, and on the whole, I have enjoyed it more the second time around, reading just for pleasure, and not study. This time around I have registered much more the sheer enjoyment Joyce has in language itself and telling stories. In Leopold Bloom Joyce tried to create the everyman for the twentieth-century, and to a large extent he succeeded. Bloom is trying very hard to be the modern man, with his adherence to science, order, and proper behaviour. However, owing to his Jewishness he will never be accepted as truly Irish, tolerated rather than a part of the brotherhood (his freemasonry also setting him apart from most in Catholic Ireland). We see clearly during the passage of 16 June 1904 how his own situation makes Bloom sensitive to the trials of others who are not in the mainstream of society: his response to the slings and arrows he receives is to emphasize the importance of love - 

"But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.
— What? says Alf.
— Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred"

And Bloom symbolises that throughout the book, especially when saving Stephen from himself at the end of the night. Of course Bloom is not a perfect man. He is unfaithful to his wife (who is also unfaithful to him), he is a failure at the "business" of life, not a success in his work, and unable to make a mark in any other way on society. Yet he is truly the hero of Ulysses, and the reader warms to him in all his goodness, foibles and follies.

Even though many of the references Joyce makes to Dublin and Irish history may go over the modern reader's head without a guide, one can still get the sense that Joyce is both reminiscing with love on his home town and also making fun of much of what the Irish see as important in themselves. Like all colonized peoples they labour under a foreign yoke, which in Ireland's case is masked with culture. Stephen is more cultured than the English he despises, yet he also despises much that Ireland has given him as well. Joyce it would seem has as little time for the Fenians as he does for the English. Bloom is in fact a man of the world, although he is quick to declaim his Irishness.

The way Joyce structured the novel was indeed revolutionary at the time, and has had a huge effect on the nature of writing since then. While he had already tried a stream-of-consciousness approach in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he takes it much further in this work, trying to capture every fleeting thought as it flies past the brain. It is of course impossible to really do so, but both the first episode and the last are wonderful attempts at it. In between Joyce toys with every literary trope, from newspaper articles to Irish sagas to romance novels.

And to do so while describing the peregrinations of a nobody through his day - it opens up the epic in the everyday, the hero in the humble. That someone like Leopold Bloom can be the centre of such a poem gives hope to us all.

The result is a fascinating melange: like many great novels, there are for every reader I'm sure, moments of boredom. The beauty of Ulysses is that, for every reader I'm sure, those moments are counterbalanced by others of amazing, brilliant, and breathtaking writing. A true masterpiece, raising the most ordinary of men to the status of hero, counterpointed with the heroine of Molly Bloom, it is not a book that should be just left on the shelf unread. I'll write no more, as brains more powerful than mine have said more profound things about this book: I would just add - read and enjoy!

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Kangaroo by D.H. Lawrence

Kangaroo by D.H. Lawrence

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950 (originally published 1923)     ISBN 0140007512


Hmmm. It's been a very long time since I've read any Lawrence, and time has not done him any favours, especially in this, one of his minor novels. The product of his short stay in Australia, Kangaroo is a bit of a mish-mash: part polemic, part philosophy, part thriller, part nature-novel, it shows the rapidity of it's writing too evidently in too many places to be a classic.

There is a strong autobiographical core to this novel. The main character, Richard Lovat Somers, is clearly based on Lawrence himself - a writer, son of a worker, married to a German. The story of Somers' experiences in World War One mirror those of Lawrence, and the reader can easily assume that many of Somers' opinions reflect those of the writer as well.

And there is much opinion and commentary in Kangaroo. Thoughts on democracy, the state of man, and of Gods. He uses the story of Kangaroo, Jack and Jaz (who together bring him into the shady world of the Digger's Clubs, a kind of New Guard) to espouse his philosophies of a natural aristocracy in man, the hollowness and failure of democracy, and the need for man to re-connect with the "ancient Gods".

There is much discussion of the various urges that beset man, and how democracy and socialism are not the answer. Somers is attracted to the idea of Kangaroo and his Diggers taking over the country, as he feels that the strong leader is the answer to Government. What Somers can't accept is that Kangaroo preaches a universal love of and for man, which Somers knows is not how a society can be run.

Torn between his own thoughts and those of Kangaroo, Somers does what he always has done and retreats into himself rather than go with the group, knowing that he can't commit to any movement, even one with aims that he may agree with.

This is certainly a novel of its time, in that Somers, Kangaroo, and Struthers (the socialist union leader) are searching for new ways to order society, after the War exposed the failings of the system that had existed up to then. Much of Somers' spoutings on human nature however are half-formed and hopeful (and to the reader of today, can be hard going). It would have been fascinating to see how Lawrence's thought may have developed and changed had he lived to see the destruction wrought by the strong men of both the Left and the Right throughout the Thirties and Forties.

Not a character in the novel, but a major part nonetheless, is the country itself - Australia. Lawrence writes of Australia as only one who is foreign to it can. He seems innately aware if its great age, and that white man was a mere pinprick on something much more ancient. His descriptions of the countryside veer between awe at its beauty, and terror at it's strangeness. As with most who come from the Northern realms, the colour and clarity of the sky is particularly noted.

The Australian people he finds less agreeable. Through the character of Somers, he struggles with the freedom they have. The idea that each man was as good as the next repulses him in a way, even though that is what he believes in. The easy familiarity that Australians have with each other seems to him to be in some way a fake. He who was so conscious of class, struggles with the apparent class-less nature of Australian society, while at the same time knowing full-well that money-capitalism was as rife here as anywhere else.

To this reader, Kangaroo is three or four novels in one, each one fighting for supremacy and none of them winning the battle. I was left a little bereft, not knowing what to think as the covers closed. Not the place to start with Lawrence, this is a little time-capsule of a book that is hard to love.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino, translated from the Italian by William Weaver

London; Vintage Books, 1998                                                      ISBN 9780099430896

Phew, what a book! It's been a few months since I have read any fiction, and what a way to get back in harness, with a work of fiction all about what it is to read, and to be a reader: compulsively readable, and yet almost too much to take in.

The book starts by throwing the reader (who becomes part of the story, and, in fact IS the story) sideways, by describing the act of purchasing a copy of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller from the bookstore, before heading into the story.....but wait, you've purchased a mis-bound copy. So you take it back to the shop, where the replacement copy is a different story entirely.....you meet a woman who is also after a good copy of the Calvino book, and from there the story becomes more labyrinthine, with each twist taking the reader to a "new" book, masquerading as something else.

Calvino draws the reader in to the search for the missing pages, which then becomes a search for truth in fiction. As the book goes on the reader becomes more and more involved and frustrated at the merry-go-round of plots and beginnings, confusing what is "real" and what is the next "novel" that lands in their lap. Calvino throughout the book is looking at the notion of reading, of what we as readers want from a book, how the same book will resonate differently for different readers, and most importantly, what is "truth" in fiction.

This is a book that is stuffed-full of philosophy, and action. At times Kafka-esque, it is a very
European novel, and in fact a very Italian novel. It's definitely a post-modern novel too, which breaks down the barrier between reader and book, and plays with the idea of what a novel is, and can be.

Highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera

The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera

London: Faber & Faber, 1990           ISBN 0571142222

I've never read any of Milan Kundera's novels, so it might seem strange that I start my relationship with him with this book. In some ways I'm glad I did, as it gives a great insight into Kundera's view of the role of the novel - particularly in Europe - and what he is trying to do with it.

This book is a compilation of pieces written in other contexts, for other reasons: some have been manipulated to make this work hang together a bit better.

Kundera's theme in this book is to show how the novel developed from Cervantes through to the end of the twentieth century, how the modern world had circumscribed the novel with ideas of realism and notions of the absurd that have come to limit what writers do with the form these days. Kundera, a composer as well as a writer, strongly believes in the connexion between the two arts, and that a book is written much as a sonata or other multi-part opus may have been written.

Kundera's view that the novel is an exploration of the human condition, and as such finds the biographical impulse of critics and so-on repulsive. He is a firm believer of novelists not speaking other than in their novels, and notes with satisfaction that Debussy destroyed all the works he felt he didn't want to leave behind.

The irony is that one of Kundera's favourite novelists is Kafka, who famously told Max Brod to burn his works after he died. The section of this book that deals with Kafka should be required reading by every faculty member who dissects his work. What they do is actually destroy what Kafka was trying to achieve. Kundera, a fellow Czech, who also grew up in a system that Kafka in some ways prefigured, shows a deep understanding of Kafka's understanding of human nature, and of modern life.

He also warns us of the dangers of translation, and why one must be very careful when reading a work not in it's initial language...anecdotes of translators of his works that can't read Czech are both funny and disturbing at the same time.

In  this book, published in 1986, Kundera flags the death of the novel as he knows it, in the rise of mass media and the loss of privacy. Some of his comments are prescient. In an age where it has never been easier to access great literature, it has never mattered less, in academia in particular.

This is a book of parts, but some of the parts are well worth reading.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Third Reich by Roberto Bolano

The Third Reich by Roberto Bolano, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

London: Picador, 2011                                    ISBN 9780330535793

Roberto Bolano is an author I've heard a bit about without ever having a chance to read him until now. I know he died in 2003, and this book was not published in its original Spanish until 2010, so it's unclear to me whether the author considered this work as finished, or how much editing has taken place to present this book before the reader.

Putting aside these speculations, what we have here is a book that is fascinating to read, but hard to make sense of. It's written in the form of the diary of Udo Berger, who is on holidays in Spain with his girlfriend Ingeborg. Udo is German champion of a wargame called The Third Reich, based on World War Two campaigns. His diary explains that while on holiday he hopes to write an article for a gaming magazine, which is a possibility opened up for him by his victories. Undo and Ingeborg meet another German couple, Charley and Hanna, and start to hang out with them at the beach and in the bars and nightclubs. Udo can speak Spanish (he is staying at the same hotel where he spent his childhood holidays), and the four Germans hook up with the "Wolf" and the "Lamb", two Spanish neer-do-wells. Udo is also becoming obsessed with Frau Else, who runs the hotel (and who he tries to bed throughout the book), and El Quemado, a man who runs pedal-boats at the beach, and who is horribly disfigured by burns.

The holiday begins to fall apart for Udo: he can't get his article going, he finds Charley and Hanna hard work and Ingeborg is increasingly upset with Udo's obsession with his wargame. Then Charley disappears while windsurfing, and because Udo can speak Spanish he helps Hanna deal with the authorities during the search (Charley's body eventually is found), in what because a slightly Kafka-esque brush with power. Udo by this stage is also prowling the hotel looking for Frau Else and her elusive, allegedly ill, husband. Udo has also begun to play a game of Third Reich with El Quemado, teaching him the rules along the way. This game becomes an obsession, with Udo staying in Spain past the end of his holiday to complete it. Ingeborg, disgusted, leaves him, and then he finally meets Frau Else's husband, who intimates that Udo is playing El Quemado for his soul.

When Udo finally gets back to Germany, he is a changed man. He returns to his gaming fraternity, but his heart is no longer in it: perhaps losing to El Quemado has changed him.

It was hard for me to grasp what, if anything, Bolano had to say in this book. At times he is almost nostalgic for the real Third Reich, with his loving descriptions of Nazi Generals and their personality traits, and turning what was one of the appalling events in World history into a game. There is an air of nostalgia throughout the book, with references to Udo's childhood holidays regularly appearing. it is a book about obsession, and how that can derail a life, even temporarily.

I'm still "processing" this book two weeks after reading it, and will be for some time yet. I will be reading more Bolano.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

London: Faber and Faber, 1987 (originally published by Faber 1986)

ISBN 057114716X

This is a book that I have known about for a long time, but I had no intention of reading it this year until I saw a copy on the bookshelf of the beach-house I was renting this summer. I'm very glad I found it.

Ishiguro has written a deceptively simple, allusive tale of Japan's adjustment to post-war reality after their total defeat in World War Two. In a series of vignettes spanning the period from October 1948 to June 1950, through the eyes of retired artist Ono, we see not only the seeds of Japan's physical recovery from conflict but also the major mental changes that occur in the populace, particularly the young, over this period of time.

The opening of the book introduces us to Ono, as he entertains his married daughter Setsuko and her son Ichiro in the bombed-out remains of his house. His unmarried daughter Noriko, who still lives with him, has just gone through a failed marriage negotiation. Ono believes the arrangement fell through because the prospective groom was concerned that his social status was too low to have Noriko as a wife, but Noriko's sister Setsuko is concerned that there might be other reasons, to do with Ono's past, that might have crueled the match. Through Ono's reminiscences, we know that before the War he was a well-known artist and teacher, not without some influence, as pointed out by his former pupil and drinking mate Shintaro as they re-live earlier times in the ruins of the drinking quarter of their city (never identified in the book).

As the book progresses, the reader learns that Ono is at odds with the prevailing sentiment of the time, reflected in the bitterness of Setsuko's husband at the older generation for the pointless waste of the War, and in Noriko's prospective husband, who is pleased that the boss of his firm committed suicide to expiate his firm's wartime activities. Ono tries to argue that these people were doing what they thought best for the country at the time, but these protestations get short shrift.

His friend Shintaro comes to visit Ono with a request. He is trying to get a job teaching in a school, and has come to ask Ono for a letter, not of recommendation, but explaining how Shintaro had disagreed with him over politics while his student (a lie). It is in this passage we begin to learn that Ono was not just an artist, but a propagandist for the militarist faction in Japan, and so is out of favour in the new polity.

After the failure of Noriko's marriage negotiations another suitor appears, and this time Ono realises he needs to do something about his reputation. So he tries to visit some old acquaintances to try to ensure they do not destroy his daughter's chances by saying negative things about him. It is in this section of the book that we learn that Kuroda, Ono's star pupil, spent the War in prison, and has nothing nice to say about his former teacher.

Along the way we learn much about Ono's artistic upbringing, how his eyes were opened to the squalor of much of Japanese life, and how he became a supporter of the militarists out of what he saw as noble patriotism. We also learn that, much as he did to his own teacher, his best student, Kuroda turned against him politically. In a naive attempt to warn him off his unpatriotic ways Ono alerts the police, which is what led to Kuroda's imprisonment.

The last section of the book reveals Noriko now happily married, and as Ono talks with Setsuko, he is both surprised and irritated that she seemingly can't remember their earlier conversation about his past being a problem for Noriko's prospects and in fact doesn't see that his past is something he should apologise for at all. The end of the book sees Ono watching the traffic and office workers stream past the place where his favourite bar used to be, as he begins to accept the new Japan.

For such a short book (206p), there is a lot to take in. There is the change from being concerned with the past to forgetting it or putting it behind in a locked box. There is, in the person of Setsuko's son Ichiro, the infiltration of American values, as he pretends to be the Lone Ranger or Popeye. There is the radical physical change in the cities as apartments and offices take the place of traditional housing and shops. In Ono, himself, we see how a determined and talented man can do things of importance, and also how little that can mean if you hop on the wrong historical tram.

Ishiguro writes with much delicacy, a literary effect to inculcate the allusiveness and politeness of the Japanese, which he punctures from time-to-time to show how the younger generation have left a lot of the old behind. We learn that Ono's son was a soldier killed in Manchuria, and that Ono's wife was killed in one of the last raids of the War, but both these tragedies are not dwelt upon, and Ishiguro makes this clear that this was all too common at the time.

The sense of Ono being somewhat of a lost traveller, trying to negotiate the territory of the new Japan is felt strongly in this book, but as it goes on Ishiguro shows us that Ono has done this before, but then it was him and his associates who were creating the new Japan. It seems to me that at the end of the book Ono is perhaps coming to that realisation. He certainly is at peace withing himself in the knowledge that he did what he did for the right reasons, in his mind.

An excellent novel.

  

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Immoralist by Andre Gide

The Immoralist by Andre Gide, translated by Dorothy Bussy

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960      (Many editions extant)

It's not often a book leaves me completely at a loss. The Immoralist is one of those books. Gide is someone I've obviously heard of, but this is the first work of his that I have read: this review was written the day I've finished this book, but I think my view may change over time and further reflection.

The book in many ways reminds of Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, with the protagonist Michel suffering a crisis of health and soul, travelling a physical and metaphysical journey: from physical sickness to health and from spiritual health to a state of limbo. Meanwhile his new wife travels the opposite journey.

The Immoralist is Michel's narration of how his illness changed his outlook on life, how everything that was important to him before his illness lost its lustre. His love of history - which formed the basis of his career - becomes hateful to him, and in fact everything that once sustained him slowly falls apart. When his wife miscarries, he also loses hope in the future.

It is his friend Menalque who sums up Michel's new ideas of living, which can be illustrated in a few quotes -

"Do you know the reason why poetry and philospphy are nothing but dead-letter nowadays? It is because they have severed themselves from life."

"Nowadays beauty no longer acts; action no longer desires to be beautiful; and wisdom is a sphere apart."

"Because I do not want to recollect...I should be afraid of preventing the future and of allowing the past to encroach on me. It is out of the utter forgetfulness of yesterday that I create every new hour's freshness. It is never enough for me to have been happy."

The result of Michel pursuing this path can be guessed at - he eventually becomes caught in the limbo of the here-and-now, with nothing to look forward to and only failure and tragedy to look back on. Along the way he thought he could find truthfulness in the lower classes. All he did find there was deceit and hatred for him and his class. The more he tries to ingratiate himself with them the more they resent his not behaving as he should.

His desire to get back to Tunis, where he recovered from his illness at the beginning of the book, brings only sadness. The young boys he knew there (there is a strong homo-erotic undertone to this book) have almost all developed for the worse, and the journey kills his wife. His care for her, undertaken selfishly, contrasts to her selfless care for him. By the final pages Michel is an aimless tramp, if a wealthy one.

This book was first published in 1902 and I can imagine at the time it may have been quite scandalous. It still is in its own way: a lesson in the result of trying to escape one's responsibilities as a human.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, The Immoralist will take me some time to digest fully.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Contested Will by James Shapiro

Contested Will : who wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro

London: Faber & Faber, 2010                  ISBN 9780571235766

For those interested in the Shakespeare conspiracy, and for an accessible guide to its history and why those who believe in an alternative writer of the plays are irretrievably wrong, this is as good a place as any to start reading. Focusing on the claims of Bacon and Oxford in the main, with a passing reference to other claimants, Shapiro not only gives a good run-through of the evidence that convinces sane people that Shakespeare wrote the plays, but also brings out some of the absurdities in the claims for Bacon and Oxford.

What I found most interesting in this book is that both Delia Bacon (no relation to Francis), who proposed Francis as Shakespeare, and John Looney, who first proposed Oxford, did so after spiritual and personal crises which - as Shapiro points out - had a lot to do with them becoming iconoclast. It almost goes without saying that their initial doubts about Shakespeare arose from a complete misunderstanding of theatre and playwrighting in the 16th and early 17th centuries, and by them thinking of authorship during that time as reflective of how authors worked and thought in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Shapiro demonstrates that it is all too easy to fall into the trap of using Shakespeare's writings to try and discover something of his life, and also explains that in the 1500s and 1600s the idea of writing - especially for the stage - that was in any way autobiographical was almost unheard of.

As historical work on Bacon, Oxford, and Shakespeare has moved on in the later 20th and 21st centuries, it has become clear that both Bacon and Oxford could not have written the plays, and that Shakespeare - despite what Baconians and Oxfordians might have you believe - was acknowledged at the time by various sources as the writer of the plays we know, and of others now lost. It has also become clear that Shakespeare collaborated on several of his plays as well.

For every character or situation in the plays or poems that the conspiratists use to further their theories, there are two or three that offer a counter view, and Shapiro uses those characters in his final summing up, which is a withering attack on the small imaginations of those who would doubt Shakespeare. For it seems that those who refuse to believe that Shakespeare could write the plays also refuse to believe that it is possible to make up stories and plays from one's imagination, using things one has read or heard. It's actually quite sad to read the bleatings of these people.

So, well worth reading, and with an excellent bibliographical essay with which the reader can take their own journey through the major literature of the authorship question if they wish. Or, just stop at Shapiro.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The wine-dark sea by Leonardo Sciascia

The wine-dark sea by Leonardo Sciascia, translated by Avril Bardoni, Introduction by Albert Mobilio

New York: New York Review Books, 2000       ISBN 0940322536

In an author's note at the end of this collection, Sciascia writes "These short stories were written - together with a few more that seemed to me not worth collecting and reissuing - between 1959 and 1972." He goes on to write that this collection came about owing to requests from his readers, who wished to have the stories collected into one volume.

And what a great little volume it is - stories that give us the flavour of Sicily in bite-sized pieces. Some of these stories are a moment in time extrapolated to show the nature of a place: Philology for example, where a discussion about the origins of a word (mafia) tell us in ten pages what the Mafia is, how it works, and how it continues to thrive in Sicily. Some stories speak of the clash of cultures, such as The test where a Swiss businessman cannot grasp what he is being "told" by his Sicilian counterparts, because the Sicilian way is to talk in metaphor around an issue, rather than with the Teutonic directness of their Northern neighbours. Many stories are about love, and how families can come to regret thwarting true love when it is deemed not to their benefit, even when the payoff can be years later, as in The ransom.

All of the stories are human stories, stories of love, of revenge, of stupidity and avarice. The are all written in the spare, ironic style that Sciascia is known for, which leaves the reader thinking.

Well worth dipping into.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell