House of Glass (Hadley Freeman, 2020)

Longtime journalist at the Guardian Hadley Freeman (since then moved to the Sunday Times) has covered topics of pop culture, politics and feminism. She had the idea to write this book for 20 years, but never knew how to start. She first wanted to write about her grandmother, but then expanded it to include all the siblings, as their stories told a story of the 20th century.

The story revolved around Freeman’s grandmother Sala, and Sala’s three brothers, from Poland to France, and in the case of Sala, on to the US. Freeman herself was born in America and grew up there, until her family moved to the UK when she was 11. It’s a cosmopolitan story, but the transfuge is motivated by oppression. The Glass family are Jews, and a series of pogroms in Chrzanow leads them to decide to emigrate to France in the early 1900s. Thinking they were safe from harm in France, it came as a shock that France became occupied and set up a collaborationist government which persecuted Jews. 

It’s a hefty history lesson, with details about the Pétainist leadership. It is also a personal story, about a young girl’s relationship to her grandmother. It’s impressive how well Freeman has been able to weave the story, with an unusual amount of detailed research. Maybe some of it was the result of artistic license? The four Glass siblings all have interesting stories, but the standout is Sander, who reinvents himself as the fashion mogul Alex Maguy in France.

Freeman puts in commentary on political issues throughout the text, in true journalistic fashion, which I believe benefits the text and makes it feel fresh. She also includes her thoughts on Jewish identity and integration. I recently read Anne Berest‘s “La Carte postale” which has a lot of points in common with Freeman’s book. Both are books about discovering a French Jewish family history, by focusing on four different individuals. The writers are also of the same age (Freeman born in 1978, Berest in 1979). Both had relatives who were friends with world class painters like Picasso and Picabia. Both had relatives detained in the French internment camp Pithiviers. They both have also written books about fashion (The Meaning of Sunglasses: A Guide to (Almost) All Things Fashionable; How to be Parisian wherever you are). The difference is in how they chose to write, because Berest wrote in a novelistic style, whereas Freeman chose a journalistic approach.

Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (Richard Holmes, 1985)

The biographical writings of a biographer of 19th century writers. Pretty unusual combination of essay, autobiography, literary biography and reflections on the art of writing biography.

My friend John used to say that literary tourism was a drag. You know, visiting the grave of Jim Morrison in Paris, or going to Kafka‘s house in Prague or something. Who do you become if you do that kind of thing?

I have fallen into this trap myself, I too have felt a sense of history when visiting famous writers’ homes – a few years ago I visited the home of Edith Wharton in Massachusetts. But I was in the area on other business. Others go even further, like a a friend of mine who once seeked out a cave in which famed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once temporarily dwelled, in provincial Norway. That’s a level of dedication I don’t possess.

Holmes, however, has this dedication in spades: as a young man, he went on a wallfahrt in the footsteps (hence the title) of his idol R.L. Stevenson and his trek across rural France.

It makes the French revolution come alive when he describes it through the eyes of Wollstonecraft. Also noteworthy for me that he describes her time in Sweden and Norway.

He then goes on to describe a lengthy stay in Italy where he traces the ramblings of P.B. Shelley. It goes on too long in my opinion.

Nerval is the least known of the writers he describes, but arguably the most interesting. He was an important figure in the literary circuit around Saint-Beuve, de Musset and Théophile Gautier.

This is the first book of this kind Holmes wrote, where he mixes biography ad autobiography, or writes literary biography through memoir. He has since ventured into that area with later titles like Sidetracks (2000) and This Long Pursuit (2016). It is an interesting experiment, and I tried to find other examples in this obscure genre. I found that most biographers don’t consider their own lives very interesting and rarely venture into writing about themselves. An interesting exception is James Atlas (biographer of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow) who wrote a few years ago The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale. It was his way of bookending his writing career. Are there other memoir-writing biographers that I’ve missed?

Under the Net (Iris Murdoch, 1954)

“… then I had more time for work, or rather for the sort of dreamy unlucrative reflection which is what I enjoy more than anything in the world.”

I have been meaning to get to Iris Murdoch for a long time. Why? Because I was curious about what people meant when they called her books “philosophical fiction”. I’m not sure I am particularly more informed on that point after having read Under the Net, but then again I suspect this might not have been the best example of Murdoch’s style. Anyway, it is her debut novel, and it concerns a man in his thirties who loafs around London working as a translator and thinking about girls and where to sleep for the night.

Murdoch was 35 when this was published, and it feels very much like a first book – it’s a lightly comic, picaresque sort of novel in which the protagonist finds himself in complications with locked doors and stolen dogs. It made me realise that this sort of fare must have been common in the mid-50’s, and it was popular, too! It didn’t do much for me nearly 70 years on… but it was somewhat interesting as an example of the zeitgeist of 1950s London.

Upon starting the book, Murdoch had been to France, and as she was partial to philosophy, she ingested a fair share of Sartre. This influence is echoed in her main character who translates from French and call parts of London “contingent”. My thoughts also lingered on the topic of gender, or more specifically the book made me think of instances of where a female writer makes the protagonist male or vice versa (as Murdoch does in this one). I couldn’t recall a single book I’d read where that was the case. Curious. I remember my father commenting on a book he read when I was a child that he was impressed that the female writer could express the male mind so well. I can’t recall the name of that writer, though. I later learned that Murdoch typically wrote male characters. I don’t know if that carries any real significance, but it was interesting nonetheless. South African J.M. Coetzee wrote the book Elizabeth Costello with a protagonist of the opposite sex. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of that practice historically (of course women wrote as men for centuries because of oppression, but I’m thinking about more recent times).

The title Under the Net is meant to refer to the Net of language, which we all are trapped in. Somewhat wittgensteinian… I found the philosophical content in this rather poor, but it was also encouraging to read about people who had philosophical thoughts. That, I suppose, must count as a kind of philosophical writing? The philosophical parts are clearly lifted from Sartre’s la Nausée, and most of it is exposed in a series of conversations with Jake’s friends who are philosophy teachers. I was curious if there would be any novel ideas on linguistic determinism, seeing as how I once wrote an essay on it for my linguistics professor. I didn’t find much about the titular net in the actual book, and will have to continue looking elsewhere, possibly next in S.I Hayakawa‘s Language in Thought and Action.

The book is filled with markers of things that (I assume) were cool in 1950s, like judo, masked Asian theatre, communism, the movie business. Part of the novel is set in Paris, and that whole segment is one big (if you’ll excuse the term) namedropapalooza. I guess it was important to Murdoch to show in writing that she knew the name of each and every street… I must assume her writing abilities improved after this, seeing as how she wrote a total of 26 novels before croaking at age 80. I remember seeing the biopic about her last days (where she is portrayed by Judi Dench) but have no real recollection of its contents.

Summing up, I won’t be returning to Murdoch anytime soon, as I didn’t particularly enjoy her style, at least as showcased in this book. But it wasn’t a waste of time reading such a well-known book. Now I at least know a bit about her writing.

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Notes on the 1954 club
As soon as Kags and Simon announced that the next club was to be themed around the year 1954, I went looking around about what kind of book I would choose. I found I had read some of the most famous ones from that year, like Tolkien, Golding, Sagan. I found a Turkish book, The Time Regulation Institute, by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-62) which I figured would be a good choice. I’ve never read a Turkish book before, so I thought it would be fun, and then put it out of my mind for a few months. As April approached, I started reading the book. I got about 100 pages in until I had to give up. It was too boring! Then I found Nigerian writer Cyprian Ekwensi‘s People of the City, but I decided against it. I thought briefly about Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade‘s collection Fazendeiro do Ar, but I don’t really know how to review poetry…so I had to abandon that idea too. In all this confusion I found Iris Murdoch, which struck me as a bit of an unimaginative choice, but I figured it was for the best. So I went with it.

Also considered:
Randall Jarrell – Pictures from an Institution
Max Frisch – I’m not Stiller
George Lammings – Emigrants
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Money (Martin Amis, 1984)

A comedic romp of a novel, filled with fast-paced equivocations on the culture of excess that was the 80s (that’s at leasy what I’m told the eighties were, as I myself only managed to experience 1987-89 as a toddler). The story of an asanine director of TV commercials who flies from London to New York in the hopes of landing his first big movie deal. He takes the odd meetings with producers and film people, but mostly his mind races commenting on his binge drinking, his food addiction, and his interest in pornography.
Very funny writing, intermittently, with good one-liners from the sterling mind of Amis junior. A lot of it is satirical takes on the consumerist mentality that got going in the eighties – and, dishearteningly enough, a lot of his satire would be just as valid today (almost 40 years later!). This could be taken to mean that not much has changed since 1984 (which of course it has), but I think Amis’ adroit apercus were a bit ahead of their time, too. Some things strike today’s reader as frightfully dated, though, like the idea that the movie business is cool or the preponderance of strip clubs and prostitution.

Amis was inspired to write the novel after his experiences as a script writer for a movie with Kirk Douglas in 1980, a scifi picture called Saturn 3 (which was a phenomenal bomb of a movie, according to available box office statistics). He must also have been interested in exploring a certain kind of male ego, which is what the whole of the novel really is – the yammering thoughts of an insecure pompous twerp. Interestingly, a real person of that type would never be able to write so funnily about his own thoughts, so it is kind of an impossible combination that makes the formula work. Amis writes himself into the book, in order to fend off any criticism that the chauvinist ramblings of the protagonist are autobiographical. But Amis has admitted that some of the scenes in the book are based on his own experiences, even though he says that he mostly just “made it up”. From the first pages it put me in mind of some books I read in my late teens, like Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, or The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe. They are also in their own way, critiques of the culture of the eighties, even though they both came out towards the end of the decade. I liked the description of American culture from a British point of view, even though Amis technically made his character half-american (in the book he mentions his American mother who died when he was young, and he spent age 7 to 15 living with his aunt in New Jersey) – noone is fooled by this trick. A person who had spend those years in the US would not come up with the things the aptly named John Self says in Money… (I should know, I spent part of my childhood there too). Money rules everything, and bank notes are somehow suicide notes, says John Self. Not everything is clear in this book from 1984, but it is very funny at times.
Amis went on to write inventive books about Stalin, a dog, a concentration camp commendant, scifi imaginings of London in the year 1999 (written in 1989) and a state of the union satire of the UK called “Lionel Asbo”.

The Innocence of Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton, 1911)

Ten years ago when I for period of time lived in Norway I chanced upon a provincial public library in one of the small towns along the Sogne fjord. The pride of the library was a collection of books by one G.K. Chesterton, donated to the library by the former mayor of the town, who must have been a big admirer of Chesterton. I remember noticing that Chesterton had written a lot of books. A few of those are centered around the character Father Brown, a Sherlock Holmes-like Catholic Priest who solves mysteries.

The reason I picked up the stories of Father Brown was on a recommendation of a friend, and they have been accompanying me the last couple of days. What sets them apart from a lot of other detective fiction is that these stories are almost like the writing in novel-of-ideas; what seems most important for Chesterton is to get an idea across, and a lot of the twists and turns are driven by this conceit. The author, famously converted to Catholicism in 1922, already leaves plenty of Catholic clues in the stories. Maybe paradoxical to some readers, Father Brown is very rational in his investigations, and it seems his secret weapon is his deep intuition in questions of the human soul. In one story he says “superstition is irreligious”.

I like the old prose and the settings of the stories. I might not return to the other collections of Father Brown, as these sated my curiosity for now. And the others seem to be more or less the same fare. Father Brown is actually based on the priest who inspired Chesterton to convert himself. One Bobby Bobby from Ireland, serving in Bradford. Father Brown is probably the original “priest-as-detective” literary character. Glaring lacunae in my own reading of this subgenre include Umberto Eco’s “In the Name of the Rose” and, perhaps Giovannino Guareschi’s stories about Don Camillo and Peppone. I have, on the other hand, read a story about the sleuth Rabbi Small by Harry Kemelman.

Autumn (Ali Smith, 2016)

This book has been much discussed in recent years. It is the first of a quartet (or quadrilogy as some Americans might say) of books named after each season, much like Antonio Vivaldi‘s 1725 masterpiece. It has been hailed as the first “post-Brexit” novel, and the series is considered innovative because the books are written and published very quickly and in step with the zeitgeist and current developments. They were in bookstores just six weeks after being finished, instead of the usual 18 months that publishers normally take before launching a book. This must be a factor in these books being so popular.

The conceit of four books focusing on each season had been an idea Ali Smith had had for 20 years, and reading Autumn made me think of books based on similar ideas. There is nature writer Edwin Teale Way‘s “the American Seasons” (1951-65), and the Hunter Diary of Ivan Turgenev (1852). Norwegian wunderkind K.O. Knausgard wrote a series of books named for the seasons in Norwegian 2015-16, but they are not more than glorified diaries, really. Smith invents characters and plots and does things with her writing.

Autumn centers on the friendship of a 101 year old musician, Daniel Gluck and his 30-year old ex-neighbor and art historian Elisabeth Demand. Through the character of Demand, Smith revives the story of Pauline Boty, a the half-forgotten figure in the London Pop Art scene, who tragically died young and whose legacy was somehow swept under the rug. Another story Smith weaves into this book is that of Christine Keeler, a woman involved in the so-called Profumo affair in the early 60s, where it was revealed that a group of politicians had visited prostitutes.

The writing style is quite unusual, with a lot of jumps and witticisms of varying success. I get the impression that Ali Smith allows a lot of herself and her opinions to come out in the characters. Numerous are the comments on contemporary mores, art history, feminism and love. Some of the exchanges feel a bit too constructed. In the final analysis, this is not really something I particularly liked, but now I know what one of the more celebrated recent author’s writing is like. I remember when I first saw her name years ago, I thought it was a muslim writer, because of the way she has chosen to spell her first name.

Red Pill (Hari Kunzru, 2020)

This book has been describes as “the Gen X Midlife-Crisis Novel in its purest form”, I discovered upon having finished it. I think it did a very fine job of commenting on changes in our cultural climate the past five years. I liked the opening paragraph:

I think it is possible to track the onset of middle age exactly. It is the moment when you examine your life and instead of a field of possibility opening out, an increase in scope, you have a sense of waking from sleep or being washed up onshore, newly conscious of your surroundings. So this is where I am, you say to yourself. This is what I have become. It is when you first understand that your condition – physically, intellectually, socially, financially – is not absolutely mutable, that what has already happened will, to a great extent, determine the rest of the story. What you have done cannot be undone, and much of what you have been putting off for “later” will never get done at all. In short, your time is a finite and dwindling resource. From this moment on, whatever you are doing, whatever joy or intensity or whirl of pleasure you may experience, you will never shake the almost-imperceptible sensation that you are traveling on a gentle downward slope into darkness.

This rather bleak passage aside, I was happy to finally be reading some contemporary fiction, after almost exclusively reading books from the 20th century. Red Pill is a book of many parts, or multi-layered, as they say nowadays. Already in the title is an indication that it deals with contemporary themes, as “the red pill” is an expression popular in certain quarters of the newer right-wing movements, which is supposed to denote an informed mindset.

The story begins with the protagonist describing his arrival at a writer’s retreat in Germany. The other writers at the place are full of pretentious blather and the narrator doesn’t enjoy the management’s surveillance policy. He tries to write a book about poetry and is preoccupied with German romantic poet Novalis. One evening, he meets the writer of a TV show he likes, a police procedural. It turns out this TV-writer is also a public speaker on behalf of the “alt-right” movement. He becomes obsessed with this writer and loses his mind a little bit.

It is a initially a portrayal of the creative class and its ludicrous idiosyncrasies, and then turns to being more focused on the new right wing internet troll culture and the protagonist’s descent into madness. It includes scenes from a refugee asylum after the refugee crisis of 2015 and also comments on “cancel culture” and mental health issues. In the middle is a lengthy passage about a punk band in the East German Republic which doesn’t really fit into the rest of the narrative. Nevertheless, I am impressed with Kunzru’s ability to weave together all these strands into a coherent narrative, and to engage with other worldviews in a non-simplistic way.

The Fox and the Hedgehog (Isaiah Berlin, 1953)

I have approached the prospect of taking on Tolstoy’s major works, and was fascinated when I learned more of his philosophical intention with War and Peace. It surprises me that I hadn’t heard about it earlier as it is quite extraordinary. My fascination led me to read Berlin’s extended essay on Tolstoy’s philosophy of history. This book is well-known in learned circles for taking an ancient roman proverb (attributed to Archilochus) and expanding it to an argument to classifying intellectual figures into two categories – hedgehogs and foxes. The first category is said to know one thing well, the second a little of everything. It is basically the same argument that is rehashed every now and then about specialization in the academy and liberal arts education and “intellectuals” who go outside their “area of expertise”. I have a long history of following debates of this kind, and for that reason should have already read this by now. Anyway.

Shakespeare, for instance, is said to be a fox. Dostoevsky however is a hedgehog. Berlin proposes the theory that Tolstoy is a hedgehog who poses as a fox. Or holds the fox as an ideal. I don’t know really how seriously to take this game, and I’m more interested in the main argument, the one about Tolstoy’s view of history. It is informed by the views of Arthur Schopenhauer, and takes in the notion of zeitgeist in a novel way. Tolstoy finds sociology to be a laughable endeavour, because history is not governed by laws in that sense. Why is that never mentioned in sociology classes? New names to me are those of Kareev, Görres, Danilevsky, Wackenroder – all 19th century thinkers that are unknown today.

Another Time (W.H. Auden, 1939)

I have been vaguely aware of Wystan Hugh Auden since I was in my late teens, when I read a passing note on his poetry in Erica Jong‘s Fear of Flying. I was also made aware of a personal family connection to Auden by way of my grandmother’s good friend who knew Auden at Oxford. It was shortly after reading Jong that I was given a signed copy of Auden’s poetry collection “Another Time” from 1939 that had been in said friend’s possession. I treated this tome with the requisite reverence, even maybe too much reverence – because I never dared read it. Until now.

At this point, I should state that although I have much respect for the form, I’m not sure I am a poetry person, because a lot (most) poetry passes me by, or leaves me untouched. A few poets have gotten through to me, like Michaux and Ekelund maybe, but generally it is tough going for me.

Several poems in this collection are about famous people, like A E Housman, Voltaire and Sigmund Freud. Some are about places (Musée des beaux-arts, Dover) and some about points in time, like the well-known “September 1, 1939” – about the start of world war two.

I know quite little of Auden’s biography – I know he was a religious man off and on, that he was in love with Christopher Isherwood, lived in Berlin, Iceland and then the US. He has apparently been described as the best poet of the 20th century by Joseph Brodsky. He must have been very big at one point. He also wrote the words to the short film Night Mail. I have always felt a connection to his name, without real reason. Now that I’ve finally read some of his work I feel better equipped to make an assessment.

Outline (Rachel Cusk, 2014)

The outline of a life – is that what is meant by the title of this celebrated “autofiction” bestseller from 2014? I read it thusly, because this book dips in and out of the life stories of a series of characters, and provides middle age sophistry as commentary. I found it quite charming.

I am always tragically late to all books with buzz, probably because the buzz ticks me off, and it is impossible to know if there is any redeeming quality to the book once the dust settles. I have found that the dust will have settled about six years after publication, so I tried this book out on a whim. Well, that’s only part of the truth – it was also a curiosity about what passes for contemporary fiction these days that brought this book to my attention. It is part of a trilogy of books, all supposedly written in the same style, published 2014-2018. And it is a very peculiar style indeed.

The story concerns a writer, about to spend a week as a guest lecturer in creative writing in Athens. She meets people during this week, whose lives are explored in detail. Not much is said about the main character, she more or less goes around as a vessel for the other stories, which makes for quite an unusual effect. I took this as a possible comment on how certain men annoyingly overshare and take over conversations – but later in the novel the same procedure goes for the women. A little trick that Cusk uses (that I’ve noticed elsewhere in newer fiction, I wonder where it comes from? possibly magazine journalism) is to mix first person narration with spoken lines of the characters, which produces a mesmerising effect. Something like this, from the beginning of chapter seven:

I said it looked very impressive, and we got out of the car and sat at a table, beside one of the palm trees. It was important, he said, to remember to enjoy yourself along the way: in a sense, this had become his philosophy of life these days.

It is a middle aged person thinking about life, surrounded by other middle aged persons thinking about life, too. I’ve never read a book that explicitly deals with thoughts on the life course. Most closely maybe Annie Ernaux, Nina Bouraoui or possibly Benjamins bok by Bo Carpelan (a book someone recommended to me). Maybe the Sports Writer by Richard Ford? But all these books are about one character dwelling on aging, Cusk’s unique contribution is to provide a chorus of voices – and this without even giving the protagonist much space at all.

The story is quite secondary, the main event is the composition. In short, she meets a man on the plane who takes her out on a boat, she has lunch with an Irish fellow guest teacher, she meets with a Greek literary agent and a local writer. And she describes her teaching sessions, where the students talk about their assignments. I don’t know how much of this is based on lived experience, and I wonder how knowing that would change my perception of the book. I also thought about whether there is any larger theme to this purported trilogy, or if it just keeps going in the same style. I might return to volume two at some point. We’ll see…