Recent Reading

Not as good as other books I’ve read by the author. I have the impression he set himself the task of writing a novel a year, or similar, and as a result he ploughed on to get one out as each temporal milestone loomed up, regardless of its quality. Moderately entertaining.

Favourite quotation: “His chronic sense of the perplexing character of the moral universe descended upon him heavily.

Well-written, slightly dated stories set in the nearish past. Possibly the nearish past is the time most likely to seem slightly dated, as it is the period that many readers remember and, in reading it described, they recognise suddenly that it no longer exists. In a way the stories are horror stories, in that they concern a world where there is very little love. The general tenor of the book is faintly melancholic.

Favourite quotation: This isn’t exactly a favourite, but it gives a sense of the book’s tone and the writer’s power of observation - “It was years since he had ridden in a bus. He had forgotten how the seats smelled, made hot by the sun through glass, and the rough white tickets that came whirring out of the machine.”

This began intriguingly but ended up as a bit of agit-prop about why we should be nice to illegal migrants. The idea that people who oppose unrestricted migration need to have it explained to them that illegal migrants are as human as they are is a patronising one. The question of open borders is not about emotions but about the practicality of large numbers of people who don't like aspects of the places where they live abandoning those places and movng to better-run, more orderly places, bringing with them all their cultural differences, unresolved resentments and inflated expectations. Leaving everything else aside, what becomes of the place they leave behind? Is it morally acceptable to give up on somewhere and see whether you can hitch yourself to another nation that has, through centuries of political convulsion and struggle, reached a place of stability and shared vision?

Favourite quotation: If I were to quote a sentence from the book, I’m sorry to say that it would only be to point out that the line editor did not do a careful enough job. Some clunky, ungrammatical lines have been left in, together with some analogies that don’t really work.

This book, an updated version of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, has had some terrible reviews, mainly because for some people Jane Austen is an object of worship and therefore it is sacrilege to play around with her work. I find Austen’s authorial voice irritating and therefore am not bothered if someone plays around with her work. I really enjoyed this clever, light hearted book.

Favourite quotation: The book is very light and I am not sure that any one line or paragraph is really worth repeating but I liked the modern twist given to the younger sister's rogue lover.

An extraordinary book about a man’s dedication to obeying God’s will. Highly recommend for those interested in Christianity.

Favourite quotation: “The work of the kingdom, the work of labouring and suffering with Christ, is no more spectacular for the most part than the routine of daily living.”

(I took this at random, where the page fell open - there are plenty of other candidates within the book)

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this, given that it is whimsical. I went on to read another by the same author, the name of which I have forgotten - something involving lanterns? I am baffled by how much I enjoy the light dreamy atmosphere of Hoffman’s books. They are like pastries made by an expert pastry chef.

Favourite quotation: Like Anne Tyler, the authorial voice in Hoffman is omnipotent, telling the reader everything (compare Jane Gardam’s method in her story Blue Poppies, which is a masterclass in how to create a fictional world in a less intrusive way). However, Hoffman pulls off the same authorial voice as Tyler without being maddening, perhaps because the world she creates is not a real one, but slightly magical and clearly make-believe, the stuff of legend, which needs a narrator - “She’d already had more than her share of botched relationships, yet she’d agreed to have dinner with Eric, ever hopeful despite the statistics that promised her an abject and lonely old age” provides an example of what I mean. I forgot to say that recently I did actually drag myself through Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and I couldn’t bear it, because I felt she sets up characters and moves them about like chesspieces. They have no depth, no reality. It is campfire storytelling. Of course it is also a matter of taste and it is not to my taste. Returning to this book, “There are those who will use any excuse to throw caution to the wind” is a mildly amusing Hoffmann aside, I suppose; however the sentence goes on to descend into whimsy.

Spark is having a moment, thanks to a new biography about her. I think she is often almost brilliant and almost always fairly annoying. The book is concerned with evil and with madness - and, after Spark's odd fashion, Catholicism. 

Evil is a fascinating subject, but Spark doesn’t deal with it particularly satisfactorily here, preferring to amuse herself and slightly forgetting about pleasing the reader, (as elsewhere in her work, there is a faint sense that she rather despises her readers - and possibly all human beings). 

Favourite quote: Spark's description of EU bureaucrat Ernst's addiction to trying to imagine what things might be worth at auction:

"When he visited the Pope, even then, he couldn't help calculating the Pope's worldly riches (life-proprietor of the Vatican and contents...) Ernst knew it  was a frightful habit, but he told himself it was realistic; and it was too exciting altogether ever to give up, this mental calculation of what beauty ws worth on the current market." 

Additionally, despite the book being published in 1990, Spark has a character who has “a job as a junior researcher in artificial intelligence, the bionics branch. He explained this artificial intelligence: the study of animal intelligence systems as patterns for mechanical devices, a mixed science involving electronics and biology.”

I bought this because I wanted to get a glimpse of life among ambitious and upwardly mobile citizens in Lagos. It was vivid and I quite enjoyed it, although the ending was mildly puzzling.

Favourite quotation: There is an interesting admission that slavery has been practised by people other than whites - "We sold slaves to them. We had slaves too, in Africa. Before and after.” 

Mind you the character who says this is disapproved of for doing so.

A well-meaning attempt to raise awareness about grooming gangs via fiction, this novel reveals the fact that Scruton, like Barry Humphries and AA Gill, could not write a good novel, despite being an exceptionally brilliant person. At least he was in good company.

Favourite quote: better not to go there.

Reading 2024 - The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld

I admire Curtis Sittenfeld very much. I have not read her imagined tales of Laura Bush and Hilary Clinton and I probably won't, as I hate fiction into which real figures intrude (the big flaw of War and Peace, for me, is the appearance of Napoleon as a character within its pages).

What I have read by Sittenfeld is her novel Eligible,  an updating of Pride and Prejudice, which I really enjoyed - even couldn't put down, to be truthful. Purists hate that book, but I have always found Jane Austen unbearably waspish - never allowing a reader to intuit, always insisting on explaining who is absurd or irritating or silly - so anything written as a pastiche of her is not going to outrage me. Instead, I found Eligible clever and entertaining, and was amused by Sittenfeld's updating of some of the original's social dilemmas. I have also read several short stories by Sittenfeld and every one of them was both a pleasure to read and full of insight. Therefore, I was very happy to start 2024 with a novel by her

The Man of My Dreams tells the story of Hannah, who at the beginning of the novel is 14 or 15 and staying with her father's sister, as her family have been driven from their home by her father's temper. The novel follows the life of this lonely girl as she grows up, with little help or care from selfish parents, in a society that gives her the message that the most important thing for a young female is being able to attract young men and go to bed with them. 

Hannah does not fit the template of attractiveness necessary for this - or at least she believes she does not. She is also not at all sexually adventurous. She feels as if she is a misfit, although she is actually both wise and normal and probably far from alone, if only her contemporaries would be honest. 

I find Sittenfeld's writing so absorbing that I happily followed Hannah through almost 300 pages of not really getting what she has been taught to want and slowly learning that perhaps what she has been taught is wrong. I don't know how Sittenfeld does it but for me at least she is simply never boring. Perhaps one element of her charm is her truthfulness. An example of this is her description of teenage Hannah's reaction to being accosted by an older male stranger in the park. Instead of the simplicity of me-too outrage, Sittenfeld explains that Hannah felt "simultaneously alarmed, insulted and flattered."

I suppose I should register the suspicion that The Man of My Dreams might be of no interest to most male readers, chronicling as it does the coming of age of a young female. Although would anyone by the same token argue that Tom Jones would be of no interest to female readers?