A Common Reader . . .

Review: Metropole - Ferenc Karinthy

I've enjoyed looking at some Telegram books recently, and found Metropole in a local bookshop.  In this unusual novel, Hungarian linguist Budai travels to Helsinki for an international conference but inadvertently is placed on a flight to an un-named and unidentifiable city, where he finds himself whisked away to an hotel without his baggage.  He finds himself unable to communicate with the hotel staff despite trying several languages, and because he is so tired he decides to accept the room he is offered and to sort out revised travel plans in the morning. 

So begins this labyrinthine tale of abandonment in a foreign city, every traveller's nightmare, where nobody can recognise your language and your passport has been retained by your hotel, you have no baggage and only a limited supply of money.  Karinthy has made a wonderful job of describing what happened to Budai over the next few days, and the world he creates is sufficiently Kafka-esque for it to hit all the right buttons in the nightmare stakes. 

The city Budai finds himself in is vastly over-crowded.  Budai is pushed and shoved every time he steps outside and returns from his exploratory expeditions bruised and aching.  The shops are full and endless queues form in cafeterias and shops.  Customers have to find what they want, then queue to pay for it and queue again to pick it up (echoes of Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross Road in times past).  It is the same in the hotel.  Budai is unable to make his problem known to the hotel staff owing to their knowledge of only their own language and as Budai makes sign language or draws little diagrams, the staff are already looking over his shoulder at the next customer. 

Days pass, with the mystery of the location of the city and its strange language deepening all the time.  Budai resorts to assaulting a policeman in order to get arrested: at least that way someone will take notice of him and perhaps call for an interpreter. All that happens however is a brief encounter with a casual and brutish system which spits him out again as quickly as it took him in. 

Budai tries to master the language, but it seems to be as difficult as decoding an ancient Egyptian text.  He steals a telephone directory, buys a book and collects leaflets in order to try to make sense of the language but this seems like one of those impossible tasks you are set in a dream, with the details hazy and fluid, and the solution just out of reach.  He manages to form a relationship with a young woman who operates the hotel lift.  She teaches him the number one to ten, but every day, the words seem to have changed, and Budai wonders whether there are different words for each number like the English zero, nought, "oh", null.  Even her name seems to change slightly each day so he can never quite capture it in his notebook. 

I found the story quite gripping and enjoyed the nightmarish aspects to it.  Anyone who travels to a foreign city knows something of the difficulty of making oneself known, and it is easy to relish the troubles that befall Budai when this is taken to excess.

There are some big themes here, the nature of language being the main one.  The people of the city seem to be afflicted with a Babelesque confusion of tongues.  The city is in the process of building a gigantic tower near the hotel, symptomatic perhaps of the confusion of tongues in the Genesis passage, "Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech".  Linguistic understanding has become a free-flowing thing, more dependent on being the right sort of person rather than saying the right things.  Budai and the lift operator (Pepe, Bebe, Ébébe?) can barely exchange any thoughts at all, but when unexpectedly intimate one night, a free-flowing understanding is achieved for a brief hour or so. 

Budai has certainly captured the atmosphere of the city very well.  It is a city gone wrong, where a population explosion has reduced everyone to just one rung above survival.  The inhabitants are short-tempered, impatient, intolerant of strangers and prone to low-level cruelty.  We see these tendencies in all cities but no city we know has descended to the point where every street is packed with people, and there is never a quiet time of day.  Budai's attempts to find the outer boundaries of the city fail: even when he takes a Metro to the outermost station he only sees vistas of further urban sprawl stretching to the horizon. 

I enjoyed this book but was also reminded of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled in which an international composer arrives in a city to conduct a music festival and finds himself embroiled in endless diversions and encounters.  While Karinthy's work lacks some of the psychological subtlety of Ishiguro's book, it makes up for it in the perfectly drawn sense of panic Budai experiences as he realises the depths of his predicament.  Metropole deserves to be better known than it is.  It is a tremendously visual book in the power of the images it creates in the mind and as I read it, I couldn't help but think that it could be turned into a fantastic film with the right direction and casting.  

Reader's Block

The Guardian yesterday published an article on "reader's block", that tendency to buy books and never read them or to start them and not finish them.  Apparently spending on books in Britain (£4.4bn per year) is rising faster than any other country in Europe while the number of hours spent reading books is declining. 

For myself I find that reading is a habit.  When I'm fully into it, I just coast through books, two a week easily.  But if I let the habit lessen its grip, then I can find reading takes more of a back seat and its harder to get back into it.  Sometimes I have to force myself through a book.  I will read it in chunks of 50 pages a session or I will force myself to read 100 pages a day.  This doesn't sound like pleasure, but I find that with this approach the book yields up its satisfactions if it has any, or if it doesn't I soon find out.

I tend to agree with John Sutherland, in his book How To Read a Novel, that "90% of them are crap", but judging by the popularity of rubbish television I don't see why rubbish books should fare any worse.  The simple fact is that reading a book is difficult.  To persevere through three or four hundred pages, is not something that comes naturally in the modern world with so many distractions to amuse us.  Even if you're stuck on a train for three hours, its so much easier to flick through a newspaper of a magazine, than to actually keep your head down in a book.

I've kept up a pretty sustained reading habit for several years now, and I think this is because I know exactly what I like in books.  My TBR (to be read) pile is never small, but on the few occasions when it has dwindled, I've wandered into Borders or Waterstones and found myself surprised how little I can actually find there that interests me.  Surrounded by books I find the "reader's block" descending.  Confronted by those tables with three for two offers on piles of books, I feel almost nauseous. No, for me a TBR book is something I've heard about, which has sparked and interest because it follows on from something else, and I seek it out, usually on the Internet, either ordering from the library or purchasing online.

Looking back on last year's reading, two things stand out:

Firstly I can't abide "stories", books whose main purpose is to tell a story, however gripping.  I exclude here the occasional thriller or crime novel.  I read everything by Gerald Seymour for example, and I enjoy the occasional Ruth Rendell.  But I recently tried Rose Tremain's The Road Home, and after a hundred pages or so, it felt like a Maeve Binchy: Polish immigrant comes to London, meets a wide cast of characters, has adventures etc, etc, etc (I've a feeling I've missed out on a good ending here, as Tremain is of course an excellent writer and no doubt The Road Home deserved its Orange Prize).   

Secondly, I've realised that in terms of fiction I like books which many would find boring. By which I mean books where nothing happens much, at least in the external world presented. I like W G Sebald and Marcel Proust.  I enjoyed the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann where 800 pages are set in a Swiss sanatorium.  I love Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled which largely concerns someone going round and round in circles for 500 pages. I guess the theme here is "internalised" books, where what goes on in the heads of the main characters matters more than what happens to them.  The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt was something I enjoyed for that reason. 

Anyway, that's enough for now, its Saturday morning and my non-book life beckons.  I'm waiting for the postman to drop the next TBR book through the door (thank you Book Depository), but in the meantime, I'm reading Granta 102 and its providing much pleasure as always. 

Review: Keith Laidler - Surveillance Unlimited

Like most British people today, I frequently read about the intrusion of public and private organisations into my private life, whether local councils putting gizmos into my dustbin or security cameras watching my every move as I walk down the street. It is only on reading a a book like Surveillance Unlimited: How We've Become the Most Watched People on Earth that you realise quite the extent of surveillance on your every move, and if you have paranoiac tendencies then this is definitely the book to avoid (but essential reading for everyone else).

Keith Laidler begins his book by describing a typical day in the life of a "database citizen", from arriving home by plane after a business trip to Germany, traveling across London using his Oystercard, driving home and stopping for petrol, and using his mobile to phone his wife (and inadvertently joking that "there was no Al Qaeda attack on the plane", thus triggering an analysis of his call).  By this time its only midday, and when John finally gets to eat dinner with his wife in the evening, over 20 surveillance interventions have been recorded. 

Government and the commercial world have today achieved the "tyrant's dream" in which it is possible to listen into the telephone conversations of every citizen, read their email, track their movements, profile their lifestyle, preferences and political affiliation.  And as Laidler points out repeatedly through his book, the legal structures necessary to prevent abuse lag far behind the abilities of the new technologies.  I used to think that perhaps it doesn't matter very much as no-one would be interested in me, but having read this book, I can see the power of data mining and aggregation, which enable a vast range of officials and private companies to gain access to my private life, and most importantly, to get it terribly wrong and then to inflict untold unjust penalties on my through their own mistakes and incompetencies.  

Review: Best of Enemies - Richard Milton

In Best of Enemies: Britain and Germany - 100 Years of Truth and Lies, Richard Milton describes the cross-fertilisation of ideas between Britain and Germany and the ensuing propaganda wars that accompanied the conflicts of the last century.  Milton describes the rise of public relations techniques in America and Britain, firstly in the world of advertising and later in political campaigns, eventually of course being adopted by Joseph Goebbells, the master Nazi propagandist.

Milton's main thesis in this book is how close were the links between the two nations, and which were only sundered at times of war.  There has in fact always been considerable synergy of ideas between the two nations, unsurprisingly in view of England's Angle, Saxon and Jute past.  During the 19th century in particular, relations between Britain and Germany were on a high. Each nation had considerable respect for the other, not least because of the Royal links, with Queen Victoria having wholly German blood in her veins, and the German Prince Albert being a visionary leader, and the inspiration behind much of the Great Exhibition of 1851. 

It is interesting to read of the strong cultural and commercial links between the two countries at the time, with Siemens laying the underwater cables which made London the hub of the financial world, Julius Reuter setting up the the global news agency, and German brands such as Nivea, Osram, Agfa achieving market dominance.  On the German side, the highest fashion was English, with its tweed jackets, monocles, and childrens' sailor suits. Interestingly, the Germans adopted the game of cricket and the Berlin Cricket Club was founded in 1883 and Germans took to the fields in whites.   

91 year-old author is awarded PhD from Magdalen College, Cambridge

Having read about Michael Cobb and heard him interviewed on Radio 4, the 91 year-old war veteran being awarded a PhD by Cambridge University, it was good to track down the book itself.  Ian Cobb spent 18 years researching The Railways of Great Britain: A Historical Atlas

The University website states that "after graduating, Cobb joined the Army as a regular officer and was sent to Europe in 1940 as the world descended into war. Rescued on the last boat to leave the town of Dunkirk itself, he then spent several years training commandoes in Airborne Operations' D-Day preparations.A life-long train enthusiast who travelled on all of Great Britain's railway lines between 1950-60, Michael began work on the atlas in 1978".

This man is more than 40 years older than me and its nice to think that I might have time to do something sensible with my own time now that I have slightly more of it.

Review: Casanova - Ian Kelly

I am grateful to Mark Thwaite for publishing an interview with me this morning on his Editor's Corner blog. 

It was only through reading W G Sebald's book Vertigo that I realised that there was more to Casanova than the usual idea of a serial lover and seducer.  This commonly accepted view of Casanova is even immortalised in the Merriam Webster dictionary as "Lover; esp: a man who is a promiscuous and unscrupulous lover".  Sebald on the other hand focused on Casanova's mind during his period of imprisonment in Venice, and intriguingly drew parallels with his own mental condition.  When actor and writer Ian Kelly's book Casanova was published last month, it was serialised on Radio 4's Book of the Week,  and when I heard a couple of episodes while driving in the car, I decided that it would be my next book purchase. 

Ian Kelly has done a magnificent job in writing the biography of this complex figure in a mere 360 pages.  The source material, not least Casanova's own Histoire De Ma Vie must have been vast, let alone the background reading on the history of the times and the innumerable countries that Casanova visited during his travels.  

Casanova was born in Venice to a travelling actress, and was brought up by his grandmother while his mother travelled throughout Europe.  At the age of nine he was sent to live in a boarding house in Padua in an attempt to cure repetitive nose-bleeds, thought to be be caused by the noxious air of the cramped Venetian apartment. 

Review: Rancid Pansies: James Hamilton-Paterson

Humour is very difficult to get right, and it is almost impossible to define what makes something "funny", particularly in books.  Some writers seem to achieve an effortless humour, almost as though it would be impossible for them to be serious.  Jerome K Jerome and George and Weedon Grossmith from an earlier age, or Tom Sharpe, and Tom Wolfe from more recent times, all seem to achieve this effortless humour, largely based on the ridiculousness of their characters and the inventive situations they place them in. 

In Rancid Pansies, James Hamilton-Paterson gives another outing to his character Gerald Samper who has already appeared in Cooking with Fernet Branca, and Amazing Disgrace and I have to say, the concept is now wearing a bit thin.  As I flick through the book now, I think I can see why. The book consists of pages and pages of blocks of text, describing the inner thoughts of Samper, with surprisingly little dialogue. The pages look dense and hard work, as in fact they are. While it was amusing to get inside the head of Samper for the first book and maybe the second, most readers will now feel that they know quite enough about him and his supercilious outlook on life and perhaps don't really need a further instalment of his self-regarding eccentricity.  I think by the end of this book I had actually come to form an intense dislike for Gerald Samper and was glad to reach the last page.