A Common Reader . . .

An embarrassment of riches

I have so many reviews to write at the moment, I scarcely know where to begin.  The trouble is the books are all so damned good!  I'll make a start tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, a photograph to enliven my blog. 

 

We visited our daughter and her husband on Sunday and found that she had colour-coded her bookshelves.  I took some photos and produced a collage and think it looks quite nice.  Better than . . . thematic, alphabetic, Dewey-Decimal?  Well, at least its different.  And at least she likes books.

Review: The Last Station - Jay Parini

The Last Station is a fictionalised account of the last year in the life of Leo Tolstoy, and as can be seen from the cover, the books has recently been filmed with actors Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer.  The book was first published in 1990 and I assume its been re-published to tie in with the film. 

Having just read The Diaries of Sophia Tolstoy, I was interested to read this book.  I have no doubt that the author, Jay Parini, did a huge amount of research and background reading in order to recreate these events in the form of a novel, and in many ways it is convincing but also contains some incongruities that rather spoilt the experience for me.

Each chapter in the book is written as if in the first person by six different voices, including Tolstoy himself, Sophia, Vladmir Chertkov (Tolstoy's companion and promoter of his work) and Tolstoy's secretary, Valentin Bulgakov (the latter show with Tolstoy in this rather good photograph).

The book has a good dramatic flow and kept my attention throughout. My quibbles are in the distortion that arises from focusing on one year only when so much has gone before which the reader needs to know in order to understand the context.  Jay Parini's focus on the present moment will not really give the reader a rounded view of these events, although they undoubtedly make a good story.

By 1910, the Tolstoy marriage was long past its "best before" date.  Sophia Tolstoy was showing signs of hysteria and paranoia as she tried to protect her families inheritance from the group of Tolstoyans formed around Vladmir Chertkov, who felt that the great man's legacy belonged to the world.  For many years she had had to contend with hundreds of Tolstoy acolytes passing through the house to worship at the great man's feet, while she had to cope with the demands of Leo's large family and the practicalities of running a large estate.  The Last Station focuses on Sophia's dysfunctions and tends to present a rather one-sided picture of her.

Occasionally I found the language which Parini puts in the mouths of his characters rather incongruous in that he tends to use modern expressions which just don't sound authentic.  For example, Chapter 23 has Sophia Tolstoy saying things like:

"I don't find it amusing.  I find it sick".

"The ungrateful bitch"

"In the past he affected great concern when what he really wanted was sex".

Perhaps its just me, but I find these not quite right somehow, and there are plenty more in the same vein.  For me, the best exponent of fictionalised history is Beryl Bainbridge, who manages to bring rather more credibility (and style and wit) to the proceedings than Jay Parini.  Last years Booker prize contender, Adam Fould's The Quickening Maze (about poet John Clare) also showed how better this type of exercise can be done. 

I can't help but feel that the author had a later film script in mind.  He has Sophia speculating that the 78 year old Tolstoy was having homosexual romps with his assistant Chertkov.  We read of a lengthy developing romance throughout the book between Bulgakov and another staff member.  And the book is full of dramatic incidents such as Sophia throwing herself into a pond to try to drown herself.  Its all so very visual you can see how easy it was to turn it into a film.

I think the book would be good book group material - and anyone who knows a little about Tolstoy's life and works would have find plenty to say about it.  My wife's book group is currently struggling through Mill on the Floss, and perhaps The Last Station would be a good choice for the next book - it would be rather less dense and would provide much to discuss. 

On the whole, I would think it would make a better film than a book and the early views on IMDB suggest that Helen Mirren could be set for another Oscar for her performance as Sophia. So, to finish this review, here is the trailer:

Book blogging and rotten reviews

The BBC Radio 4 programme Off The Page on which dovergreyreader recently appeared along with a "professional" book reviewer and a psychologist (see my previous post), seems to have sparked off a discussion on the difference between book-bloggers and those who review books for a living.

I think the essence of book blogging is that the writers do it for sheer pleasure.  They love books, read because they have to, and enjoy writing about their reading experiences.  This means that they tend to write only about books they enjoyed.  They don't write about books because they have to, and so if they don't enjoy a book they tend to either discard it before they've finished it, or else forget about it as soon as they can. 

This is definitely my approach, but the programme caused me to think about my own reviews and I found it very difficult to find any really critical reviews.  I occasionally point out flaws or where things could be improved but I discovered that I've only written two or three real stinkers.  And it seems that the thing that sparks me off is books which I think are pretentious. 

Cliffs by Olivier Adam for example: writing like this really gets me going in critical vein:

dissolving in into tears in the middle of the meal . . . her arms around us tight and her tears soaking into our hair . . . a terrible sadness invaded the space, drying out the texture of the air . . . a sadness wreathed in fog, like and endless November, froze us from inside and a lump rose in my throat for no apparent reason

or

"Our lives are alike.  Our lives are the same and blighted.  We mourn the same dead and live in the company of phantoms. . . . Lost forever in the crowd, our lives fit into a thimble.  However tall we stand on tiptoe, we remain smaller than ourselves. . . We cry out in the night, scream and tremble with fear".

I think someone spent a little too long in the creative writing class!

Another one that got me going was The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels, and for much the same reason.  Its not that the book is bad - it has many good features and was reviewed in a number of qality newspapers, but the writing style is just too much for my unsubtle northern ears.  For example, my wife and I have had countless conversations during our long marriage, but none quite like this:

- You're like a man seen from a distance, a man who we think has stopped to tie his shoelaces but who is really kneeling in prayer.
- Our shoelaces have to come undone, said Avery, before we ever think to kneel

It would be cruel to repeat any more of the quotations I listed in my review, and in any case, no doubt there are people who love this sort of writing. 

So, in summary, if you get reviewed by A Common Reader you're probably going to have a fairly comfortable ride because I wouldn't have even finished your book unless I enjoyed it and I certainly can't be bothered to write about books which are just "poor".  But sometimes I encounter a style of writing which sends me off into satirical mode. I usually feel ashamed of myself and consider deleting the post a few days later, but by then its usually attracted some comments and it seems a shame to remove it. 

But what am I worrying about.  The Daily Mail review of The Winter Vault was really caustic:

"Avery and Jean . . . lie next to each other at night telling the stories of their lives, laced with gnomic utterances on love and world events.  The characters never come to life, serving only as mouthpieces for the author whose tendency towards the portentous weighs as heavily as the Abu Simbel stone".

Now that's what I call criticism!

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The picture at the top of this post is included solely to brighten up this post.  It is from a photograph I took of he Lewes Embroidery and shows the area I live in.

A couple of news items . . . dovegreyreader and Jewish Book Week

With continuing cold weather in Britain, I'm livening up this post with a painting of a polar bear which my wife painted this week.  I'm going to mention a couple of news items today.

BBC RADIO 4 - OFF THE PAGE

Book blogger Lynne Hatwell of dovegreyreader scribbles was a guest on Radio 4's Off The Page programme last night.  You can listen to it online here.  The theme was "Everyone's a Critic" and addressed the value of professional critics when online is allowing everyone to write whatever they want about books, film, theatre, and music.  Lynne described the role of book bloggers very well, and opened her short talk with the words, "I'm not a literary critic. I won't even call myself a book reviewer". 

After many years of writing "officially" in the NHS, Lynne described the joy of writing about a topic she loves - books.  She went on to say how she enjoys writing subjectively, emotionally and humorously, and tends to only write about books she enjoys.  "There's enough criticism out there and plenty of people paid money to do it - why make myself and others miserable while I can be happy doing something I love".  Lynne had to respond to some tricky questions from professional critic Toby Young and psychologist Dominic Arkwright who were a bit sniffy about book blogging throughout the programme.  However, Dominic Arkwright did concede that you can often do a lot more by being positive than by focusing on the negative. 

Review and author interview: Sabra Zoo - Mischa Hiller

I value my independence as a book reviewer and rarely accept invitations to interview authors and to promote their books, but I am making an exception for Sabra Zoo by Mischa Hiller, published by the excellent Telegram Books. I rate this as a very fine book which deserves as much exposure as it can get, so I shall make some opening remarks about the book and then publish Mischa's answers to my questions. 

I enjoyed reading Sabra Zoo for its fast-paced narrative and insights into an event that is fast-fading from public memory, the Sabra Refugee Camp massacre in 1982. This fictionalised account follows a year or two in the life of Ivan, an 18 year old man with Danish and Palestinian parentage, the fortunate possessor of a Danish passport which provides him with the ability to survive the many road-blocks and searches that are an inevitable part of life during the Lebanese Civil War. 

The book opens with Beirut in a state of chaos: "It was July, the siege was settling nicely into a routine that people could understand: the water had been cut off, the electricity had died, the city had been pounded with big bombs, peppered with small, a ceasefire was announced and then it started all over again".

Ivan's parents have returned to Denmark and he lives in the apartment they vacated, while working as a free-lance translator in the hospitals where Western aid-workers deal with the injuries arising from the conflict.  Ivan's apartment becomes a meeting place for aid-workers and young Lebanese and Ivan finds himself sharing food and beds with a variety of people, including the Norwegian doctor Eli.  

Review: The Unnamed - Joshua Ferris

Note: This review has now been copied to the new version of A Common Reader.  To read it in its updated form, click here

I didn't particularly enjoy Joshua Ferris's last book, Then We Came To The End, perhaps because its theme (the tedium and chronic insecurity of modern office life) was a bit too close to home at that time.  Many of the events in it paralleled my own experiences a little too painfully.  Fortunately those days are now gone and I was in a happier mood to read The Unnamed, and I thought it was a much better book, original in both theme and execution.

This is a great book for walkers, but in a rather perverse way.  Not for lawyer Tim (the main focus of the book), a gentle stroll through quiet countryside, but rather a compulsive need to take-off, in an OCD type of way, a driven emigration from family, work and comfort into the snowy outer wastes of the city, however inadequately dressed, whatever the time of day and night. 

Tim walks until he is exhausted and then gets found among the rubbish bins behind a Safeway, or knocks on someone's door asking for help.  He phones home and begs his wife to come out and save him, but has no idea where he is.  Telephoning the emergency services for help is pointless when you can't give your location.  This it a terrible and unique affliction which confounds doctors and specialists and could easily lead Tim to his death.

Review: The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy

Note: This review has now been copied to the new version of A Common Reader.  To read it in its updated form, click here

I find the Alma Books catalogue always worth following, and it was a particular pleasure to discover in it the recently published Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy, with the informative and insightful introduction by Doris Lessing. 

Sofia Tolstoy's diaries provide a dramatically different picture of Leo Tolstoy to that presented by his followers who seemed lost in adulation of the great man.  To them he was the inspiring writer, the saintly prophet and pacifist who renounced his worldly ambitions to follow what they saw as a simple lifestyle as a celibate and vegetarian.  Sofia's diaries reveal a rather different character - a pronounced anti-feminist whose views of women was little less than contemptuous and whose later other-worldliness came at great cost to his family.

To a family like the Tolstoy's, diaries were of crucial importance.  As Doris Lessing points out in her introduction, they were written so that others might see them.  Sofia's diaries were, "her life's work, and the counterpart to her life and marriage".  As their marriage deteriorated, "it was to her diary that she confided her worst fears and deepest anxieties . . . in the hope that he might see them". 

The diaries of Tolstoy and his wife had to be protected and fought for.  As Tolstoy became increasingly surrounded by acolytes, Sofia had to hide her husband's diaries away, even to the extent of depositing them in the State Bank, while her own became of immense interest, and soon, as she reports in 1910, "Now they have discovered that I am keeping a diary, they have all started scribbling their diaries".  Clearly everyone wanted a part in the great man's literary legacy.