Dennis Glover – The Last Man In Europe

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Book Review, Books about Books, Dennis Glover, George Orwell, The Last Man In Europe

As clearly, accessibly and authentically written as the subject himself would have insisted on

The title of Dennis Glover’s faction about George Orwell and his writing, was a possible work-in-progress title for Orwell’s last novel, the extraordinarily reverberating Nineteen Eighty Four

Australian author Glover has very clearly penned an absolute labour of love here, which though drawing strongly from Orwell’s writing and from various biographical and historical writings of his times, is crafted as a novel, and in language which tries for the clarity and immediacy of Orwell’s own writing.

Eric Blair the man was someone of great complexity. I confess he was very much a hero of my youth, and not only the novels, but the much cherished 4 volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, published by Penguin still maintain their battered, thumbed presence on my bookshelves

Glover’s book starts really with the writing of Keep The Aspidistra Flying, published in 1936. Central character Gordon Comstock, a shabby, high minded unsuccessful writer, castigates and vilifies the bourgeoisie, and exists on the edges of genteel penury, whilst working in a bookshop and seeking to find a way to bed his girl, Rosemary, when neither of them have the money to find privacy to do so, in a world of sharp eyed landladies living on the premises.

He started walking. Bleakness. Why did he have to be good at bleakness? Obviously, to represent failure, bleakness was inevitable. But how many writers had become successful by depressing everyone? Such writers were usually famous after they were dead….You didn’t buy books in order to feel gloomy, did you? For 10/6 you wanted a little happiness and pleasure…..Bleakness, it occurred to him, meant he would never be able to afford to marry. He picked up a piece of brick and threw it over the embankment at the water, but it landed in the mud

Orwell himself drew heavily on his own experiences with this one, a reflection of the challenges between being a high minded writer and a successful one. Not to say the challenges of getting published in the first place.

Orwell moved with ease – well, the results moved with ease, however hard the writing itself may have been in the crafting – between fiction, whether mined from his own experiences or from the lives of the times, and from his investigations into the reality of what life was like, particularly for those on the margins of society, or at least, deprived from present power which might shape society. His writing on the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, which is also covered here, on the life of the poor, The Road to Wigan pier and Down and Out in Paris and London are also explored.

Glover beautifully delineates Blair the man, Orwell the writer and avoids slipping into hagiography.

I found myself moved and excited by Glover’s fictional imaginings, – how particular ideas, phrases, events might have made their way into his two most bleak and warning fictions – Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – for example, the horrific rat episode in his last book, juxtaposed with reality on Jura, in a damp, decaying, isolated abandoned farmhouse, where he had retreated to in order to write and edit his last novel. At this time, Orwell was in severely failing health, with tuberculosis. His specialist had forbidden writing, through the exertion any activity was placing on his lungs, and he had also had several excruciating sounding procedures carried out to try and manage the condition, before then being treated with a new medicine, Streptomycin, which was also not without horrific side effects at the dosage required.

He realised with a shudder that the future wasn’t something to look forward to, but something to be frightened of. Yes, it was coming alright

I found this section of Glover’s book almost unbearable and heartbreaking, even though they were leavened by the satisfaction found in the crafting of the writing itself, by the dying man

For the first time, he was no longer certain he would live to see the world rebuilt. And even if it was rebuilt, maybe it would all happen again, people’s memories being so short

I recommend this most warmly to Orwell’s admirer’s – but also, to those for whom the subject himself may not be so well known. It stands on its merits as a very well crafted, thought provoking novel

This was a wonderful choice by my on-line bookclub so well done to the pickers of the titles and to those of us who voted for this one (including me!)

The Last Man In Europe UK
The Last Man In Europe USA

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Irvin D. Yalom – The Spinoza Problem

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Book Review, Irvin D. Yalom, Pantheism, Philosophy, Spinoza, The Spinoza Problem, The Therapeutic relationship

Novel ‘form’ used to explore ideas and the personalities which subscribe to them

Reviewing The Spinoza Problem is more than a little challenging, it is not quite successful as a novel, but is a far better way of educating the reader into grasping facets of Spinoza’s philosophy than any of the ‘Dummies’ type guides might be, because the information is woven in a more dramatic, narrative, human way

Irvin Yalom is a much revered humanistic psychotherapist. He is also a marvellous writer/communicator about these matters, and his non-fiction writings are rich, meaningful and informative, to practitioners and to those interested in our very human nature, and all the ethical and philosophical ideas which might arise from consciousness, and self-consciousness. He has written other novels, using a semi fictional framework to explore ideas.

In ‘The Spinoza Problem’ there are two parallel journeys happening, separated by nearly 300 years, and both stories, of real people with a strange, cross-time connection, are explored using a similar device, that of presenting the central character in each time, with a kind of analyst figure, a wise, self-reflective listener who can be trusted to explore how who we are, and our formative experiences, often determines how we think

God did not make us in His image – we made Him in our image

Baruch, later Bento Spinoza was a Portuguese Jew of extraordinary intellect and a rigorously independent, questioning nature. The Netherlands, where he lived and died was, in the 1660’s, a markedly tolerant society, where religious freedom, and different religions, were able to live side by side. Great things were expected of Spinoza within his community, where his understanding of religious texts and analytical mind seemed to indicate he would become a highly influential rabbi. This was not to be, however, as he began to question religion itself, and dismissed the forms as created by man, not God. Extraordinary thinking in those times, and brave to voice those thoughts : religious intolerance and fundamental beliefs were rather more the bedrock of the times, and dissent, in some cases, led to death. He had an extraordinary certainty in his own belief system, but also a tolerance towards others of different beliefs. He was, however, uncompromising in his insistence that he could not live untruthful to his own beliefs. The result was that he was cursed, excommunicated by his community, for the rest of his life. This was a man who hugely valued his community, but valued adherence to his own understanding of ‘truth’ more. Where I found his uncompromising adherence to that to be even more laudable, is that he did not feel the need to force others into his thinking. A rather unusual combination of uncompromising adherence and toleration. Often, those who hold most fiercely to their own ‘right’ seek to deny others theirs – where we are talking the systems of beliefs

nothing can occur contrary to the fixed laws of Nature. Nature, which is infinite and eternal and encompasses all substance in the universe, acts according to orderly laws that cannot be superseded by supernatural means

The shadow side of belief lies in the second figure, the one who searches for the solution to ‘The Spinoza Problem’ : Nazi Alfred Rosenberg, who was chief ‘theorist’ of the Party. Rosenberg, committed Anti-Semite, had a major problem with Spinoza – that he was a Jew, and was admired, hugely by the ‘good German’ Goethe, whom Rosenberg venerated. Here is a clear mark between mature and immature thinking, feeling, being – the inability to hold any kind of nuance or conflict between ‘this’ and ‘that’

You attempt to control the populace through the power of fear and hope – the traditional cudgels of religious leaders throughout history

Where the book particularly fascinated me is through Yalom’s own background as a psychotherapist, and one with a view which is both ‘narrow focus’ – this person, this story of theirs, and ‘broad focus’ – the overview, the wider issues. So, our own beliefs, which we generally believe are rationally driven, whilst the beliefs of others, with different opinions, we are more likely to believe spring from ‘personality and individual psychology’ than fact, are always driven more by ‘who we are’ than by rationality.

Yalom teases out, in the ‘invented’ encounters, giving Spinoza and Rosenberg people whom they can trust to have meaningful dialogue with, of the kind that happens in the best-run psychotherapeutic encounters, known history and personality traits. Obviously, more is known of the man Rosenberg through his writings, sayings, deeds as his is a more recent history – Rosenberg was one of those brought to trial, at Nuremberg, and executed for his war crimes, and his crimes against humanity. Yalom traces this aberrant personality and psychology, which the wider events of the times fitted so horribly well – when external political/economic systems hurt ‘the common man’ the easiest, and most terrible solution is to make some massed ‘other’ the cause.

This is what we are of course seeing, nascent, in the rise of what is being improperly named – ‘the alt right’. Let us name it – certainly there is proto Fascism as a driver : the so called ‘alt right’ leaders are using the terrible, dangerous language of Fascism, before it became powerful enough to translate word into action,  and the terrible, dangerous, ‘feeling thought’ is gaining credence.

Reason is leading me to the extraordinary conclusion that everything in the world is one substance, which is Nature, or, if you wish, God, and that everything, with no exception, can be understood through the illumination of natural law

To return (and how we need to) to Spinoza. There is a wealth of quite complex writing – which Yalom has clearly studied at depth – which can be used, with historical background about his life, and what has been said about him by others, whether at the time, or later students/researchers into his life an writing – to create an idea of who this man might have been. Certainly there is an enormous intellectual and emotional intelligence at work here, a visionary, positively inspirational individual. He may not have been an easy man to be around in some ways – those who are ‘greater’ in a kind of moral, ethical way than most of us, those who serve as ‘inspirers’ to our feebler selves to orientate towards, can easily inspire our fear and our dislike – through no fault of their own, but because they make us uncomfortable and uneasy with our own shortcomings. ‘Dead heroes’ of history may be easier to read about and be with, than the person better, more humane, more morally fine, who lives next door!

It is the fall from grace of the most highly placed that has always most excited crowds: the dark side of admiration is envy combined with disgruntlement at one’s own ordinariness

So, not quite fully satisfying as ‘novel’ Yalom, as ever, invites the reader to engage with themselves, and with ethical ideas, educating without standing dryly outside what is being explained

You can see I have categorised it as both fiction and non-fiction. I am trying to hold the ‘this AND that’ idea together, rather than this OR that.

I keep coming back in my mind, to that idea of ‘one substance’ in the quote which starts ‘Reason’ . Right there, is the idea of wholism, communality, community, respect towards other – including towards our planet itself. Not a splitting, not a division. Spinoza grasped the spirit of matter. Spiritual materialism, not the split, mechanistic version that is merely consumerism.

All quotes  come from the Spinoza section, and are either from his writing, or from a clarifying/ distillation/explanation of his philosophical framework.

Quotes from the ‘disordered thinking’ Rosenberg section do not bear repetition, and some of the current political leaders are espousing modern versions of them, daily, by spoken word and by tweet

The Spinoza Problem Amazon UK
The Spinoza Problem Amazon USA

Jeanette Winterson – Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

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Book Review, Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

All the mythological fruits a reader might yearn for

Original cover

I came to Jeanette Winterson quite late, and have no idea what took me so long. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, her first book, is the fourth Winterson I’ve read in as many months.

It’s probably because, knowing the one-word ‘what is this book about?’ preconception subject matter of ‘Oranges’ I mistakenly assumed it was a book devoted to lesbian erotica. Or, perhaps as Winterson amusingly suggests in her prologue to my 2009 digitised edition or perhaps truthfully suggests – she is, after all clear to remind us she is a writer of fiction, of novels -:

When Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was first published in 1985 it was often stocked in the cookbooks section with the marmalade manuals.

As is known Jeanette Winterson had a harsh beginning. Adopted by an extraordinarily eccentric couple (particularly the dominating Mrs Winterson), fervent Pentacostalists, Mrs W’s life-plan for the adopted baby was to raise her to be a missionary. The extraordinary creative, imaginative, hugely intelligent child Jeanette turned out to be was never quite going to fit into classic missionary mode. Though close acquaintance with the Bible and the English Hymnals did bring her into early contact with a rich, lustrous, poetic language.

Le Douanier Rousseau’s last painting : The Dream. 1910

Best of all, she had a collage of Noah’s Ark. It showed the two parent Noah’s leaning out looking at the flood while the other Noah’s tried to catch one of the rabbits. But for me, the delight was a detachable chimpanzee, made out of a Brillo pad,; at the end of my visit she let me play with it for five minutes. I had all kinds of variations, but usually I drowned it

Sex was not really part of Mrs Winterson’s mission statement for the little girl, but when Jeanette showed herself to have, along with all her other qualities, a passionate nature, that was itself challenge enough for Mrs W – who abjured sex. The fact that Jeanette’s passions were directed towards other women proved to be several steps too far.

Deuteronomy had its drawbacks; it’s full of Abominations and Unmentionables. Whenever we read about a bastard, or someone with crushed testicles, my mother turned over the page and said ‘Leave that to the Lord,’ but when she’d gone I’d sneak a look. I was glad I didn’t have testicles. They sounded like intestines only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not be able to go to church. Horrid

The facts of Jeanette’s life – of course subjectively experienced as well as observed by her writerly sense – are expressed in another book (wonderful) Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, Winterson’s autobiography.

THIS book, by contrast, though it uses ‘what she knows’ – herself, and her own life in this case, as springboard, is NOT autobiography, it is a novel, genre literary fiction, even though the central character is called ‘Jeanette’ and her mother is Mrs Winterson.

The Judgment Of Paris Joachim Wtewael, 1615

Winterson rather tartly (and quite probably correctly) wonders if, had she been a young man using his dysfunctional background as springboard, the critics would have been quicker to realise the work as fiction, literary fiction, and indeed fiction where the novel’s form is being explored. It shouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to ascertain this, as woven into the twentieth century Lancashire working class Pentecostal narrative, are various myths and legends, Arthurian, Grail, and the chapter titles are Old Testament biblical, and allude to the overall feel and flavour of particular books of the bible

 Perceval/ Grail : Dante Gabriel Rossetti – 1864

The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they’re supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.

The book is a journey towards individuation and authenticity : the Heroic Quest, that deep myth which underpins much literature. And literature itself provides many of the magical tools which help the hero – another version of Excalibur, in fact

Jeanette Winterson is a wonderful writer – inventive, rich in imagery, playful, dark, heart-breaking, shocking and more than a touch shamanic. And how she demonstrates this in her introduction:

Reading is an adventure. Adventures are about the unknown. When I started to read seriously I was excited and comforted all at the same time. Literature is a mix of unfamiliarity and recognition……as we travel deeper into the strange world of the story, the feeling we get is of being understood…..it is the story (or the poem) that is understanding us

Books read us back to ourselves

Yes. That was a hairs up on the back of the neck moment, for this reader. It came from the Introduction Winterson wrote to a later edition

Oranges works absolutely brilliantly as a fine, quirky, comedic page turning roman a clef, a girl’s journey to young woman. And is also something of depth and richness as well as brilliant sparkle

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Amazon UK
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Amazon USA

Delphine de Vigan – Nothing Holds Back The Night

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Book Review, Delphine de Vigan, George Miller (translator), Nothing Holds Back The Night

“Writing can do nothing….it allows you to ask questions and interrogate memory”

Delphine de Vigan’s Nothing Holds Back The Night is a curious book to categorise. On one level, it should be easy : it is an account of the difficult, yet sometimes vibrantly experienced life of de Vigan’s mother. Lucile Poirier, born in 1946, was one of 9 children born to Georges and Liane Poirier. The family was extremely Bohemian. Lucile, remarkably beautiful, a rather introverted child in some ways, helped family finances through money earned as a child model. The family was beset by tragedy, and there was some history of mental and emotional fragility. There were also various family secrets, the nature of which can probably be surmised by the reader.

Delphine herself was born when Lucile was 19. She had fallen in love with the young brother of one of her father’s colleagues, and the two married in a hurry. Lucile was different from Delphine’s classmates’ mothers – more vibrant, more playful, more sophisticated, fun and glamorous. But she was also unstable and the instability took over. The marriage itself foundered quite quickly. Delphine had various love affairs which would buoy her up. Some of her partners were also unstable. Delphine and her younger sister Manon, sometimes with Lucile, sometimes with their father Gabriel and his new family, had a childhood far from ideal. There were periods where Lucile was institutionalised due to the severity of her bipolar disorder.

The book starts with Lucile’s shocking death in 2008, and Delphine’s discovery of her body. de Vigan at this point was an already published writer.

Lucile’s pain was part of our childhood and later part of our adult life. Lucile’s pain probably formed my sister and me. Yet every attempt to explain it is doomed to failure. And so I am forced to content myself with writing scraps, fragments and conjecture.

Writing can do nothing. At very best it allows you to ask questions and interrogate memory

She wrote Nothing Holds Back the Night because it was what she had to do, in part to understand her own story, and her mother’s. But she acknowledges it is not quite purely memoir. Much was underground, forgotten, hidden, denied, and different members of the Poirier family and others produced different memories. So, inevitably Delphine, in order to find the shape, pattern and sense of her mother’s life, acknowledges that what she is writing is part memoir, part fiction, the shaping of narrative to create pattern and story to events. Memory remembers some events and not others. And sometimes what is remembered is memory of someone else’s narrative of their memory. A memory of a story told, becomes an account of ‘this is the fact of what happened’. Sometimes, what gets forgotten is that memory is often as much interpretation as a laying out of moments taking place in time

De Vigan’s book won a couple of literary prizes. It is beautifully written, and here translated by George Miller. And I assume the translation is a sensitive and thoughtful one, as I lost awareness of the fact I was reading de Vigan’s words, images and thoughts through the filter of another person

I was brought to this difficult but strangely illuminating read, by a mention of it from another blogger, JacquiWine, which caused me to search out her earlier review, and then to read this myself

Nothing Holds Back The Night Amazon UK
Nothing Holds Back The Night Amazon USA

Lynne Reid Banks – Dark Quartet

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Book Review, Dark Quartet, Lynne Reid Banks, The Brontës

Out of unpromising, dysfunctional beginnings, literary genius; thrice.

The Brontë family attracted huge interest at the time of their celebrity, and, indeed, continue to do so now. I suppose it is the combination of wonderful, different writing from the three sisters, and the extreme dysfunction of the family itself, the early death of all the siblings, and the fact that the 4 who reached adulthood – Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne were also – unusual, individually as well as collectively, lacking well-developed social skills and acceptable masks.

So I was delighted to discover that Lynne Reid Banks had written a fictionalised biography of the siblings. Lynne Reid Banks had burst into prominence with a kind of female version of the kind of gritty realism writing of the ‘Angry Young Men’ brigade, with her first novel, published in 1960, The L-Shaped Room. I read that book, and the second of the trilogy, some years later, but remember the powerful writing still. The author who is now in her late 80s is still writing.

Dark Quartet was published in 1977, and takes the lives of the four from childhood, to the death of the youngest three – who were in their late twenties (Ann) or very early thirties (Emily, Branwell) A second fictionalised biography, Path to the Silent Country, deals with the remaining 6 years of Charlotte’s life, as the last surviving sibling of that extraordinary family.

Anne, Emily and Charlotte painted by Branwell 1834 – who removed himself from the original painting

I was thoroughly absorbed by this book, even though it did not ‘explain’ the extraordinary talent of the three novelists, all so different, all within the same family as understandably as another, later fictionalised biography I read a few years ago – Jude Morgan’s A Taste of Sorrow. Morgan incorporated the previous generation – most particularly the Reverend Patrick Brontë. Reid Banks shows him as a slightly weak character. Morgan presenting him as the more autocratic, dictatorial figure I had associated from some much earlier reading – but he delves more into an understandable psychology, which explained the father, and the earlier stifling of his own burning literary yearnings, so that the gestation and development of not one, but three extraordinary writers from within apparently inhibited and unpromising beginnings, became infinitely more plausible

Reid Banks draws a lot of background not only from the lives of all three women, most particularly of course Charlotte, as food for their novels, but also focuses on the ‘juvenile makings’ – Charlotte and Branwell’s Angria and Emily and Anne’s Gondal, and the influence of strong heroes in the Byronic mould from those childhood writings

            Signatures of the three Bell ‘brothers’

Initially, reading this, I felt more ‘on the outside’ of the siblings, compared to Morgan, who somehow threw me more fully inside the family unit, and the stifling, secretive environment they lived in, where only individual imagination soared unfettered, but I did very much become engaged. It was only towards the end of the book, as, in rapid succession, Branwell, then Emily, and then Anne, rapidly declined and died, that I felt that the author had rather galloped through her climaxes. And then I paused, because of course, those climaxes of dramatic and devastatingly quick deaths, advancing one upon the other, were what happened. Branwell, dead on the 24th September 1848; Emily, not quite 3 months later on the 19th December, and Anne, a longer time fading and dying but still, gone by the end of May 1849. Charlotte, not to mention her father, barely left with time to recover from one death before another, and then another, came upon them.

I am definitely minded to read Reid Banks ‘sequel’ to this one, and also, to re-read the Morgan

Dark Quartet Amazon UK
Dark Quartet Amazon USA

Peter Ho Davies – The Fortunes

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America, Anna Mae Wong, Book Review, China, Chinese Americans, Peter Ho Davies, The Fortunes, Vincent Chin

American History through Chinese and Chinese-American eyes.

Peter Ho Davies The Fortunes is a mainly American set account of the Chinese American experience, told through 4 different viewpoints, over more than 150 years, starting with the building of the railways, opening up Goldrush routes in California in the 1860s, and ending with the experience of wealthy childless couples in the market for unwanted babies from less wealthy nations – in this case, as a result of China’s ‘One Child’ policy, and the less favoured status of girls.

Ho’s book is extremely well written, but, covering as it does the experience of what it means to be an immigrant – or even to be second generation, but of mixed ethnicity, – it is a remarkably depressing and distressing read, particularly at this time of turmoil and casual, not to mention not-so-casual, evidence of racial hatred and distrust as part of the water table.

The Fortunes (which has a title page subtitle of ‘Tell It Slant’) is beautifully structured in four sections. Each story is set in a different time and place, seemingly disconnected though there are nods to the previous experiences, and 3 of the stores feature real people, though Ho Davies makes it clear this is a fictionalised interpretation. There is a satisfying framing device.

The first section, Gold, is the story of the railroad and the Goldrush. Ah Ling is the son of a ‘saltwater girl’ a prostitute from Hong Kong and a ‘white ghost’, her probably British protector. The reader is battered from the start from everyday racism – both within China itself, as Ah Ling is a Tanka, reviled by the Han Chinese, and then, after he is sold to be a laundry boy to ‘Uncle Ng’ in San Francisco, the blanket racism towards ‘chinks’. We are reminded also, that whatever the experiences suffered by men, the status of Chinese women was even lower. Racially abused, sexually abused. The laundry Ah Ling works at is also a brothel, and Ah Ling, as a young boy, has his eyes opened by ‘Little Sister’ – who of course lacks even her own name, described only by family relationship:

How can you hate your own people”

“How? I tell you how! You know who sold me to Ng?” She paused to catch her breath. “My father! You know why? So he could send a brother to Gold Mountain to make the family fortune.” She nodded heavily. “That’s right. Chinamen love gold more than girls.

Silver follows the story of Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American film star from the 1920’s onwards, whose career covered both silent film, talkies and stage. This section is structured almost like a silent film, with short chapters with headers in capital letters, as if they were scene titles

THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME

Turned down for the role of a lifetime – O-Lan in The Good Earth, a Chinese female lead; how many of those will she ever see? – and turned down for a white actress. It’s a public humiliation, a famous snub. A loss of face, she’s still Chinese enough to think.

She’d been tipped for the role in the press for years; “born to play it,” they said. It was what she’s been waiting for all this time. But she’d known she wouldn’t get it as soon as they cast Paul Muni, Scarface himself, in the lead. The Hays Code forbade the portrayal of interracial relations on-screen, even when white actors were playing in yellowface.

Jade, the third section, is based on the story of Vincent Chin:

if you remember it a all, if you were around in the eighties, say, what you remember is a Chinese guy being beaten to death in Detroit by two white auto workers who mistook him for a Japanese. This at the height of the import scare, when Japanese manufacturers were being blamed for the collapse of the Big Three U.S. auto companies.

Maybe you remember it happened outside a club where the Chinese guy – actually a Chinese American named Vincent Chin – was celebrating his bachelor party. Maybe you remember he was buried on what should have been his wedding day.

But perhaps you thought it was just an urban legend, a bad joke come to life

 Vincent Chin, source: Wiki

The final story, Pearl, concerns a middle class couple, Chinese American John Ling, teaching university students, and his wife Nola, also a teacher, in their mid-thirties, with a history of difficult and failed pregnancies. They are part of a group of other couples with similar difficulties, going to China to adopt a baby.

Ho Davies, one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, is British born, to Welsh and Chinese parents, though he now lives in the States and is also a University lecturer in Creative Writing.

This is, as stated at the beginning, an emotionally difficult read, but a recommended one. He writes very well, his characters are clearly delineated, and complex. It left me with lots to think about, and distressing matters to feel about, particularly within the context of many world events, at this time, and a resurgence of ‘populist’ parties with simplistic foci for ‘blame’

I received this as an ARC from Amazon Vine UK. It will be published on 25th August in Hard Cover and on Kindle in the UK, but curiously, Statesiders will have to wait until September 6th for HardCover or Audible, with, at the moment, no Kindle version listing. Curious, because Ho Davies now lives in the States, and this is set for the most part there.

The Fortunes Amazon UK
The Fortunes Amazon UK

Robert Harris – Imperium

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Ancient Rome, Book Review, Cicero trilogy, Imperium, Robert Harris

Prodigious research; prodigious narrative; full of grim echoing down the centuries

Imperium is the first volume of a trilogy by Robert Harris which tells the story of Cicero, politician, orator, philosopher, and lawyer, who lived from 106 B.C.E. to 43 B.C.E. Much is known directly about Cicero from his published letters, speeches and treatises. Cicero’s writings were rediscovered by the fourteenth century scholar and humanist Petrarch, so Harris would have had a great amount of direct source material to give direction to these novels, plus of course any number of works by later scholars referencing Cicero.

Cicero

Imperium is far from a dry scholarly read though. Harris is a novelist, and knows how to shape and tell a tale as well as how to flesh out real people with real histories.

Rather than third person narration, or even a narration by Cicero-in-the-first-person, he makes his narrator another historically real individual, Tiro, Cicero’s slave and scribe,later made a freedman after his master retired from public office. Tiro, who died in 4 B.C E. aged 99, published Cicero’s speeches after his death and was a writer himself. It is also believed that he invented an early version of shorthand.

Tiro is presented as both highly intelligent, but, because of his status he has a certain naïvity – he is not always the recipient of Cicero’s thinking, or the receiver of personal confidences, though he is always present in Cicero’s public outings, to scribe him. His lowly status also casts him as observer and interpreter of the great events. He is a kind of intelligent everyman, without a defined ego and agenda of his own to prosecute. He’s fluent, engaging and with understated humour as part of his nature : a good companion for the reader. Tiro is writing his life of Cicero long after these events have happened, a good half century later.

Cicero denounces Catiline, Cesare Maccari 1888

This has been a particularly apposite read in these troubling, corrupt times. It is a book about the politics of Rome, in the first half of the last century B.C.E, but of course, there being nothing new under the sun, the corruption which underpins so much of the life of power, money, and the division between classes, not to mention the particular workings of states, nations and empires, stalks Ancient Rome as heavily as it does our own times and places.

Cicero is a man not of the aristocracy, therefore despised by them, as his intelligence and skills, and his championing of the ‘public’ brings him closer to taking the reins of power himself. However, the closer he comes to that, the more he will have to, and will, dirty his hands and play the system to achieve the ends desired

Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them

Initially rather soft-hearted, hating to see cruelty and violence done, Cicero will have to steel himself and harden himself, fostering steely resolve

If you must do something unpopular, you might as well do it wholeheartedly, for in politics there is no credit to be won by timidity

Tiro will be the recorder of Cicero’s journey towards a kind of cynical pragmatism

the journey to the top in politics often confines a man with some uncongenial fellow passengers and shows him strange scenery

Whatever the venality, cupidity and self-serving arrogance of some of those currently attempting to achieve the greatest political stages in our own time, they had their moulds in ancient Rome. Indeed, I found myself visioning some of our present politicians in the guise of the worst characters stalking Imperium’s pages, Crassus (well named) and Verres. Unfortunately, learning from history’s mistakes isn’t something we seem to do well, even if Cicero himself, over two thousand years ago, was urging the study of history. Tiro quotes this from Cicero :

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

A terrific read, and I shall for sure want to read the next two volumes, but I may let the fallout from the recent referendum, not to mention the upcoming election in the States this autumn, settle first. Reading how easily the populace can be manipulated by brash and power hungry demagogues, and how serious the consequences of such manipulations may be is a little too close for comfort, even if this account has as its real setting the Rome of over 2000 years ago.

Imperium Amazon UK
Imperium Amazon USA

Christopher Isherwood – Goodbye to Berlin

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Berlin, Book Review, Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, Weimar Republic

Autobiographical Fiction reflecting on Troubled Times

In troubled times of our own, with the rise of ‘populist politics’ it seems both sad and sagacious to be drawn back into a re-read, a fictionalised account by Christopher Isherwood, of time spent in the Weimar Republic, primarily in Berlin, between 1930 and 1933.

Goodbye to Berlin, first published in 1939, is a collection of six short stories or novellas, with a cast of characters who sometimes reappear in more than one story, all linked together by the narrator ‘Christopher Isherwood’

In a short foreword, Isherwood reminds the reader that although he has given his name to the ‘I’ narrator, we should not assume that this is purely autobiography, or that the characters with the pages are EXACT portrayals of the other people. Isherwood points out that “Christopher Isherwood” should be regarded as a kind of “convenient ventriloquist’s dummy”

However, those interested in the man and his writings certainly can read biographies which let the reader know which real individuals are being described.

Goodbye to Berlin of course also later appeared as a stage play ‘I Am A Camera’ – a direct quote from the book itself, as, very early on Isherwood states what he intends this writing to be

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed

And, of course, one of the central novellas in this collection is “Sally Bowles” and that particular story gave rise to the successful musical and even more successful film, Cabaret.

To return to the book, it is Isherwood’s creation of his “Christopher Isherwood” ventriloquist’s dummy – or camera – which gives the book its cool power. He casts himself, and is, the Englishman abroad, drawn to the unprovincial, dangerous, decadent, colourful and extreme life of Berlin, where personal and political morality is open, not hidden, where political extremes walk the streets, and where, quite quickly everything is in change and confusion. Isherwood makes his ‘dummy’ an interested-in-everything observer. It is the very reverse of polemic writing – though it is always clear where the writer’s mind, heart and moral judgement lies.

                   Jeanne Mammen – Carnival in Berlin

Starting in 1930, the narrator, earning his (small) living by teaching English, is staying in a not quite respectable boarding house, run by an impoverished ageing woman, who rather turns a blind eye to the fact that one of her guests earns her living on her back, whilst another, a not particularly talented cabaret artiste, is an ardent Nazi (at that time, just a rather laughable party led by a silly little man no one really expected to go anywhere). The book ends in 1933, when the silly little man has formed a cabinet, and ardency in populist politics is clearly going in the direction it does, or, as Isherwood observes, about his landlady:

Already she is adapting herself, as she will always adapt herself to every new regime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about “Der Führer” to the porter’s wife. If anybody were to remind her that, at the election last November, she voted communist, she would probably deny it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatizing themselves. After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town

And in between Isherwood’s arrival in 1930 and departure in 1933, the writer introduces us to a brilliant mix of messy humanity. There are three major stories to follow – Sally Bowles, the louche daughter of a wealthy English family come to Berlin to be an artiste and to enjoy sexual freedom; The Nowak Family, almost on their uppers, whom Isherwood lodges with when he is so poor that he can’t even afford to stay at Schroeder’s any more, and the wealthy, liberal established German Jewish family The Landauers.

The writing, like the humanity, is wonderful

‘Goodbye to Berlin’ as a title, also demonstrates the layers of meaning Isherwood packs into his clear and deceptively simple prose. This is not just Isherwood saying ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ at the end of his stay – it is Berlin, saying goodbye to itself.

Goodbye to Berlin Amazon UK
Goodbye to Berlin Amazon USA

Susan Fletcher – Let Me Tell You About A Man I Knew

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Book Review, Let Me Tell You About A Man I Knew, Susan Fletcher, Vincent Van Gogh

I had never read (or heard of) Susan Fletcher, but the subject matter of this novel interested me – Vincent Van Gogh’s year in the Saint-Paul Asylum, Saint-Rémy, where he admitted himself, and was a patient for a year, from May 1889- May 1890, painting some of his most loved, intense paintings during that time.

What made the book particularly intriguing to me was the fact that Van Gogh is not the central character. There have been novels and films about the painter, telling his story, but Fletcher has written from the perspective of an ‘ordinary person’ affected by art and the artist’s vision. The central character is Jeanne Trabuc, the warden’s wife at Saint-Paul. Jeanne is a woman in her 50’s, a quiet woman, a woman who has stifled, or had stifled, her blaze, and free-spiritedness. She is the mother of 3 grown-up, long left home, boys. She loves her repressed, correct, conventional husband, a decorated Major from when he was a young man, during the Crimean war, but the two have become externally estranged from each other, somehow trapped in mutual sorrow, and unable to emotionally connect and express their true feelings.

Wheat Field With Cypresses, 1889

Can ancient stones be loved? But if love is a strong, settled fondness, a vine that takes hold and grows and wraps itself about you, as she’s imagined it to be – then perhaps her fondness of the swallows that nest in the crevices and of the goats dozing in the olives’ shade and of the Romans and their slaves and wives that Jeanne has pictured have all grown into love

Although both Charles Trabuc and Jeanne were real people – and Van Gogh painted them – as were other major players in this book, Peyron, Poulet and Salles, the first two hospital workers, the last a cleric, friendly to Van Gogh, Fletcher has imagined their lives, fleshed out an invention. This is not fictionalised biography, and she takes no outrageous liberties with the man who is the central focus for everyone in her book – Van Gogh. She has used his letters to his brother Theo, and, most particularly, used the paintings he created whilst at Saint-Remy, the gestations of which are stunningly, powerfully, dynamically rendered in this book. She focuses on Van Gogh, observed by Jeanne, in the act of painting, what he says about his art, and what Jeanne, seeing the painting happening either before her eyes or as finished works on the canvas, feels for the works.

A painted portrait is a thing of feeling made with love or respect for the being represented

(from a letter written by Van Gogh to his sister Wilhelmina)

Now this is not a book which will satisfy if the reader is demanding huge action and operatic emotionalism. Rather, the central characters other than Van Gogh – the Trabacs, are pent inside themselves, quietly and rigidly suffering. Van Gogh, man and painter, is a catalyst of change, he and his paintings are cathartic, but it is in the interior landscape, not in huge dramatic events.

Starry Night 1889

This is a stunning book, though it did take time for me to settle into the quietness of time, place and character – a sleepy, conservative small village community in Provence, at the tail end of the nineteenth century, gossipy, traditional, suspicious of those who are different.

Portrait of Madame Trabuc

Fletcher gives voice to small people, and shows their uniqueness, and how reined in, private natures may blaze with dreams, desires and subtle, refined sensibilities. Jeanne is a wonderful creation – and so is her husband, and they make an individual and connected transformation. Along the way, themes of love and loss – youth, age, death, the losing and finding of friendships is beautifully laid out, And the paintings, which rather underpin everything about this book are both illuminated, and illuminating the story.

The heart, she thinks, is the painter. Love, and moments like this, are the art. The Dutchman taught her that

I was offered this as a review copy by NetGalley and for sure am going to explore Fletcher’s earlier writing.

I sometimes feel very leery about writers who invent the lives of real people. And this is mainly when privacy seems to have been invaded, or detrimental untruths have happened. Now I have no idea whether Jeanne and Charles Trabuc were quite like Fletcher’s inventions or not, but I am fairly sure that if there are known descendants of the two, they would be more likely to be charmed by Fletcher’s tender, invented portrayal. It reads, indeed like  “a thing of feeling made with love or respect for the being represented

 Let me Tell You About a Man I Knew Amazon UK
Let me Tell You About a Man I Knew Amazon USA

Christopher Isherwood – Mr Norris Changes Trains

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Berlin, Book Review, Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains, Weimar Republic

Sex and Spying In The Weimar Republic

Christopher Isherwood, inextricably associated with W.H.Auden and Stephen Spender, represents a kind of educated, literary, urbane Englishness, but with interests outside provincial England. Left wing, fairly openly homosexual (when it was illegal) intellectual, finely crafted poets, playwrights and or novelists. And sometimes moving between more than one genre, and even collaborating as writers.

Cambridge educated – though he never finished his degree, Isherwood was drawn to the decadent, artistically modern, politically volatile city of Berlin at the tail end of the twenties and early thirties.

In this book, – and in his more well-known one, Goodbye to Berlin – mainly because it was later turned into the movie, Cabaret – he recounts his experiences in that city, as political instability intensified, and lines of allegiance became sharply drawn, and the Nazi party, initially regarded as a kind of loony fringe, not to be taken seriously, began its terrifying rise.

Isherwood casts himself as William Bradshaw, a young man, eager for the experience of living in another country, earning his living by teaching English to private students. Bradshaw meets the eponymous Mr Norris, striking up a conversation with him as a way to pass time on a long train journey.

As he spoke he touched his left temple delicately with his finger-tips, coughed, and suddenly smiled. His smile had great charm. It disclosed the ugliest teeth I had ever seen. They were like broken rocks

Norris is another Englishman, middle-aged, dissolute, clearly a not-to-be trusted wheeler-dealer of some kind, but his distinctly eccentric physical persona, and a strangely appealing charm, despite the obvious dishonesty, amuse Bradshaw, and the two form an unlikely friendship. Norris’s fastidious oddness – the wearing of bizarre wigs and an obsessive attention to prinkings and powderings not usually found at that time openly engaged in by English men, certainly not in England, is typical of the Berlin experience – decadent, sophisticated and utterly unprovincial, which proved alluring about to those seeking a more colourful, even dangerous, European experience. Norris, it later transpires, has predilections for a kind of wholesome sexual deviancy – he is open about his relations with a dominatrix and her ‘minder’ a young man who is a member of the Communist Party. It fact Anni, the whore, AND her minder Otto, are regarded as friends by Norris.

Political affiliations are centre stage everywhere. Isherwood, and Norris choose the Left, even though Norris is not necessarily, ever, quite what he seems, and may have fingers in many pies, as he also has some friends whose political allegiance seem to belong more naturally to the right.

What is marvellous about Isherwood’s writing, a kind of story telling journalism, an exploration of what it was like to be in Berlin, is that although he is undoubtedly writing about a period which became very dark and very dreadful, the second of his Berlin books, particularly, this is the undercurrent, flowing underneath a brilliant, light-touch observation. A sense of frenetic life, liveliness, wit and urbanity drive the book along, there is certainly more than a touch of fiddling whilst Rome burns about the Weimar republic.

Gay Club, Berlin, 1930s

Norris himself is a quite extraordinary creation, and, just as Bradshaw is Isherwood’s novelising himself, Norris has a real origin – a friend of Isherwood’s, Gerald Hamilton, also a writer, and once known as ‘the wickedest man in Europe’. Hamilton was served time in prison for bankruptcy, theft, being a threat to national security, and, interestingly, numbered amongst his friends not only Isherwood himself, but the unlikely combination of Winston Churchill and Aleister Crowley!

The reader quite falls, as Bradshaw does, under his dubious charm, and it is a strange experience to find oneself appreciating the strange moral ambiguity of someone who would undoubtedly sell his own Grannie to the highest bidder, yet, somehow, even whilst Grannie might even know that herself, he comes across as naughty, rather than vicious. Or, as Isherwood/Bradshaw puts it, so much more elegantly at the start of the novel:

My first impression was that the stranger’s eyes were of an unusually light blue. They met mine for several blank seconds, vacant, unmistakably scared. Startled and innocently naughty, they half reminded me of an incident I couldn’t quite place; something which had happened a long time ago, to do with the upper fourth classroom. They were the eyes of a schoolboy surprised in the act of breaking one of the rules. Not that I had caught him, apparently, at anything except his own thoughts; perhaps he imagined I could read them

Once again I have been enchantingly led into a re-read by another blogger, in this case JacquiWine, whose recent review of Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical experiences in Berlin between the wars can be found here

Mr Norris Changes trains Amazon UK
Mr Norris Changes trains Amazon USA