Paperback Reader » Riverside Readers

July's People

Paperback Reader — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:14:29 +0000

July’s People by Nadine Gordimer, her imagined end to apartheid through civil war, was banned in South Africa after its publication in 1981; her predicted end was a violent revolution in which blacks are killing whites in order to regain control of the country and overturn the system of racial segregation. Bam and Maureen Smales, a liberal white South African couple, and their three children, flee Johannesburg with the aid of their loyal black servant, July, who hides them in his village among his “people” (the Smales are also his people and the title is ambiguous in whom it refers to and as July’s loyalties to both his kin, his Chief and his employers are tested). The Smales family, under the cover of forest trees, live in a mud hut that belongs to July’s mother and attempt to adjust to the new life that has been enforced upon them, whilst being thankful that they have life.

The dynamic between the Smales and July has shifted; they owe him their lives (it was July’s idea to bring them to his home) and they depend on him for protection and for survival. Gordimer examines the power relations between her characters and the ambiguities that lie therein; July, Bam and Maureen struggle with their pre-existing master/servant roles and their new roles, which are never fully certain. The issue of control and who now possesses and exerts it, who is subservient to whom, is the crux of the novel and plays out in complex ways, particularly between Maureen and July; Maureen and Bam also change within their relationship with the dynamics of their marriage altered irrevocably in such close quarters.

In less than 200 pages, Gordimer’s take on the deteriorating situation of apartheid (in its imagined end) is immensely powerful. The narrative is tense and claustrophobic, conveying the volatile situation and the close living quarters. The first chapter (five pages) was disorientating as I attempted to grasp Gordimer’s style; the interior monologues and the dialogue -mostly between July and Maureen or Maureen and Bam- that is a dichotomy of dialogue but a blending of speech on which you have to concentrate to ascertain who is speaking (there are no quotation marks or he said/she said pronoun indicators; the speaker even switches mid-line) takes some adapting to but once you are in the thick of it, you’re there, just like the protagonists. The blending of English and Afrikaans is effective as it highlights the frustration between different, often untranslatable, languages and cultures as well as the power struggles between the speakers. Gordimer’s characterisation is nuanced with the personalities of the three main figures rendered through their words and actions; their circumstances expose them and their true thoughts.

The content quickly devolves to the animalistic and the primitive with body odours and secretions, hunting and sex described in their raw and unrefined states; the Smales adapt to their new surroundings and their instinct is to survive. I found the rudimentary, functional events compelling to read as what fascinated me was the gradual break-down of white power in the far removed, non-habitual surroundings and the break-down of masculine power in the domestic sphere, as Bam and Maureen fail to cope with a new reality forced upon them. Of course race is central to the changes in power, both politically and domestically, and Gordimer envisages wonderfully the struggle for control in people used to having it and those to whom the concept is new.

A favourite passage:

The heavy cadences surrounded her; the earth was fading and a thin, far radiance from the moon was faintly pinkening parachute-silk hazes stretched over the sky. She understood although she knew no word. Understood everything: what he had to be, how she had covered up to herself for him, in order for him to be her idea of him. But for himself–to be intelligent, honest, dignified for her was nothing; his measure as a man was taken elsewhere and by others. She was not his mother, his wife, his sister, his friend, his people.

Claire's Corner

Paperback Reader — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:16:16 +0000

Each month the Riverside Readers book group meets on the South Bank (close to the London Eye, photographed above) to discuss our monthly book choice. I noticed earlier this week that all but one of our choices feature on the Guardian’s 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read list, which is entirely coincidental although when I came to make my choice it was a book that I was aware of because of the list. The list was compiled early last year and ran as a weekly feature, with the books separated into different categories; I followed the series with interest at the time and have since used the complete list as a handy reference. No list is definitive, of course, but I do like a challenge; by no means will or would I want to read all 1000 Novels but some of those included are books that I have been meaning to read and an incentive (a sense of accomplishment by striking through a title on a list) always helps. So far I have read 187 of the novels and would like to achieve a fifth of the 1000 read by the end of this year and a quarter by the end of next, at least; from my to-be-read piles alone, I should accomplish this and it helps that the Riverside Readers are contributing to the tally, albeit unconsciously. Thank you to Mae of Mad Bibliophile for reminding me to talk a little about the list as lists like that one (and the book 1001 Books) are timeless book-guides.

In this week’s Guardian is the feature “A week without books”, in which the writer blogs of her experience of giving up books for one week. I am not thoroughly convinced by her motivation -I can understand giving up buying books for Lent, as an experiment, as a means of saving books … but giving up reading? If I did that then I would be starved of oxygen to the brain. I read to enjoy, to educate, to entertain myself and I would be lost without books. I recognise myself in van der Zee, I am that girl with her nose in a book on the tube, going up the escalator, walking along the travelator in Waterloo station; I always have a book in my bag as you never know when you will be caught waiting whether it be for a person you are meeting or a train that is delayed. A few months ago I went to see my grandparents -who were visiting my aunt- and they were caught up in traffic for some time; I stood on the doorstep and occupied myself by reading and when they did arrive I reassured my uncle by honestly informing him that it was okay, I had packed a spare book. I am never caught without a book and a day doesn’t go by where I don’t read one, at the very least in bed, unless I need a break from reading; sometimes a well-deserved book holiday is prescribed but even then it is only for a day or two and only as a result of severe symptoms i.e. a migraine or a major book slump. I cannot foresee an occasion where I would deprive myself from the pleasure of reading for an entire week.

Last February I read Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (funnily enough because its inclusion on the 1000 Novels list prompted me to finally read it) and I found it time-consuming; it took me a week to read and, to offset the time invested into one book, I decided to read seven books in seven days. Now, reading a book in one day isn’t a rare occurrence for me but nor is it a regular one either; I am no speed-reader and although I do set aside a Sunday afternoon here and there to read a book, sometimes it doesn’t happen unless it’s a book that I simply cannot put down or an occasion such as Persephone Reading Week or the seven books in seven days goal that I set myself. I read: Chéri by Colette; Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka; Fireworks by Angela Carter (reread); The Lover by Marguerite Duras; Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams; Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary by Ruby Ferguson (three of these featured on the Guardian list along with the Marquez novel). Where I will never intentionally have a week without books, I am more than willing to have another conscious week-with-a-book-a-day. Sometimes it is easier to read one book a day, even two (novellas are great, aren’t they?) but it is never something that I manage often in succession; I find myself often craving something more substantial that I can fully immerse myself in for a few days without it finishing too quickly. I am not a particularly fast reader, nor a slow one (maybe a page a minute?) and I wouldn’t change the rate at which I read as I am quite content to luxuriate in a novel, bath in its words and submerge myself in the plot. However, when the to-be-read piles are overwhelming me it is nice to know that I can kickstart my progress by ticking off seven at a time and I would never hinder my reading quota by taking an extended reading break. What about you, could you go a week without books?

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Paperback Reader — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:20:00 +0000

I love Classic literature; I love books in translation; I love controversial novels with scandal and intrigue so when Polly of Novel Insights chose Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) by Pierra Choderlos de Laclos for the Riverside Readers to discuss, I was delighted.

An eighteenth century epistolary novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses concerns two bored aristocrats in pre-Revolutionary France who are in dire need of the guillotine for the evil ways the employ to alleviate their ennui. The Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, ex lovers, each enjoy the arts of deceit and manipulation, each wishing to excel over the other. What begin as acts of revenge and of sexual conquest evolve into intricate Machiavellian plans of diabolical proportions; Valmont and Merteuil embroil others into their salacious machinations and nobody comes off unscathed.

The structure of the novel celebrates what is now the lost art of letter writing; the letters back and forth between all the players serve to look at the deceptions from every available viewpoint and fully appreciate their well-thought-out wickedness. Despite the epistolary form, the characters each had distinct voices and the letters their own style and tone; each writer was easily identifiable and by providing the majority of the correspondence the reader gains an insight into the complex manipulations and behind-the-scenes workings that occur. The multiple ironies of Les Liaisons Dangereuses that the reader is privy to throughout make it compelling reading as did the insight into the other face and persona that each character showed depending on whom they were writing to. Les Liaisons Dangereuses is very witty and intelligent and where some readers find the Chevalier Danceny and Cécile Volanges, the piano teacher and the convent girl respectively, to be annoying, I found them exceptionally amusing in their naïveté and their hyperbolic declarations of love.

Madame de Tourvel, the sexual object of Valmont’s whim, is exceptionally virtuous and pious but her letters display great intelligence and passion and Laclos’s representation of women is very impressive for its time; the Marquise is a vividly-drawn alpha-female and her verbal sparring with Valmont is every bit as much about sexual politics as it is sexual attraction. A manual in seduction, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is salacious and sordid; sex sells and the novel was very ahead of its time in being very much a part of ours. The scandalous lengths that Valmont and Merteuil go to to gain revenge are quite something; the novel is enthralling (the second volume does admittedly drag in its involved scene-setting) and shocking. At the same time as attempting to seduce Madame de Tourvel -whose conquest will earn him a sexual reward from Merteuil- Valmont is playing older male tutor to Cécile Volanges, at Merteuil’s request as she has a score to settle with Cécile’s future husband and Valmont consents because he desires revenge on Madame Volanges, Cécile’s mother, who is confidante to Madame de Tourvel; further pawns are the impressionable Chevalier Danceny, in love with Cécile and seeking advice and assistance from both Valmont and Merteuil, and Madame de Rosamonde, the matronly aunt of Vamont and friend of de Tourvel, as well as a couple of other by-standers who are caught up in the devilishly dangerous scheming.

I did not find Merteuil or Valmont at all sympathetic; they are thoroughly cruel and loathsome characters in their depravity yet they are fascinating, especially Valmont in his phallocentrism and boundless vanity. Les Liaisons Dangereuses in a study of Sadism and a play-by-play of how people deceive, seduce and manipulate others to their will; it examines the underbelly of human nature. Merteuil loves Valmont and Valmont de Tourvel love each other as much as vain, narcissistic people can love another, but they will not bend to the other and relinquish their power, which is why they can not, ultimately, co-exist; these odious characters will never submit to true feeling at the expense of their reputation and the face that they show to others.

I read the Douglas Parmée translation of the novel, which I found immensely readable; it gives a modern voice to the words, which never jarred for me but it may for some. I didn’t lose any of the aristocratic language nor Laclos’s deft and clever plays on language and innuendo to depict sexual liaisons. I also watched the Stephen Frear’s 1988 adaptation of the novel and thought it wonderfully brought to screen; the editing that is lacking in the novel is brutal in the film but not to the detriment of the story. John Malkovich as Valmont is outstanding although I was disturbed by his sympathetic portrayal as I was vehemently opposed to the deeds he carried out -in relation to Cécile- but could not resist his charm. Frears achieved an impressive visual representation of Laclos’s moral ambiguities and complexities that resonates; of the people at book group who had seen the film, none of us could separate the characters from their incarnations on-screen, that and it was far easier to refer to the Marquise de Merteuil as Glenn Close as none of us could pronounce her name.

Some key dialogue -through letters- between Valmont and Merteuil setting out their despicable plan:

Till now my thoughts were all of love; but it was soon replaced by rage. Who do you think is trying to ruin my reputation with the woman I adore? What fiend in woman’s shape is evil enough to weave such an abominable plot? You know her, it’s your friend and relative, Madame de Volanges. You cannot imagine the tissue of horrors that obnoxious old hag has written about me. It is she and she alone who has been disturbing my angel’s peace of mind; it’s her views and her pernicious advice that are forcing me to leave; in a word, it is she who has victimized me. Oh, there’s no doubt about it, her daughter has got to be seduced; no, that’s not enough. That woman must be smashed and since the old trout is too long in the tooth to be attacked directly, she must be made to suffer through someone she loves.

You may be a trifle annoyed at what I’m asking you to do but isn’t it a very small return for all the trouble I’ve been taking over your affairs? Didn’t I restore you to the judge’s when, through your own stupidity, you’d been forced to leave her? And then wasn’t it me who placed into your hands ways and means to settle your score with that mischievous old bigot Madame de Volanges? You’re always moaning about the time you waste looking round for exciting things to do. Now you have a couple under your very nose. Love or hatred, take your pick; they’re both sleeping under the same roof and you can live a double life, fondling with one hand and stabbing in the back with the other…

Thoughts from other Riverside Readers:

Farmlanebooks

Novel Insights

Reading Matters

Savidge Reads

I Served the King of England

Paperback Reader — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:10:00 +0000

This month’s book for Savidge Reads’ and Kimbofo’s book group was I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal. This Czech book in translation was my choice. I first came across Hrabal six years ago when I took a Slavonic literature course as an elective at University and read his novella Closely Observed Trains; I would like to reread it as all I can remember of the somewhat bizarre book is that Milos, the apprentice signalman, had attempted suicide after the humiliation of his first sexual experience. I Served the King of England had been on my radar at that time but I promptly forgot about it until coming across it whilst working in a bookshop last Christmas and then it featured in the comedy section of The Guardian’s 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. The entry for the book, written my Joanna Hines, caught my imagination:

Ditie, the hero of Hrabal’s comic masterpiece, learns early in his career to keep his ears open without hearing, keep his eyes open without seeing. From busboy he progresses to become a waiter in a Prague hotel, and then a millionaire with a hotel of his own; but his personal parameters remain those of the small man. Building on the rambling style of Hasek’s Svejk, the novel’s humour and bathos achieve universal significance in the contrast between Ditie’s meagre resources and his eternally grandiose ambition.

I was curious whether the comedy would translate and it did, albeit perhaps not as well as it may have in the original Czech (although credit to the translator Paul Wilson who has translated Hrabal who, the Czechs say, is “untranslatable”). The important thing to take note of from the synopsis above is “his personal parameters remain those of the small man” because Ditie -which means “child”- is a small man, complete with small man issues; an interesting hero in himself but especially with the backdrop of WWII where megalomaniac dictators with their own small man issues wreaked horror on the “sub”-man. Ditie is reminded by his first manager that as a busboy “you don’t see anything and you don’t hear anything … But remember too that you’ve got to see everything and hear everything”. Hrabal, via Ditie, then shows us everything in an overly descriptive first part of the novel. Ditie’s escapades -because they can only really be called that- are ludicrous and at times hilarious. In his first job Ditie saves his money to visit Paradise’s, the local brothel, so he can have his first sexual encounter. The novel becomes quite lewd, surprisingly so, at this point and Ditie lavishes a cast of prostitutes with visits, attention, and a lap-full of flowers (hence the fabulous cover of the newly re-issued edition from Vintage Books).

Described accurately as a “novel of two halves” by Polly of Novel Insights, the first part of I Served the King of England is a lighthearted expose of the hotel industry with some very amusing -and detailed- descriptions of the tricks of the trade; the second half, however, takes on a far more serious subject matter albeit still with an irreverent tone. The juxtaposition of the horrific German occupation of the now Czech Republic and the subsequent Blitzkrieg, the unbelievable coming true, with the comically farcical is superbly done. Hrabal injects black humour into the unimaginably abhorrent and I found myself chuckling uproariously at the most shocking of moments, that in a straight novel would be far from humorous (moments that in The Glass Room by Simon Mawer were uncomfortably haunting). To share Hrabal’s achievement and to demonstrate the style of writing, I have shared a scene where Ditie goes for German testing to see if he is fit to mate with an Aryan woman:

And so while execution squads in Prague and Brno and other jurisdictions were carrying out the death sentence, I had to stand naked in front of a doctor who lifted my penis with a cane and then made me turn around while he used the cane to look into my anus, and then he hefted my scrotum and dictated in a loud voice. Next he asked me to masturbate and bring him a little semen so they could examine it scientifically because, as the doctor said in his atrocious Egerlander German–which I couldn’t understand, though I got the gist well enough–when some stupid Czech turd wants to marry a German woman his jism had better be at least twice as good as the jism of the lowliest stoker in the lowliest hotel in the city of Cheb.

Ditie is then presented with pornography and when that doesn’t arouse him is masturbated by the nurse. Hrabal certainly knows how to create an image and one that doesn’t jar but does make an impact in its ridiculousness.

As a group we were mainly ambivalent towards this book and even after discussion most of us could not make up our minds what we felt about it; none of us hated it and Linda even loved it and saw qualities in it that many of us missed but we were not jumping up and down eagerly in our seats or agreeing that it is a novel that everyone must read. I am glad however that I have read it as I had been meaning to and in reading the very informative introduction by Adam Thirwell, I appreciate it the more. I will leave you with one passage of his, where he certainly sees the profound in I Served the King of England:

A sense of humour, in Hrabal, is really a sense of proportion: the ability to diminish the things of the world to their true and miniature size. This, in the end, is the real way to be a hedonist: to be content with how small the world’s pleasures are, to be happy with humiliation. But this sense of proportion is so rare.
Ditie’s diminutive stature, which leads him to try to impose himself on the world in such grandiose ways, is really metaphysical. It is universal. For everyone it is miniature, but with grandiose ambitions. So everyone is laughable.

Voice Over

Paperback Reader — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:02:00 +0000

They have known each other for a long time. She has never quite been able to recall the moment when they met, the place, the precise day, whether she shook his hand or they kissed on the cheek. Nor has she ever thought to ask him. She does have a first memory, though. As she was was climbing into her coat in the narrow hallway of an unkempt apartment, she had caught his look of distress. The woman he had flirted with all evening was refusing to leave with him. He was trying to persuade her with an insistent barrage of words, which fell to pieces in the face of the majestic creature. She thought the idea of being suddenly deprived of the object of his affections must have been more than he could bear just then. And seeing him this way, in love, had moved her. She had slipped between the two of them and said, I’m off. But he had not replied.

I have quoted the opening passage of Voice Over by Céline Curiol in its entirety to give you a sense of its style. At first I was immersed in the narrative, admiring her approach, but I soon became lost and never found my way in the text, to where it was going. The style is at first novel but it quickly becomes off-putting. The anonymous narrator -a disembodied voice who announces trains at the Gare du Nord- remains faceless and nameless and I never had a sense of who she was. The “he” from the opening paragraph, the man she loves, also remains nameless and I was often confused about who I was reading about, especially as the time narrative moves backwards and forwards, like a train making stops at certain stations along the way. The style is never-changing and the continual stream-of-consciousness throughout the text, with no chapter breaks or even dialogue, made it inaccessible to me. The style though is definitely a talking point.

As mentioned yesterday, this was a book group choice and it certainly generated discussion. For the most part though it was to voice our own incomprehension and wonder at what Curiol was attempting to achieve, at which we drew no definitive conclusions. We deviated into a rich and informative discussion on accomplished, unique, and, at times, alienating narratives (think Coetzee, Self, Amis), which greatly interested and intrigued me. I am attracted to books that play with the boundaries of narrative and I do enjoy feeling confused by an author’s intent on occasion but I don’t think I was in the right head space for Voice Over. For a start, my head has hurt since last Thursday and prose that I really had to work at made it worse. I thought that a book at just over 200 pages would be a breeze to read in a couple of days but it wasn’t; I struggled with its density. I was left with no insight into the narrator -the stream of consciousness doesn’t actually allow you into her mind or a sense of who she is- or the authorial message, if there was one; I even questioned whether all of the strange events in the novel existed or were imagined in her head. I found this book a very difficult one to read and I don’t think it was limitations of translation in any way but a style that simply didn’t suit my reading needs. With a fuzzy head and post-Persephone week exhaustion, followed by immersion into Catching Fire, I have fallen into a bit of a book slump, that isn’t helped by a time-sensitive to-be-read pile (Bookers mainly).

I was left feeling underwhelmed and confused by Voice Over but it generated a good discussion. All in all it is a curious book but makes an interesting choice for a book group. Some of us disliked it and others enjoyed its originality but we all agreed that it is bizarre.

Polly of Novel Insights has also posted her thoughts and I enjoy that we took different things away from it and both provide different views of the same picture. I forgot to mention the Esther Greenwood (from The Bell Jar) comparisons to the narrator, which were wonderfully coincidental. eta: Simon has also posted his views from Tel Aviv!

The Bell Jar

Paperback Reader — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 07:30:00 +0000

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York”. Such an opening line! It was a queer, sultry summer, ten years ago that I first discovered Sylvia Plath, the summer before I began University. Back then I didn’t know who the Rosenbergs were, I didn’t know who Sylvia Plath was, but it was enough to know that she had killed herself by putting her head in an oven to court my interest. As an angsty eighteen year old whose own pain made her self-involved, I loved controversy and Sylvia Plath with her tragic suicide and appropriation of the Holocaust to evoke her pain, was right up my street. That summer I read her poetry and then during the year I read The Bell Jar around the same time that I first read The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Melodramatic much?

Re-reading it a decade later for the Savidge Reads Book Group I had more of a perspective. Where the first experience of it spoke to my tortured, intense, and angst-filled self, the revisit allowed me to appreciate the beautiful prose and the humour that pervades the novel that is inaccurately thought of as depressing. The Bell Jar is dark, of course it is: it deals with the themes of depression and attempted suicide (the first of its kind) but amidst some comedic instances. Plath/Esther Greenwood is exceptionally observant and witty; her observations and insight into her thoughts and thought processes are highly amusing; Esther gives voice to bizarre thoughts, the type of which we wouldn’t admit to anyone. I appreciated the stripped-back exposure of Esther, naked and wounded. The ones at book group who were re-reading the book agreed that it should be compulsory for adults who had read The Bell Jar in their youth to re-read it again in adulthood. It resonated with me in my angst-ridden days and it resonated with me again -in a different way- as a more mature, less naïve adult; having been in the bell jar -that confined, claustrophobic, introspective place- between now and then, I appreciate it more and am less inclined to think that it “speaks to” my poor, immature, tortured soul. Yes, I am being self-deprecating but I recognised its black humour during this re-read and perceived that it is not all darkness and tragedy. In many ways I identified more with Esther this time around than I ever did, or thought I did.

These are more my thoughts and impressions outwith a normal book review but I have a lot of thoughts and impressions about this book! I suspect that most posts made after book group will be random observations about the book as I ponder it after discussion, rather than a cohesive account.

To lighten what can often be a light book anyway, I would like to share a favourite quote from a favourite show, Gilmore Girls:

“Hey, did anybody ever think maybe Sylvia Plath wasn’t crazy, she was just cold?” Lorelai Gilmore

Often, when I feel cold, I love to take a bath.

“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down so far and then I say: ‘I’ll go take a hot bath.’” (page 18)