Two new books found in Cape Town

I bought the new Anna Quindlen, Every Last One, and the new Jonathan Coe, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim while in Cape Town a week ago. Both are eminently readable as they say, why I am not sure now. Why eminently? Anyway, I could have finished them both in a flash but savoured them slowly, especially the Quindlen. This is sounding horribly sickly and I apologise.

Every Last One is half Wally Lamb but uniquely Quindlen who invariably writes with compassion and care but who also writes about critical moments in people's lives (dear God, I should abandon this blog right now).

This book is just what I needed, the first half anyway. It begins thus:

This is my life....

and ends with an echo of these words, but what happens in the space between their utterance is too terrible to bear, almost.

Naturally I can't tell you what happens, but from the moment I started reading, I was.... what? captivated, entranced, engaged, utterly there, completely content to read about this woman's every day life with her every day family, hoping against hope that disaster wasn't looming but of course it was. This is Anna Quindlen and she prefaces the book with that beautiful but ominous poem by Philip Larkin:

There is an evening coming in.......

Read this book.

Jonathan Coe's book is clever and also "eminently" readable (I haven't improved my writing ability in the past half hour obviously). It's like, if we are to pursue comparisons, a not so clever JM Coetzee, certainly a less pretentious JMC, in its surprising last chapter. I thought I had the mystery of the book all wrapped up until I read the last few pages, then felt mildly cheated but grinned nevertheless. Think about Slow Man, JMC fans.

While its technique is a little too foregrounded, I enjoyed the various transitions between narrative and intervening letters, short stories, emails etc all of which our protagonist is reading during the rather strange journey he's on beginning in Australia and ending there too, again, think Slow Man.

Despite my woeful attempts at book reviewing this sunny Sunday, I can heartily recommend these two books (there she goes again, "heartily", huh!).

Sunday morning with William Fiennes

I woke as usual around 6.30 and made my early morning tea. I knew what I was going to do this sunday, go to the gym and walk on the treadmill in the (vain) hope that my tummy would shrink and that the strange and new stiffness in my right leg would ease. Why I thought about The Music Room I don't know, but I dragged my bookclub bag onto the bed and started reading. It's now 9,36 and it's over. I read it in one fell swoop but I would like to return to it one day. It's simply beautiful, a book about boyhood in a magical place, a ancient castle, a family heirloom, greatly loved by all who live there and conjured up in this book as a reverent memory still wholly alive. The upper classes of Great Britain are an endearing lot. They struggle with money like the rest of us but on a different plane. To keep the castle in some kind of decent order, the family entertains the public throughout the summer, with Dad acting as ticket keeper and Mom as tour guide. But this is no sentimental gush about a lost past, it is a sharply focused memoir suffused with detail about birds, plants, lineage and, above all, about the human brain and the history of medical procedure and research into epilepsy. Rich, Williams much older brother acts as the focal point of this book. His charm and ferocious strength alternate with his joy in using language like a poet. His rages are terrifying but the family cocoons him with loving protection. The ending is a marvel, once again, bringing me to tears. I am definitely getting old.

William Fiennes. The Music Room. Picador. 2009.

hilary mantel

Look at that face. Before I found this photo on Amazon I had imagined Hilary Mantel as dark and studious, but she's a pixie, an mischievous elf, with upturned eyes and a wry and slightly wicked smile. Which matches my enormous pleasure in reading a 2007 novel of hers called An Experiment in Love which is absolutely not what it seems. The title would appeal to Siri Husveldt readers, something evocative and soulful. But this book is about young women as friends and foes, living together in the 1950s in a university residence in London and the book has the most remarkable Roald Dahlish denouement. Read it and find out.

After Wolf Hall and now this, I'm a dedicated fan.

Reading again

It's pathetic really the way I am (not) managing this blog. I think it's because I'm the only follower (je suis meaning I am and I follow quite appropriate here I think, are you there Karen?) and there's no pressure to write. But also because until this morning, I have not read anything that made me really want to write. Until this morning.

OK. The book in question is Paul Auster's Invisible and it was absorbing from the first page as all good books should be. He's difficult to describe in terms of literary affiliations, lots of Henry James, a little of JMC (or perhaps JMC takes his cue from PA?) something of Ian McKewan. Maybe, all the male writers of a certain age (late fifties, early sixties), the baby boomers, are all circulating around similar themes including the BIG one which is what we are doing to our planet. Ian M has done this directly in Solar, Auster does this very indirectly in Invisible. But as I reluctantly but furiously came to the last pages of the book this Sunday morning, I did what I always do when a book knocks my socks off. I say "Jesus". Then I read the passage in question again, and I repeat. Then I do a lot of gazing out of the window, then I read it again. Then I look to the back cover (note my copy has a beautiful and relevant photograph of a young couple sitting on the edge of the Seine in Paris)to see if some clever critic has said something clever (no such luck here) and i look at the cover, then I put the book down very gently and get typing on my Macbook.

This is a very illusive book about the invisibility of authors and authors within authors but it tells a cracking good yarn at the same time through multiple authors who seamlessly glide into each other while being controlled meticulously by the "REAL AUTHOR".

The ending brought me to tears. It was so utterly unexpected, not in terms of the plot which it seemed to abandon as if it was of little importance but because of the subtlety of its vision of an oh so cruel and imperfect world.

Read it and see.

Booker Prize Week

So Hilary Mantel did it and I didn't. Let me explain. Di and I were standing in Waterstones, mulling over which of the new books to buy, all of them shiny harbacks with enticing covers. Di chose Wolf Hall, the winner of the Booker, I didn't. Well done Di. Now the question is, what did you think of it?

I chose the new Iain Banks and the new Margaret Atwood although if I hadn't faced the prospect of being overweight at Heathrow, I would have bought the Coetzee as well.

I'm not being a good reader at the moment. A few pages into Home by Marylin Robinson (Gilead sequel), a few chapters into Waterlog by the late Roger Deakin, half way through the Iain Robinson, nearly finished The Wisdom of Crowds, almost finished Dreams: A Very Short Introduction (husband has grabbed it from me) and about twenty more books are glaring at me from all over my bedroom, on my desk, at my bedside and on the floor. Husband says he wants to live in a Zen environment and is very annoyed by my clutter. Ah, the joys of marriage.

Our NIKE group

This is for you, Francette.

The first meeting of the NIKE (just do it) group met the day after a new moon in Leo and a partial solar eclipse. This was obviously auspicious since the group seemed (to me at any rate) to be centred and calm yet inspired and inspiring. Alternating waves of laughter and quiet filled the room. I loved it, every bit of it, and wished that we had booked in for the night so that we could be together a little longer.
I had been reading, with rapt attention, a book by Nancy Kline called Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind. Armed with the provocative ideas Kline puts forward about listening, really listening to people, and knowing that I had an awe-inspiring video by Sugata Mitra to share, I felt only positive anticipation about the day's conversations. There seemed to be no tension this time and no bone-wearying boredom either, but I could be wrong about this. It is possibly easier to be the organiser than the receiver on these occasions as one is able to control the flow and pace of the talk.
There will be another blog soon with heaps of information and a synopsis of the day's events but for now that's all, except to say, thank you Colette, thank you Elmarie, thank you Deon, thank you everyone for being so generous with your ideas and reminding me that there is power in the collective.
A luta continua!

On Netherland and reading at 3 am

So the dog wakes me at one in the morning and I curse my stupidity in going to bed too early because I can't get back to sleep. I stagger to the lounge and pick up where I left off last time Netherland by Joseph O'Neill. I am reading this book v-e-r-y slowly because it's such a marvel. When I use my usual skimming methodology, I have to go back and read again, because you can't miss a single sentence. Even though this book has the game of cricket at its centre, as Breath had surfing at its, and I don't know much about cricket nor will I ever, O'Neill has this gift of instilling significance into every phrase, not in that soppy sense of Wow, This is Significant Stuff, but in the real sense which makes me put the book down and stare into the middle distance. So early this morning at the time when one feels most alone and wonders how many other people are also up, I thought of what it means to write a really good novel, as this is. A novel that, like Henry James's, doesn't do much. A contemplative novel that manages to keep your interest throughout the contemplation. Hans has roots in the Netherlands - his memories return there repetitively with scenes of skating, the quiet orderly streets of The Hague, his mother, his school - yet his heart is in New York where he is an unwilling sojourner, a legal alien. The Chelsea Hotel comes to life in this book in a miraculous way, just as that other hotel, whose name I have forgotten, but which is being restored, will always remain for me part of my childhood thanks to Eloise. This morning I read this wonderful scene in which the Turkish angel (he wears rather dirty angel wings and robes) is lying on the roof of the synagogue and Hans lies next to him while the angel's mother has hysterics believing that her son has committed suicide. Hans looks up at the night sky and what follows is typical of the book - a synergy of signficant moments which I can't possibly capture in my clumsy and turgid prose but which made me put the book down and stare into the middle distance. You'll have to read it yourself.
So I get back into bed at 3 in the morning and lie there writing this in my mind. How annoying that the words flowed so fluidly there in bed which they never do when I face the screen, hands poised over the keys. I thought of what it means to write in this blogging space - how private it is - and what a paradox that is, to be most private when being most public. But no-one reads this. It's name - anacoluthon - protects my privacy. Who would bother with a blog with a name like that? So, why is this different from writing in a journal? Well, someone always finds the journal, so it's never a truly private space, whereas this huge etheric place which is theoretically open and free for all is a better place to hide.

Oh, and Kate Atkinson's latest is also a joy albeit in a totally different form.
And I have further thoughts about the novel as the most accomplished form in which to grasp the meaning of life, but I won't go there.