In praise of idleness

I've been reading Bertrand Russell's 'In Praise of Idleness'. The title attracted me - and I remember my mother eading his stuff when she was about my age, and I always wondered what she saw in him. I think I still do, though it's interesting reading these 15 essays written in the 1930s.

He covers a wide range of topics, from idleness, to architecture and social conditions, to communism and fascism, the cynicism of the young, the powers of capital (to use a Marxist phrase). I cannot quite work out what kind of type he was. Clearly he was not a scientist - while there are references to other thinkers/writers, they are not properly referenced. While one could argue that perhaps the style of academic writing may have developed since then, in fact Freud who wrote a good 20 - 50 years earlier, was fairly meticulous in his referencing. So he is not a scientist - is he 'just' a thinker? He did get a Nobel Prize for literature - which makes me wonder what constitutes 'literature' - I always thought it was novels, poetry and such like - but I don't think he wrote those.

The book is fairly readable; the foreword talks about his wit - I did not notice much of that, unless it was unintentional. Clearly his ideas are somewhat dated. But there are some interesting moments:

In his essay on idleness he suggests that 4 hours work is quite enough for anyone, given the possibilities of modern (1935!) machinery. If the income from work were properly distributed we could all live quite happily and enjoy idleness - time to sit and think. (I am getting better at that....though for a long time that damned protestant work ethic got in the way). He even suggests that teachers should not work for more than 2 hours per day to keep themselves fresh and interested in their charges.

On architecture and social conditions he suggests that families should live together, eg in apartment blocks, with a communal kitchen and kindergarten, to free (especially working) women from the drudgery of housework. The kitchen would provide wholesome meals for families (this might be desirable given the UK obesity epidemic) and the nursery would be child-safe so the children could explore their limits; they would spend all day there, only returning to their parents after the evening meal. A bit like the kibbutz idea - at the time attachment theory (relating to babies and children) was not even thought of. ...

On finance and financiers he writes: 'the interests of finance in recent years have been opposed to the interests of the general public....It is unwise to leave financiers to the unfettered pursuit of their private profits'. Something we could echo today....

On youthful cynicism he suggests that young men (sic) in Russia are not cynical because they accept ...the Communist philosphy. Perhaps he was not aware of the Stalinist clampdown on free speech, even thought, at the same time.

He writes a lot about stoicism and mental health, particularly in the face of death. He suggests, for example, that parents who lose a child should not hide their grief from their other children, who might then think that they would not care either if this child died. I suppose there is not much danger of hiding parental grief these days - perhaps the opposite is the case.

Although he often mentions the lot of downtrodden wives, he is still a man of his period; discussing body and soul he writes 'we knew that a man consists of a soul and body'. And pray, what do women consist of?

Interesting reading, in terms of social construction of social categories.....

and now I will idle some more.

The Children's Book

Picked up A S Byatt's latest book, 'The Children's Book' a week ago at the local bookstore. I was quite surprised that they had one of hers, but it's not a bad place ('Exclusive Books', in Riverwalk, Gabarone, a South African chain; has the most choice). I did not really mean to buy more books, have quite enough to last me for the moment, but could not resist. I think it may have been listed for the Booker prize.

In some ways, Byatt always writes the same books; complex arty and often left-wing families, who always seem to be putting on Shakespeare dramas in amateur performances. This one was a bit different, being set at the turn of the 19th/20th century until the end of WWI (my heart sank when I noticed that), and for my liking it contained far too much history - I hate that stuff. It contains a wide mixture of real and imaginary people, and probably real quotes. All sorts of left wingers, from the Webbs to the Pankhursts and so on. Particularly near the end the characters almost disappear under the weight of history. Ok, so it was a horrible time, even before WW1, and the struggle of the suffragettes was quite horrific (just had conversations about women's votes this week on the eve of the Botswana election tomorrow), but I am really not into history.

Apart from that, it was a jolly romp, though also including some deeply disturbed families (my diagnosis - bipolar depression in one person, unipolar depression in at least one other), emotional abandonment and so on. All upper middle class stuff, apart from the working class folk, who somehow fitted in, more or less, on sufferance. Some characters always remained on the edge of things, colourless - one never got an idea of what went on in their heads.

It was a nice read, it's just that I found it much of a muchness for A S Byatt (bit like Isabel Allende, who always writes the same book), and I could not abide all that historical stuff. But maybe that was a new challenge for her.

More books....

Getting hold of what I can (South Africa next week, hope Stellenbosch has more bookshops with a wider range; have already identified some...):

Ian Rankin's 'The Flood' - this was his first book, written while he was still at university and rejected by many publishers then.... Set in a mining (former mining...) village in Fife, it tells the story of a woman who fell in a pit burn aged 10, after which her hair turned white overnight, and had a son aged 16 whose father remains unknown until the end of the book. Also of her son and various other people who come into contact with her. The son has no idea who his father is and is afraid to ask his mother in case he hurts her. I know the feeling well! He, a smart lad (an alter ego of Rankin?), in his teenage years has his own problems and dreams....The woman falls in love but cannot do sex, given her earlier experiences, there is a new minister in town who also feels strongly attracted to her.... many people in the village think she is a witch, and she is a bit of an outcast (somehow she also made me think of Susan Boyle, who, like Mary Miller in the book, has not worked until now). There is no crime and no Inspector Rebus in the book. Knowing Scottish former mining communities (albeit in Ayrshire) pretty well I liked this book very much; it describes the community very convincingly, its decay, the despair settling in, the boys who are desperate to leave school (but after the summer holidays are envious of the boy staying on at school). It also made me think about all the policies everywhere in the world where staying in education for as long as possible is encouraged - but there are people who hate school (me included), and alternatives need to be found for them. The book made me feel quite at home.

Coincidentally I then went on to read Kate Atkinsons 'When will there be good news', another Jackson Brodie book set mainly in Edinburgh. Actually I find her a better crime writer than Rankin (and she has not always been a crime writer); the characters are more sympathetic, though also quite appallingly complex. This book is another crime novel with twists and turns you would not believe - the opening scene reminds me of that murder in Kent where a guy murdered a mother and at least one of her daughters. The chapter headings are a mix of nursery rhymes, converted religious quotes, quotes from other literature, and she displays an intimate knowledge of classical Greek. The main heroine is a plucky 16-year-old girl who the reader's heart goes out to - she has had so many disasters in her life that it is surprising how well adjusted she is. It's also quite funny, despite all the murder and mayhem. Well worth getting (and I will be taking it home).

Finally (not finally really, given that there is another book on my office bookshelf whose name I cannot remember) there is Andrew Wilson's 'The Lying Tongue', about a young art history graduate, Adam Wood (notice the coincidence of the initials?) who gets a job in Venice tutoring a young boy with the aim of writing his first novel in his spare time. The job falls through, and he finds another one looking after an old author with a very murky past (which, not surprisingly, he is rather secretive about). Young Adam sets out to find out about the past, which is not very pleasing - but at the same time Adam is not necessarily the guy you would like to have as a friend, or even as an acquaintance - never mind as an enemy. It's ok; a good read, for hospital reading etc, and its end is one which I could not help feeling a little satisfied with. Not terribly high-brown literature though, the descriptions of Venetian art, buildings etc notwithstanding. This one is for sale in the office....

Reading, reading, reading

So what can a guy do when there is virtually no cultural life, no restaurants, little social life, but read.  Lots of books, all so far very interesting, but I wonder how long it will take me to use up the books in Exclusive Books in Riverwalk Mall of Gaborone? At least at the moment they have their winter sale, which helps. Need to look in Stellenbosch next week - I hope they will have a wider choice.

What did I read?

Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene (1938). A scary book set in the underworld of Brighton, with knife-gangs etc (as they say they had in Glasgow in the 1950s). Some desperate guys kill a guy (except it seems he died of fright before they managed to kill him). A woman with big boobs has her suspicions about his 'natural death' and pursues the gang. It describes their rather horrid lives rather well - there is a rather complex character, all of 17, who runs the gang, and who has had the usual upbringing of reform school and so on. What surprises me about him is that he does not drink or smoke and he hates sex, perhaps because, in his family's one-roomed flat, he saw his parents at it every Saturday. But a 17-year-old boy, with hormones all over the place? A bit strange....

The Bad Mother's Handbook, by Kate Long - about a single mother (aged 33) of a clever 17-year-old daughter living on a council estate somewhere in the North of England, and with a rather batty mother herself, who slips in and out of dementia. Except there is a secret..... and the daughter herself follows her mother's footsteps. Very amusing in between all the drama. Well worth a read if you understand life in the North of England.

Spud, by John van de Ruit, written as a diary by a 14/15 year old boy in a South African boarding school. It's very funny, though I hope not too many of the events in the book happened to folks I know who went to boarding school.  The narrator comes across as rather a complex child, singing in the choir one minute and up to no good the next.

A book by a South African author (currently lent out, cannot remember author's name or the book's title) about a Jewish family in South Africa and their black servants (in passing). Told by all the different characters (which makes each chapter difficult to sus out - just who exactly is talking here?). The grandparents come from Lithuania, and for some reason talk about Polish money (fair enough), had a terrible life in Lithuania (ditto), spoke little Russian (why would they speak Russian if they were using Polish money) and speak much Yiddish (when suddenly the Lithuanian word 'bulves' = potatoes) drops into it.  The book is set in the 1950s when the main character, a child, is a young child, and goes on. It's very interesting psychologically, with the child/family having to deal with a mother who clearly sinks into deep depression (understandable, under the circumstances described in the book), but no-one in the family is able to deal with the woman's rejection of any help.  Only much later, after the woman is dead, the daughter realises what difficulties her mother had to struggle with.  Initially it seems a bit corney, but when you get into it, you really (or I really did) get into the child's suffering.  I can't believe I can't find the book on the internet. Would help if I remembered any of the characters' names; I have a feeling it was shortlisted for some (UK?) prize within the last few years....I picked it because I have a South African Jewish friend who would have been about 10 years older than the child in the book.

A wild sheep chase' by Haruki Murakami; a usual Murakami thriller-type book involving the slightly weird and wonderful. Great reading, as always, less sex than usual (:-().  Unputdownable.

And I am still reading 'MacroPsychoanalyse', an economics/psychoanalytic textbook (in French) about how any economic models are really run by emotions (as is everything, in my view, even if, sometimes, it is the denial of emotions, which also gives its own message). Very interesting, converting the individual model of people (in French 'le ça', 'le moi' and 'le supermoi', as well as 'la pulsion de la vie' and 'la pulsion du mort'). Fascinating stuff, it really is - but it is so threatening to people to talk about emotions in relation to what they think are rational decisions.  I'm waiting for a few more books on the same topic, should they ever arrive in Botswana.  It's not quite as easy to get into it in French....

But Philip Roth's book, 'Our Gang' or 'Le théâtre de Sabbath' in French may be one step too far for my French. It's sitting there, and I have laboured through a few pages.....

Two harrowing childhoods

These are two very different childhoods, but ones you would not wish on your worst enemy. I'm talking about Lang Lang (growing up as an only child in China) and Janice Galloway (whose older mother, during pregnancy, thought she was the menopause and the child was thus welcomed into the family), growing up in Saltcoats, Scotland.

In his autobiography, Lang Lang (born in about 1983) describes how parents in China invest all their hopes in their only child. He sure got to feel that! His father always wanted him to be Number One - in a country where at any one time, 50 million children learn to play the piano! Thus Dad devoted his life to making sure that his son became the Number One. This meant making his boy practice all the time. The father attended his lessons, later, at the Central music school in Beijing, the father spied on the lessons of other children to such a degree that the other teachers began to complain about him. At one stage the father, in his despair about the son's progress, held him over the balcony rail of their block of flats and wanted him to commit suicide; when that failed, he wanted the boy to take pills.....Once Lang Lang 'failed' as a pianist - he came only 7th in a competition.  If Lang Lang did not practice enough or make enough progress the father would not allow his mother, who in a distant part of China earned the money that kept them all afloat, and who was sorely missed by her son, to visit the child.

Life in China was always about competitions, winning the local one, the national one, an international competition....the family raked together enough money to send the boy and his family to Germany for a competition, then to Japan....Later Lang Lang got a place to study in the US. He arrived clutching a piece of paper listing the next competitions he wanted to enter. His teacher told him that this was not the way they do it there...so he knuckled down. When, after his US breakthrough, he wanted to play a concert in China with a major US orchestra, the Chinese authorities nearly refused him to come - on account of him having won no further competitions. At the press conference on arrival they asked, effectively 'so what exactly is it you have done in the US?'. 

Was it worth it all? Of course he now has all the trappings of a glittering life-style, and he has been able to side-line his father in the US, what with Dad's English being not so good. But he has also suffered from severe depressions..... a condition which he may have been able to overcome thanks to having to take an enforced break after a hand injury, when he suddenly realised there were other things to life than playing the piano.

It's harrowing stuff, well-written (by a ghost writer) and unputdownable.

Janice Galloway's life in Saltcoats, on the other hand, was quite different ('This is not about me', described as a memoir-cum-novel). An unexpected, and it seems, unwanted child born in the mid 1950's (her mother tells her at the age of 4 for the first time that she wishes she had not been born), she grows up with her mother, her abusive and drunk father (until that age) and a sister who is about 20 years older and a nasty piece of work. The mother flees from the marital home when Janice is 4 and finds shelter in the tiny attic of her doctor's surgery which she cleans in return. The attic is so small that when the bed is pulled out there is just a tiny bit of space for the mother to move around it. Then the sister returns from her broken-up marriage and joins them there.....(it never becomes clear what exactly has happened to the sister's son).  Later the father dies and the family returns to the family home, an 'architect-designed' council house.

I'm not sure what makes the sister tick. Is it sibling rivalry - for a 20-year-old? She seems to be totally selfish, and constantly bullies and trips up little Janice, who quickly learns to keep her head down. Keeping her head down seems to be the central theme of her life - living at the doctor's she has to be quiet when he has surgery, quiet when she accompanies her mother in her cleaning rounds, and quiet at home when her sister, Cora, sleeps. So when she starts school, she is good at being 'good' and quiet - and her world is totally rattled when in a gym lessons the children are told to run around and pretend to be an aeroplane, and to make a noise. She cannot deal with this and refuses to participate. Later her mother is called into the school and told that Janice seems to have some problems; the school suggests, among others, that Janice should see a psychologist - the mother refuses, angrily. Little Janice finds some solace in singing, which she and her mother do well, and in writing, especially in forming beautiful letters.

The book ends around the time she finishes primary school. For me it was very evocative, given that I know Saltcoats, West of Scotland culture and the language spoken there. I just wonder how many other children there grew and grow up like this (though in many cases now parents in her mother's situation might not care about their children being noisy or quiet or anything).

Colonic Irrigation!

Noooo, not mine!

Jackie Kay, it seems, has written a wonderful poem about Maw Broon and her new health kick. See here. Glad it's the top story in Scotland on Sunday today.

Grim, grey, depressing

....that's what the UK was between 1945 and 1951, according to David Kynaston's wonderful tour de force 'Austerity Britain' which had been lying around half-read for about a couple of years. One of the benefits of smoking are the frequent breaks from other things, and for reading....

It's an amazing book, all 632 pages of text. The amount of research that has gone into it is amazing - I was extremely impressed at how he had got hold of all those personal diaries, until I discovered that people used to send their diaries to the Mass Observation.  It's an amazing resource of bits and pieces of insights into people's lives. And lives is mostly what this book is about; the impact of rationing, housing shortages, lack of everything including heating after the war, but also some politics and economics. It's so interesting reading about some young up-and-coming politicians, eg Arthur Scargill (no politician, no?), Jim Callaghan, the young Harold Wilson whom someone promised not a very great future.  There are the battles over the establishment of the welfare state, the nationalisation of industry, the building of houses (flats) and demolition of old slum-type housing (read that and you understand slum clearance), the experience of the first post-war blacks in England (all 1500 of the new arrivals by the time the book finishes, and the fear of being over-run).

And you thought that sociology only came into being into the 1960s? Wrong - apart from Mass Observation, there was a chap called Ferdynand Zweig who seems to have talked to every worker under the sun during the period, and lots of others.  Many of the fears of the late 1940s still exist, like of the young ones, of crime and disorder - 'with this deterrent [capital punishment] gone, no woman will feel safe in London after dark'....following nationalisation, there were 'too many men walking about in hats' (ie management) - what would those people say now, when they see the health service... 

The funniest thing is the language - jeez, how English has changed over the last 60 years - you mark my words!

Trumpet

This is a wonderful book by the black Scottish (lesbian?) adopted writer Jackie Kay, who grew up just over the water from us (Dunoon way?). I would not normally go into someone's private affairs this much, but the book is about a black Scottish transsexual trumpeter, who gets married and adopts a son - some parallels there....As it happens, the trumpeter, Joss Moody, comes from Greenock, where another black Scottish guy I know was born...(port city, you know).

Joss Moody does not get much of a speaking part in this book, given that he is dead and only lives on in people's memories. The thing is that it is only when he dies that most people find out that in fact Joss Moody was a woman. The doctor who comes to sign the death certificate (Moody hated doctors and hospitals, so died at home) finds some bandages around his chest, and under them discovers some perfectly formed breasts - then she looks down his body....; the undertaker, the lovely Bangladeshi registrar, the guy's son, all find out something new about Joss. Then it hits the media and his wife flees the marital home to a wee cottage in Scotland.

The story is lovingly told in a series of little vignettes, from different points of view - and paints extremely sympathetic pictures of all who are involved in dealing with this situation. Even the son, who initially agrees with a tabloid journalist in 'telling it how it was' (how can he, seeing he thought his father was a man) and who at first comes across a bit as an arse (though he perhaps has reason to be angry), eventually becomes quite likeable. The author's descriptions of Moody's trumpet playing are awesome - I wish I could write reviews like this!

There are some logic gaps, though - how could Moody get married as a man? Even in 1955 I am sure they would have needed his birth certificate (Josephine Moore). His mother, who is finally tracked down by her grandson, lives in a sheltered housing scheme in Greenock called 'Larch Grove'. In Scotland, in public housing a name like that? I don't think so - 'Rankin Court' or something like that would have been more appropriate.  It never becomes clear what caused Moody to live as a man - childhood photos show him in a dress (but he was born in 1927, different times, different place).

The first page of the book was a bit hard, a bit irrational - but it was the widow's first days of widowhood, while the media were camped outside her house - this reflected her despair. But I am glad I persevered; it really is a wonderful, wonderful book - especially also with the references to places in Scotland I know and love! Must look out for more books by this author!

Kamchatka!

Picked up this book by Marcelo Figueras I don't know where. Munich? It's in German, but an English translation exists, too - at a price. Of course it should be available in Spanish.  It's wonderful!

I should have twigged that a book by a guy with a Spanish name, apparently about a remote Siberian region, is not what I might have expected. In fact, it's about Figueras' childhood, in Argentina, during the period of the military coup (1976).

Figueras' parents, a lawyer defending many human rights cases and a university scientist, are, effectively, dissidents and as the military coup approaches, life becomes more and more difficult for them. They and their family have to leave Buenos Aires in a hurry and hide in a cottage at the edge of the city, also changing their identities. The story is told from the viewpoint of 10-year-old Marcelo, who sort of understands, but not entirely. His little brother, known as 'the dwarf', who likes very strict routines, understands even less. After a while normality sets in, Marcelo joins the religious village school (before which he has to cram religion, given that that was never a topic in his family's life). An older boy, Lucas, appears and lives with the family - it seems that he may be part of an underground movement.  The parents eventually return to work, though after a while the mother is sacked.

Figueras describes beautifully the changed situation, as the young boy grasps it - which includes mysterious phonecalls, sometimes having to flee again, relationships with his grandparents, his friends and his brother.  The parents seem to be wonderful, very loving and very engaged in making sure that the children are all right. They drive what sounds like a lime-green 2CV (aaaah, those were the days) - something which perhaps the average lawyer's family might just laugh at.  The mother (the 'Rock') appears to have a talent for everything except housekeeping and especially cooking, the father engages much with his son despite presumably having many troubles of his own. 

In between Figueras drifts through considerations of the history of the earth, astronomy, religion, Houdini (he finds a book on Houdini and tries to emulate him) and other topics. Sometimes these hold up the story line a bit, but perhaps, from his point of view at the time, not much else was happening within the family.  Much of the story focuses on the inner life of this little boy who is quite happy to share it, and discuss it, with his parents and his big friend Lucas.

The book ends not entirely conclusively, rather obliquely in fact - the future of his parents is not entirely clear. (Or perhaps only too clear?).  An afterword would have been nice.

I found it really interesting to read about a country and a period I know very little about. It's also very funny. What has it got to do with Kamchatka? You'll need to read it to find out!

Suffer the little children....

....seems to be a continuing theme in Jessica Duchen's books, of which I have just read the third, 'Hungarian Dances'. In every one of her books children seem to draw very much the short straw, either becoming anorexic, being pushed by ambitious parents, or being 'abandoned' by both parents, for different reasons. I hate that!

Another theme running through her books is music - this one is about a violinist who eventually finds herself, at considerable cost to her family (see above). Every time I see the title I have those Brahms Hungarian dances running through my head.

It's a story that flips backwards and forwards, between the life of her Roma grandmother, the lives of her parents who fled Hungary in 1956, and her own life - all of which contain a certain amount of trauma, particularly at the Hungarian/Roma end (I am not entirely sure why I do not care so much about the Roma part of the book; I also did not care so much for Colum McCann's 'Zoli', reviewed here which covers much the same topic. Is it because it is well-meaning foreigners writing about them? I think I might prefer a book written by a Roma person). In between there is the family who has lived across the road from Karina's (the heroine's) family who lose a daughter in a catastrophic railway accident.

There are some logic gaps - Karina's father appears to speak with a strong Hungarian accent and slightly fractured English - but he spent his first 7 years in New York - should he not have an American accent?  Also the body of her friend, following the train accident and a fire, is identified by a dental filling - but the accident happened in the 21st century - would they not have used DNA analysis to identify it conclusively?

It's a very readable book (lightish) in a sort of middle-class English way with Hungarian ingredients - a bit of an English goulash. Perhaps this adds extra spice (ouch!) to the type of readers who read Joanna Trollope (and no, an Aga is never mentioned). It's fairly unputdownable - I finished it on a long journey to Kazakhstan.

Matters of Honor (sic)

'Matters of Honor' by Louis Begley is a wonderful book! Is it a 'bildungsroman'? Might be - I'm not that hot on types of novels.

It's about 3 fairly privileged young men who start college together in the 1950s (at Harvard), and follows their lives - throughout their lives. It's told from the viewpoint of Sam, the son of a couple with a drink problem who appear to be the black sheep of a very middle-class New England family. Henry, a Jew, survived the war in hiding in Poland, and Archie is the son of a US military officer and his wife who has grown up in Panama. They are put together in a student flat and from there their friendship begins.

The question occurs, though, who's 'bildung' is being told here? Is it Sam's, or is it Henry's? Archie remains somewhat peripheral, but Sam and Henry remain closely connected throughout their lives. Henry tries hard to throw off the yoke of Judaism - of course, as a young man with a Polish accent he is always asked how he survived the war, which he hates. His mother clings to him, and his parents want him to become a doctor - but he drops that course and studies classics instead., though later he develops into a direction which might have made his parents proud. Sam's life, on the other hand, proceeds fairly calmly, apart from a mishap or two, into the life of a successful writer.

What's so wonderful about this book? It is written so beautifully (probably better in English, I read it in German), and meanders along so calmly, even though some of the events described in the book are quite traumatic. It is interesting how much the men in this book (in which women are very marginal) talk about their feelings and experiences - most of it is about the emotional lives of the characters. And still the book is unputdownable. Very much worth reading.

(And now it looks like I am off to Georgia for an emergency assignment - and I have exams to pass, and and and....)

Summer reading

Have had lots of time to read, in different languages. Including

• Ismael Beah's 'A long way gone' (in Spanish). A harrowing tale of a child soldier in the wars of Sierra Leone, including moments of almost unbelievable cruelty, escapes, wars catching up on him, an event at the United Nations in New York while he was still a school boy (in the middle of winter when he had never seen snow) and final escape to the next country, Guinea. The book appears to have been discredited a little, but is still a very useful source document for anyone who has to do with the resettlement of traumatised children.
• Haruki Murakami's 'Kafka on the Shore', his best yet, as far as I am concerned. It's unputdownable! It's about a boy who runs away from school, an old man who was involved in a strange accident at the end of the war and who can talk to cats, the boy's friend who turns out to be a female-to-male transsexual (or perhaps intersexual, in this case), various other people connected in mysterious ways, and some, quite frankly, spooks. There's a murder and some strange tale about disappearing cats, the story travels from Tokyo to some far flung island - and to the end you don't know what has happened or what is going to happen. Brilliant, and a good, long read. I hear Murakami is due to have another book out soon. Can't wait!
• Donna Leon's 'Death and Judgment' (in Spanish); one of her usual books which I had not read before. Very nice with the descriptions of Venetian footpaths, bridges and so on. To some degree her books are much of a muchness, what with corruption and socially important people always playing a role. But nice to read, especially with her sense of irony.
• Lilly Brett's 'Too many men', the predecessor of her book 'You gotta have balls'. Story of a neurotic woman and her Auschwitz-surviving father returning to his roots in Poland. It's nice, and interesting, but frankly, I thought that the balls book is better. 'Too many men' is divided up by (imaginary) conversations with Hoess, the head of Auschwitz (probably portrayed in 'Schindler's List'), which, while adding information for those readers who don't know much about it, breaks up the story. After a while one becomes inclined to flick over these conversations. But still quite funny and also a good read.
• Colum McCann's 'Zoli' has been lying on my desk for some months, waiting for a comment. It's about a Roma woman who in the 1950s, as the then Czechoslovakia becomes communist, gets involved in politics and becomes political flavour of the month, before the regime changes, and she is effectively excommunicated from her community for fraternising with the enemy. So she has to leave the country. It's a bit weird - there's some English guy in it who after a while fades out; the story jumps backwards and forewards and every time it does so it takes some time to sus out where it's at. Not all that riveting.
  

Spitting blood!

So, after loving Lily Brett's 'You gotta have balls' I bought the other two books by her that amazon.co.uk sell. I had been a bit surprised that 'Uncomfortably close' appeared to have an almost identical cover to the balls book. But I thought that was maybe her house style.

The reason, I now discover, why the cover is virtually the same, is because it's the same frigging book! On the title page, in tiny writing it says 'previously published as 'you gotta have balls'. Why would they do a thing like that? Was the original title to offensive for sensitive American readers?

So now it needs to go back to amazon, at a not inconsiderable cost of postage. Not happy!

Two Girls

Not sure which of my blogs to put this book review into - it's a Turkish book (so Eastern Europe might be relevant), but it's a book, so my arts blog is also relevant - though it is not music....

So here it is, Two Girls by Perihan Magden, the third of the books I picked up at the Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus in Berlin. Reasons for not moving to Berlin - 1) the expensive concert tickets, 2) the proximity of Dussmann and potential for spending all my money on books and CDs (though on the other hand I could at least use public libraries again).

'Two girls' is a scary book! It's about two young women in Istanbul (lovely references, if not descriptions of places in Istanbul I have been to) who bump into each other and fall in love immediately. If this book were written in Western Europe, it might have had lesbian love scenes, but this one was sponsored by the Turkish Culture Ministry, so it does not.

The girls are very different - Behiye is a red-haired, freckled punk who seems to like to wear more male clothes and likes Metallica, Hadan is a very pretty and very feminine girl, big into Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears, whose mother is a high-class tart. After a day Behiye moves into Hadan's and her mother's flat, not without having stolen money from her brother.

But gently the world falls apart - there are differences in musical and intellectual taste, and there's Hadan's continuing interest in boys, particularly rich boys - shades of her mother? Behiye is very jealous. Intermittently, within the story, dead male bodies appear dressed in brand name clothes, and with their throats cut - what is the link to the scalpel Behiye carries in her pocket?

The book is beautifully written - particularly the inner life of the rather tortured Behiye is portrayed incredibly vividly. It keeps hurtling forward - though the end is not quite what one might expect. Another unputdownable book!

Boomsday

Absolutely not a cultural novel, 'Boomsday' by Christopher Buckley (author of 'Thank you for Smoking' which might have a similar focus), is an all-American, very funny in a wise-cracking sort of way novel about the machinations of government in the US. Though these could be the same machinations in the UK, especially in relation to party donors.

It's about a young woman who is annoyed about the huge social security bill for the baby boomers (of whom I am one) who will need to be supported by the under-30s from now and for a long time. Working in public relations, she has a pretty good idea on how to get people fired up, and starts, through her blog, a series of attacks on gated communities for the elderly. This snowballs, and snowballs, and through very close connections with a senator she develops a bill to introduce voluntary transitioning (ie suicide) for people aged seventy or over, in return for tax breaks. This gets everyone in a tizzy, and from here on in all hell breaks loose, with the churches, her estranged father, the president and all sorts of other people piling in, plotting and counterplotting against each other, blackmailing, promising and undoing promises and so on. A typical few months in US government.

The style takes a bit of getting used to, and some of the jokes are just a bit 'oh aren't we so clever to have thought of this one?'. It's very 2006 US; not subtle and not for everyone. The events are of the kind that you read about in the Guardian every day. Is it like 'West Wing'? I don't know, not having seen it. Like it's cover, the book is brash, bold, and a bit vulgar (but also typically American, without explicit sex). Would make a great airport book, though - and an easy read for a day spent sick in bed.

I hope the US citizenship knows, after West Wing and all the other shows, that this is how its government operates.

A book after my own heart

Picked up 'Finale' by Michael Wallner in Austria. A book with a played violin on it is always interesting.....It's not available in English, though his book, 'April in Paris' is, interestingly also in Polish - which says something about changes in the UK population (theme for a sociological study...). 'April in Paris' is set in the war, and, it seems like all books covering that period, on the title page shows a young couple kissing.

Anyway, Finale. It's set in Vienna and a distant village called 'Ratten' ('rats' to you!). It's about a music manager (yeah!), who comes back to Vienna after a long absence, for medical treatment. Going to a concert (wow!) he spots a young woman in the Philharmonic (now, I mean, really, that is actually stretching the fantasy just a bit, seeing as the book was written in 2003 when there was no woman violinist in the band, and still isn't as far as I know), who he thought had died in a swimming accident.

He becomes obsessed with her, and as the opportunity arises, he starts up a festival in Ratten where her grandmother (a former VIOLA player - of course!) now lives, still working part-time in the village government (aged 80?). The programme will be the Bach a-minor concerto (we've all played it). In between he comes across, and deals with, all sorts of obstacles, not least his seriously deteriorating health. Since he is the narrator, the book does not reach its actual end.

It's a fascinating book, set in a world I know (including Vienna which I know particularly well early mornings and evenings), including little coffee houses, the streets I know, the vinyards around Vienna, all the aspects of music management. It's great, and unputdownable (also rather short). His writing style reminds me of Elfriede Jelinek, though it's not at all pornographic. There is no stated dialogue - the writing is just continuous, and any dialogue is entirely in indirect speech. Very skillfully done, beautifully written, and very recommendable.

'Suite francaise'

this book by the Russian Jewish French Catholic Irene Nemirovsky had caught my eye some time ago, but I always resisted it - period pieces are not quite my thing. But then it turned up under my Christmas tree.

It's interesting. It's in two halves, though these are mildly connected now and again. The first half describes the exodus from Paris as the Germans march in (and to a lesser degree the return to Paris); the second half is about a village somewhere in France, which is occupied by German soldiers, and what goes on during the three months or so of the occupation.

As someone rather familiar with war-time refugee stories (mostly East to West) there is nothing very surprising about the departures from Paris, while people are being bombed, bridges are being mined, and different people have different experiences. Some of these people still had cars, whereas those who fled from Poland to the West four or five years later had nothing (though they were also among the vanquished). There are some lovely little characterizations, though, of those who are rich and who think they can buy everything, of another, very mutually supportive little couple, a dancer who makes the most of her assets and finds strengths in herself which she did not know she had.....

The second story also has a beautiful, and quite biting, characterization particularly of the middle class ladies in a village who have conflicting thoughts and ideas - should they resist the Germans or not, how can they show their superiority to those common people in the village, while at the same time the common people in the village also look down on the fine ladies. Everyone in the village does quite well out of the occupying forces, what with charging them well above the going rate for anything (as a foreign consultant, I recognize the symptoms). In passing, given the films I have seen of how collaborators were treated by the French after the war, I wonder what will have happened to some of the people in this village.

Neither story, though, seems to go anywhere. The first one just finishes, the second one contains a crime that someone committed and ...nothing happens.

Now, here comes the problem with reviewing such a book. In itself, you would say, yes, it's interesting, nicely written, but it's just a snapshot of a situation. What happened next? This is a bit of a weakness.

Then you turn over the book and you see that the writer [most probably] perished in a concentration camp. And at once it becomes more difficult to review the book. It is absolutely possible, therefore, that she meant to continue the stories - but she was taken away in 1942. Her husband a few weeks later. The children survived, hidden all over the place.

Clearly, also, the writer anticipated that things would not go well for her. Appendices in the book contain much anguished correspondence about money (Jews were not allowed to be paid royalties), and eventually many efforts by her husband trying to get her back from wherever she was sent - an effort for which he paid with his life.

So, then, do you review the book as the oeuvre of someone coming to a tragic end who maybe was unable to tidy it up and whose editors did not dare tidy it up, or as a piece of literature regardless of the condition of the author; as a risky work of its own period, or, like me, as another brick in the body of literature and biography involving the Third Reich? Think of Anne Frank - was she a great writer? It's like reviewing Bach with ears that have heard Stockhausen as opposed to ears that have only heard baroque music. An impossible question.

Strange book

Can't remember what made me buy Richard Feynman's book 'What do YOU care what other people think?'. I'd had it on my self of books 'to be read' for at least a year.

Feynman, a physicist, was involved in the development of the atomic bomb (nice man??), and it seems he also got a Nobel Prize, for physics, presumably. I had thought this book would be a 'meaning of life' type book, and I have a feeling I may have given it to someone else for his birthday.

It's a strange collection of materials, consisting of a rather moving story about his first wife, a few letters to his family, some anecdotes about his travels, and a large section on his part of the 'Challenger' disaster enquiry. I wonder how they chose to put these writings together in one book?

His writing style is very strange; extremely colloquial, to the degree that you think some of the stories are written for an audience of 10-year-olds. Which makes it very easily readable and accessible, of course. It is clear that he has a huge enthusiasm for science, and is very keen to interest people in it, and to use any means whatsoever to connect people with science. He also seems to be a hands-on kind of guy who is not afraid to ask difficult questions, and is very happy to connect with people at all levels of organisations and society in order to find out sensitive facts, or just to talk to them. There are stories of him having wonderful relationships with other people's children who, when he was expected for dinner, would not go to bed without connecting with him first.

This is all very well, and very pleasant, but it seemed a bit pointless to put together a book about it. Until I got to the bit about the Challenger disaster (when one of those space shuttles exploded shortly after take-off). This I found really fascinating. Call me a techie (which I was before I turned all warm and loving and 'social' ['social' only in the technical sense, not in the meaning of 'sociable']), but it took me straight back into the world of systems analysis and systems failure, my happy hunting ground of about 25 year ago. Seems that the Challender disaster was a classic case of systems failure - technical problem combined with management issues, and possibly political pressures. This section I found absolutely inspirational and would hope to use his approach in dealing with my work, too. Unfortunately often there are political reasons why this might not be appreciated; and in cultures where people can be sacked at whim for giving open and free information you have to weigh up the risk to individuals.

'Musicophilia' - not music and the mind

...is a rather more unputdownable book about music, this time by Oliver Sacks, who I always thought was a psychiatrist, but actually he seems to be a neurologist. He's famous for having written other books about neurological conditions, notably 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat'.

In my current interest about music and the mind I had bought the book, which people had been raving about. And indeed it is a great resource - for those who are interested in music and the brain. Like Alex Ross' book 'The rest is noise' it covers a huge amount of ground, but not too much in depth. Probably Sacks covers a larger percentage of the ground than Ross does - but I would not really know.

The subtitle 'tales of music and the brain' says it all. There are lots of stories about people who cannot speak, but sing; people who have apparently total dementia, but can still perform music, about musical hallucinations, earworms, perfect pitch, synaesthesia, people who lose their feeling for music, others who gain it in old age, music therapy and Parkinson's disease... you name it, it's described in the book. As long as you don't look too much for music and emotions; David Levitin's 'Your brain on music' is better on this. Sacks only touches on this a little.

So it covers lots of topics, and it would be a very useful resource for someone who might be looking for a starting point to do some research in relation to music and the brain, as in 'pick a topic'. Or for someone faced with a brain/music problem either in themselves or their relatives. In depth the stories are not, and given that he often talks about the brain and different parts of it, it would have been quite nice to have a map of the brain (though perhaps we could look that up on the internet).

It's very pleasantly written, giving a lot of personal (mostly patient) stories - which make it unputdownable, and it's easy to race through it, as I did in two days. I'm glad I did not pack this hardback book to take back to Georgia - not much reading value for weight....

Es ist vollbracht!

This is Friday's text, of course (St John, 19:30) and perhaps I should not really compare my completion of Alex Ross' 'The Rest is Noise' with Jesus' death on the cross......but it's a fitting set of words.

Got the book around Christmas, was reading something else at the time, read the first half here, there and everywhere,before I left for Georgia, forgot it at home, came back, it was still looking at me and blocking me from other reading, so yesterday on page 363 I set myself a goal to read at least 40 pages a day to finish it by the end of the week (539 pages of text). By last night I had really got into it.... another target fulfilled early.

It's a monumental book, of course. One of the reasons for its putdownability is that it contains lots of little stories about lots and lots and lots of 20th century composers. It must have taken a huge amount of research putting all this together, and really, to fully take in all the information contained in it you would need to read it again and again, or pick up one or two lines of thought and follow them through. It's so rich in information (albeit also anecdotes) that if it were food, it would be close to indigestible. At least the anecdotes lighten it from time to time. It is a fantastic resource for students - it's not in-depth enough for very serious research, but it has a list of over 500 references which can lead the researcher further and further and further. It's certainly my most dog-eared book - apart from the fact that it is falling apart after the first reading.

Like a piece of music it also has its own rhythm (though you could not say that about the pieces of some of the composers such as Feldman). Like in a symphony (that seems to almost be a swear word in the context of this book) you know when the end approaches, so you do in this book, as it approaches the end of a section on a composer - it always describes a piece of music, and the writing changes from the past tense to the present.

In passing it also gives interesting descriptions of life in general in the countries involved ('the social conditions of composing') which I have found quite interesting; for example where he describes how in Nazi Germany the needs of 'the people' always came before the needs of the individual. This is interesting and explains some sayings I hear from time to time ('duty [to the public?] comes before pleasure [for the individual/family?]' - one of the banes of my life).

And yet, and yet....Overgrown path had a debate about the american-centricness of the book, and particularly its thin treatment of British music. While I can think of reasons for having a very short chapter on British music, I was rather surprised by the 7 page description of the plot of the opera 'Peter Grimes' - by far the lengthiest description of anything in this book. Since I know and love the opera, it would have given me opportunity to sing it all the way through - but I really know it well enough not to read the plot again....

Actually the book starts very Europeancentric, then many of the composers involved end up in the US (eg Schoenberg, Hindemith, Adorno - not a composer, but often quoted), and after the war only the US, Germany and France seem to exist (apart from Peter Grimes), with a bit of the Soviet Union (I must be one of the few music bloggers who has actually seen the Armenian Composer's Union Home in Dilijan, Armenia, where Britten worked on pieces for Rostropovich [it was the day of the outbreak of the Iraq war and I was staying in an Armenian army rest-home across the valley]).

Although it covers an increasingly wide range of music including 12-tone music to minimalism, most of even the 'western' world is not included, eg Spain, the Scandinavian countries except Finland, South America (Piazzola does not get a look-in..). Japan and China get a mere glimpse, British music has huge gaps and here he goes on more about homosexuality than anything else, it would seem; German music beyond the Darmstadt summer schools is hardly mentioned, Australia has a very passing mention of Peter Sculthorpe (can't really expect little Lithuania to get a mention).... I would not rely on this book as the ultimate guide to 20th century music, though of course it already provides a wonderful snapshot.

But...'The rest is noise?' All the rest? Doubt it very much.