Tag: book club

Still funny after all these years

The Diary of a Nobody
by George and Weedon Grossmith

I first heard of this book a few years back when the BBC dramatised it as a mini-series. The way it was scripted was essentially reading the whole book aloud, so you might say I had read the book before, but it was still funny second time around.

The book was originally a series in Punch magazine, complete with comic illustrations. It is what it says on the tin: the diary of a middle class man living in a London suburb, which he hopes, after his death, will provide some small comfort to his wife and son and perhaps even be published. Even after more than 100 years it remains fresh and funny and accessible.

I have no idea if this was the first comic “diary” to be published but I can certainly see its influence on, for example, Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole series. The everyday life of Charles Pooter is pretty mundane and he is not even the most likeable character, but his observations and preoccupations are funny and cleverly observed. Pooter is a city clerk and a complete snob, though he has no aspiration to be fashionable or even original. Aside from a few minor bumps on the way he takes the sensible, non-adventurous route and frets that his grown son Lupin is more daring.

A lot of the comedy comes from the writers cleverly using Pooter’s own po-faced words to poke fun at him. He is a largely old-fashioned man, fretting over colourful language in the presence of ladies when clearly he is the only one offended on most occasions. He has a fondness for writing letters of complaint, whether to the laundry or a friend, and this has a tendency to go wrong for him.

Unlike Adrian Mole, though Pooter’s antics occasionally land him in hot water, for the most part he gets by very well. He has a loving wife, forgiving friends and an appreciative boss. In return Pooter speaks highly of all those people, particularly his wife Carrie. He does, however, jump to pre-emptively judge anyone else he meets and is often obliged to change his mind.

This was a book club read and it went down well. It was interesting that all us Brits felt a certain affection for Pooter while the non-Brit in the group didn’t (though she did enjoy the book). Apparently we have a national fondness for the underdog. What we did all agree was that Pooter seems to attract people who take advantage of him, and while he may be a bit of a fool, the rest of the characters are little better.

First published in Punch in 1888–1889. First published in book form in 1892.

Not my cup of tea

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The Fifth Mountain
by Paulo Coelho
translated from Portuguese by Clifford E Landers

Usually disliking a book isn’t a barrier to having plenty to say about it; in fact the opposite is often true. But even though this was a book club choice and I’ve therefore spent an evening down the pub discussing it, I still don’t feel I have very much to say.

I must admit I wasn’t enthusiastic when this book was suggested. Like many avid readers, I had my Coelho phase and quickly discovered that his books can be a bit samey and preachy and that’s not really my thing. (Though I will say that I enjoyed Veronkia Decides to Die and Eleven Minutes.) But a retelling of the story of Elijah from an author who gets oh-so-spiritual and life-lesson-y didn’t get me excited.

And sadly it turns out I know myself well. I have nothing against using religion as the backdrop or even the foreground of a novel, in fact it worked very well for our previous book club read, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, but it still needs to be well written and have a storyline and engaging characters and all the rest. I think you can guess where this is going.

I didn’t know the story of Elijah well but I’m pretty sure I could tell you which bits of this book were biblical and which were added by Coelho. Elijah is a bit of a wishy washy hero who should have been so much more. At a surprisingly young age he abandons his career as a carpenter because he is called by God to be a prophet. But prophets are being slaughtered in his homeland of Israel so he flees to neighbouring Lebanon, where they don’t believe in his God and only let him live because he could be a useful bargaining tool. And there’s a little bit of a love story. And a foreign army is threatening to attack Elijah’s adopted city.

So there’s plenty going on. And yet I was frequently bored by this book. It’s not long or complex, the writing is light and simple, there aren’t too many characters, so why was it a bit of a slog? First of all, almost nothing is described – people, places, anything, nothing is visualised for you. In fact few of the characters, including main ones, even have names. Second, the majority of the narrative is Elijah whining and philosophising and whining some more. He doesn’t do anything unless God tells him to, resulting in one of the wimpiest, dullest characters I’ve ever come across. And third (though certainly not finally) Coelho injects it all (somehow) with an isn’t-this-meaningful self-help vibe.

One thing that I did enjoy and that could have been made more of, was the story of the spread of the alphabet. I have no idea how historically accurate the coverage of this was, but I was interested in how it was resisted and the reasons for that. Sadly Coelho did not dwell on this as much as I’d have liked. Maybe I’ll search out a better written book on the subject.

First published by Harper Collins 1998.

Don’t be put off by the title

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The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
by José Saramago
translated from Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero

This month’s book club pick sounded a tad intimidating and I certainly would never have picked it up if not for the group. What I discovered was a complex, at times difficult, but also beautiful and funny book that I’m glad to have read.

Much could be made of the heretical aspects of this book. It was written by an atheist shortly after the publication of The Satanic Verses and definitely attracted the attention of the Church. But what struck me the most was that it seemed to be at least partly an attempt to answer some genuine questions – if Jesus experienced life as a real human man (whether or not he was the son of God) what would that life have been like? Saramago answers this in depth, from the landscape and food to the people, ways of speaking and acting, and the historical context – Jesus’s part of the world was under Roman occupation, which had its effect on everyday life. Saramago also explores how Jesus might have been treated when he started talking about his relationship with God, the reactions of those close to him and those of strangers.

Of course, it’s about more than that because it also takes some small but significant deviations from the accepted Biblical story. Mary and Joseph conceive Jesus in the usual way, with God only later claiming to have had some part in the union. God is indifferent toward his people but then decides he wants more followers so starts to pay attention and make demands of Jesus. Jesus and Mary Magdalene are lovers. Satan is a friendly, approachable, “human” character. And Jesus is perhaps a little too human even before Mary Magdalene comes along:

“…such is youth, selfish and thoughtless, and there is nothing to suggest that Jesus was any different from other boys his age.”

So yes, it’s certainly heretical. It suggests God only wants to expand his leadership, to have more followers, but is unhelpful in terms of how and tricks Jesus into accepting his fate. It also says that God and Satan are equal, or rather balance each other out. This is certainly not a cuddly, loving God.

The style is a little difficult to start with, written in Biblical rhetoric, sometimes reverent sometimes very not. It can be very detailed and descriptive, even beautiful (OT-like, perhaps), especially near the start. But in other places it is bareboned, more like reading the New Testament. There are no paragraph breaks (a Portuguese thing?) and speech is not marked out by speech marks. But I got used to those things quite quickly and found I was reading at a faster pace than I had expected considering how demanding the prose is in terms of references and allusions. There is a lot of pathos. These characters are so human, with hopes and fears and guilt and temptation and the little niggles of everyday life. It could have been a very serious book, so thank goodness for the wonderful sense of humour:

“…this revelation did not escape Mary despite the angel’s obscure speech, and, much surprised, she asked him, So Jesus is my son and the son of the Lord, Woman, what are you saying, show some respect for rank and precedence, what you must say is the son of the Lord and me, Of the Lord and you, No, of the Lord and you, You’re confusing me, just answer my question, is Jesus our son, You mean to say the Lord’s son because you only served to bear the child, So the Lord didn’t choose me, Don’t be absurd…”

Clearly a lot of research went into it. It directly references not only passages from the Bible but also other religious writings and historical/archaeological knowledge of what life would have been like in that time and place. To a certain extent it fills in the gaps left by the Biblical gospels, therefore there’s lots of detail about Mary and Joseph, and Jesus’ childhood, but it skips quite quickly through the evangelism and miracle-working of Jesus’s last few years.

I was never clear about who the narrator is. The title suggests that it’s Jesus but it doesn’t read like that, it reads like one of his followers. But no-one could know all of this except an omniscient narrator so is it God? Or Satan? Or Jesus but much later from his seat in Heaven talking about “Jesus” in third-person because he’s now Michael?

Whoever it is, the narrator sometimes interjects in a manner that drags you out of the beautifully and believably constructed world of 2000 years ago to the present day, whether by directly referencing something modern or by applying a modern perspective. For instance, the narrator is often at great pains to point out the misogyny of life back then.

Joseph takes centre stage for the first half or so of the book and is therefore fully fleshed out, despite his brief appearance and disappearance in the Bible. He is a good man who, in contrast with the thinking of the time, is tormented by guilt for his own personal wrongdoing, which lays the groundwork for the major difference between Judaism and Christianity, according to this text – that Jews say prayers and give thanks and make sacrifices as part of the collective guilt of mankind, wheras Christianity is about acknowledging and asking forgiveness for personal sins.

At book club we discussed how, because the reader already knows the story, or thinks they do, Saramago plays with this. There’s a sense when reading this book of “when’s it going to get to the part when xyz” and xyz either happens later than expected or in an underwhelming sort-of way or even doesn’t happen at all. But some scenes are taken almost word for word from scripture, cleverly woven in.

There was some symbolism that I noticed but didn’t get, and I suspect it would help to have some solid theological knowledge when reading this rather than just a semi-deliberately forgotten memory of Sunday School and acting out Bible stories for Girls Brigade. I did find myself looking up some passages because they either rang a bell or rang false and the result varied from discovering they were surprisingly similar to the Bible (e.g. the wedding at Cana) to being a combination of different gospels put together in a new way (Jesus’ birth) to being a twist or slightly skewed take on the Biblical telling (Judas betraying Jesus to the Romans). Sometimes the narrator gives us a clue as to how this “true” account might become altered, for instance when Jesus spends 40 days and 40 nights talking to God and Satan he is not in the desert, but almost immediately on his return his followers are talking about it as his time in the desert.

There is so much to say about this book (clearly), and it was definitely a good one to have a roundtable discussion of.

O Evangello segundo Jesus Cristo first published 1991 by Editorial Caminho, Lisbon.
This translation first published 1993 by Harcourt Brace.
José Saramago won the Nobel Prize in Literature 1998

Sometimes you shouldn’t probe too deep

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Rupture
by Simon Lelic

This was another book club read and it certainly generated a lot of discussion, even if part of that was our cynical reaction to the marketing surrounding this book – a lot of review copies were sent out and the book includes “book club” style questions at the back. I mean, it worked, we all read it!

I really enjoyed this book but I didn’t note down my thoughts on finishing it, as I usually would, because I suspected it wouldn’t stand up to intense criticism. Turns out I was right. The more questions asked around the table, the more I realised that this was a guilty pleasure rather than a class act.

The story follows policewoman Lucia May’s investigation into a school shooting. It seems to be a cut-and-dried case – teacher walked into assembly, shot and killed five people including himself – and May’s superiors urge her to wind up the investigation quickly so that the community can move on. But May wants to know not just what happened but also why, and that’s a complex question.

Lelic certainly has some skill. I was gripped by the story even though most of the facts are revealed early on. Every other chapter is a transcript of an interview from shortly after the shooting, allowing a lot of characters’ voices to be heard. Certain details are revealed in these chapters that you realise Lucia has known all along (because she conducted all the interviews) while we as readers had to wait to get to that interview, which is the opposite way round to how information in a novel usually works, and I liked that.

Without wanting to give too much away, the key theme of this book is bullying, and it wears its mission statement so plainly that the message can get heavy handed at times. Yes, bullying happens among adults as well as children and I think it’s important to acknowledge that, but I’m not sure that this book gave the most accurate portrayal. I’m also not sure how accurate Lelic’s portrayal of the police is (I’m guessing not very) though I did find the school convincing. Our discussion revealed a number of plot holes, many more than I would ever have spotted alone.

I was glad to find I was not alone in considering the killer, Samuel Szajkowski, to be the most compelling character in this book. Even though he is dead before the book begins, and there are no flashbacks, we get to know a little of him through other people and what emerges is a believable, complex man. It’s a shame that no other characters are quite so fully rounded, but then you could argue that the book is really about Szajkowski even though it follows Lucia’s daily life.

It was suggested that there is a certain element of doggedly following writing guidelines evident in this book, which is Lelic’s first novel. But while reading it I was able to completely suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride. Which is no bad thing, let’s face it.

First published 2010 by Picador.
Finalist for the Crime Writers Association John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award 2010.

Comedy is soul

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The Commitments
by Roddy Doyle

This was another book club read and I was excited when I was told it had been chosen. It promises a lot – great author, raucous humour, snapshot of an interesting time and place – and I definitely got the humour but I’m sad to say that I wasn’t bowled over on the whole.

I think that was the general feeling of everyone in book club. It’s definitely funny – we all had a favourite joke to recite – and it’s stylistically interesting, but it didn’t stun anyone or inspire deep thoughts.

In brief, it’s the story of a soul band in a working-class suburb of 1980s Dublin, a band which is formed at the start of the book and falls apart by the end. Most of the characters have either never played an instrument before or are amateurs at best and it’s unclear if they ever become good, but they certainly enjoy a brief spell of success. And that’s roughly it. There’s no dark undercurrent, no distracting sub-plots, there’s just the band.

The book is almost all dialogue, written in dialect, which is occasionally confusing as a non-Dubliner but it adds a lot to the characters to really hear how they speak. The songs are also written as dialogue, with stress and accent picked out, making the music a character itself.

There’s a certain amount of casual sexism and racism – the girls are often referred to as a unit, expected to be pretty and ego-free, there solely to look good; and the characters’ views of black musicians are hideously stereotyped – but I think this is a reflection of the setting rather than actual bigotry.

None of the characters is particularly fleshed out. The book is very short, with a song often taking up a few pages, which doesn’t give much room for stuff like character development or personal histories, so we learn very little about these people, only what they say and do while they’re in the band. There’s a lot of fun to be had guessing at when a character is lying or embellishing, which we got the feeling was a lot.

Quick word of warning: there is a lot of coarse language, which I don’t mind myself but can see others being put off by it.

This is a very funny book, an easy and quick read. Thanks Matthias for choosing it for book club!

First published in Ireland in 1987.

Bigger issues than story

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David Golder
by Irène Némirovsky
translated from the French by Sandra Smith

This was another book club pick, in fact this one was my choice, so I was pretty nervous before the meeting. I’d chosen it based on Némirovsky’s brilliant final work Suite Française but this was a much earlier novel of her’s, with no guarantee of the same brilliance. What if everyone hated it? Or was bored by it? What if it failed to generate any discussion?

I needn’t have worried. While this is a slim volume and not as good as Suite Française, in my opinion, it did have plenty for us to talk about.

David Golder is a Russian Jew who works endlessly on obscure international financial deals to maintain the fabulously wealthy lifestyle to which his wife and daughter are accustomed. However, while he lives in a Paris apartment, they live in a multimillion franc estate in Biarritz, accompanied by an endless stream of hangers-on.

Golder isn’t the most likeable character, but we meet him near the end of his life and the impression is given that it was a difficult life and that he worked incredibly hard for himself and his family. His wife and daughter seem to only care about money, only showing Golder affection immediately before asking for a handout and getting very aggressive when he honestly tells them that business is rough and he can’t afford it right now. Add to that his failing health and you have a very sad, lonely picture of a man.

Némirovsky toys with the reader a little regarding characters’ true selves. At first Golder’s daughter seems much nicer than her mother because that’s what Golder sees. Only later is her selfishness fully exposed. And with Golder it’s the reverse – at first all you see is obsessiveness about money and his scheming seems horrible but it becomes clear, as we discover more about him and especially when we learn about his past, that he has his reasons, that his family and business associates encourage him, maybe even force him, to be this person.

I was glad to discover I wasn’t the only one at book club weirded out by the way the narrative labels everyone as a Jew, in an insulting sounding way, even though the author herself was Jewish and indeed died because of it. It could be part of the characterisation of Golder, that he has an odd skewed view of Jewishness. Or it could just be the vernacular of the time.

There was a general feeling that the book is very bleak, there is no ray of hope, no good person to contrast everything else against. But despite that Némirovsky has an easy, fluid writing style that keeps you reading even though there’s no-one to like and a fairly uneventful story.

I can’t recommend this as highly as I had hoped but I will still be interested to read Némirovsky’s other novels if they continue to be translated into English.

First published in France in 1929 by Editions Bernard Grsset
This translation published 2007 by Vintage

Talking books

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Hunger
by Knut Hamsun
translated from Norwegian by Sverre Lyngstad

A few months back I went along to a new book group at a local pub. I only found out about it a few days beforehand and didn’t even know which book they were discussing, so that was an odd start to the evening but it was a great night. I met some new people, found out more about my adopted city and talked a lot about books. The chosen book turned out to be Hunger, which was already on my TBR, and the discussion about it inspired me to dig it out and give it a try.

The unnamed narrator of Hunger (except for when he gives himself pseudonyms) is a young, struggling writer, battling with his pride and the difficulties of getting paid to write, with the result that he is often starving or even homeless. The lack of food and warmth plays with his mind and the story delves into a dark psychology that to me seemed far more advanced than its publication date of 1890.

The writing is brilliant, and draws you on even when the narrator is incomprehensible or the storyline particularly dark, both of which happen often. There are dozens or more moments that stand out as somehow key – sleeping out in the forest one night (which struck him as a romantic idea and a potential source of food but turned out to be cold, wet and a long walk from the city); trying to sell the buttons from his overcoat to a pawnbroker; turning down a food coupon because he has told the police he is a rich man who lost his key, though it seems that surely they see through that lie and the writer hasn’t eaten in so long…

I completely agree with the member of the book group who said that she often wanted to scream at the narrator, he’s so frustrating. Although his pride does wear down eventually, for a lot of the book it gets in the way of him getting money or food. I did sympathise to a certain point. He seems to find it funny to tell lies to random strangers, including policeman, which is sometimes entertaining but other times costs him dearly.

I also think that the narrator probably has serious psychological issues that may have preceded the starvation. He has extreme highs and lows, achieving euphoria in his hunger or his writing but also stark depression. It’s a pretty extreme experience being described and it affected me deeply that the high moments were such small, simple things like a sunny day or decent night’s sleep. Interestingly, I don’t think eating was ever described as particularly pleasurable. In fact, he often vomits because the rare food he gets he eats too quickly, or it’s too rich.

One thing we discussed at the book group was the question of translation. This book is old enough that it has been translated into English multiple times. There were three or four versions round the table. This could mean that members of our group had very different experiences from each other. I wonder if all those who liked it most read the same version?

Thanks Hombre Mediocre for the book choice and for starting the group. I look forward to our January meeting.

First published in Norway in 1890.
This translation first published by Canongate Books in 1996.

Not as sweet as it sounds

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The Heart of a Dog
by Mikhail Bulgakov
translated from Russian by Michael Glenny

This book was selected for our local book group, partly because most of us had never read any of “the Russians”. Including me, unless Nabokov counts (I’ve only read Lolita, which he wrote in English, and he left Russia when he was 18 so it’s a bit tenuous).

I’ve always wanted to explore this group of authors but didn’t know where to start. The Heart of a Dog was probably a good choice in that it’s short and easy to read, but it’s crammed full of analogies to history and politics that I suspect I’m not familiar enough with to get the most out of it. I did study the Russian Revolution as part of A-level history but that was a few years ago now and I had rubbish teachers.

The story is a combination of the real setting of Moscow in 1924–25 and the surreal. Rich, successful Professor Preobrazhensky appears to be protected from the ravages of the Party by his specialism – STDs and “sexual rejuvenation” – and when he first picks up a scarred, mistreated stray dog and takes him back to a plush apartment it seems like a sweet friendship is developing. But the professor has more sinister reasons for adding to his household and the Party sees an opportunity to hold the rich man to account for continuing to have more rooms and more money than anyone else in the building.

A lot of the book is narrated by the dog, which sounds bizarre but is actually very well done. Bulgakov uses humour and empathy to create a novel viewpoint of the poorest of the poor. I liked the logic given for the dog being able to understand most of what is said around him and the way he loyally repeated his master’s political views without understanding them. When the surreal part of the story takes over and switches to a conventional third-person narrative, I found it harder to connect with the characters I had previously liked immensely. I began questioning my previous judgement and was uncertain I liked where the plot was going. But although the undercurrent is one of fear, this book doesn’t get too dark or scary.

I liked how, as the book went on, the descriptions of the professor’s assistant, Dr Bormenthal, get increasingly canine, referring to him as loyal and faithful and having been rescued from poverty by the professor, just like the dog. I also found the book genuinely funny, much of it mocking the Party, so I was not surprised to learn that the manuscript was confiscated from Bulgakov and not published until after his death.

For such a short book, this book was able to generate a reasonable amount of discussion in our group. We talked about whether you can enjoy this as a story without worrying about analogies and historical context, what that professor character was really up to, where Bulgakov’s sympathies lay, the development of the dog character and particular moments and phrases that stood out for us. It was postulated that the distancing of the narration was a deliberate ploy to make the reader look more analytically at the characters. That made a lot of sense to me.

I’m not sure I would ever had read this book without the book club so thanks Bedminster Bugbear for choosing it!

First published (in this translation) in Great Britain in 1968 by The Harvill Press.