'Reading Like A Writer' by Francine Prose

'Reading Like a Writer' by Francine Prose is a book I picked up on a whim in Waterstones in Oxford - I had one of those classic 'ah, this book is for me' moments, when you see something and immediately take it to the counter to pay. Bravo on both the title and the cover, whoever came up with those: 'A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them'...which includes all the book bloggers in the world, for a start, am I riiggghhttt? Great branding, and a great section of society to target for free publicity, so hats off all round.

The structure of this book is that Francine Prose, a writer with the most fortuitous name imaginable ( I hope it just happens to be her name, like Lisa Maffia), breaks down the various aspects of good writing down into manageable chunks, such as 'Close Reading', 'Words', 'Sentences' etc. She then talks about her own writing, her own teaching experiences and other books that do this particular thing really well, giving examples and then deconstructing them for the reader. 

In tone, this book reminded me, oddly, of 'Molotov's Magic Lantern' by Rachel Polonsky, which I video-reviewed earlier this year, which is kinda funny as they actually look vaguely alike, although it's likely more that they are both female academics/writers of a similar age than that they are actually the same person. What I really mean is that the style is easy to read, very informative and perhaps the teensiest bit dry if you're not really into the subject about which they are talking. I was, however, so it's fine.

Good things about this book were Prose's obvious teaching experience, which I found to be both interesting and illuminating, and her advocacy of attention to detail. Of the writing guides I've read, structural devices and the necessity of a bangin' first chapter are usually the closest areas of study, so I found it quite refreshing to read:

'The well-made sentence transcends time and genre. A beautiful sentence is a beautiful sentence, regardless of when it was written, or whether it appears in a play or a magazine article. Which is one of the many reasons why it's pleasurable and useful to read outside of one's own genre. The writer of lyrical fiction or of the quirkiest, most free-form stream-of-consciousness novel can learn by paying close attention to the sentences of the most logical author of the exactingly reasoned personal essay.'

I think that's perfect advice: read everything, don't be a snob, sweat the small stuff and endeavour to make all your writing beautiful. I was quite moved by that sentiment and have tried to apply it to all my types of writing since, including this blog (gee, thanks for noticing!). I thought the chapters on first sentences and paragraphing were great as they provided a great range of pointers to try immediately; the dialogue chapter was the weakest, as I found the examples given quite obscure and not overly declarative or compelling. But I guess a lot of that will be down to reading taste, as if I've not been moved by a paragraph before, it's inevitably less illuminating when picked out for display, so you might find different.

There's a chapter called 'Learning from Chekhov' which, whilst dallying about with teachings concludes that great writers are unknowable and flout the rules that others follow, also reminded me a little of the 'Lesser Known Chekhovian Techniques' from McSweeney's, but not to its (hilarious) detriment; this is then followed by a chapter called 'Reading from Courage', which I found useful and unique amongst writing guides. 

'When we think about how many terrifying things people are called on to do every day as they fight fires, defend their rights, perform brain surgery, give birth, drive on the freeway, and wash skyscraper windows, it seems frivolous, self-indulgent, and self-important to talk about your writing as an act that requires courage. What could be safer than sitting at your desk, lightly tapping a few keys, pushing your chair back, and pausing to see what marvellous tidbit of art your brain has brought forth to amuse you?

And yet most people who have tried to write have experienced not only the need for bravery but a failure of nerve as the real or imagined consequences, faults and humiliations, exposures and inadequacies dance before their eyes and across the empty screen or page. The fear of writing badly, of revealing something you would rather keep hidden, of losing the good opinion of the world, of violating your own high standards, or of discovering something about yourself  that you would just as soon not know - those are just a few of the phantoms scary enough to make the writer wonder if there might be a job available washing skyscraper windows.

All of which brings up yet another reason to read. Literature is an endless source of courage and confirmation.'

Isn't that great? And ringing a tonne of bells in your head, as it is in mine? I feel endless kindness to Francine Prose for writing that down. It also ends with a list of 'Books to be Read Immediately', which I smugly ticked off, pretending to myself that I've read more than is perhaps actually true.

This is a good addition to any writer's-guide shelf, and hopefully reading and writing about it will, someday, result in some of the good practices rubbing off and enhancing my own writing from the outside in. Fingers crossed.

Title: 'Reading like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them'

Author: Francine Prose

Date of Publication: US, 2006; UK, 2012

Publisher: US, HarperCollins; UK, Union Books

Format: 268 pages, heavy paperback, and I bought it.







'Breakfast at Tiffany's' by Truman Capote

Like most modern readers, I didn't come to this book uninitiated: the 1961 film version is one of my all-time faves. This is my first Truman Capote though, so that was something, although the stories and folklore surrounding his work made him feel familiar enough even before I started reading. 

The edition I read, the Penguin Modern Classics edition, published in 2000, has been superseded by 'new ed.' 2000 version, with the cover you see displayed. Like this edition though, it also featured three of Capote's short stories: 'House of Flowers', 'A Diamond Guitar' and 'A Christmas Memory', as 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' itself is a mere 100 pages. 
  

Breakfast at Tiffany's  

 

'Breakfast at Tiffany's', as I'd hoped, is a gorgeous story, with jubilantly lively writing, the irrepressible Holly Golightly and New York city,  full of glamour, potential and portent. I imagine you know the story: young writer moves into an apartment building in New York, is intrigued by his mysterious socialite neighbour, who thinks nothing of telling you what she wants to tell you, but will tell you nothing really of herself, and a relationship between them builds in which he immortalises her character, which alternatively delights and repels him, but always intrigues. She is one of the seminal character sketches, longing for both a solution to the 'mean reds' whilst abhorring the idea of ever being tied down.

The main thing that's stayed with me from it is that reading this story feels eerily like watching the film. The majority of it is the same, which never happens with adaptations. I don't mean it as a criticism, as it was actually a delight; much of the dialogue seems to have been lifted verbatim and the settings and scenes seem stunningly imagined/re-imagined in large part, down to the very last detail. There were a few structural changes made, but take this as your spoiler alert, as I'll discuss them below.

And there's Holly. Audrey Hepburn did a stunning job of making film-Holly much more likeable than book-Holly, I thought, although What. A. Character. - no wonder she's lasted. She twists and turns and contradicts herself and sits there flashing you a smile, fully formed and elusive on the page. Book-Holly seems flakier though, and less like someone you'd happily let pick you up and put you down and allow to crawl in through your bedroom window at 4am without asking too many questions. It's more realistic I suppose, and quite a bit less Hollywood: '$50 for the coat check' is rather more explicitly described, and the implication of a relationship between Holly and 'Fred'/the narrator seems paradoxically far more likely before the big reveal, and also silly in parts, as both Holly and the narrator seem to suggest throughout that he is, in fact, gay. I know that must seem kind of strange, but book-narrator seems less infatuated with an idea of her, and more in touch with the real Holly, who endlessly refuses to admit the real circumstances of her life in favour of something more hopeful and nebulous. 

And that's the big structural difference *spoiler* - she breaks her bail after the Sally Tomato scandal and goes off to Brazil. The narrator is in a limo, which substitutes for the taxi, with her just the same, as she changes her wet clothes and debates what to do, and she also lets Cat out in the street and he calls her a bad person, but then she's off, and the narrator only finds Cat some weeks later, sat, looking very content, in the window of another house.

 'She rubbed her nose and concentrated on the ceiling. 'Today's Wednesday, isn't it? So I suppose I'll sleep until Saturday, really get a good schluffen. Saturday morning I'll skip out to the bank. Then I'll stop by the apartment and pick up a nightgown or two and my Mainbocher. Following which, I'll report to Idlewild. Where, as you damn well know, I have a perfectly fine reservation on a perfectly fine plane. And since you're such a friend I'll let you wave me off. Please stop shaking your head.'

'Holly. Holly. You can't do that.'

'Et pourquoi pas? I'm not hot-footing after Jose, if that's what you suppose. According to my census, he's strictly a citizen of Limboville. It's only: why should I waste a perfectly fine ticket? Already paid for? Besides, I've never been to Brazil.'

This alters the beginning of the book too: we are introduced to the setting and to Holly when Joe Bell, who runs the bar close to the building they lived in, calls to say he's been in contact with Mr. Yunioshi, who was in Africa and found a tribesman with a wooden statue head that is the spitting image of Holly. So that's where she went when she left New York, they guess...and so he tells us how this all came into being. It's quite funny, I suppose, but apparently the likeness of the carving is so like her that there is no mistaking it, and in 1944, pre-facebook, I suppose looking for wooden carvings that resembled old friend's faces is the way you kept track of who was doing what and where in the world... Also, her husband Doc appears, just the same, but that is almost a side note, and is dropped much more quickly as a plot point than it is in the film.

I loved this story, which is a novella by definition, and devoured it in a day. I suppose the truest compliment I can pay it is that the novella is worthy of the film, and the film is worthy of it. Both are fuzzy and vibrant and wonderful. Some of the dialogue is original though; I spent the whole book looking for my favourite line,

'I'd marry you for your money in a minute'

but, alas, no. Capote is a hell of a writer though, even if this is the only story of his I ever were to read.

But, we know that not to be the case...

House of Flowers

 

This is another stunning story. It is about, although not narrated by, Ottilie, a teenage girl who comes down from her adoptive family in the Haitian mountains to Port-au-Prince and ends up, after dropping all of the rice that she has been entrusted to sell, as the most popular girl in the Champs-Elysee brothel. At a cockfight she meets Royal Bonaparte, a boy with a house of flowers in the mountains too. They get married and six months after her absconding with him her family and friends all presume that she must be dead.

In reality she's living in this house of flowers with Royal and his evil grandmother Old Bonaparte, who makes spells. She hates Ottilie and takes every opportunity to criticise and pinch her, and starts doing disgusting, witch-crafty things, like putting cat heads in her sewing basket and snakes in her food. Ottilie turns these spells around with effective effect, whilst Royal starts to return to his pre-wedding behaviours.

I don't want to give any more of the plot away, but this is a story about the satisfaction that can come with love, however abusive, and the challenges that a person can, frankly, take pleasure in overcoming.

Haiti is beautifully evoked - the whole story felt hot, heavy, dark and fragrant, and completely divorced from the New York which I'd been living in just a few pages before, and Ottilie is a great, three-dimensional character, as are, to a slightly lesser degree, Royal and Old Bonaparte.

This story subverted my expectations throughout, turning on a knife edge at one point, and the ending was a surprise that had me trying to suppress the shock and surprise on my face in a coffee shop, which seems a bit daft now as the rest of the country was sat elsewhere, watching the first England game.

Anyway, 'House of Flowers' is a really great short story, and a lesson in how to write them for best effect.

A Diamond Guitar 

 

The Diamond Guitar, the third story of four, is a story told in retrospect about a prison farm in an American forest where Mr Schaffer, one of few literate men in the prison camp and your classic old-timer, befriends Tico Feo, a young Cuban inmate with a diamond guitar, given to him by his sister, who also, incidentally, has a ruby guitar too. A relationship builds between the two men and they start to consider attempting some kind of prison break.

 I thought this was the weakest of the four stories, and I struggled to get into it before it was over, so much so that I don't remember the detail of what happened. I'm still wondering though how a man could be allowed to keep something like a diamond guitar with him in a prison - it's a working guitar with, what I imagine, are rhinestones stuck on - and why the other men wouldn't try to steal it, but nothing happens of that sort. It was quite an artificial premise and not one that I felt particularly affected by, although undoubtedly, my opinion of it was coloured by the fabulousness of the two stories before.

A Christmas Memory

 

'A Christmas Memory' was a touching, bitter-sweet story, somewhat incongruous on a sunny June day, about a little boy called Buddy and his cousin in her sixties, who I'm guessing is suffering from dementia or a learning difficulty as she is treated like a child also, which means Buddy, the lady and a Jack Russell called Queenie are largely free to do as they please.

This particular Christmas memory concerns the day they want to make Christmas fruitcakes to send out by post to all the 'acquaintances' they remember together, including President Roosevelt and the knife grinder who comes to town twice a year. They then want to decorate a Christmas tree, which is very sweet, although the story is kept on the bitter side of sweet by their lack of resources and ingenuity, and also the old lady's confusion about how she's treated and the fact that Buddy will soon grow up. Loss, loneliness and the sadness that many feel at Christmas are under-lying features of this story, as well as the notion of time and the inevitable passing of special moments with people you love.

''Buddy, are you awake?' It is my friend, calling from her room, which is next to mine; and an instant later she is sitting on my bed holding a candle. 'Well, I can't sleep a hoot,' she declares. 'My mind's jumping like a jack rabbit. Buddy, do you think Mrs Roosevelt will serve our cake at dinner?' We huddle in the bed, and she squeezes my hand I-love-you. 'Seems like your hand used to be so much smaller. I guess I hate to see you grow up.'

I found this story quite moving and I can see how it attained the 'classic' status that seems to have been bestowed on it, according to Wikipedia at least, but for me it pales in comparison to 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' and 'House of Flowers.'

Title: 'Breakfast at Tiffany's'
Author: Truman Capote
Date of Publication: 1958; this edition 2000
Publisher: 1958, Random House/Hamish Hamilton; 2000, Penguin Modern Classics
Format: 157 pages, paperback, and I bought it from a used book stall in my home town for the bargain price of £4.







Review: 'Surfacing' by Margaret Atwood

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'Surfacing' is the first Atwood book I've read since 'The Handmaid's Tale' fully freaked me out at uni, and after a friend of mine perceptively commented the other day about the contraceptive-insurance-hoohaa moving the US towards a reality not dissimilar to the'The Handmaid's Tale', I thought the time was ripe to read some more. 

This is one of Atwood's first, published in 1972, after the publication of 'The Edible Woman' and six volumes of poetry, and concerns a young woman returning to the remotest wilds of northern Quebec with her friends and lover to try and find out what happened to her father, who has been missing for quite a time. Things descend after they arrive, both in terms of their personal relationships and also the protagonist's state of mind, as she arrives as a relatively well-adjusted city dweller, haunted by a failed relationship and various things to do with a baby, to something slightly less civilised, shall we say? 

The way this book is written is quite arresting: Atwood uses a first person, agrammatical, stream-of-consciousness style to tell the story in a fragmented, subjective way, which leaps from topic to topic, and from present day to the protagonist's childhood and back again, without interruption or pause. This means that several incidents are recounted in her memory, each time with a different slant on what happened, which means by the end of the story you have a totally different idea of her past from the one originally presented. It's totally immersive, especially as I think it's one of the few books I've read written entirely in the present tense: 

'In the middle of the night silence wakes me, the rain has stopped. Blank dark, I can see nothing, I try to move my hands but I can't. The fear arrives in waves, like footfalls, it has no center; it encloses me like armour, it's my skin that is afraid, rigid. They want to get in, they want me to open the windows, the door, they can't do it by themselves. I'm the only one, they are depending on me but I don't know any longer who they are; however they come back they won't be the same, they will have changed. I willed it, I called to them, that they should arrive is logical; but logic is a wall, I built it, on the other side is terror.

Above on the roof is the finger-tapping of water dripping from the trees. I hear breathing, withheld, observant, not in the house but all around it.' 

This style, for the main part of the book, sits on the right side of histrionic, but there were a few pivotal moments in the plot when, for clarity's sake, I wished that she'd just say what had happened and be done with it. But I guess that's not the point of the book: our perception is prismed by hers, and the story of the book is the story that's evolving inside her head. This is offset by a great evocation of the nature environment, which spoke of a deep familiarity and affection for the water-soaked, threatening landscape in which the story is set. 

This book was deeply satisfying for other reasons as well: it had endlessly interesting things to say about femininity, sex, motherhood and relationships, and also about civilisation vs. our nature state, as well as the differences and similarities between humans and animals. It's intelligent, well-considered and non-judgemental, as well as liberated and serious, and I found it entirely instructive spending time at the feet of Madame Atwood. In fact, this is the kind of fully formed, female-penned read that makes me disappointed by comparison when Katie Ward just moons over paintings or entire swathes of people think of female writing as just tales of the pursuit and the temporary acquisition of men. 

I really enjoyed this book, and have added a good portion of her back list to my Classics Club list above. 

Title: Surfacing 

Author: Margaret Atwood 

Publisher: Virago Press 

Date: originally published in 1972; reprint from 2009 

Format: Paperback, 251 pages,and I bought it. 







Review: 'South of the Border, West of the Sun' by Haruki Murakami

This is the latest in a vague, meandering odyssey through Haruki Murakami's books that I've been making over the last few years, and I'd estimate I'm now about halfway through. I picked it up in Waterstones the other day as I fancied something new to read and I'm totally attracted to slim volumes at the moment after my epic Dickens tomes, the complete reading of which has turned into a total non-starter, not that I'm too sorry about that.

'South of the Border, West of the Sun' is the story of Hajime, the narrator and central character, who we follow from early adolescence to his mid-thirties in Tokyo, where he goes from awkward schoolboy to lonely twenty-something to a married, jazz bar-owning early middle-aged man. The story starts with his quiet friendship with a similarly lonely girl called Shimamoto, with whom he plays records after school and feels his first confusing feelings of teenage lust. He then moves schools and they lose touch. The story then moves forward detailing his few failed love affairs, his sad, maladapted twenties and then marriage and fatherhood, before Shimamoto reappears, just in time for his tragically-impending mid-life crisis.







'Ashenden' by W. Somerset Maugham

'I'll tell you an incident that occurred only the other day and I can vouch for its truth. I thought at the time it would make a damn good story. One of the French ministers went down to Nice to recover from a cold and he had some very important documents with him that he kept in a dispatch-case. They were very important indeed. Well, a day or two after he arrived he picked up a yellow-haired lady at some restaurant or other where there was dancing, and he got very friendly with her. To cut a long story short, he took her back to his hotel - of course it was a very imprudent thing to do - and when he came to himself in the morning the lady and the dispatch-case had disappeared. They had one or two drinks up in his room and his theory is that when his back was turned the woman slipped a drug into his glass.'

R. finished and looked at Ashenden with a gleam in his close-set eyes.
'Dramatic, isn't it?' he asked.
'Do you mean to say that happened the other day?'
'The week before last.'
'Impossible,' cried Ashenden. 'Why, we've been putting that incident on the stage for sixty years, we've written it in a thousand novels. Do you mean to say that life has only just caught up with us?'

'Ashenden, or, The British Agent' by W. Somerset Maugham, is a book based upon Somerset Maugham's own experiences as a spy in Switzerland during WWI, which is remarkable for being the first collection of published spy stories written by someone who has actually done the job. Already a celebrated writer in 1914, Somerset Maugham's cover as a writer who was in various European locales for research and relaxation was inspired, but I do wonder at the logic of dispatching a writer on your most secret missions, and then expecting them to stay entirely secret. This collection was first published in 1928, so I do wonder if a little 10-years-of-silence deal was done before he was made privy to the establishment's inner workings.






Review: Bulgakov's 'The Master & Margarita' - the Novel and the Play

'The Master and Margarita', Bulgakov's riotuous, surrealist masterpiece, was pressed into my hand by my lovely friend Abi, already mentioned for her fabulous book taste, several months ago, and it sat on my TBR pile until a week or so ago, when I realised the showing of Complicite's stage version, at London's Barbican Theatre, for which we had tickets, was fast approaching, so down it came.

Having both read the book and seen the play this past week, the two are now inexorably linked in my mind, so I'll explore the both, albeit separately, in this one blog post.

First of all, The Novel:

'The Master & Margarita' is as surrealist and fantastical as any book you are ever likely to read, with one of the profoundest and most exciting dangerous messages of any book I've ever read.   







Review: 'Molotov's Magic Lantern' by Rachel Polonsky

So, I thought I'd do another video review; this time for 'Molotov's Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History' by Rachel Polonsky.

What I basically said was:







'Girl Reading' by Katie Ward

'So Maria must go to the library. She balances on the step, stretches to her full height to reach the shelves, turns books over, sorts them into piles and replaces them. New books and old books, books she has never seen before. Flicks and fans through pages. What would Angelica want to hear? What is Maria prepared to read?'

'Girl Reading' by Katie Ward is another book from the pile very kindly sent to me by the More4 TV Book Club, but isn't one that requires a video review (for my attempt at that see here).

The basic structure of this story is that it is not one story at all, but rather 7 short stories, linked by the common theme of featuring a girl reading. The quote above is from the third story, 'Angelica Kauffman, 'Portrait of a Lady, 1775'; the other six feature a hospital orphan in 1333 Siena, a servant girl in the house of a 17th century Dutch painter, a spiritualist and her twin in Victorian London, a female academic, her sister and the man who comes between them in 1916 Arnault, an MP's researcher in 2008 Shoreditch and, finally, a virtual lady programme in 2060. The books are obvious in some, less obvious in others.







Dickens from the Start, No. 4 - Oliver Twist, or a Railway across China

So, I read Dickens's evergreen childhood-of-crime classic, 'Oliver Twist'. back before Christmas as part of my Dickens from the Start series, and after doing so, realised an eternal truth of reviewing books that everyone knows: I have nothing to say about it. 

How do you review a book like 'Oliver Twist'? Everyone knows the story, everyone has seen the films, if not the book, and the characters are an integral part of the mental landscape of crime and childhood for a large proportion of the literate, English-speaking world. You all know Sikes and Fagin, so there's nothing I need to tell you about them. The Artful Dodger is an old childhood friend of yours, so no need to introduce him either. You're going to have to forgive me, but I'm gonna to tell you a story instead.







A Year in Japan: Kate T. Williamson

This might be a bit more niche than the books I usually review, but I've been dipping in and out of Kate T. Williamson's illustrated travelogue 'A Year in Japan', and I love it.

Kate T. Williamson is an American writer and illustrator who went off to Kyoto for a year to work as a sock designer (!), which is especially awesome because she did it at around the same time as me; who knows, we may have met at some point. She wrote 'A Year in Japan' about the little, idiosyncratic memories that make up your impression of a place, which is wonderful because whilst everyone knows about the cherry blossom and the kimonos, the things I really remember, as she does, are random things like the 'safe fruit' in completely OTT packaging that cost an extortionate amount (there was always a box fresh melon in my local supermarket for

¥10,000 (about £50) that I never saw anyone buy), and the delicate gloves and fresh flowers of the taxi drivers, who drove spotless cars with automated voices and automatically opening doors. It hasn't got the best reviews on Amazon (I added a nice one to even things out) because I'm not sure its description there makes it clear that this is a book of nostalgia, rather than information, which is why I particularly enjoy it, but also why someone who knows nothing about Japan may not.







Emotional Reactions in Reviews

My Friend Amy wrote a great piece the other day about the validity of emotional reactions to art, and the appropriateness of including this in reviews, which perhaps should be based on more objective factors, such as the quality of the writing and the originality of the piece. Here's an short excerpt to give you an idea, but click through for the whole piece:

'A couple of weeks ago, one of the TV journalists I follow on Twitter mentioned how they find it strange that people equate their emotional reaction to a film with the film's objective quality. I wish I had screen capped the tweet as I cannot remember who said it, but it forced me to start thinking about how we determine the worth of art.

I would say the reason we have professional critics is so that we have people who are supposed to evaluate a film, book, TV show, album, etc. based on what are considered to be the more objective qualities of a piece of work, to evaluate if they accomplish what they set forth to do, and if they take new risks. To do this, though, a professional critic must deny their emotional reaction to a piece of work and I wonder if that's entirely possible. The way we take in and perceive art will always be colored by our own understandings and limitations so while I do think professional critics strive to do this in a way the casual consumer of art does not, it is still just that...very limited.'

This got me thinking about the way I include my own emotional reactions in reviews, and whether this is the right thing to be doing in order to give the book or film a fair deal. Like anyone else, I have things I know are derivative nonsense that move me (some silly, weepy films  immediately spring to mind) and things that I know are 'great' or 'ground-breaking' but leave me entirely cold. When speaking about them on this platform, because I've always thought people want to hear what I think, I will gush about the ones that move me, and I will be cool about the ones that leave me cool, whilst adding caveats for objective factors like quality of writing and originality etc.







'Rules of Civility' by Amor Towles

I think I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago that I'd been asked to do a video-blog for the TV Book Club on More4; the episode I was in was broadcast last night (cringe!) in the UK, so I thought I'd share the clip with you all, if only to avoid having to write out the review for 'Rules of Civility' by Amor Towles that I chat my way through in this vlog.

What I basically said was:







Review: Everyman's Library Pocket Poets - Edna St Vincent Millay

This poetry anthology, Everyman's Library Pocket Poets' edition of selected poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, came to me as a Christmas present from someone who kindly picked it off my Amazon wish list. It had been on there for a while, an anomaly amongst the more modern stuff, as I knew a few poems of hers from other anthologies and was desperate to read more. This Everyman volume is a beautiful slim volume that is as attractive and lovely as the poetry inside.

And what's lovely about Millay's poetry is that it's not that lovely at all - it's sad and happy and cynical and witty - and it's defining characteristic is Edna herself: hers is a clear, defiant voice that rails with humour against love, loss and the realities of her life, whilst speaking about relationships, mortality and the world at large in the most tender and insightful way.







Review: 'Charles Dickens: A Life' by Claire Tomalin

The world is a veritable Dickens-fest at the moment, and there is zero point in fighting it.

Actually, I wouldn't, because I'm quite enjoying it, not least (smug) for the number of people around me who are happy to rhapsodise on the importance of Dickens whilst having never read a word of it: I know for a fact that there is a certain Head of Something Bookish in my city who only opened a free download of 'Great Expectations' just before Christmas, despite the fact that he'd already been planning all the bicentennial celebrations and related work in schools for the best part of a year, singing Dickens' praises all the way. Oh the shame.

Anyway, I bought Claire Tomalin's 'Charles Dickens: A Life', just before Christmas, out of sheer curiosity, desperate to read it and see what it was about. The thing is, there are a few people in my sphere who dislike this book immensely, regarding it as a libellous travesty, whilst there are those who think it is wonderful, and a deservedly honest account of a very complex man. All this, naturally, made me keen to read it myself and wade into the fray.







Review: 'The Artist'

Last night, I saw 'The Artist', and came away with the following conclusions:







Review: 'The Death of the Adversary' by Hans Keilson

"His death is enough. Tell!"

"He will fall, Father, like a dead thing, a rotten branch, bare and desiccated, whihc a mountain stream sweeps down into the abyss. Or like a stone, cold and hardened against the perils of a fall through the blind night, leaving no luminous trail that could one day light torches in the memory, before it buries itself in the soil of the steppes which no human or animal foot will ever tread. Such will be his death: bare and unfruitful, like the avalanche of stones under which he lies anonymously buried, the refuse of extinct planets, and there is nothing more to tell."

Hans Keilson's 'The Death of the Adversary' is a very strange book. 

Throughout its 208 page, the narrator remains vague and nameless, cities are known only by initials, the country is never referred to and the adversary is never given an identity beyond that. It's a mysterious book strangely lacking in Proper Nouns or concrete ties, that might lock it down to a country, an era, a place.

If you didn't know better, you'd think it was some kind of dystophian coming-of-age story in which the young man pits himself against some kind of Big Brother, where the adversary is a known person and the narrator is one of a persecuted mass. Of course, though, we all do know better - we have all heard of WWII, after all - and then it becomes a bleak and horrifying look at the diabolical relationship between Hitler and the Jews of Germany, of which Hans Keilson was one.







Review: 'The Night Circus' by Erin Morgenstern

'The circus arrives without warning.
No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.'

And so starts Erin Morgenstern's 'The Night Circus', an epic tale of  a dark and magical travelling circus, and all the dark and magical people therein. The coming of Le Cirque des Reves (The Circus of Dreams), the Night Circus of the title, is a stylish and mystical event for the town it pitches up in during the night, enchanting nocturnal visitors with an elaborate series of spectacles and dreamy, game-like challenges and acts, before disappearing just as quickly just a few days later. Within this, Celia, the beautiful illusionist, whose illusions are more than a little bit real, and Marco, assistant to the circus' proprietor and more than a little magical himself, are locked within a predestined contest of magic, wits and eventual loss and sadness.







Dickens from the Start, No. 3 - The Pickwick Papers

Or, to give it its full title, 'The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club'.

This was the first book in my 'Dickens from the Start' challenge, and, well, there was a lot of it. A lot. 801 pages, to be exact, and I feel like I felt every single one.

The premise is pretty nice, if a little antiquated: a group of likely young men of a certain social standing traverse around the countryside, drinking like fishes and looking for girls and a good time. It was, of course, originally published in serialised form, with each edition as a stand alone but linked episode in the great collection of Pickwick Papers, which means that reading it as a complete collection is a bit like watching a box set of half hour episodes of a rogueish sitcom, where some storylines persist throughout (Ross and Rachel), but for the main part it is the characters repeating and then resolving mistakes (Joey and his dating, Chandler and the awkwardness) that make up the main narrative thrust. Pickwick's most capital chaps, Augustus Snodgrass, Tracy Tupman and Nathaniel Winkle, are a kind of amalgous mass of good humour and carpe diem recklessness, indistinguishable from each other as far as I could ascertain, but rather fond of the odd comely servant or marriagable middle-aged widow. There's also a lot of ghosts, goblins and ghouls, as well as a talking chair who dispenses romantic advice:

'Tom gazed at the chair; and, suddenly as he looked at it, a most extraordinary change seemed to come over it. The carving of the back gradually assumed the lineaments and expression of an old shrivelled human face; the damask cushions became an antique, flapped waistcoat; the round knobs grew into a couple of feet. encased in red cloth slippers; and the old chair looked like a very ugly old man..."Tom," said the old gentleman, "the widow's a fine woman - remarkable fine woman - eh, Tom?" Here the old fellow screwd up his eyes, cocked up one of his wasted little legs, and looked altogether so unpleasantly amorous that Tom was quite disgusted with the levity of his behaviour; - at his time of life, too!'

I thought that bit was actually quite funny.  







'A Woman should know only how to do 3 Things: Tell the Truth, Ride a Horse, and Sign a Cheque.'

....or so said William Faulkner, according to Javier Marias' delightfully surreal 'Written Lives', which brings together a series of mini biographies of well-known writers, composed out of 'fragmentary and often...bizarre' anecdotal vignettes and tit-bits that 'treat these well-known literary figures as if they were fictional characters, which may well be how all writers, whether famous or obscure, would secretly like to be treated.' Of course, we know this to be absolutely true (in my case anyway - I used to frequently fake name people for the hell of it, and whilst temping, would make up fictional life histories and fake siblings and uncles just to pass the time.) 







'I am a Literary Sensationalist!'

Or so it would seem: have you read 'The Woman in White'? Of course, you have, but I've only just got to it. Not to rave or anything, but I totally want to rave about it. It was like a shot in the arm - that plot arc! those coincidences! Marian's upper lip! Wow.