What (who) I'm reading now

Ever since I read my first Patrick Gale novel (Little Bits of Baby, 1989) I've loved his writing, but with his latest books he just seems to get better and better. 

Most memorable for me have been Friendly Fire (2005), a funny and tragic portrayal of adolescence in an English public school (whose ending had Daughter the Elder weeping inconsolably on a summer barging holiday in France) and Notes from an Exhibition (2007), about the emotional havoc wreaked by a troubled artist on her marriage and children (which had me briefly quite seriously considering becoming a Quaker. Do you sense a familial trait of becoming over-involved with books?).

His latest novel, A Perfectly Good Man, is set in Cornwall, a landscape Gale knows well (he lives in remote Lands End with his partner, a farmer). The perfectly good man of the title is Barnaby Johnson, a parish priest for a rural community ... not exactly a fashionable choice of hero, but Barnaby turns out to be far more interesting than one might imagine, and not immune to sin.

From a riveting and unsettling opening, the narrative zig zags backward and forward in time, focusing on individual histories (Barnaby, his wife, biological daughter and adopted Vietnamese son, significant  figures amongst his parishioners), but these are so skilfully woven together that it flows beautifully, his characters' souls laid bare as the plot gradually converges like the bits of a jigsaw slowly fitting together. There's a great authenticity to his characters and although this book is above all an easy and totally engaging read, Gale had me reflecting often on the ambiguity of that title, the nature of goodness and of faith.

Another book that has had that wonderful effect of transporting me heart and soul into a different reality is Fortunate, the latest novel by writer Elizabeth Wix, who is also the author of two of my favourite blogs, About New York and My Life by Buster. 

We meet Jane, the fortunate child who is at the heart of the story, at the beginning of the book as an older woman who finds herself in an unfamiliar Polish town, as she embarks on a search for traces of her birth mother. From here on, the narrative becomes the stories of two parallel lives in wartime Europe. Gisela, a young German woman, suffers unimaginable hardships and losses as the events of the war unfold. Meanwhile Ruth, in middle class, rural Kent, England, deals with day to day wartime privations and anxieties in the relative comfort of family and home. Wix’s skill as a writer is to make both women’s experiences equally absorbing while weaving the threads together so that their paths tantalisingly converge and diverge in unexpected ways.

The fact that the story is based on real events in Elizabeth Wix’s personal history makes it even more intriguing. But it’s her fluid and effortless writing that draws one in – I read this over successive late nights, unable to put it down.

Here is the lovely Elizabeth Wix (I had the pleasure of meeting her late last year, but did not take this photo) and you can find her book here. Read the first couple of pages and I guarantee you will be hooked. And right now I'm off to search for her other titles ...

What (who) I'm reading now

Richard Mason is an author whose dreams of being a famous writer came true unexpectedly early in life, proving both a burden and a blessing.

Born in South Africa, he moved with his family as a young boy to England. At the age of 18, while still in his first year at Oxford university, he wrote his first novel, The Drowning People. Published the following year, it became a literary phenomenon, selling 5 million copies in 20 languages and putting Mason into the spotlight of media attention, both acclaiming and critical.

Image source: www.flavorwire.com

Not too surprisingly, the mix of hype and expectations that followed effectively paralysed him as a writer. He had used the money from The Drowning People to set up a foundation in South Africa to pay for gifted children from poor backgrounds to attend privileged private schools. The pressure to produce another novel successful enough to sustain their futures led him to clinical depression and a breakdown.

His second novel, Us, was written under this pressure, to suit a commercial market dictated by a highly commercial American publisher offering a stellar advance. He said later that it nearly tore the soul out of the book and the heart out of him, and that it took him a long time to rediscover the joy of telling a story. 

But rediscover it he did, with his third novel, The Lighted Rooms, which really got me interested in Mason as an author. In this he wrote with amazing compassion and insight about ageing and Alzheimer's (in the shape of an engagingly dotty elderly central character) in a story that shifted from nursing homes to cutting-edge scientific research in present day Europe to Boer War concentration camps (drawing angry parallels in the process between the US destruction of Iraq and British atrocities in South Africa a century earlier).

And this brings me to his fourth and latest novel, History of a Pleasure Seeker, which I recently finished ...

Image source: www.richardmason.org

Set in Amsterdam in the early 1900s, the protagonist and pleasure-seeker of the title is Piet Barol, an ambitious and charming young man "extremely attractive to most women and to many men". Born to poverty but usefully educated by his French mother in the arts of piano-playing, sketching and seduction, he secures a place for himself as tutor to the troubled young son of a wealthy family in one of the finest mansions on Amsterdam's Gilded Curve.

Maarten Vermeulen-Sickert, his employer, is a hotel magnate with an appreciation of culture and the arts; his family, while close, is fraught with repressed desires. Gifted at sensing and meeting other people's needs while fulfilling his own at the same time, Piet earns Maarten's respect and trust whilst doing a fine job of freeing the libido of his wife and becoming indispensable in various ways to his children.

There are rich descriptions of the Vermeulen-Sickert's Amsterdam home, art collection and gilded life-style, interwoven with real historical events such as the Wall Street crash of 1907 and the opening of New York's Plaza Hotel. But it's the dynamics and nuances of the family's life and Piet's insidious but indelible impact on it that are so well written. Some of the most memorable (and amusing) scenes are his seduction through music - the refined drawing-room concerts in which Piet makes finely-considered judgements on matters of which piano key offers the best means for negotiating his tightrope path between eroticism and deception, Bizet or Chopin over Bach.

It's a nicely-plotted, very sexy novel, full of vivid characters and rich period atmosphere, and also very funny in parts. And as events in Amsterdam's Grachtengordel come to a climax in more ways than one, Piet inevitably meets his downfall yet lands on his feet as we know he will, and the last section of the book sees him on an ocean liner headed for Cape Town, his sights on a new world. The book ends with the words "To be continued" (when last have you seen that in a modern novel?) and they made my day - I can't wait for the next round of adventures of this character - who a Guardian reviewer has dubbed a sort of 'highly cultivated, bisexual Flashman' of the pre-first world war era! The same critic, incidentally, feels that Richard Mason is properly repaying with this novel the faith his publishers placed on him at the age of eighteen ...

Photographs taken in Amsterdam in February 2011

What (who) I'm reading now

William Boyd is one of those authors whose latest books I’m always excited to read. Restless and Any Human Heart would have to be on my list of all-time favourite novels.

Image source: www.blogarrebatado.com

His latest, Waiting for Sunrise, opens in Vienna in  1913, where Lysander Rief, a young English actor, has come to seek psycho-analysis for a sexual problem with a contemporary of Freud (who we meet briefly in a Viennese kaffeehaus later in the story). A pretty young fellow-patient sorts out his problem rather satisfactorily, but Lysander’s liaison with this slightly unhinged and dangerous young woman leads him into serious trouble with Austrian law.

                           Image source: my own, taken in Vienna December 2011

His successful escape from Vienna in disguise (helped by his acting skill) brings him to the attention of the British secret service who recruit him for spying. By now World War I is in full flow and the story sees Lysander gadding about from war-besieged London to the front lines in France and on secret missions across Europe to trace a traitor in the British War Office. 

The basic theme is of an ordinary person being caught up in dramatic historical events – something Boyd did brilliantly in Any Human Heart. Certainly Lysander Rief starts off an unpromising hero – a pretty, well-off, slightly wimpish young man fairly certain of his place in life. As he’s thrust unwillingly into a series of extraordinary events, he becomes both more self-reliant and less sure of anything, negotiating his way through a slippery world of assumed identities and fake personas. “Nobody really knows what’s real, what’s true” says the traitor he’s engaged to unmask, while Lysander’s actress girlfriend tells him “We’re all acting, aren’t we? Almost all the time – each and every one of us?”

                                       Image source: www.waterstones.com

Both the galloping plot and the cast of characters are hugely entertaining, in rich Boyd style. I especially liked his female characters – from Lysander’s mother to the various younger women he attracts (sculptor, actress, secret agent), they are all strong, substantial and interesting personalities. The only disappointment for me was the ending  -  ultimately too few of the threads connected and I was left frustrated by unanswered questions.

You can hear William Boyd discussing the story here. 

This would make a wonderful film - one can only hope that someone is onto this, after the excellent BBC mini-series of Any Human Heart which showed last year. I also hear that a film version of Restless is in the making.

       Scenes from the BBC mini-series version of Any Human Heart, from www.guardian.co.uk

  

And on an entirely unrelated note ... and though I'm no great royalist ... while scanning the BBC's highlights of the jubilee celebrations after returning from spending the weekend away, I did find myself quite touched by this scene here - of the group of RCM chamber choir singers on a rocking boat in the middle of the Thames managing to belt out Land of Hope & Glory with quite such enthusiasm and gusto, despite being completely drenched in the sheeting rain that washed out the river pageant on Sunday. It's a uniquely English moment - do click on the link to watch, if you haven't already seen this.

What (who) I'm reading now

Antonio Tabucchi is an Italian writer who describes himself as 'in love with Lisbon'. An expert on Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa, Tabucchi spends half of each year in Lisbon and the other half in Tuscany (hmm, I want his life) where he teaches Portuguese language and literature at the university of Siena. 

Photo credit: http://www.listal.com/

Appropriately enough, then, Pereira Maintains (in the English translation from the Italian original Sostiene Pereira) is set in Lisbon, though it is Lisbon in the late 1930s, under an oppressive, fascist regime. 

Pereira is editor of the cultural pages of a daily newspaper, at a time when cultural and intellectual life is stifled, government informers are everywhere, and resistance brutally quelled. He's an entirely unlikely hero, which is part of the great appeal of his character ... an overweight widower who talks aloud to a photograph of his dead wife, harbours stoically his private losses and regrets of the past, and generally keeps his head down in the political climate, dutifully translating 'safe' French novels and writing tame obituaries of famous writers. 

His perspective begins to shift uncomfortably when he meets a young writer and his girlfriend who are involved in subversive activities, and a doctor who stimulates his political conscience through a series of conversations. Ultimately Pereira is moved to commit himself to a single act of great bravery. 

amazon.co.uk

It's a short but entirely memorable book, written with understatement and humanity. Even the minor characters have stayed with me. 

I'm now struggling to get hold of the film version, in Italian, with Marcello Mastroianni as Pereira and the wonderful Daniel Auteuil and Marthe Keller as co-stars. Amazon appears to be out of stock, and the best I've managed is to get onto a waiting list for it at LoveFilm ... if anyone out there knows of an alternative source to try, I'd love to hear it. 


(Photos above, except where credited otherwise, were taken by me in Lisbon last summer)


Another good recent discovery for me was Siri Hustvedt (below) - a writer (most well-known, I think for What I Loved) who I've been meaning to read for ages. My introduction came through her latest novel, The Summer Without Men, another short book with a big impact.

Photo credit: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/

Poet Mia Frederiksen's equilibrium is sent into turmoil when her solid scientist husband Boris, requests a "pause" in their 30-year marriage ... the Pause turns out to be "French with limp but shiny brown hair ... significant breasts that were real, not manufactured ... and an excellent mind."  

Mia goes briefly to pieces, then retreats to the small hometown of her childhood for the summer to lick her wounds and reflect on her past and future. There she makes unexpected connections with, amongst others, a lively group of octogenarian women (in a home for the elderly) with varied and surprising pasts, and teaches poetry to a group of pre-adolescent girls with whose personal dramas she becomes involved. The summer becomes a reflection on the stages of being a woman and a gradual reconstitution of her self. What strikes you most is the intelligence of her writing - reflecting an extraordinary breadth of knowledge and interest (this is also evident from the range of articles on her interesting website here) - and secondly, her empathy and humour. I am definitely going to read some earlier Hustvedt now.


And finally, here is her writer's room from the Guardian series, and you can read her description of her writing space by following the link below ...

Photo credit: www.guardian.co.uk/books

What (who) I'm reading now

Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot, Talking it Over, Love etc., England England ... and so many more) has been one of my favourite contemporary writers for years. Late last year I read his two most recent books ... 

                    Image source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Pulse (published in 2011) is a collection of short stories that collectively amount to a reflection on relationships between men and women, as well as on qualities of 'Englishness' ... at least, as far as these apply to middle-class, educated English lives. (Interestingly, Barnes seems to be bi-cultural: English-born to parents who were teachers of French, he's been a life-long Francophile and has won major French literary prizes as well as been made commandeur of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres).  

                         Image source: www.dispatch.com

It's tempting to wonder about the extent to which he draws on personal experience for these stories. Barnes was married to the very successful, South African-born literary agent Pat Kavanagh (below right), whose clients were some of Britain’s best known writers, including Auberon Waugh, Andrew Motion, William Trevor and Martin Amis. (When Amis dumped Kavanagh in favour of a new editor, the longstanding friendship between Barnes and Amis, two of the best living British writers, ended summarily, bitterly and publicly). She famously left Barnes briefly in the 1980s to have an affair with the writer Jeanette Winterson, returning to him for another couple of decades until she died quite recently.

                    Image sources: www.julianbarnes.com; www.nytimes.com

Not surprisingly perhaps, then, many of the stories in Pulse have themes of loss and bereavement, though I was also struck by the honesty (often uncomfortable) with which he explores men as partners. 

The Sense of an Ending won the 2011 Man Booker prize - Barnes’s first win after being shortlisted three times previously. Only 150 pages long, it’s a novella rather than a novel, yet has the feel of a substantial story. Unlike the previous year’s Booker winner, Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, which I had many reservations about (see here), I found this a really engaging read ...

                         Image source: www.guardian.co.uk

It explores the question of what we remember about the key relationships in our lives as we get older. The main character, Tony Webster, is in retirement, nearing the end of a life he considers unremarkable but pretty satisfactory.  In the early stages of the book, he chronicles this life with the rather tidy explanations of key events that most of us tend to rely on in summing up our lives. Tony’s watershed moment comes when he receives an unexpected bequest that includes the personal diary of an old friend who died young many years before. From this point, it becomes apparent to both him and the reader that he is an unreliable narrator. Delving back into events, he is forced to re-interpret his past and question truths he held which now appear to have been built on illusory grounds. Successive ‘understandings’ giving way to newer ones as they are proved inaccurate too. In the process, Tony discovers that “as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or what you have been.”

The book’s unsettling message is that we only partially understand our own life stories; as Barnes’s character is confronted with the unreliability of personal memories, he reflects that “the history that happens under our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent”.

What (who) I'm reading now

Esther Freud is probably best known as a novelist for her autobiographical novel Hideous Kinky (1992), based on her childhood experiences of travelling in Morocco with her sister and hippy mother, because of the film that was made of it, starring Kate Winslet. 

More recently, two of her books that have stood out for me as wonderful reads were Gaglow (1997), set in a fictional country estate in East Germany of 1914 and spanning several generations of a German Jewish family, and The Sea House (2003) a love story and much more, set in a seaside village in Suffolk, where Freud herself has a home. 

Clearly, Esther Freud mines her own history in her writing, drawing on her extraordinary family – she is the great-grand-daughter of Sigmund Freud and the daughter of artist Lucian Freud who died a few months ago; her sister is fashion designer Bella Freud, responsible for the revival of Biba; her uncle Clement Freud the politician and broadcaster (Just A Minute); her first cousin Mathew Freud the PR mogul connected, unfortunately of late, to Rupert Murdoch. 

Her stories seem to draw one in gently - not page-turners that hook you right in from the beginning, but gradually working their way right into your affections. Lucky Break, published this year, which I read recently, is just like this. 

It recounts the diverging paths and fortunes of a group of actors who first meet as students at a drama college in London. From nervous, hopeful young first years being inducted into Stanislavsky, method acting, and a brutal, often arbitrary weeding out of talent, we follow the unpredictable course of their careers over a decade and a half. The highs and lows ... first night elation, disastrous castings, unscrupulous agents, the mechanics of sex scenes, demoralising periods of waitressing in Pizza Express or playing a penguin for four-year-olds, and the rare lucky breaks that lead to A-list success ... are all narrated with an authentic, unsentimental touch and often pitch-perfect observation. In one of my favourite quotes, "There had been blood, foundation and some hysteria."

Again, perhaps, this is because she draws on personal experience: Freud herself attended drama school in London and acted early on in life before turning to writing, and she is married to actor David Morrissey (State of Play, The Deal, Sense and Sensibility).

The photo above shows her writer's room, from the old Guardian series. I must say I do love it ... for the natural light, the view to the garden, and of course the Lucian Freud portrait next to the bookshelf.

What (who) I'm reading now

Justin Cartwright is a British author with African roots, who was born in South Africa and educated there and in the USA before doing a degree at Oxford and working in Britain in broadcasting, advertising and film. He draws on all these experiences in his novels.

After Masai Dreaming, his first really successful novel (in 1993) - and a wonderful read - I found his books a bit hit and miss, but lately he seems to just be getting better and better. They're filled with interesting characters and thoughtful reflections about random aspects of contemporary life, written in almost deceptively simple style. Two of my recent favourites have been The Promise of Happiness and To Heaven by Water.

Photo source: www.foyles.co.uk

His latest novel, Other People's Money, has the recent banking crisis and financial meltdown at the heart of its story. It centres on the declining fortunes of the Trevelyan-Tubals (I love this absurd name!), an upper class English private banking family, whose wealth is in jeopardy. Elderly patriarch, Harry Trevelyan-Tubal, is dying in his Matisse-filled mansion in Cap d’Antibes, conveniently unaware of the crisis and of the increasingly desperate measures being taken by his son Julian, his reluctant successor, to save the family from disaster.

Into this scenario Cartwright weaves a colourful, rich cast of characters. He conveys the world of privilege, private yachts and trust funds as vividly as that of those with no money – the latter most memorably in the shape of  ageing playwright and thespian Artair MacCleod, reduced to consuming leaky Cornish pasties while working on his magnum opus and eking out a living staging productions of Thomas the Tank Engine for ‘little, obese, pig-faced kiddies of Cornwall’.

Photo source: www.guardian.co.uk

There are some great female characters too ... The dying patriarch’s much-younger, attractive wife, Fleur, is back in London cavorting with her personal trainer in in a broom cupboard at the local gym while reflecting on her vulnerable future position in the family. And twenty-something cub reporter Melissa is on her first job at a parochial Cornish newspaper, finding herself shifting uncertainly from blogging about cupcakes to becoming caught up in a story of national importance. I thought Cartwright treated them with empathy and intelligence, avoiding simplification.

The story also conveys very well the tension of looming financial disaster, though (thankfully) without boring us with the technicalities of the process – (I'm thinking here of Sebastian Faulks who also used this as a theme for A Week in December but with pages of detailed and mind-numbing explanations of sub primes, hedge funds and collateral debt). An engaging plot intertwines the affairs of all these characters in what is really a comic, satirical novel – intelligent and also highly readable. And as a wee bonus, the novel signs off with a final scene involving a well-known actor that is wildly improbable, but at the same time sweet and comical, and made me laugh out loud.

Photo source: www.guardian.co.uk/


Browsing the internet for images for this post, I was reminded of a weekly feature that The Guardian ran a few years back, called Writer's Rooms, which featured a photograph and accompanying description of the places where well-known writers graft away at their novels. I loved this series - mostly because I  loved reading about and seeing the objects that writers surround themselves with in their creative working spaces. I was sorry when it ended, though I guess there's a limit to the number of recognised authors one can feature. Here's the link to Justin Cartwright's writer's room, in the pic above, and from there to the others in the series. 


On an unrelated note, apologies for my previous post having turned into gobbledygook (in some browsers only, it appears). I can't fix it in Edit mode, as it appears correctly there. Of all the weird things Blogger has been up to lately, this is the weirdest.