Nursing a grudge against Fitzgerald?

The Guardian has been running a series of booklets that come with the paper containing what it believes will comprise a set of the greatest interviews of the 20th century. The one in the paper today was an interview of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Michel Mok written in the New York Post in 1936.

In an introduction Jay McInerney refers to the fact this interview is famous for being a hatchet job that almost pushed Fitzgerald to the brink of suicide. Reading it you are struck by a man who is on the brink of self-destruction but he paints himself out to be a loser with very little prompting from the interviewer. The real betray of trust comes from the nurse who reveals when Fitzgerald leaves the room the true state of affairs, which Mok is only too happy to relay:

“’Despair, despair, despair,’ said the nurse. ‘Despair day and night. Try not to talk about his work or his future. He does work, but only very little – maybe three, four hours a week.’”

What a great help that must have been to her employer. Mok took advantage no doubt of a man who should never have been encouraged to share his thoughts and his failings with a reporter. But the level of naivety is staggering from the nurse who manages to undermine any appearance of a successful return that Fitzgerald might have been trying to portray.

Roseanna - post I

Do you ever get one of those days when you pick up a book in a charity shop without much of a clue about its contents and then when you start to read it get a very pleasant surprise? Today has been one of those rare and precious moments.

What first attracted me to Roseanna by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo was not only that it is written by Swedish authors, which is not something you come across everyday, but also that Edgar Allan Poe is mentioned in the introduction. Any detective story would naturally be referenced back to Poe but in his introduction Henning Mankell makes the point that this is not a book trying to ape someone else’s style.

You think that maybe those claims are one thing and reality will be another but things start and carry on in such a way that not only is this different but it is so well written that you start planning to purchase the other nine books in the series.

Bullet points between pages 1 – 73

* A body is found in a canal by a dredger, which pulls it out in its bucket and then dumps the female body on the side of the towpath starting off a police investigation that is handled by the small and local police force

* To help out with the local police Martin Beck and two colleagues are sent from Stockholm but they have no joy either even identifying the victim who seems to have no name even after numerous door-to-door enquiries

* Beck who is brilliantly described as being on the border of being ill most of the time in a marriage that seems to be pretty mundane and joyless becomes obsessed with solving the case along with one of the detectives from the local force he leaves behind

* Beck starts off looking for missing persons who are not from the area but visiting on vacation and eventually, after three months, he gets a breakthrough with an American police force recognising Roseanna a librarian who has gone missing

* Beck concentrates with his like minded local colleague Ahlberg on following their hunch that Roseanna was on board a boat and they track her down to being a passenger on a boat named Diana which throws up some blood samples from her cabin after forensics give it the once over

* The next task is to track down the other passengers and try to recreate what happened in the murder scene, a bleak small cabin on the Diana

Maybe I haven’t read enough crime fiction to know but I have never come across an example where for three months almost nothing happens and you get to share the tense desperation of the investigating officer. When the breakthrough comes a rush of excitement runs through you and far from being switched off it keeps you hanging on for more waiting to get back on the train to work to read the next instalment.

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: Selected Tales

The Poe is almost at an end an although it is dark stuff it is interesting because it is so clearly written by someone with an enquiring mind. Not prepared just to let the norm be the stuff of writing there is a supernaturalism here that adds to the story an added dimension that does work. On top of that there is clearly a fascination in the line between good and evil and what happens when you cross it and murder someone.

Highlights from The Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar
A man who is on his last legs agrees to be put into a mesmerist state and the narrator manages to put him under just before death intervenes. He remains in a state of half-death for months until finally it is agreed that they will let the patient wake. Asking him how he elicits the answer that is dead and demands to be let go. But no sooner out of the mesmerist state than the body crumbles and the bed is left full of a bitter smelling goo where the patient had been only moments before

Highlights from The Case of Amontillado
A man seeking revenge decides to get it on a festive day when the town will be focused on enjoying themselves. He beckons for his victim to accompany him into his dark and damp cellar to find some decent alcohol and when he reaches the farthest point chains the unsuspecting and drunk victim to the wall. He then bricks the man in and finds him changing from anger to hysteria to finally silence – a state that spooks the killer. But unlike other Poe tales he manages to get away with it and the story ends with the admission that no one has found the corpse.

Final couple of stories tomorrow…

Slaughterhouse 5 - post III

Because I was dropping a wardrobe off for a colleague at work I drove into today and that meant no reading. Add to that a business lunch and there was no chance to even pick up a bit of Poe. I’m almost running out of time with the Poe and am in my penultimate week to get the review over to the Penguin Classics site so will get stuck back into that tomorrow.

In the meantime there was a chance to get through the final pages on the Vonnegut. An odd book but very powerful in the end and one of those slow burners that twists and turns in your mind as it fuses all sorts of thoughts.

Bullet points between pages 124 – 157

* Billy Pilgrim time travels between the war, his wedding and his death meeting some interesting people on the way including the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout who has never met a fan before and lives in the same town as Billy

* Billy is reminded of his anniversary night when the optometrist barber shop quarter, who were to die in the plane crash, sang and the expressions on their faces reminded him of the horror of war

* Back on the planet run by the aliens he has fathered a child with ex porn star actress Wild Montana and the gossip papers speculate that she has been murdered to try and explain her long absence

* Billy’s wife Valencia dies trying to visit him in the hospital after getting carbon monoxide poisoning after losing her exhaust in a car crash and for days Billy appears to be a vegetable that can take nothing in

* But when he does talk he is happy to share his recollections about Dresden and the night it was bombed and the moon like appearance of the dead space that remained afterwards and although historians argue it was justified in war it killed tens of thousands of innocent people

* Billy along with Vonnegut were put to work to try and dig the corpses out of the rubble and the book ends with that image of the horror of death on a mass scale being enough to flip anyone’s mind looking for a way out of a planet that is full of people that can’t help killing themselves

A review will follow shortly…

bookmark of the week

Whenever there is a big promotion on for a book there are alsways these sorts of bookmarks available on the bookshop till. Some are well done, and end up as minor collectables on eBay, but others are cheap and not worth keeping. Probably because of the book in question these will end up in the former category.

Slaughterhouse 5 - post II

There is a real method in the madness here with Billy Pilgrim going from an alien zoo to a prisoner of war camp in such a seamless manner that the whole idea of time travel back and forwards suddenly seems very familiar. It almost doesn’t matter if you don’t believe it because the point here is to investigate the impact war makes on individuals and Pilgrim’s problems are not designed to be an advert for war.

Bullet points between pages 86 – 124

* The prisoners are moved to Dresden to an old abattoir and are told that if they ever get lost and need to get back they should give their address, which is Slaughterhouse Five, and they will et sent back to the makeshift camp for 100 American soldiers

* In his time travelling Billy recalls more episodes in the alien zoo and the moment when they brought him a mate who was the opposite of his large and ugly wife who every time she appears in the narrative is chewing a different branded candy bar

* He also knows that when he boards the plane to an optometrists conference with his father-in-law that everyone except him and the co-pilot will die when the plane hits a mountain

* He also knows that he will be shot by a nutter he meets in the war who promises to avenge his friend Roland, who blames Billy for his death, and he finally gets Billy in 1976 as he comes off stage speaking at an alien abduction event

* Back in Dresden the Americans are trying to be convinced that they should sign up for a Nazi fighting corp on the Eastern front but no one is interested and as Billy alone knows the next night the bombers will come and will destroy most of the city

More maybe tomorrow…

book of books - Imposture

Most of the time the books I read have been written by people who have been six feet under for quite a while. Part of the reason is that there is some comfort knowing that a book has stood the test of time and been deemed a ‘classic’ by plenty of people. The other reason is that most of the modern stuff just doesn’t grab you in the same way. This book ironically is written as if it was something produced in the last century.

Benjamin Markovits starts using a literary device that sets it up and established the theme of imposture. There is nothing wrong with that but the problem throughout this book is that it is hard to ever really care about the main character. Not only is he pretending to be some one else but also he is pretending to be someone clearly more confident.

Plot summary
A young doctor who is drifting through life with no purpose is given the chance to become Lord Byron’s travel companion as the poet escapes his creditors and a divorced wife and heads to the continent. During the trip the famous incident with Mary and Percy Shelly, which gave birth to Frankenstein is covered but is the doctor John Polidori who writes The Vampyre. Things start with the book, which is mistaken for the work of Byron, and as he waits to complain to the publisher a young woman, who herself pretends to have met Byron before meets him and manages to get his address out of him. She then sets her sights on being seduced by him and in the end after Polidori reveals how he burnt his bridge with Byron, who made him feel inadequate and then seduced his sister. And runs up some debts the truth is finally revealed. Polidori takes his own life as things fall apart around him. He loved his sister, and not necessarily it is hinted in a purely platonic way, he dreamt of being a writer and he wanted to be loved. Byron did all of those things better than him and in the end he could not live in the shadow of the man he had pretended to be.

Is it well written?
It is a little bit like - male scene then female scene alternatively - until they intertwine and then it ends with the conclusion, which makes it a bit like reading a movie. The problem is that Polidori is a disturbed pathetic man struggling to get over his guilt of letting down his father, sister and Byron as well as finding out what his real purpose is in life. He fails at everything and seems to only succeed when he pretends to be Byron, which in the end makes him even more miserable. You get the point before the end and there are moments where you feel it is put on a bit thick. Plus having introduced a literary device where an old English teacher shares his writings there is not reference back. The style is almost nineteenth century but at the same time clearly written in much more modern times. The theme works but the only criticism would have been to maybe take the foot off the failure pedal at some points and make Polidori slightly more likeable and as a result the story would probably have been even more tragic.

Should it be read?
Hard one to answer that because there is no particularly compelling reason you should. But I suspect that is purely because of my prejudice against modern literature. What would I necessarily pick up anything – recommendation on another blog might help but it’s a minefield. In fairness if this is read then it is a well-written story and certainly a story that has been well researched and will not leave you with any unanswered questions. A quick check on Wikipedia indicates that most of the story was built around the true story of Polidori.

Summary
Pretending to be someone else might get you a bit of money and female attention but when the truth comes out sadly an overdose is the only ending possible

Version read – Faber & Faber paperback

Lunchtime read: Selected Tales

The reappearance of Dupin is welcome but lets face it after the Murder in the Rue Morgue the detective adventures are best left to Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes. Apart from that there is another reminder of how Poe can make you feel uncomfortable dwelling on one particular phobia.

Highlights from The Purloined Letter
A member of the royal household is discovered in possession of a compromising letter and a minister steals it knowing that no protest is possible. The woman turns to the police to get it back but they take the house apart and cannot find it. The reward for finding it is considerable but no one has any joy. Dupin asks for a large sum, of money to get it back and no sooner is the cheque written he hands over the letter. He realised that the best place to hide it is right under the noses and so he discovered it on a visit and then replaced it with a copy.

Te moral of the story is that if you wan to hide something them keeping it obvious often tricks the minds of those looking for some secret hiding place.

Highlights from The Imp of the Perverse
After a few pages suggesting that sometimes there is an overpowering desire to be perverse and go against the norm Poe introduces a man who has committed murder who is quite happy at having got away with his crime. But then he is infected by the desire to shout out his crime and starts to run through the crowd and when he is caught sure enough he blurts it out and for his honesty is rewarded with the hangman’s noose.

More tomorrow…

Slaughterhouse 5 - post I

Never having read any Vonnegut it takes a little bit of getting to grips with. It helps because you get a rambling opening chapter that acts as both as scene setter as well as an introduction to the style of writing that is to come.

In terms of style it is on first appearances quite disconnected anecdotes but you start to realise that things are linked and there are echoes that crop up and make you appreciate the skill. So it goes.

Bullet points between pages 1 – 86

* Vonnegut starts by revealing that he was a prisoner of war caught in the Dresden firestorm caused by the allied bombing and had always planned to do a book about it but couldn’t really remember much to do with those days

* He contacts an ex military buddy and starts to talk to him about the past and after convincing his wife it will not be a pro-war memoir he sets off to try and tell the story of the past

* Things really start in the third chapter with the arrival of the central character Billy Pilgrim who is introduced as an old optometrist who is a widower and happy writing to the local newspaper about the time he was abducted by aliens

* He is told to stop talking about his space adventures by his daughter but Billy is a time traveller and the story skips across his birth, marriage and his war years where he was captured behind enemy lines limping along in his assistant chaplains uniform

* Once captured he skips back and forth in time recalling the adventures in the space ship and the zoo he lived in on the alien world, his spell in a mental hospital after the war, his marriage to an ugly rich girl and his relatively stable but uninspiring family life

* The weaving in of the abduction and the capture make you feel as if one experience triggered the other and there is the suggestion of a fourth dimension but there is also the hint that just as time travel with aliens might seem intensely bizarre so does fighting against your fellow man

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: Selected Tales

Poe uses a device whereby the story is being told by someone who is confessing of a crime. It is used in the Tell-Tale Heart and again here with The Black Cat. The technique makes it darker because you know it ended in some grislly manner for the narrator to be telling the tale at all.

Highlights from The Gold Bug
A doctor on an island colony meets up with a friend who lives with a servant and occasionally meets up. He lets him self into his friends home and although the weather is usually hot it is such an unusually chilly day the fire is blazing and he sits down next to it and waits. His friend arrives and talks about finding a gold bug and draws it for him but when the doctor looks at the paper all he can see is a death’s head skull. The friend’s part on bad terms arguing about the image on the paper but an idea seems to have germinated in the mind of the gold bug owner.

Weeks pass and the doctor gets a visit from the servant who informs him that his master is going mad and has a letter calling on him to come. When they meet up the strange behaviour continues and the gold bug owner asks them to walk off into the forest and sends his servant up onto a tree. At the end of the seventh branch there is a skull and dropping the bug through the left eye it marks a spot from which the men can dig up Captain Kidd’s treasure. The gold bug is almost unconnected but had the owner not attempted to draw it he would never have found the map on the reverse that included the pirate sign of a death’s head that the doctor saw as he sat by the fire – which had heated the invisible ink.

Highlights from The Black Cat
An animal lover becomes an alcoholic and after one particularly bad bout he comes home and decides that his cat is looking at him strangely so cuts its eye out. He then tries to be remorseful but a few weeks later he hangs the cat. That night his house burns down all except for his bedroom wall that has the image of a cat being hanged burnt into the plaster. Again time passes and the animal lover comes across a cat almost identical to the one he killed and buys it. After a while he tires of the animal and moves to kill it with an axe but his wife stops him. For her trouble he puts the axe through her head. He thinks he has got away with bricking up her corpse but when the police come there is a screaming behind the wall that leads them to frantically pull the bricks away to reveal the corpse with the cat sitting on the head.

Highlights from The Premature Burial
A man, who is obsessed with being buried alive, partly because he suffers from a condition that means he slips into trance states that resemble death, discusses his phobia. First of all he reveals stories of others who have not been dead who wither died in a crypt or were lucky to be found before they died. Then he thinks the worst has happened and starts to scream out before remembering he is tightly squeezed on a ship and is waking the rest of the crew. The result of his moments when he really thought he had been buried alive is to relive him of the fear and hand him the chance to enjoy life.

More tomorrow…



 

Lunchtime read: Selected Tales

Back from Dublin and tired from a full day being talked to about Cisco’s plans for the future so although I started Slaughterhouse 5 on the plane will just stick to the lunchtime read. Although must make one moan. Having read most of James Joyce it seemed like a great idea to pop into the bookshop at the airport and pick up Finnegan’s Wake. But all they had was The Dubliners and not just one or two copies but about ten. It was a real shame that having been deprived of the chance to go to a bookshop the airport failed to deliver the goods.

Anyway back to Poe…

Highlights from The Pit and the Pendulum
A man sentenced to death by the inquisition is put through various tortures with the first being a room with a deep pit, which he only narrowly avoids in the dark. Then a pendulum swings down and only just misses him after he frees himself from its path. Final attempts to push him into the it by heating up the walls, which are pushed in towards him leave him about to faint into the abyss until a hand reaches out and pulls him back and it’s the French who have come and quashed the inquisition forces.

Highlights from The Tell-Tale Heart
A man decides to murder an old man because he has an evil eye that keeps staring at him so he waits and stalks him night after night until he manages to get into his room without waking him. But one night he disturbs the old man who is so terrified that his heart beats loudly and appears to be beating enough to raise the alarm but the murderer silences the heart by killing the old man. Then the police come after reports of a nigh time shriek and they are shown the old man’s room where the killer has cleverly dismembered the body and hidden it in the floorboards. He starts hearing the beating heart and finally is driven mad by the sound and confesses his crime to the police.

More tomorrow…

Mr Pye - post IV

The book ends with Mr Pye finally finding out which side of good and evil he is on and leaving Sark the poorer for his departure. A bit like the Poe things end here with your imagination still going and plenty of follow-up thoughts about what happened next there to entertain you after the book has finished.

Highlights from pages 214 - 254

* Mr Pye alarms Miss Dredger and the painter and his girlfriend by showing them his horns and decides that the only way to get rid of them is to do something humiliating and identifies the cattle fair happening the next day is the place he will venture out with his horns

* He fully expects to be caught by the police and hopes that he can somehow make his escape before the police arrive from Guernsey, at least forty minutes away, but the alarm is raised quickly and the islanders turn on him and it is only because of the painters girlfriend Tanty who suggests hide and seek and gives Mr Pye the key to the prison that he escapes

* When she catches up with him his horns are almost gone and he has grown wings and then with her help he jumps on a horse and carriage and heads off into the night chased by islanders who are witnesses as he rides to the edge of the cliff and hurtles over

* Unfurling his wings Pye flies off into the sky and leaves the island which returns to an insignificant rock with a small population

Review will follow later...

Lunchtime read: Selected Tales

I am in Dublin right now with work so everything is going to be slightly delayed. Sadly work is intense so there won;t be a chance to see anything other than the conference facilities at the Guinness storehouse. Anyway back to Poe...

There is something about a book that makes you really think that is very attractive. There is something happening here beyond the simple trying to guess which way the plot will turn and with the sequel to Murder in the Rue Morgue you are left without a resolution but thinking about the value in thinking differently about events and understanding what makes it as a clue.

Highlights from The Masque of the Red Death
A territory run by a duke is plagued by the red death, so called because of the bloody appearance of its victims. The Duke turns his back on his people and takes 1,000 courtiers and takes to a walled citadel to protect themselves against the plague. But at a masqued ball suddenly a stranger appears in a cloak with the marks of the red death on his face. he Duke demands his removal and when no one manages to do anything about it he runs at the stranger and then falls down dead, swiftly followed by the rest of his guests who tried to avoid death but managed to get caught after all.

Highlights from The Mystery of Marie Roget
This is a sequel to Murder in the Rue Morgue so Dupin reappears but he doesn't do so for quite a while. Mirroring the true events of a murder of a girl in New York the case centres on a girl found dead in a river.Theories abound through the press but Dupin shows by reading all the press cuttings, which are printed here in full, it is possible without even visiting the murder site to show that not only have the police missed most clues but also made completely the wrong assumptions about the killers - which is not a gang but an individual.

You are left wondering if the killer was a mystery naval officer or wether or not the finance had somehow managed to find out about a possible elopement and stopped it. The reality is that no one tells you because you are left wondering without an answer.

More tomorrow...

Mr Pye - post III

Poor old Mr Pye struggles to work out the impact on his person of good and evil hoping that by swinging the balance in the negative direction he will force his wings to disappear. Unlike the battle between Titus Groan and Steerpike this contest to stick to the right path is fought in the single man with the result of him appearing to frighten those who know him by his wild character changes.

Bullet points between pages 140 – 214

* Mr Pye consults a series of doctors on Harley Street but none of them know how to react to his wings, which continue to grow, so Pye tries to come up with the answer to the problem himself

* He decides that he has been given the wings because he was being so Godly so the way to get rid of them is to go to the other extreme and start being evil so he walks out of his hotel without paying the bill and do some minor vandalism

* Heading back to Sark his evil attempts continue and he turns up and disturbs Miss Dredger with his rudeness and then a series of events happen as a result of people witnessing his wings with Miss George having a heart attack and falling down the stairs winding up at the bottom dead and a local witnessing Pye’s shadow and getting carted off to the local asylum

* To get rid of the wings Mr Pye starts nightly sessions with the devil and soon enough it starts to work but as he walks along with Miss Dredger he complains of having been bitten again twice but this time on the forehead

* Peake doesn't take as long to describe the growing of the horns and all of a sudden Pye is faced with this difficulty balancing good and evil and realises that he never understoof his relationship with God at all properly

More tomorrow...

Lunchtime read: Selected Tales

By now with not quite 200 pages of the book got through you get the feel of Poe, an inventive and dark writer, really must have had fun pushing the boundaries. He is able to come up with different styles and make up the rulebook as he goes along.

Highlights from The Colloquy of Monos and Una
This one is a bit of a struggle until near the end when it becomes clear that this is a conversation between two dead lovers that have been reunited in the spirit world. They say that the sign of a good writer is someone who can get into the head of a different character. Poe shows here with the description of the thoughts of a dying man and then a corpse that he is quite capable of going into any sort of territory.

Highlights from The Oval Portrait
A very short story but by now you recognise all the hallmarks of Poe – darkness, horror both against a sense of faded grandeur. A traveller pitches up at a chateaux for the night and a book on his pillow explains the history of the numerous pictures in the room. As the hours tick by he is struck by a small oval portrait of a woman. Picking up the guide book he reads that she married the painter of the picture and he agonised about her portrait for a long time and when it was finally finished the sitter had died.

More tomorrow…