Lunchtime read: For Esme with Love and Squalor and other stories

There is certainly something to be said for reading a large amount of an author’s work because it provides an opportunity to really discern the style, as well as providing a chance to pick out the best work. Salinger produces some great short stories when he mixes the classic elements of a great plot with strong characterisation.

Highlights from The Laughing Man

* A former boy scout is reminiscing about his days playing baseball, camping and having some after school fun led by a leader named the chief who entertains them in the bus before going home with tales of The Laughing Man

* The bus stories centre on a hideously deformed man who fights injustice and has some animal friends and wears a poppy mask to keep his features hidden - and the boys are addicted to the stories

* The routine is suddenly changed by the arrival of the chief’s girlfriend who starts playing baseball with the boys and starts attending their meetings pretty regularly until one evening when she suddenly turns up late and then cries and runs away

* That night the chief, obviously upset about the relationship tells the last episode of the Laughing Man with the hero choosing death after vanquishing his enemies and the impact on the boys is tears and silence as if they realise that they are mourning the end of a more innocent stage of childhood

More tomorrow…

Iron in the Soul - post II

There is a real sense of futility as the rumours spread of the defeat and the armistice being signed. Now with 100 pages gone all of the main characters have been reintroduced with the exception of Marcelle and you wonder how she is getting on with Mathieu’s child. War seems to have damaged people and put their lives in perspective and has also had an impact on Paris itself, which is beautifully described:

“It was Sunday. For the past three days it had been Sunday. The whole week now, in Paris, consisted of one day, a ready-made, colourless sort of day, rather stiffer than usual, rather more synthetic, over-marked by silence, and already filled by a secretly working rot.”

Bullet points between pages 57 – 112

* Boris is injured in a hospital and given the chance to fly to England and escape before the Germans arrive but he explains that he needs to ask Lola first and then goes off to meet with his sister

* It is then revealed that Ivich is not only married to the man she ran to when she thought war was coming in Paris but had a miscarriage and has aged a great deal and as a result of her experiences has drifted almost completely away from her brother

* Daniel is in Paris and almost enjoying the state the city finds itself in and then he spots the Germans, the first time they have appeared in the story in the flesh, and he realises just how many enemy military are in the deserted capital

* Mathieu and the troops wait to hear what is going on and get mixed messages about the signing of an armistice and as a result feel as if they have failed because they have not had a chance to fight

* But then they drift back to camp with the feeling that they might after all get a chance to prove they can fight only to discover they are being abandoned by their officers and left to fend for themselves

“No one likes us, no one: the civilians blame us for not defending them, our wives have got no pride in us, our offices have left us in the lurch, the villagers hate us, the Jerries are advancing through the darkness.”

More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: For Esme with Love and Squalor and other stories

Before I get into commenting on the story today I wanted to mention that like most other people reading these stories without too much knowledge about the author you do assume that the members of the Glass family are based on Salinger's own family. But they are not and the discovery that this is one of the classic fictional family creations is something that adds to the respect for the author's imagination.

Just Before the War with the Eskimos

* Two friends, Selina and Ginnie, are coming back from playing tennis and have an argument over money with Ginnie pointing out that she always has to pay the fare and so demands some money from her friend

* Selina storms into her apartment and tells Ginnie that sshe will have to wait while she gets the money from her mother

* As Ginnie waits she is interrupted first by Selina's brother and then by one of his friends who both bowl her over with their observations on life and enthusiasm for being cycnical

* Selina returns with the money but Ginnie tells her to keep it because in a away you feel that she has enjoyed herself and learnt more than a couple of dollars worth of entertainment and knowledge

More tomorrow...

Iron in the Soul - post I

After the difficult reading experience of The Reprieve this is a more conventional style sticking with a character for a chapter, the diary date that Sartre uses, and giving them the room to think that was absent in the rush to war that was in the second book.

Things start in an odd position because you know that at the end of The Reprieve Sartre has a choice to start Iron in the Soul either just before the Nazi attack on France, which might have been tempting for tension. However he starts not in France but New York and starts with Paris having fallen. That’s why you know this is going to be an interesting read because from page one none of the easy options have been taken.

Bullet points between pages 1 – 57

* The story starts with Gomez in New York looking for a break from the heat and the struggle to get money but he seems to be being looked after and he is offered a job as an art critics based on his experience as a painter

* Gomez hears that Paris has fallen but because of his experience in the Spanish Civil War he feels no sympathy and even when he sits down and has a drink with a French man in a bar he still feels nothing

* Meanwhile Sarah his wife and son Pablo are struggling to escape from the Germans and are mixed up with other refugees and the picture that is painted of life in France is incredibly hard

* Then the time moves on and the story picks up with Mathieu with seven other troops lying in a field waiting to find out where they are going next in the retreat from the oncoming enemy

* Mathieu and his colleagues sum up the sense of the frustration in the defeat with some not caring, others regretting the death of their troops and all worried about what will happen next to them

More tomorrow…

More than an hour? Switch off and read

It’s nothing particularly new but more evidence has been made available if it were needed that watching TV rather than reading might make it harder for you to learn and climb up the academic ladder. The Guardian reports on an American study that found that 14-year olds who watched more than three hours of television a day were twice as likely not to continue their education after school. Although the study proves a point you do have to wonder who funds these studies into the painfully obvious.

Lunchtime read: For Esme - with Love and Squalor and other stories

As you read more Salinger and start to appreciate the role that the family plays in his stoties and even when you don't think that it is going to be about one the Seymour and Buddy clan it turns out to fill another part of the jigsaw about the family history - this time about Walt who died in the war.

Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut

* Two old college friends meet up on a cold snowy day and share some memories and plenty of alcholol and start to talk about the old times and some of the people they went to college with

* But the married woman who lives in the house starts to turn bitter in her recollections, particularly after her daughter comes home with her imaginary friend, and reveals that she adored a soilder who was killed in the war

* She tells her friend that she has never been able to tell her husband about the relationship, which she valued for the humour (the title comes from something Walt said) and he would be even more jealous of a ghost

* The friend asks for details of his death and is told a camping stove blew up and killed him and then the drink and futility of the loss overcome her and she is angry with her daughter and then in tears asks her friend if she was good - obviously wondering why something so bad happened to her

More from the collection tomorrow...

Lunchtime read: For Esme with Love and Squalor and other stories

The theme is Seymour again but this time the suicide is dealt with head-on with the holiday in Florida, which was mentioned in Seymour: an Introduction being the location for the final hours of a disturbed but obviously talented man.

There is no sense of impending doom in this story at all so the ending takes you by surprise and it is hard not to come to the conclusion – shared by the mother-in-law – that Seymour is unhinged.

A Perfect Day For Bananafish

* Muriel, Seymour’s wife, is in the hotel and makes a long distance call to New York and tells her mother that Seymour is acting reasonably normally but the mother is alarmed and argues that he should never have been let of hospital by the army

* Muriel defends her husband but there have obviously been issues around the grandmother and suggestions Seymour has made around her funeral arrangements and something to so with trees

* Meanwhile Seymour is on the beach and then plays with a little girl as they go into the water searching for bananafish but at the end when he kisses her foot as she plays the imaginary game you sense there is a bridge he cannot cross

* He then walks back into the hotel embarrasses a woman he accuses of looking at his feet in the lift walks into his room and gets his gun and then lies on the twin bed next to Muriel and blows his brains out

Where this collection of stories can go from there is hard to guess but there will be more tomorrow…

The Reprieve - post VI

The book comes to an end with the mixture of different stories being told in succession carrying onto the last page. The difference compared to the beginning is that by now you see the method in the madness and the juxtaposition between events with a brilliant contrast between Ivich being violated by her lover and Czechoslovakia being let down by France and England.

There is also a mixture of relief and disappointment when it appears that the Munich agreement has heralded peace and not war. Half of the characters are still being mobilized when the announcement is made and the book ends with a feeling of limbo.

Bullet points between pages 348 – 377

* Everyone is waiting for a statement by the French leader Daladier that most expect will be an announcement of war and it is with a sense of resignation that some of the major characters make decisions that they could regret with Ivich giving herself to a man and Boris joining up for three years

* However as the announcement arrives Daladier explains that he is flying the next day to see Hitler with Chamberlain and so he has nothing to announce - a move that starts to dispel some of the tension

* Mathieu sits on a train going towards the barracks and planes fly overhead leading some aboard to believe that they are German and war has been declared but when they arrive at the station they are told the news from Munich

* The French and British faced with war to defend Czechoslovakia back down and let their ally down and in a scene of anger and disappointment the Czech government understands it is on its own

* Back in Prague the news is met with anger but in France there are crowds waiting to meet Daladier as he flies back into the capital celebrating what they believe is a peaceful end to the confrontation with Hitler

“Daladier stood on the top step, and looked at them dumfounded. Then he turned to Leger and said between his teeth:
‘The blind fools!’”

A review will follow in the next couple of days…

the week ahead

Having posted a week ahead plan last week, which served as both a target and a reminder, it seemed like a good idea to do it again. Plus it is a graphical way of getting the taste buds going.

On the review front the aim will be to post a review of J.D Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters Seymour: an Introduction which was last week's lunchtime read.


Also by either the end of tonight or tomorrow Jean-Paul Sartre's The Reprieve should have been finished and ready for the review treatment.


That leaves next week to look forward to and keeping with Salinger the lunchtime read will be another short story collection For Esme - with Love and Squalor and other stories.


The main read during the daily commute will be the final part of the the Roads to Freedom trilogy by Sartre Iron in the Soul which should update the story and bring it to some sort of conclusion.


That's the plan anyway...

book of books - Goodbye to Berlin

When this book by Christopher Isherwood starts you can’t help felling its some sort of travel journal come diary written by someone who is hanging around Berlin teaching English until they can make it as a writer and go back to England. But as the book goes on it has a deceptive edge to it that becomes heart breaking at the end as a City, country and people is consumed by Nazism.

For those historians that wonder how Hitler managed to appeal to a large number of the population this gives a slight insight into the fickle nature of people, the desperation of the poor and the willingness for people to accept the status quo.

Plot summary
Christopher is a writer who has had one book published, which he confesses sold only five copies, who is teaching English in Berlin and making friends along the way. He tells the story of a couple of years in the German capital at the start of Hitler’s reign through a series of stories that link and roughly follow in consecutive order. The characters he meets illustrate the poverty the German’s find themselves in after the slump, the sort of people (aggressive loners) who are in the vanguard of the brown shirt movement and the ignorance of many people about the looming danger. He leaves Berlin when the city is daubed in swastikas and Nazi flags and the change in the city and the people he knew is starting to make it an unsavoury place to live. He can show the reader just how things have changed by reflecting them back on the characters and the locations.

Is it well written?
It is subtle in its power and authority and it manages to slowly turn itself from a journal into a historical statement. But it never feels like that is going to happen from the start it seems like a genuine reaction to events and that makes it more powerful. Some of the characters you discover become early victims of the Nazi anti-Semitic policies with Bernhard the man Christopher befriends who is the nephew of a Jewish department store owner being killed. The various different characters, ranging from a social gadfly from England who sleeps her way through the city, a homosexual who becomes obsessed with a German named Otto and Christopher’s various landlady’s all represent different social positions and political views and the book is made richer by the author’s movement through various different situations.

Should it be read?
The simple answer is that it should because if history repeats itself then it is best to be aware of just what can happen to a people when they are put under economic strain, exposed to extreme politics and largely react with indifference. It is an easy book to get through and although you sometimes want Christopher to become more than just an observer you are grateful he can remain objective. For history lovers, those who like the diary style and anyone looking for a book describing the end of an era this is a perfect read. I particularly like the end of the era feel to it because just like some of the great Russian revolutionary literature it is the political background that drives the story and defines the characters.

There is one other point that is still haunting me. When the Nazi’s sat down and dreamt up the horror of the final solution it was in a Wannsee villa that they had taken over from the Jews. In the book Christopher is invited out to a villa in the same location by Bernhard the rich retailer. You can’t help but feel it might have been the same place and the bitter irony of the lonely detached Bernhard having his villa, where he entertained, being used as a venue for such a gruesome discussion.

Summary
A tale of how a people allowed themselves to sleep walk into a Nazi regime that started killing from the start

Version read – penguin paperback

bookmark of the week

With all this Sartre it seemed apt to dig out a bookmark that was purchased in a castle in Britanny. Don't ask for a translation I've no idea but it looks good.

Lunchtime read: Seymour: an Introduction

After an odd an uneasy start the penny finally drops and you start to understand that this is a book that the author is finding very hard to write about a brother that he idolised and the rest of the family looked up to. The weight of trying to come up with a suitable tribute is crushing and you start to see the pain of the exercise:

"I said I'd finish this, but I'm not going to make it after all. Not because I'm not a proper iron man but because to finish it right I'd have to touch on - my God, touch on - the details of his suicide, and I don't expect to be ready to do that, at the rate I'm going, for several more years."

Highlights from the final third of Seymour: an Introduction

* Buddy describes how his brother was his greatest critic but also a friendly voice of encouragement and he prints a memo his brother sent after he had written his first major piece of writing

* Then he stumbles around the area of revealing what his brother looked like and he admits he cannot do that easily and gets frustrated and calls on the reader to be satisfied with the information he has been able to provide

* He tries as best he can to describe the eyes, nose and dress sense but where he manages to get a bit more colour is round his brother’s love of sports but throughout he never manages to describe Seymour as an older man preferring the safety of their youth

A review will follow shortly…

weekend paper round-up

If there is a theme to the coverage in today’s papers then it is about versions of books with some disagreements about the concept of cutting them down and printing draft versions.

David Lister uses his arts column in The Independent to have a crack at Orion Publishing, which is launching its compact editions of classics. Lister describes the whole idea as arrogant: “I wish the scheme as much failure as it is possible to have. It takes a certain sort of arrogance to mess with these texts and make massive cuts.”

One of the obvious candidates for cuts would be War & Peace and in The Times there is a story about the controversy between rival publishers as the original draft version of the book is published. The graphics on the front cover apparently are not too many miles away from the current Penguin classics version.

The Guardian review section ponders on what the biographers will make of a politician who has so far been hard to pin down in print. “What makes Tony Blair tick..has always been elusive.” No doubt the biographers will never be able to match the advance or the sales figures of Blair himself ever decides to pen his memoirs. Remember the Thatcher books? And people wonder why most of us think politics is boring – just try reading about the politicians.

The Reprieve - post V

Just as it seems like war is inevitable it looks like Hitler might back down but the wheels are in motion and the characters move to take up their places in the event of a war. In a flood the old characters come back to the centre of the story and Mathieu gets more attention than he has nearly all of the book and Ivich reappears and Boris and Daniel share their thoughts with the wrong audience.

Bullet points between pages 288 – 348

* Mathieu returns to his Paris flat and cannot sleep sp heads out to visit some old haunts and take a mental picture of the city for what he expects could be the last time but before heads out his landlady hands him a letter from Daniel which he pockets rather than reads

* Boris confides to Lola that he is not sure if he will be frightened by war and that concerns him but she only thinks of herself so he resolves to join up and put an end to his doubts and heads for the recruitment office

* Philippe the pacifist is noticed in a bar with the prostitute he picked up by the secretary of the pacifist editor the boy has fallen under the influence of and so she resolves to follow him and watches as Philippe is beaten up for calling an end to the war

* Mathieu pretends to be a policeman and steps into save Philippe and then helps the secretary Irene put him into a cab but she stops and asks for his help because the young man is trying to escape

* They take him to her flat and put him to bed and then in the most emotionally intense scene yet Mathieu and Irene share the night together and although when they wake Philippe is gone she agrees to see him off at the station that night when he leaves

* Ivich meanwhile has just about had enough of being cut off in the country and after her father welcomes the German aggression and comments that soon they will be able to return to Russia she storms out and heads for Paris

* Once back in the capital she heads for Mathieu’s flat and he meets her and tells her she can stay there but he seems to have gone past the point of having any thoughts for her of love and lust and leaves her to go to the station and there he says goodbye to Irene

* Philippe goes to the police and tries to get himself made a martyr for peace but all they do is phone his father and ask him to come and pick him up

The final thirty pages will come at some point this weekend…

Lunchtime read: Seymour: an Introduction

Accepting defeat this book is not going to be finished today and so the second third has been read rather than the second half and the enbd will have to come tomorrow. After a rather mixed start you still feel like shouting to the writer "get on with it" and begging him to cut to the chase.

highlights from the second third of Seymour: an Introduction
* Buddy explains that his brother Seymour loved Japanese and Chinese poetry and he has a collection of his brother's poems that the family is pressuring him to print and potentially make public

* He describes the frustration his failure to print the poems has caused and also shares some of his life story describing himself as a virtual recluse teaching english to students and writing in a home near the Canadian border

* Then he sketches some of the family history with the mother and father orginally being musical hall stars who finally settled down when they had several children and the father got a job in radio

The final third comes tomorrow...