Lunchtime read: The High Window

How about this for a great description of a woman Marlowe is about to go an interview, or at least attempt to:

"A long-limbed languorous type of showgirl blonde lay at her ease in one of the chairs, with her feet raised on a padded rest and a tall misted glass at her elbow, near a silver ice bucket and a Scotch bottle. She looked at us lazily as we came over the grass. From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.”

Fantastic stuff.

Highlights from chapters four, five and six

* The leads Marlowe has to chase are being actively pursued with him setting up a meeting with the coin expert who tried to buy the coin but before that he sets off to try and catch up with the old flatmate Lois Magic of the woman he is trying to track down

* She refuses to see him and then when he manages to get to her refuses to help him out instead lying to him before her boyfriend threatens to shoot Marlowe

* Throughout all of the time since he took the job for Mrs Murdock Marlow has been tailed and he finally gets the man in a hotel and talks to him and it turns out that his tail is also a private investigator but working for the wife Marlowe is searching for

* They agree to meet that evening and Marlowe leaves his tail behind for now but there is a sense there is a lot more going on than meets the eye

More tomorrow…

Listen to some short stories

All this week on Radio 4 there is a chance to hear, and via the website catch up on those you have missed, the short stories that are finalists in the Prospect magazine organised short story competition.

The winner is announced next Monday and along with a cheque for £15,000 the author has of course had the chance to reach a significant audience as a result of Radio 4's involvement.

Having said that of course it can backfire as it appears to have done with Haif Kureishi who had a story about beheadings in Iraq, which is deemed to be too senstive at the moment. According the The Guardian's report about it Kureishi is angrey at the decision and believes it is unhelpful censorship.

One of the short story writers that was name checked by last year's winning author on the radio last week was Chekhov and the plan is to post my review of his short story selection tomorrow...

A Sentimental Education - post V

Although A Sentimental Education uses the backdrop of the 1848 French Revolution throughout the book it is only in the last stages that it erupts with fighting on the streets of Paris, the monarchy swept from power and Frederic and his connections changed by the shift of control to the people.

Thanks to the joys of the Internet finding out about the revolution is no problem and Wikipedia has the details but in terms of the influence on the characters it shows how allegiances can change rapidly when the political situation is so uncertain. Against that background Frederic is continuing to come under pressure to resolve his love life.

Bullet points between pages 310 – 378

* With fighting on the streets breaking out Frederic is drawn away from the bed of his mistress and heads out to see what is happening in Paris and meets old friends who are either fighting (Arnoux) or commentating on it (Hussonnet)

* On the urging of some friends Frederic considers putting his name forward for election and he goes to a meeting to get support but his decision not to provide the money to help his old friend Deslauriers comes back to haunt him and he is not accepted

* He decides to take his mistress Rosanette away from Paris and they head into the country and he feels, for want of anything to rival it, that this is a great love affair, but when he reads that fighting is continuing and when he discovers that Dussardier, another long standing friend has been wounded he heads back to the capital

* Once there he immerses himself with the cares of his injured friend but then it emerges he is hiding from Louise who has come up from the country with her father

* But he cannot hide from her forever and he meets her at a function at the Dambreuse home and also bumps into Madame Arnoux there and so is surrounded with those who love him and those who he loves

Who will win his heart? What will become of those wrapped up in the revolution? More tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: The High Window

Having never read any Raymond Chandler it is hard to come to it without expecting a character with a trilby, cigarette dangled from a lip and a gun pointed at the direction of a blonde dame who has been caught conning their husband. While most of that image is true what it fails to appreciate is the style of writing, which is as assured as the main character Marlowe. Three chapters in and you can tell this is going to be a cracking read – no need for warming up here it grabs you from the start.

Highlights from the first three chapters

* Private detective Marlowe is called to a house to be hired by a woman who has discovered that a coin from her deceased husband’s collection worth $10,000 has gone missing

* She suspects her daughter-in-law, a night club singer, who has vanished and tells Marlowe to find her and recover the coin and then she will arrange for a divorce for her son

* Marlowe charges high but manages to win over the cantankerous old bird with his display of tough resolve and he heads back to his office with a cheque for $250 in his pocket

* Back in his office he is visited by the son who wants to know what his mother wanted him for and admits he owes a criminal $12,000 and then when Marlowe makes a pop at his wife he pulls out a gun and then tries to punch the detective in the face

Where is the story going? You sense there is much more going on here than just a simple coin theft. More tomorrow…

Weekend paper round up

This is not an attempt to make excuses, well sort of, but my wife has been ill this weekend and I have had to amuse two children under six and I feel exhausted and desperate to get back to work tomorrow.

The energy levels are far too low for any reading so I will confine myself to a weekend paper round up.

A lot of lit blogs commented on the death of Kurt Vonnegut and from a personal point of view having never read his work it has at least prodded me in his direction and I hope to read Slaughter - House - 5 soon. The Independent ran an interview from 1977 that was published in the Paris Review and among great answers to questions about literary inspiration Vonnegut is asked what he would do if he was in charge of publishing in the US: "There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers...I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check."

Literary inspiration is the subject of a Guardian feature in the Saturday magazine about whet helps with writers creativity. Jonatahn Franzen said it was his squeaky chair and other authors made replies ranging from chocolate chips (Douglas Coupland) to a hot bath in Jane Smiley's case.

Quite what the authors who wrote such classics as Vanity Fair, Moby Dick and Anna Karenia would have made of the cut down editions that Orion Books is producing to read the book "in half the time". At the risk of getting pompous it might be a good idea to take the author's names off the covers and list the credits for whoever edited them because they are the greater influence on the reader. But quite a few people were happy to tell The Times that the editions were a good idea because it made unreadable books readable.

Those authors that fear their great idea will never get into print can always aim for the bizarre and hope to pick up the Booksellers oddest book of the year award. The Independent reports that the lucky winner this year is Julian Montague who spent six years roaming the streets of America looking out for the chance to write about and photograph shopping trolleys for his book The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification. Previous winners have included Bombproof your Horse, which won the prize in 2004.

It was quite easy to turn the page and miss the small story in The Guardian about how chemists are analysing the aromas that books in Cambridge University to discover if gases will indicate when a book is starting to decay. “The same emissions cause the musty smell beloved of habitual ‘book sniggers’,” a university spokeswoman told the paper.

bookmark of the week

The National Maritime Museum is making a concerted effort to promote the numerous paintings it holds under the banner 'Art for the Nation' and as part of the range in the shop this magnetic bookmark entitled The Parting Cheer is availble and was recently added to my collection. Not a great fan of magnetic bookmarks because as you turn the pages it either gets in the way or far too often falls out.

The literary census

This of course is an attempt to fine tune marketing campaigns and improve newspaper content but it might be worth getting involved.

To mark the 25th anniversary of Waterstone’s the book chain’s staff were asked to nominate the five books they thought were outstanding that were produced since 1982. The results, a top 100 no less was published in the Telegraph, were notable mainly because of their male bias. But to put the ball into the public’s court and exploit the tools of the interactive age the paper is asking people to take part in the literary census. It is worth having a go because some of the questions make you think about your reading habits and there is a great question about if you are a reading snob – I’ll keep my answers on that one to myself.

Final thoughts on Gormenghast

One of the things about putting thoughts down in a review is that you miss the chance to make some other observations. So, despite the weeks that have passed since reading the trilogy, I wanted to get some final thoughts down about Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy.

The use of light and darkness
It would be too easy to say that characters are robed in black if they are evil – Steerpike being the most obvious example – but then you get characters that are more difficult to define like Flay who have the potential for murder but also for loyalty. Darkness is used to suggest potential problems and echoing the use with people it also cloaks parts of the castle with long dark passages both over and under ground being a feature of the disorientation.

The use of time
One of the hardest things to reconcile between the world’s described in Titus Groan and Gormenghast compared to Titus Alone is that they could co-exist with a world with aeroplanes, spying globes and telephones being in the same time as a castle run on completely medieval rules. Peake was ill by the time he wrote Titus Alone but it does make you question the security you felt in Gormenghast castle. It is as if reading the Fellowship and Two Towers all of a sudden as the final battle for the Ring is fought some tanks, medium range missiles and jet fighters turn up in The Return of the King.

The use of faces and eyes
One of the constant reference points in the books is the colour of eyes and the detailed descriptions of faces. So for instance you discover that Steerpike has red eyes that flash with anger or glint with malice and Titus has violet eyes that disturb his father. Throughout all three books it is usually the eyes, and Peake’s description of them that usually gives away a characters true intentions. Faces, particularly the descriptions of Swelter the cook’s

The use of animals
One link between the worlds of Gormenghast and the city in Titus Alone is the Muzzlehatch character that seems to love animals as much as Titus’s mother did. The relationship is one of master and servant but it is once his menagerie is lost that Muzzlehatch decides to blow up the factory. Likewise the Countess turns her anger on ‘The Thing’ because it is eating her birds and banishes faithful Flay from the castle when he dares to hurl one of her cats.

The use of the strange
The doctor’s hair, the Under-River world and even the scale of the flood that engulfs Gormenghast are all exaggerated to make an impact. The scale of the castle is a constant source of challenge to a reader and despite its gargantuan proportions there continue to be almost a handful of people living in it. None of the characters seem to be free of some sort of major character flaw with the Earl’s slide into madness an obvious one but even Titus is wrestling with his mind working out what to do with his future.


There are lots more things that could be said but writing this down has got the urge to comment off the brain for now…

Tying up some loose ends

There has been quite a bit of stuff I have wanted to write about over the last week but because of the pressure of work - it is one of the hardest weeks for a weekly magazine because of the bank holidays - there hasn't been a chance. But the next few posts should rectify the situation giving me a chance to write a bit more about Gormenghast, comment on the Google fear factor raised in the Guardian this time last week and put my two penneth in on the Telegraph's literature census.

Plus there will be a review of the Chekhov short story collection which reminds me to mention the Radio 4 short story prize which is being promoted all next week and got a mention on the Today programme yesterday with Monica Ali praising the short story medium.

That's all to come over the rest of the weekend, but first I'm off to spend the day in Cambridge with family...

A Sentimental Education - post IV

There is a Graham Greene, End of the Affair, type moment with Madame Arnoux trading the health of her son for the potentially sinful relationship with Frederic. There are also some powerful reminders that Frederic is immature, totally inexperienced in the ways of love and prone to making the wrong decisions based on gut instinct.

Bullet points between pages 200 – 310

* Money is at the centre of a break down not just in the Arnoux marriage but also at the heart of the relationships now between the debtor and Frederic who starts to feel used by the couple as a source of credit

* Hoping to exploit the problems to split Madame Arnoux apart from her husband Frederic continues to dog her like a shadow but receives little encouragement in fact gets quite the opposite as she shares her views on the sanctity of marriage

* Elsewhere Frederic is getting entangled with Arnoux’s mistress known as the Marshal and gets caught in her company at the races by Madame Arnoux and later that evening has to watch his friend Cisy take her away and leave him with an expensive restaurant bill

* The two men fight a duel – which turns out to be a bit of a damp squib - and as a result of Frederic turning down a request from a friend to invest in a newspaper he is lampooned in the press

* With pressure mounting for him to make a choice about his career he puts things off by heading home but there the expectation is that he will marry the young neighbour who fell under his spell Louise

* Enjoying being loved for once Frederic shows off to Louise but ends up wondering if he is doing the right thing and rushes back to Paris and unbeknown to him having been told about Frederic’s marriage plans Madame Arnoux has realised she loves him

* The relationship between them increases to the point where Frederic hires a room to use as a location to make love to her but her son falls dangerously ill and she prays to God that she thanks him for sparing her and she realises the potential costs of her adultery

* In a fit of temper Frederic turns to the Marshal and takes her out and she becomes the woman taken back to the room and while he cries for what might have been the streets of Paris erupt in demonstrations and revolution as the government is overthrown

Is there any way back for Madame Arnoux and what will Frederic do next with the pressure coming from Louise, his friends in Paris, his mother and potential employment? More to come…

Lunchtime read: Selected Stories

The final tale in the Chekhov short story collection proves that this really is a medium that has the ability to make you think. Seen as one of the greats among the short story writers this tale is exactly the reason why he deserves that accolade. Because this tale is slightly longer than all of the others in the collection he is able to extend the twist and show how brutal life is among the peasantry.

In the Ravine
A merchant, who screws his customers has two sons, on deaf and one who lives away. The wife of the deaf son works with her father-in-law running the business and has started to pick up his ruthlessness. Suddenly the eldest son reappears and hands out some money to his family and then under their advice gets married to a quiet girl. The money turns out to be fraudulent and the son is sent to Siberia for six years. The trial starts to unhinge the old man, a process that is completed after the dominant daughter-in-law starts to take over. On her way to becoming a ruthless business woman she kills the child of her timid sister-in-law and virtually turns her father-in-law out of the house. A final scene has the frail and beaten old man being handed food by his timid daughter-in-law reducing him to the ranks of the peasantry and reminding everyone of how the mighty can fall.

A full review will follow over the weekend…

Wake up and smell the future

What is it about coffee and books? You can’t go into a bookshop these days without finding one corner of it is dedicated to sofas, chairs and a griding coffee machine. So it probably makes total sense for Starbucks to launch its book club in the UK. After all everyone else is doing it the other way round.

A Sentimental Education - post III

Now Frederic has money his horizons are broader but he is still in love with Madame Arnoux and is getting ever closer to prising her apart from her adulterous husband who is running into severe financial problems. The problem for Frederic is that you sense that while others are making up their minds over which side they stand on in the revolutionary movement and in terms of their lives he is still like a child looking in the toy shop window not yet ready to choose.

Flaubert uses the growing tension between the industrialised masses and the aristocratic royalists as a background with some characters involved with it heavily and others like Frederic skating the surface. It is a useful device not only for grounding the novel in a period but also for giving some of the minor characters more substance as they discuss the issues of the day.

Bullet points between pages 120 - 200

* Frederic starts to move in more elevated circles and as a result comes across Arnoux’s mistress and the characters that frequent a small circle of lovers and spurned hangers on who all follow each other round the Paris social scene

* Meanwhile Madame Arnoux is starting to suspect not just that her husband is having another affair but that he is keeping money problems secret from her and she is increasingly unable to hide her concerns from the ever present Frederic and uses him as a confidant spying on her husband

* After an argument Frederic witnesses Arnoux tells his wife that the woman she suspects of being his mistress is in fact Frederic’s and then asks the young man to lie to protect him, something he in fact refuses to do and goes as far as to deny it all to Madame Arnoux

* Frederic has tried to impress his friends with a house warming party but he receives nothing but sneers and jealously and his childhood friend Deslauriers keeps trying to get money out of him to launch a political newspaper

* When Frederic finally gets the money Arnoux is in desperate straits but because his wife asks Frederic to help them he does although it starts to become clear he will never get his money back

More of the continuing drama tomorrow when Frederic might just be able to take his relationships with friends and women to the next level, getting rid of those holding him back and embracing those who can offer love…

book of books - The Return of Philip Lationowicz

Art is a difficult subject, particularly the debate about what constitutes good art, and so it is a challenged theme running through this book by Croatian author Miroslav Krelza. There are several things going on here in a confined area with a small collection of characters. If you stripped out the debates about art, the thoughts Philip has about painting and his own origins and just ran the final few chapters it has such a limited cast it comes into short story territory. But the larger themes make it more than just the tale of an individual.

Plot summary
Philip Lationowicz has returned home after an absence of eleven years and arrives at a station in a town where his mother and himself used to live but she is clearly no longer there and you half wonder if she is dead. But he then travels to a town where the bishop lives and his mother is there and he moves into an attic room in her house. Philip is a painter but has lost the creativity urge and inspiration and hopes to rediscover it, as well as solving his history discovering the real identity of his father. The first comes and goes and the second is finally revealed but you have to wait until near the end. On top of those twin tracks there is also a relationship with a cashier in a café who attracts Philip and in the end dies as a result of the jealousy he partly inflames in her long time lover. The conclusion of the book provides Philip with plenty of material for artistic ideas and leaves him with no excuses to stay with his mother and his past any longer.

Is it well written?
It’s an odd book in that it is a slow burner starting with a idyllic return to a childhood village and ending up with a gruesome murder. The action builds like a pressure cooker as Philip starts to fall out with his mother, becomes obsessed with Bobocka the cashier in the café and because of his weak nature allows his entire view of the world to come under attack by a Greek philosopher. Where it is well written is providing an insight into the mind of the artist in torment. Where it is easy to find fault is around the relationship between mother and son, which is sketched out when it could be described more fully.

Should it be read?
As part of an education into writers from other countries then Krelza deserves to be read. But I am not sure that had this book not been £1 in a second hand book store then I would have brought it. It doesn’t really say anything about Croatia and it is slightly depressing to find Philip reading the Daily Mail while he smokes a cigarette and sips his coffee. But as a tale of tightening tension and the price people will pay to avoid loneliness then it is well worth reading.

Summary
An artist looking for his muse discovers one in his childhood village but she is destroyed by her jealous lover in an evening that reveals more than Philip ever expected about the truth of his family

Version read - Quartet Encounters paperback

Lunchtime read: Selected Stories

Most Russian literature is typified by a tragic darkness but Chekhov is able to get a broad smile with his story Without a Title and prove that it can be dangerous sticking with stereotypes.

The Head Gardener’s Tale
Two men sit and wait while the plants they have brought are packaged up and talking about justice the head gardener overhears and tells them a Swedish tale about a doctor who was so beloved by a town that when he was found murdered no one could believe anyone capable of killing him so they acquitted the murderer.

Hush!
A journalist who has to write to order comes home and demands peace and quiet and then stays up until four in the morning writing. All the time his wife tells the children to be quiet and the word “Hush!” is the order of the day

Without a Title
This story has such a good ending, a bit like a joke, that it ranks as one of the favourites in this collection. A monastery surrounded by desert is cut off from the town until a drunken hunter appears. In response the leading member of the monks visits the town to remind them about God but comes back a broken man reeling off all of the sinful activities of the city dwellers. The next day there isn’t a soul left as all the monks have headed for the town.

Last story tomorrow…