The Age of Reason - post IV

There is a pace change with the book as things start to move towards a conclusion in some of the plot areas. There is a great moment when watching Boris and Ivich together Mathieu realises that it is not so great being young and perhaps the age of reason is not only negative but something positive if it distances you from immaturity.

Bullet points between pages 176 - 250

* The group of Boris, Ivich, Lola and Mathieu are at the night club and there is a row between Lola and Boris inspired by the young man's quest to get some money for his professor and it ends with them seperating with no one having enjoyed themselves too much

* The next morning the brother and sister meet Mathieu and Botis is convinced that Lola has overdosed on cocaine and sends Mathieu back to her flat to get hos love letters but as Mathieu is moving around the apartment Lola wakes and asks him to tell Boris to come back but the young man says that she is dead for him and has been disturbed by the idea of death and age an idea that disturbs Mathieu

* As a result of a telegram Mathieu meets up with Daniel and his friend reveals that he has been meeting Marcelle and leaves the question of whether or not she wants an abortion in the air but his mixing backfires slightly because far from being angry Mathieu is bemused and surprised and leaves him questioning what the nature of his relationship is

* But before he can go and meet with Marcelle he gets a telegram from Ivich telling him that she has failed her exams and will be pushed out of Paris by her parents so worried that she might do something dangerous

* Mathieu sets off to find her and finds her in a bar and takes her home but mixed in with lust there is a great deal of feeling about her immaturity

Final pages will be read tomorrow...

lunchtime read: Alice in Wonderland

The book starts in just the way you remember it but what you get from reading the first couple of chapters is a very clever suggestion that this is a sleep state, a dream and all of the rules of normal life are suspended. On a film they would probably make the edges of the screen wobble or make it go cloudy but Carroll manages to do exactly the same effect with words.

Highlights from the first two chapters

* Alice is bored and tired on a hot afternoon and her mind starts to wander and then she sees a white rabbit running a,ong checking his wrist watch and so she decides to follow him and falls down a hole

* She falls for a long time in suspended motion and lands softly to catch sight of the rabbit again running off down a long corridor and heads after him but all of the doors along the corridor are locked

* She notices a curtain with a small door but she is too big to go through it but then she notices a small key that opens it and there is a garden beyond and a bottle on a glass table with a label ‘drink me’

* She shrinks but has left the key on the table so then notices a cake with a label ‘eat me’ and grows up to nine feet but then cries because she cannot go through the door and at that point the rabbit returns mentions being late for the duchess and speeds off

* Using thy rabbit’s fan Alice waves her self back to just inches high but then almost drowns in the pool of her own tears and is helped out by a mouse

More tomorrow…

coming next week...

On the review front there will be reviews posted of The High Window by Raymond Chandler and A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert.



In terms of the reading for the week. The aim will be to finish off the Age of Reason and also start a fresh lunchtime read.



On a trip to the library yesterday I picked up some more J.D Salinger and on the shelf the spine of Trouble is my Business by Raymond Chandler is looking appealing. But I'm going to go for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The motivation is that like a lot of books that have been turned into films I haven't read the orignial and wanted to read the book. There are quite a few books that fall into that category including the likes of Moby Dick and a couple of the Jane Austen's - it might make quite a good reading challenge to read filmed books - but I'll just stick to Alice for now.



Anyway that's next week in theory...

Lunchtime read: The High Window

“’All right,’ he said wearily. ‘Get on with it. I have a feeling you are going to be very brilliant. Remorseless flow of logic and intuition and all that rot. Just like a detective in a book.’”

The lunchtime read of last week comes to an end with a great scene where Marlowe reveals the entire series of events to not quite the person you expected and then not only solves the crime he was hired for but a fair few others on the way. As an introduction to Chandler it has been great, not just because of the style, but also because this is not The Big Sleep or Trouble is my Business, which conjure up images of old black and white Hollywood classics.

Highlights between chapters twenty-six to thirty-six

* Hoping to track down the missing dentist Marlowe discovers he has done a runner and after some research guesses it’s because he has used his dentist technician skills to formulate false coins

* Then things take a different turn with Marlowe being phoned at his office to be told by his building manager that there is a woman there to see him, Merle Mrs Murdock’s secretary, and she appears to be in quite a state

* He rushes over to be confronted with a woman who claims she has killed Vannier and then faints so Marlowe calls a doctor and heads over to find the blackmailer dead but not by her handiwork and discovers he had been blackmailing Mrs Murdock for eights years because he knows she pushed her husband out of a high window to his death

* Marlowe heads back to his home and then goes off to see Mrs Murdock to explain what has happened to Merle and explain she isn’t coming back to work for her again and as he leaves the old woman without an argument after he confronts her with a few home truths he has a showdown with the son

* In response to a line about whether or not this is the bit he shows off his detective deducing Marlowe sets out the entire story – who killed who and why – and decimates not just the son’s defences but those of the Murdock family

* He then heads off to take Merle back to her parents in Kansas but before she goes he tells her it was Mrs Murdock who pushed her husband out of the window and not her, despite the years of manipulation making it seem that way

* On his return from helping Merle he calls on the police who seem to have reached most of the right conclusions in the case, except for the Murdock’s who remain untouched, but as they were his clients Marlowe owes them indifference if nothing else

A full review will follow shortly…

bookmark of the week

A couple of years ago on holiday in France the nearest large town – Dinard – had an exhibition all about Napoleon. It seemed like a good idea to go round it and see what they had to say about their greatest general. The sad thing is that my French doesn’t extend beyond asking for a baguette, Orangina and a beer and all of the descriptions with the exhibits were in French. Mind you the man who died in British imposed exile no doubt would have liked the idea that a bunch of English tourists (we were not alone) could not understand an exhibition all about him.

This bookmark is a silhouette of Napoleon and his officers and the grand army

Defining an era

The main thing worth commenting about in the papers today is the supplement in the Guardian about the books that defined certain decades. There are fifty books listed that have the potential to be seen as the titles that inspired their decade. The public gets the chance to vote for their choices and if lucky enough get a prize.

What is interesting looking at the choices is that some decades seem to have generated more than others with the 1920s being a particularly strong year with six choices. Again, just like the recent Waterstones list in The Telegraph this is all subjective but it does at least have the benefit of putting books and as a result hopefully reading on the agenda this weekend.

The full list:
1900s
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Interpreting Dreams, Sigmund Freud
Kim, Rudyard Kipling

1910s
Howards End, EM Forster
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed Jon Silkin
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell

1920s
Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawrence
Relativity, Albert Einstein
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
The Waste Land, TS Eliot
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

1930s
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
Right Ho, Jeeves, PG Wodehouse
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

1940s
1984, George Orwell
The Diary of a Young Girl, Ann Frank
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
The Outsider, Albert Camus

1950s
From Russia With Love, Ian Fleming
Look Back in Anger, John Osborne
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett

1960s
Ariel, Sylvia Plath
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré
Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann

1970s
Carrie, Stephen King
The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M Persig

1980s
A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
Money, Martin Amis
The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks

1990s
Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes
Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby
No Logo, Naomi Klein
The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi

Age of Reason - post III

Things didn’t quite go according to plan yesterday and a business lunch that started at 1pm ended at somewhere around the 9.30pm mark. Good company and very pleasant red wine meant that not only did I fail to be in a position to read anything on the train home but after I managed to convince my wife making me sleep in the garage was a bad idea I had to crawl upstairs and leave the blog alone.

Of course I could have mentioned Sartre and my sense of a search for freedom but I sense Sartre might not have had a wife like mine.

Bullet points between pages 134 – 176

* After discovering the Daniel is involved with boys and seems to be a man that walks on a thin line between trying to control and suppress his desires and actually carrying them out the focus falls back on Marcelle

* Daniel visits her and explains that he know she is pregnant and then because of a hatred and jealously of his outlook on life and freedom Daniel manages to pull out of Marcelle the desire to keep the baby

* Daniel’s plan is to force Mathieu into a marriage he does not want and that seems to be going very well as she allows him to become a go between with Mathieu and herself and you sense that Mathieu does have some idea of this sort of impending decision because he keeps muttering to himself about marriage and the age of reason

Will he be forced into fatherhood and marriage? Reading starts again on Monday…

Lunchtime read: The High Window

The beauty of Chandler’s style is that the plot evolves a bit like a beating heart with the central case being added to with almost every breath providing Marlowe with leads to chase and a trail for the reader to follow that feels organic in its development. The other great thing about Marlowe is he says what most people would only think and uses his bluntness as a weapon to open people up.

Highlights from chapters eighteen to twenty five

* Marlowe manages to get some time with the woman he is chasing and she is candid about marrying for money but appears to know nothing about the missing coin and then gets bored with the private detective and asks him to leave

* Under pressure from the police Marlowe heads back to see Mrs Murdock and tells her he is going to have to reveal the details of the case and she reveals that the coin was stolen by her son who needed money to pay off a criminal he had borrowed from

* Marlowe doesn’t believe him and then has a row with Mrs Murdock and implies that she is implicated in the murders and that she is not telling him but before he storms out into the night he works out that the deceased husband was involved in an abusive relationship with his secretary

* His next assignation is with the dentist that the night club owner asked him to look into but the man has fled his office so Marlowe heads out to track him down at home

More tomorrow…

The Age of Reason - post II

Sartre uses each chapter as a platform to introduce characters and then take the story on so Mathieu remains on his hunt for money to pay for the abortion but you are introduced to his rich friend, brother and sister-in-law and an old friend who has become a communist party recruiter exploiting the Spanish Civil War and the fears about Nazi Germany.

Bullet points between pages 70 – 134

* Having sent Sarah off on her mission to find out the cost of getting her Jewish surgeon contact to perform the abortion Mathieu meets up with Ivich in a café and awaits the call, which informs him that the cost will be, 4,000 francs

* There are only a couple of people who could provide that sort of money and so Mathieu makes a mental note to visit them after taking Ivich to see some Gauguin pictures but on the way he kisses her in the taxi and fears that he has spoilt the friendship for ever

* Before he gets there to ask for the money Daniel is described as a good looking confident man who is on his way to drown his three cats but when he gets to the river he has second thoughts and takes them back home

* Although he planned to keep the reason why he wanted the money secret Mathieu blurts out that Marcelle is pregnant not just to Daniel, who turns down his request for money, but also to his brother Jacques who also refuses to help him out with a loan

* His brother challenges Mathieu’s philosophy on life and accuses him of murder but also not following the freedom to surprise everyone and marry Marcelle and he outlines is belief to his brother that now is the age of reason

“You have attained the age of reason, Mathieu, you have attained the age of reason, or you ought to have done so”

* From those bad meetings Mathieu heads home to be met by Boris who invites him to a night club and then his old friend Brunet who tries to get him to join the communist party and then gives up on him when Mathieu refuses

* Meanwhile Daniel is off for his secret meeting with Marcelle but stops in a fair that seems to be a notorious hang out for men looking for rent boys and there meets one of his old conquests (not totally clear) who badgers him for money

More tomorrow…

book of books - Selected Stories

As promised here is the review of the Anton Chekhov short story collection. Most of these stories were short in terms of word count but deep in terms of content and issues raised and it is because he can leave you pondering over a tale for days that he rightly is held up as a master of the short story art form.

The introduction to this collection makes the point that most of the time Chekhov was only aiming to portray characters and wanted the reader to make up their own mind about their morals and motivation. As a result you get a style that is non judgemental and more challenging because you are called onto think a great deal more as a reader – the decisions haven’t been made for you.

There are some great example of that approach at work:

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.

The Robbers
A doctor is caught in a snow storm and seeks refuge in a den of thieves and not only has his horse stolen but all of his medicines and he has a run in with the girl living in the inn for his trouble. A year and a half later he is out of work and starts to ponder the freedom of the thieves and ends up wondering why he didn’t become one himself and as he gets closer to desperation reveals he has stolen already and plans to do so again.

The Beggar
A man takes pity on a beggar and tells him that if he is prepared to work then he will give him a chance. After cutting wood for months the man is given the chance to get an office job, which he seizes. Months pass and he is spotted at the theatre but he says to his saviour that the cook is the real hero because she cut all the wood but it was watching her that made him reform his ways. A powerful little twist that makes you think about charity and what the motivation really is behind giving it.

Is the collection well written?
What Chekhov proves is that length is not the crucial factor it is the characterisation and in this case the involvement of the reader. It is almost as if he is telling you a story to see your reaction. Rather than waiting for you to agree with him there is a sense that you could take sides and they could be different depending on the time in your life when you are reading the stories and your moral stance.

Should the collection be read?
Well worth reading because on a practical level they are far from taxing but in terms of being rewarded there is a glow that last long after the light has burnt out with these stories. It also proves that a writer is capable of various different styles with humour, thriller and morality tale all being part of Chekhov’s armoury.

Version read – Wordsworth Classics

Lunchtime read: The High Window

Death seems to be one step ahead of Marlowe this time claiming the coin dealer before the private detective can question him further. Then the police start to pressure him to reveal the complete details of the case he is working on.

Highlights from chapters fourteen to seventeen

* There is an odd moment when Marlowe takes the coin into a pawn shop and trades it for $15 and then heads off to see the dealer only to discover that he is on the floor behind his desk with a fatal gunshot wound

* He then heads back to his office and is visited by the police who spell it out to him that although he is known by figures in the force and to a certain degree tolerated they feel his has to share the details of the case with him

* Marlowe pumps them for information and discovers that the private detective did not appear to be working on a case and instead was a failure and barely kept a job down

* In between making drinks for the police and getting grilled he gets a call to go and speak to one of the criminals that seems to have links to the woman who Marlowe is trying to track down

With two murders and the tension from the police mounting what will happen next for Marlowe? More tomorrow…

The Age of Reason - post I

Following on from Flaubert I scanned the bookshelf last night and settled on something else from a French author. So Jean-Paul Sartre seemed like a good idea and starting his Roads to Freedom trilogy the only option on the shelf.

As you would expect from the existentialist king there are characters here that don’t feel the need to express their feelings because after all why should they and different characters get asked to reveal their thoughts, which they are always loathed to do. But the big theme that seems to be emerging is an obsession with age. For those of us over 30 the bad news is that we are old and youth has passed us by. For those in their mid twenties the message seems to be grab it while you can because time is running out.

Bearing in mind the book is set in France in 1938 with the Spanish Civil War raging, and the lead character had wanted to go and fight there and the book starts with a beggar handing over a postcard from Madrid there is a sense of youthful innocence about to be crushed.

Bullet points between pages 1 – 70

* Mathieu Delarue is a philosophy teacher that is broke and on his way to visit Marcelle a woman he seems to have a slightly odd relationship with because she is both ill and also mainly housebound

* After undressing in her pink seashell resembling room she reveals that she is pregnant and in response Mathieu starts to plan for an abortion and heads off to check out an old woman that has been recommended to Marcelle

* He doesn’t like that option and plans to visit his friend Sarah and ask her advice and borrow money from his friend Daniel to pay for the operation but the only contact Sarah knows is going to cost 4,000 francs

* Meanwhile the brother and sister Boris and Ivich are revealed with the former obsessed about his life dripping away at the age of 25 and finding little consolation with his singer lover who is in her early 40s and desperate for confirmation of his love

* Ivich turns out to be an odd woman who doesn’t like to be touched, is a hypochondriac and has the ability to annoy Mathieu but is fearful that having failed her exams she will be packed off back to the country and her parents

* With the burden of the pregnancy over him Mathieu starts to crave the freedom he has always wanted to be kept intact from the age of sixteen when he first thought about what he wanted from life:

“He had said to himself: ‘I will be free.’ Or rather he hadn’t said anything at all, but that was what he wanted to say and it was in the nature of a bet: he had made with himself that his whole life should be cast in the semblance of that unique moment.”

* Meanwhile back at Marcelle’s house she is thinking about the illicit friendship she has with Daniel, how she might feel about being a mother and whether or not she would hate Mathieu for forcing her to have an abortion

The whole sense of youth/age birth and death runs through the first seventy pages but at the same time there is of course a story developing about characters that want in their own way to be loved and to be free. How that develops will become more apparent tomorrow…

Lunchtime read: The High Window

The plot starts to thicken and the shady characters start to multiply as Marlowe tries to get nearer to the truth. The first murder occurs and after that the guns are out as the temperature rises.

Highlights from chapters seven to thirteen

* Having established links with a fellow private detective who wants to share information Marlowe heads off to see the coin dealer who admits that he was offered it at $800 but will sell at $1,000 making some profit on the transaction

* Afterwards he heads for his meeting with the fellow detective but discovers him dead in his bathroom and heads to the building manager and gets him involved with the discovery of the body

* The killer has swapped his gun with that of the neighbour in the apartment across the hall and as a result there is a fight and then the police take away the man who seems to be an innocent victim

* Marlowe leaves the police and heads back to his office where a package turns up containing the coin he is after so he phones the client who grumpily informs him that she had also had the coin returned and wants to terminate his services

Where have the two coins come from? Will Marlowe give up the case? More tomorrow…

London Book Fair

Popped into the London Book Fair on my way home from a meeting in town last night and wanted to record the impressions – and that’s all they are after just an hour there. It had a good atmosphere with the show split into sections based on content like children’s and design and art. As you would expect Penguin had a big stand and there was representation from Faber and Faber and Bloomsbury but apart from that it was mainly foreign publishers and a lot of foreign language books.

If you were coming away with a gut feeling you would say publishing as an industry is alive and well but there could have been more of a British presence. Also for those people looking for the impact of technology the presence of Google and Microsoft was all that I discovered so it seems there is a little bit of a reality and hype gap at work on that front.

A Sentimenal Education - post VI

The book ends with everything being wrapped up and Frederic missing out on his dreams of finding true love but he ends with his childhood friend Deslauriers who has also missed out on what he wanted from life – power - and all of the loose ends are tied up.

At the risk of stealing some thunder from a full review there is a great quote that sort of sums up what the book has been about:

“They’d both been failures, the one who’d dreamed of Love and the one who’d dreamed of power. How had it come about?
‘Perhaps it was lack of perseverance?’ said Frederic.
‘For you maybe. For me, it was the other way round, I was too rigid, I didn’t take into account a hundred and one smaller things that are more crucial than all the rest. I was too logical and you were too sentimental.’”

Bullet points between pages 378 – 464

* Frederic is deeply involved with his mistress Rosanette and is taken aback when she announces that she is pregnant because he has since turned his attentions on wooing the banker’s wife Madame Dambreuse

* The political situation continues to change and Frederic again is given a brief chance of getting involved with politics but misses it because he does not move quickly enough and is criticised by friends who would have helped him

* Rosanette gets into financial difficulty and is on the brink of having her possessions sold but a friend steps into loan the money to pay her debts but the Arnoux family is not so lucky and they flee to Brittany to avoid creditors

* One of the creditors is Rosanette who breaks up any final chance that Frederic might have had of finding happiness with Madame Arnoux and then peruses her money which leads to the family fleeing

* Meanwhile Madame Dambreuse tumbles on Frederic’s love for Madame Arnoux and uses old debts to force a sale of her rival’s belongings and at the public auction Frederic decides to spurn the marriage that is on offer from her after her husband dies and settle for independence

* He has also cut ties with Rosanette after their son died and so heads back to the country to Louise but as he arrives in Nogent he watches her wedding to his old friend Deslauriers and heads back to Paris with nowhere to turn

* Then time passes and Frederic is described as leading a middle class life with a few lovers and Madame Arnoux appears for one final time but with white hair and the sings of age the talk of their love is in the past

* The final scene reunites the two old school friends and reveals that Arnoux has died and Rosanette has become fat and adopted a boy and some of the other characters have gone onto better things leaving the two friends to ponder where it was that they went wrong

A full review will follow in the next couple of days…