Francine Prose

     Surely a great name for a writer. Prose.
     Not wanting to start one of the major books we have reserved for our trip, I looked at my books for something to delve into for the couple of days before we leave, and I hit on Francine Prose's "Reading Like A Writer--A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them."
     I remember reading it some time ago (it was published in 2006) and thinking how good it was, and I have been re-reading it with a great deal of pleasure.
     You can get an idea of the detail by looking at some chapter headings: Words, Sentences Paragraphs, Narration, Character, Dialogue, Details...  
     There is a chapter on Learning from Chekhov, in which she illustrates how Chekhov breaks all the conventional rules that writing teachers teach and yet succeeds in producing short stories that are masterpieces. She notes that, by the time Chekhov died at the age of 44, he had written--in addition to his plays--some 600 short stories.
     "Once, when someone asked him his method of composition, Chekhov picked up an ashtray.
"This is my method of composition," he said, "Tomorrow  I will write a story called "The Ashtray.""
      I have always been a sucker for these "how to write your novel" books: not that they have done me much good as far as writing any more than the odd short story. Poking around among my books, I found "The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose," by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, first published in 1979: and "The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers" by John Gardner, published in 1984.

To South America

         Apart from moving ahead with War and Peace on my I-Pad and getting Austerlitz out of the way, with a chapter or two at breakfast each day, I have not done much reading lately. In a few days we are setting off for Patagonia on a hiking trip, which will be followed by a ten day cruise. In preparation, we have been getting our travel reading organised.

         On the Kindle we have 'The Blazing World' by Siri Hustvedt, which was, I think, on the long list for the 2014 Man Booker prize and was very well reviewed. On the I-Pad from Apple I-books, we have 'All The Light We Cannot See' by Anthony Doerr, which has climbed to the top of the NY Times Best Seller list. And I recently bought from AbeBooks for $3.95 (and no postage) an older novel by Siri Hustvedt, published in 2003, "What I Loved." The publishers of the paperback seems to have quoted from every review they could find, including Vogue, Elle, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Le Figaro, and many others. Of course, they have only pulled out the sentences that contain words like, impressive, consummately intelligent,, truly memorable, defiantly complex and frequently dazzling...etc etc.  So I am looking forward to starting it on the first plane trip from here to Atlanta, where we change planes for the onward journey to Argentina.

           We have been sweating a bit about the start of the trip because, for several days, the weather forecasts were showing snow for the day we will leave; but now that threat seems to have disappeared and all we are told now is "cloudy or partly sunny."

So..the blog will go into hibernation for a few weeks.

Siri Hufstedt

As a brief addition to the comments about 'The Blindfold,' I downloaded from Amazon the first chapter of Hufstedt's non-fiction book about the Shaking Woman--which includes the description of her neurological problems. The details of the problems she had with her migraines are reflected exactly in the problems of Iris Vegan, the protagonist of the novel. One of the sections in the non-fiction book describes her stay in a hospital for patients with neurological problems, and the novel recreates that description in considerable detail, down to the derogatory comments about the doctor who was supposed to be the expert. Well, many first novels are essentially autobiographical...but I was interested to see how willing she was to show just how autobiographical it was.

Three Books

The Three books are:

Tom Rachman: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

Jonathan Coe: Expo 58

Siri Hustvedt: The Blindfold

.  The Rachman book starts with Tooly, in her thirties, running a failing bookstore in a Welsh village. We then go back to 1988 when she was nine years old living in Bangkok with Paul—the relationship is not clear. There are chapters set at other dates: 1999, in Brooklyn, where she is living with an elderly Russian émigré called Humph, and having an affair with a law student, Duncan. We move to the present day when she meets Duncan again—now married with two kids—and Humph living in squalor in Brighton Beach, close to Coney Island. Apparently Tooly has moved around over the years, from city to city—always with Humph, but sometimes another male—Venn—appears on the scene and seems to use Tooly as an accomplice in scams. And there is Sarah, who drifts from country to country, and meets up with Tooly now and again.

       And all the time you are asking yourself, how was all this peripatetic wandering possible? Slowly the chapters on the past—interspersed with happenings in the present—provide the answers. But you have to plough through a lot of philosophizing by different characters to get those answers.

      One reviewer of the Rachman book said he was beginning to go to sleep at page 40, but fully awake at page 340. For me it was the other way round: fully awake at page 40, but losing my patience at about page 300.

      But to be fair, here is an excerpt from a review in The Guardian:

“There's something slightly cutesy about the wall-to-wall eccentricity, something slightly precious about the fey withholding of information from the reader. Tooly isn't quite the Manic Pixie Dream Girl stereotype, but she threatens to be. You find yourself thinking: get on with it. But if you stick with it, Rachman hits his stride. The Rise and Fall of Great Powers gestures with its title and its scope at something world-spanning. That's semi-ironic. Its background music is world-historical – there are intermittent bursts of chat about Reagan and Gorbachev, 9/11, the Rwandan genocide and the Clinton impeachment – but it's at its heart about individual lives: how opaque we are to each other, and how little we understand our own histories.”

    The Jonathan Coe book is a neat piece of work, well written, funny, and touching in places, but one gets the impression that the author simply enjoyed recreating the World’s Fair in Belgium in 1958. I think he described the process in his author’s notes as a form of archaeology. Tom Foley, the protagonist is transported from his humdrum civil service job, his small house in Tooting, and his problematic marriage, to the glamour and international ambience of Expo 58, where he oversees the Britannia Pub, which is a major feature of the British exhibit. And he gets caught up in Cold War spying and falls for a beautiful young Belgium girl. You want to keep turning the pages, but I thought the novel was a fairly light-weight piece of work--well-written, well-observed, and worth a read if you are a bit tired of the intellectual effort of reading more weighty tomes.

     The Siri Hustvedt book, her first novel, is “The Blindfold.” It is weighty—but not a tome—221 pages in a small page format. I found it at the Library when I was searching for her most recent, much praised book, “The Blazing World.” “The Blindfold” is an extraordinary book. It consists of five sections. In the first four sections, the first-person narrator—a graduate student named Iris Vegan—relates strange and disturbing experiences. In the fifth section, she goes back to a time before these episodes, and brief mention is made of each of them as she goes over the whole period. BTW: Iris is Siri backwards, and Vegan was the author’s mother’s name. The first four sections could be independent short stories. The fifth section is novella length.

    Hustvedt, who is married to Paul Auster, has published a non-fiction book about her migraines and her psychic disorders called “The Quaking Woman or A History of my Nerves” (well reviewed by Hilary Mantel in The Guardian) and one can only assume that much of this novel is at least semi-autobiographical.

You may not like Iris: you may well ask, “what the hell is wrong with this girl:” you may lose patience with her obsessions: but I think you will keep reading…to the end.