The two books that you must read are:
1. Alice Munro's collection of stories (I deliberately don't say 'short stories' as they are all of moderate length--one or two could easily have been expanded into novellas) entitled "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," which is the title of the first story. She is so good, such super writing, such acute analysis of relationships, such accuracy in choosing the right word--and the way in which she delineates the whole lives of her characters with looks backward to childhood and adolescence and forward to old age--all great, and no wonder she got the Nobel Literature prize.
2. Anthony Doerr's "All the Light We Cannot See." Once you start you won't stop, except perhaps as you get towards the end, when I think it does drag a bit. Joan was glued to it from the time she started, and on many occasions--reversing the usual procedure--it was I who wanted to switch the light out to go to sleep. A strange but compelling book--a sort of fairy tale in a sense, with all the characters a bit out of this world: an orphan and his younger sister in a German orphanage--she stays at the orphanage, but her brother is a technical genius and is selected to go to a fascist school; works on detecting the positions of wireless transmissions; enters the army; and spends the war with a comrade who shoots those who are caught broadcasting subversive or resistance messages. The other principal character is a French girl--blind, whose father is a locksmith at a museum in Paris and with whom she flees the German invasion of France and goes to an elderly uncle who lives in St. Malo, in a house he has not left for many years. Her father goes back to Paris and is arrested by the Germans. Eventually, the German boy and the blind girl meet at the time when the Americans are destroying St. Malo with shelling and fire-bombing in 1944. The chapters are typically short, and the story very cleverly switches from the present to the past. Ultimately, when you are finished and brooding over the book, you do begin to feel that, perhaps, the twists of the story have strained credulity--and that it is a fairy story. The writing varies a lot--at its best, super; in other places, over the top; and sometimes the author's scientific bent gets the better of him with somewhat incomprehensible passages.
Those are the two books I strongly recommend.
I was lent a book called 'The Voyage of the Narwhal,' by Andrea Barrett, which the cover blurb says is "part adventure narrative, part love story," and "it captures a crucial moment in the history of exploration, the mid-nineteenth century with the mystery of the
Arctic." Not something I would normally have read, but the lender thought I would like it, and as I am going to her 94th birthday party in a few days, I thought I had better read it. I looked for a review and discovered that it was reviewed in the NYTimes in 1998, and the following is a brief excerpt from that review:
Like "Ship Fever," "Narwhal" showcases Ms. Barrett's gifts for extracting high drama from the complex world of science and natural history and for placing her characters in situations that reveal their fundamental natures. Indeed, "Narwhal" is an adventure story in the way that Conrad's "Lord Jim" and "The Nigger of the Narcissus" are adventure stories: the story's extreme conditions and harrowing experiences, which make for such gripping reading, are actually moral and spiritual tests that strip away the characters' public masks and expose their innermost drives and fears.
On its simplest level, "Narwhal" is the story of a fictional 1855 expedition to the Arctic to look for a missing explorer who disappeared a decade before, an expedition that will cost the lives of several men and warp the lives of others with memories of guilt and anger and horror. On another level, it is a story of scientific hubris and sheer pig-headed ambition, a story meant, in some ways, to recall such disparate works as Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and Melville's "Moby-Dick."
I have also revisited Penelope Fitzgerald's "Offshore" which won the Booker prize in 1979. All I can say is that I doubt it would win a Booker prize today. It's an amusing novel about a group of Londoners who live on house-boats of various types and vintage in Battersea Reach on the Thames. It's ironic and funny: it paints interesting studies of the diverse characters: well-written: but it just does not seem to me to be anything but a pleasant and amusing read. Whereas with Alice Munro, I could see paragraph after paragraph that deserved quotation to illustrate her skill, a second trip through "Offshore" revealed nothing so striking or worth quoting.
In a long review of the work of Penelope Fitzgerald in the New Yorker--prompted by a recent biography--James Wood made only the following comment about "Offshore:"
In “Offshore,” the novel she wrote about the years
she lived on the river, Fitzgerald drew a caustic yet tender group portrait of
her fellow-houseboaters, watery drifters who “aspired towards the Chelsea
shore,” but who sank back, condemned by “a certain failure, distressing to themselves,
to be like other people.”
Finally--prompted by an article he wrote in the Financial Times about the difficulties of knowing exactly what happened in the past, and how our views are conditioned by highly inaccurate novels, films, and pictures--I recently read Simon Schama's book "Dead Certainties," which looks at, and imaginatively turns into fiction, the circumstances surrounding two deaths: General Wolfe, and a Harvard professor who in the eighteen fifties committed murder (or did he?) and was hanged for the crime. Schama's aim in the book--apart from writing an entertaining account of the crime and the trial, focussing on Boston society--is to demonstrate the uncertainties of writing history. The book was published in 1992, and you would never recognize as Simon Schama the young bearded man whose photo appears at the beginning of the book.
