"The Escape," by Adam Thirlwell

    I forgot to mention an excellent novel I read recently by Adam Thirlwell—The Escape. Thirlwell is a very skilled writer—he was noted by Granta as one of the best British novelists under 40 when he was 24 years old. And I think he is still under 40.

    Raphael Haffner is an aging womanizer who is staying in an ex-communist eastern European spa town to try to gain possession of a villa once owned by his dead wife’s family. Like most aging characters in fiction there is much rumination and reminiscence over the main events of his life while, in the present, he engages in two ‘affairs’—one with a middle–aged German hausfrau and one with the gorgeous Zinka, a yoga instructor who permits him certain physical liberties. And at the same time he is wrestling with the bureaucratic problems of trying to gain possession of the family villa.

    The narration is first person—a close friend—unnamed, who tells the story with considerable insight into Haffner’s thinking. This form of narration was apparently used in Thirlwell’s first novel, “Politics,” and was the subject of some criticism in the Guardian review of “Escape.”

    “With The Escape, his second novel, Thirlwell's voice has, fortunately, grown up, and he has produced an accomplished book that begins to realise his considerable potential. Thirlwell remains a mannered writer, to be sure, but the manners have become considerably more sophisticated. Although the narrator of The Escape still takes a proprietary interest in his characters, he has acquired sufficient poise to refrain from blurting out his opinions (a recurring tic in Politics), confining himself to oblique judgments, such as describing the less-than-heroic hero as "my squalid Don Quixote". And a very apt description it is.”

    Thirlwell’s main theme is sex, but generally he seems to treat it as comedy and farce, rather like Philip Roth: and Haffner has a definite resemblance to Mickey Sabbath in Roth’s “Sabbath’s Theater.” Mickey is a prototypical “dirty old man, with a strong affinity for whores, adultery, and the casual sexual encounter. Haffner is not quite that, but to give you a taste of where this clever novel goes, it opens with Haffner, concealed in a wardrobe with the door slightly ajar, watching the luscious Zinka engaged in sexual activity  with her boyfriend.

I recommend it—I read it in a few sittings, irritated by the need to stop from time to time.

Blazing World: The Girl on the Train

The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt

I am not sure whether I should recommend this book. It will not be to the taste of many of you. It was noted as one of the best ten novels of 2014 by the New York Times and there were other glowing reviews. But I found it a bit of a struggle to get through. The novel is in the form of a scholarly work about the life of an artist, Harriet Lord, whose work is not given much attention when exhibited with her as the artist. But she arranges for three exhibitions of her work to be shown as the work of three different men--and her sophisticated and mystifying installations, when presented as the work of men, received much more attention--proving her feminist point that male artists were taken much more seriously than female artists.
The author of the scholarly work is a professor of aesthetics and his book consists of a collection of a wide range of voices--Harriet's son and daughter, the three men whom she uses as 'masks' in the three exhibitions, the man she lives with after the death of her husband, odd characters to whom she provides accommodation in her large studio premises--and excerpts from her voluminous diaries. Be prepared to read long footnotes dealing with the work of many European philosophers and psychologists, including--of course--Sigmund F. It is a very cerebral novel--much on the aesthetics of art. In all sorts of ways it is an extraordinary accomplishment. If you want to try Siri Hustvedt out with something perhaps a little lighter, this excerpt from the NYTimes review might give you some ideas:

"...ever since The Blindfold (1992)—hailed by the late David Foster Wallace as “very powerful and awfully smart and well-crafted, a clear bright sign that the feminist and postmodern traditions are far from exhausted”—to The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), What I Loved (2003), The Sorrows of an American (2008), and The Summer Without Men (2011), the judgments about Hustvedt’s fiction have been loud and laudatory. “One of our finest novelists,” declares Oliver Sacks. A writer—says Salman Rushdie—of “sexy…indelibly memorable fiction.” “A contemporary Jane Austen,” writes a UK critic; “densely brilliant…terrifyingly clever.”

Adding to the consternation: Hustvedt isn’t only a novelist. In addition to her fiction, she’s published three volumes of much-admired art and literary criticism, plus any number of squibs, reviews, and off-the-cuff autobiographical forays of charm and candor. (One is about how it felt to wear a corset for eight days as a movie extra for a film of James’s Washington Square.) In 2010 she published the weirdly gripping neuro-memoir The Shaking Woman; or, A History of My Nerves, in which she explored—in full-on brain-science-mystery mode—her struggles in early middle age with an onslaught of terrifying and seemingly inexplicable quasi-epileptic seizures. (Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio went bananas over it.)"

The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins

Pick it up, start reading, and be annoyed when you have to put it down. This is described as an 'amnesia' thriller--where the few remembered details of an event of violence, blood, a blue dress, and a man with red hair, revolve around in a mind befuddled by alcohol, and they hold the clues to what happened that night when...well, wait and see.
Told in the  first person voices of three women--Rachel, Anna, and Megan, with switches from one to the other at different times (note the times and dates of the chapter headings)--the story unfolds in a taut and gripping manner right the way through to the end.
The book starts with Rachel on the commute home from London--an ordinary worker on her way back to the suburbs, except that she has four cans of pre-mixed gin and tonic in her bag: "It's Friday, so I don't have to feel guilty about drinking on the train." Off you go, dear reader...
Paula Hawkins does a great job...I must check if she has written anything else.

Ship Fever: Embers: and Embers of War

   Well--it has been a long time since I posted anything, but the reading has gone on. We are now in London until mid-August, and since I have no employment--while Joan pursues her consultant work--I will have time to do a bit of blogging.

Ship Fever

 The last book I commented on was one called the Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett. In 1996 she won the U.S. National Book Award for fiction for her collection of stories called Ship Fever, which was the title of a long story/short novella about a doctor who worked on Grosse Ile, which was the quarantine center in the St. Lawrence during the years of the Irish potato famine, when ships were pouring into Canada with Irish immigrants, of whom a high proportion were suffering from typhus, often the results of the appalling conditions on the ships that were bringing them over. On the quarantine island the death toll was very high, the conditions dreadful, the medical staff inadequate, and very little could be done for the patients The story follows a doctor who volunteers to work on the island, having been disillusioned with his desultory practice of medicine in Montreal. I thought the writing and the story were excellent, but I was not so taken with the other stories in the book. Ship Fever prompted some research on my part, and I was amazed at the flood of Irish immigrants into Canada and the typhus epidemic, which eventually crossed over to the mainland and caused a large number of deaths. Andrea Barrett, who was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001, obviously does extensive historical research in recreating the circumstances of her stories and novels, and her writing is first class. I still wonder why I had never heard of her until recently.

Embers

     A friend recommended me to read a short novel--Embers--by the Hungarian author Sandor Marai. I read it almost in a single reading after the $1.99 (no postage) paperback arrived from Abebooks. Let me quote from a review (cutting and pasting is easier than writing).

"Describing the story of Embers is almost to do it a disservice. An elderly aristocratic general, Henrik, invites a childhood friend, Konrad, who disappeared 41 years ago in mysterious circumstances, to dinner in his castle. That's it for action. The meal doubles as a trial of Konrad, an almost mute defendant in the face of Henrik's prosecution, which minutely re-examines their schooldays at a military academy, the years leading up to Konrad's vanishing and his unmilitary character: "One cannot be a musician and a relative of Chopin and escape unpunished." The reason for Konrad's flight, after a shooting party when the general senses that the Konrad's intended prey has two legs not four, is linked to Krisztina, the rich general's beloved wife."

The novel was originally published in 1942 and has recently been rediscovered. It had been translated into a number of European languages, but not English, and was recognized as a masterpiece. The English text has actually been translated from the German translation, not from the original Hungarian. But the result is, nevertheless, excellent.  To quote more from the Guardian reviewer: "This taut and exquisitely structured novel...conjures the melancholy glamour of a decaying empire and the disillusioned wisdom of its last heirs"

Embers of War

   When I was poking around trying to find out how to download to my I-Pad an e-book from the DC Public Library, I tried to find Embers, the book I mention above. And..wow..I thought I'd got it: click on download. But it was not the novel by Marai, but a book called Embers of War, which traced the history of Indochina, and particularly Vietnam, starting in WW2--when it was still part of Vichy France--and on to the defeat of the French and the deaths of the first Americans. The author is Fredrik Logevall, and the book won the Pulitzer Prize for history. I do not often read non-fiction, but this grabbed me from the start. It is a fascinating chronicle. And every mistake the French made seemed to me to presage similar mistakes by the Americans when they took over the fight against Ho Chi Min with the misplaced rationale of the domino theory. And the Truman decision to support the French led to what George Kennan described as "the most disastrous of all America's undertakings over the whole 200 years of its history." A great book. Long, but it held my interest to the end, and now I am searching around for the 'best' history of the American involvement. I am told one by Stanley Karnow is excellent.

Bedtime...but more tomorrow.