"Unraveling Oliver," by Liz Nugent

      Often I am at a loss for a book to read on my I-pad when I am marching up a 10 percent grade on the treadmill in our exercise room--something I do a several days a week. Then I go into the DC Public Library and look for an E-book I can download. Most of the desirable books can only be accessed by putting a 'hold' on them, and this usually means a long wait--for example, you are 135th in line and the library has 15 copies.
Recently, without a clue as to author or title, I downloaded "Unraveling Oliver," and after the first chapter I was hooked, and I finished the book in a couple of days. I am not sure where I rate it in literary terms, but--so what?--it held my attention from beginning to end. Much of the 'unraveling' does involve a coincidence that somewhat beggars belief  (actually, a couple of coincidences, at least) but I am sure the author researched the background to establish the possibility of the major coincidence.
     The author, Liz Nugent, is Irish and she has written children's stories and radio and television drama. This is her first novel, and it received the Irish Crime Novel of the Year Award. While there is more than one crime, I certainly would not call it a crime novel
       Oliver, who is unraveled, is an author of a set of very popular children's books, and something of a literary pundit. He lives with his wife, Alice, in what soon seems a rather strange relationship. In the first chapter--actually, in the first sentence--for reasons that are unclear, he seriously assaults her, leaving her unconscious as he leaves the house to get a drink in a pub. And from there on, each chapter is narrated by Oliver, or by one or other of  seven characters who have observed his life from a childhood onwards and been involved with him in a variety of ways. Eventually, we are brought back again to the present day, knowing how the initial vicious assault came to pass.
     I enjoyed it. Now I must send it back to the Library. I do this conscientiously when I have finished a book. But the slowness with which I get informed of the availability of a book on hold suggests to me that many readers just leave them on their devices until they expire at 21 days.

"The Sparsholt Affair," by Alan Hollinghurst

    Hollingshurst is clearly one of the UK's finest writers, with all his novels focussing on the lives of gay males. The writing is always of a very high order--critics rave so frequently about his sentences that a discussion of the book I heard recently started with the moderator saying, 'let's not talk about the sentences...'
    There is something rather strange about this latest novel, which spans the history of Britain, from 'the War,' as we still talk about it, through to the advent of gay marriage, the ubiquity of mobile phones, internet dating sites for gay males, openly gay clubs and bars, and other major changes in social mores. But not much is actually made of the many momentous changes in the lives of gay males over this long stretch of years. The illegality of homosexual acts up to 1966, when the laws were abolished, is briefly mentioned, but with little elaboration as to the effect this had on gay males. There is only a brief allusion to the AIDs epidemic. Almost as an afterthought, well after the event, there is mention of a gay marriage at Chelsea Town Hall. But as we move forward from 1940 to the present day, in a series of episodes, with the dates not always clear, it is apparent that these changes and events are taking place.
     At the centre of the novel is "The Affair" of the title. David Sparsholt is somehow involved in a scandal involving a Clifford Haxby and an MP. There is some unexplained background of political and financial corruption, but the focus was on the rather mysterious sexual relations among the three men. And two years before homosexual acts between consenting adults became legal, David Sparsholt was sent to prison. "The Affair" is all over the newspapers, and its resonance is always connected with the name Sparsholt.
    We start in 1940 in Oxford, in Christ  Church college where David Sparsholt--a jock, in the US terminology--is ogled by other students, including Evert Dax, who is gay, and Freddy Green who is not, as he lifts weights in his lighted room. Evert does have sex with him on one occasion. The novel opens with an account of these carrying-ons in Oxford by Freddy Green in a memoir written for the Cranley Gardens Memoir Club, which was "found among Freddy Green's papers after his death," but not read at the Club.
    The Oxford section is about one sixth of the novel, and much that occurs in it is echoed in various ways as we move forward to focus on Johnny, the son of David Drummond and his wife Conny, who makes her first appearance in the Oxford section. After Art School, Johnny works for an art dealer as a restorer and framer, and one day delivers a picture to the house of Evert Dax, where the Cranley Memoir Club is meeting. And obviously the son of David Sparsholt is welcomed by the Evert Dax circle.
     And the novel follows Johnny, with a wide variety of developments from a teenager in love with a French boy Bastien on holiday in Cornwall, through a number of both failed and successful relationships. We have a lot of detail about his career as a successful portrait painter, his role as a father (yes), and his ultimate arrival into his contented sixties. All very well done, all the psychology well-worked out, whether Johnny is dancing in a frenzy in a gay night club, or working out how to paint portraits of a family of four.
     Now I just cop out--a very good read. It's long, and I thought there were periods of tedium and felt the urge to say 'get on with it,' but for the most part it held my interest to end--in fact, I was a bit disappointed when I realized I was at the end. And the writing is of such a high quality.

"A Long Way from Home" by Peter Carey

    Anything by Peter Carey cries out to be read, and his latest novel, "A Long Way from Home," certainly should be. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
    The novel is set in the early 'fifties. With a rather slowly developing introductory section, we meet the Bobs family: "a lovely little fellow, Titch Bobs," his wife Irene (one of the two first person narrators) who is devoted to him, and the eccentric patriarch, Dan Bobs, who constantly puts down and represses his son Titch.
(For US readers, 'Titch' is the English nickname for anyone vertically challenged.)
    Titch is in the process of trying to establish a Ford dealership in the small town of Bacchus Marsh, 33 miles from Melbourne. The effort fails, but behind his back Irene sets him up with Holden, the Australian arm of General Motors. 
    The other narrator is Willie Bachhuber, the son of a German pastor, married very young, divorced, failing to pay child support, and working as a teacher in Bacchus Marsh until he is suspended for dangling a trouble-making pupil out of a second-floor window. He is also a constantly winning participant in a rigged radio quiz show. He lives in a run-down house next to the Bobs family.
    The second part moves into Titch and Irene's participation in the 'round Australia' motor race/rally, The Redex Trial, with a course of some 10,000 miles--up the east coast, across the top of the continent, down the west coast, east along the southern coast, and back up to Sydney. For many long stretches the roads were unmade and treacherous, sometimes seemingly non-existent, and the cars took heavy punishment. Titch and Irene drove their specially prepared Holden, and they took along Willie Bacchuber as their map-reader and navigator. Titch ditches Willie somewhere deep in aboriginal country, far to the north of Perth, and he is stuck as a teacher in an aboriginal community. The focus of the third section--although still following Titch and Irene to their winning finish in The Redex--is on Willie's life in the aboriginal community, where he works as a teacher. Carey has admitted that his novels set in Australia had little on the history of aboriginals, and this novel was partly motivated by a desire to repair that omission.
    There some surprises along the way that I deliberately do not mention.
     Just a final book cover blurb: from The Economist--"Carey is one of the finest living writers in English. His best books satisfy both intellectually and emotionally; he is lyrical yet never forgets the imperative to entertain." And two other blurbs label him as "Dickensian"--and I certainly recognized this quality in this novel.









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"Too Loud A Solitude," by Bohumil Hrabal

    A strange but compelling short novel--98 pages in a small page format. You can read it is a couple of sessions. Hrabal is a Czech author, born in 1914. I haven't looked up the date of his death, but presumably he is no longer with us. Two other novels are mentioned on the book jacket--"Closely Watched Trains," (made into a film) and "I Served the King of England." I shall read them both when I can get hold of copies. "Too Loud a Solitude" was in the DC Public Library.
    I heard about the book on the New York Times Book Review Podcast, on which a couple of critics talk each week about the books they are reading, and one mentioned that he had read "this extraordinary book" in one sitting.
    The first person narrator has been--as he reminds us at the beginning of most chapters--"in wastepaper for thirty -five years," working in a cellar beneath a courtyard where paper waste is deposited. The waste comes down through a trapdoor, and Hant'a (the narrator) compacts it into bales with his hydraulic press. He rescues books from the waste and has accumulated in his apartment so many books that he has over two tons of them on shelves above his bed and in his lavatory--so many that when he sits on the loo, or sleeps in his bed, he often fears they will all fall down on him. And he reads a great deal from the books he rescues, and he is thus able to keep quoting sentences from a very wide variety of authors-- Kant to Hegel to Sartre to Lao-tse. His consumption of beer is prodigious, and one pub-crawl seems to involve every bar in central Prague.
    Memories play a large role in his inner life--he relates his relationship with a girl friend called Manca, who drops out of his life at one point and reappears much later living with an aged sculptor who is carving a marble statue of her in his garden. He relates how his uncle--a railway signalman sets up a railway and a signal-box in his garden after he retires. And he remembers the little gypsy girl, with whom he flew a kite, and who would curl up in bed with him--and he speculates which concentration camp she might have died in. But this only scratches the surface of the inner monologue as Hanta discovers that there is a new, hugely efficient, hydraulic baling system that has been built, run by an efficient team of young workers, that will bring his thirty-five year career to an end.
    This is a book where I have taken pleasure in going back in and re-reading chapters.

"The Undoing Project," by Michael Lewis

     This is mainly an account of the relationship between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that resulted in Kahneman being awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics six years after the death of Tversky. (Nobel Prizes are only awarded to the living) 
     Kahneman gave great credit to Tversky for his contribution to their joint work.
     Both were mathematically inclined psychologists who explored decision-making, and especially the irrational nature of many of the thought processes that lead to our decisions. Much of the book is devoted to biographical accounts of their lives and their sometimes troubled personnel and professional relationship.
     Interesting--yes, but a lot of the explanation of what they were fleshing out is rather turgid. There are some fascinating descriptions of how much their work influenced decision-making in certain fields, particularly in medical decisions.
     One of the oddities about this book are three chapters in which the protagonists play a minor role--one on the selection of professional basket-ball players, and two others on a Canadian doctor's work in refining the way medical decisions are taken.
      If one is interested in this general field of human irrationality, my recollection is that  Kahneman's book--"Thinking Fast and Slow" is a more entertaining read.

"Dept of Speculation," by Jenny Offill

    This book was mentioned on the weekly podcast of The New York Times Book Review. It was one of the ten or so books that a couple of women critics listed as "breakthrough" books by women authors in the 21st century.
    And, yes, I think this deserved to be listed. It is an extraordinary book--an unending stream of consciousness of a woman experiencing the birth and early bringing-up of her daughter, while her marriage is rocked by her husband's affair. And she also copes with teaching, deals with a plague of lice, ghost-writes an astronaut's biography, moves apartments, moves to the country, goes to a therapist, screams at her husband, strokes his forehead in the night...
    The narrative technique is one of short paragraphs, interspersed with brief sentences, and strange wanderings of the mind. One page simply consists of the words "scared of" run together as follows:
scaredofscaredodscaredofscaredofscaredof ...and there are eighteen lines of it.
     Sometimes there is just a sentence--"A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things."
     A plethora of short passages like this--with the italics:
      "Three things no one has ever said about me:
        You make it look so easy.
        You are very mysterious.
        You need to take yourself more seriously."
      And lots of quotes from a wide variety of authors.
      It's a fairly quick read (168 I-Pad pages: downloaded from the DC Library), and I found it fascinating--though don't expect it all to make sense: after all, how much of our wandering thoughts make sense?
BTW the book was first published in 2014