Indefinite Pursuits

The year’s drawing to an end and so are the noughties.  Papers are being filled with ‘definitive lists’ of great events, the most read books, the best books, etc.  I realise that I haven’t kept pace at all these last few months, I’ve stopped recording my reading lists, have been slack on reviews.  All this made me think, again, about the advantages and disadvantages of retiring, of chucking it all in and start a different life.  Not yet, though.  I’ll come to that some time; meanwhile I’ll brood on the list of advantages and disadvantages of retiring…

For now, I’m going to draw up that list of books that I’ve recently read but not reviewed.   This, mind you, is purely for my own satisfaction: I want a complete record of the books I’ve read this year, finish the 2009 list to the bitter end.  Why?  Well, I don’t know, just because I want to, I’m a finisher in the jargon of business staff surveys.

Here it goes, without a sense of the sequence in which they were carried along with me, on trains, travels, bedtime reading or whatever:  this is the pile of books and short stories that I’ve recently read or half read.  

Helen Garner – The Spare Room.  This is the story of Helen who agrees to put up her old friend Nicola, knowing that she has cancer.  Nicola is determined to use ‘alternative’ ways of beating her cancer, even though it seems apparent to everyone around her that she is fooling herself and insists on everyone else agreeing that this treatment, that is only available in Melbourne, hence her self-invite to Helen, will indeed prove to be the miracle cure.  It’s a quick read, this book and well written, even though I found both Helen and Nicola quite irritating at times in their apparent inability to tell each other what they really think.

Jonathan Franzen – The Corrections.  How come I never read this before?  The writing is tremendous and once can only envy the seemingly effortless way in which the stories unfold – stories of members of Enid and Alfred’s family, Alfred slowly descending into Parkinson’s disease and his long suffering wife Enid for ever trying to have a full family gathering for a last Christmas, their three children, their idiosyncrasies, hopes, differences.   It is a marvellous book and if you haven’t read it yet, ask a copy for Christmas!

Patrick Gale – Notes from an Exhibition.  Another family saga, but quite a different one from the above.  Rachel Kelly moves into Antony’s student life and stays, despite the initial unlikeliness of their being a couple or even staying together.  Antony more or less rescues Rachel from an otherwise bleak future; she is pregnant by a lover who has jilted her.  They do however stay together and make a life in Cornwall, first in Antony’s father’s house which subsequently becomes theirs.  They have a family, three children and Rachel becomes a well-known painter whose demons only Antony and their friend, the local doctor is aware of.  Who is Rachel, where does she come from?  Her children and husband only find out after her death, and having left behind some new and quite extraordinary paintings.  The twists and turns of this family’s life slowly unfold, when we are taken along the journey, sometimes hearing Rachel’s voice, then Antony’s and then one of her children’s, now adults.

Philip Roth’s Indignation is quite a different story, about a studious and intense young man, who escapes from his hardworking overprotective butcher father from Newark New Jersey, only to end up at a university in Ohio where life turns out to be even more suppressive than the claustrophobia of the parents’ home.  It is as if he is on an almost relentless path towards his own destruction, growing up painfully and foolishly, resisting the imposed rigours, questioning settled convictions and beliefs, and ultimately being sent to his death.  It is extremely well written, the terribly suppressed atmosphere of the 50s, the Korean War, the inability to extract oneself from being classified according to one’s parents’ beliefs and class, these are all painted very vividly and this is a really satisfying read.

And then, then there are the short stories, the ones that you have on your bedside table, or can read whilst on a train journey.  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s collection ‘The Thing Around her Neck’ is just brilliant.  Every story, bleak and real, not a word too many and just so fluently written, is great.  I love the simplicity and the starkness of her stories, which are also amusing and funny – she understands human nature, the women who are trying so hard to fit into their own lives, to make the most of it, yet, somehow, never quite escaping their own harnesses.  In ‘A private Experience’, the third story in the book, two women find themselves in the same hideaway when caught up in a riot.  One is from a rich and comfortable background, the other poor; one has lost a Burberry handbag in the melee when trying to escape from the riot, the other her necklace, probably plastic.  It is as if you are there with them, see the unbridgeable gap between them, their pains and sorrows worlds apart, private, yet they spend the night together in that hideous room. The next day the rich girl finds out what has happened to her twin sister.

If you are a lover of short stories, this is for you.  Or give it to someone who loves short stories!

Actually, William Boyd’s Fascination is a similar ‘must read’, although the stories evoke quite different moods and experiences.  I enjoy Boyd’s novels, but his stories as just as good.  These stories move around the place, are very unusual in the sense of evoking characters and places which range wide across the globe and in time.  There are stories about the Second World War, the nineteenth century, about Los Angeles and Russia.  In A Haunting, the narrator carefully notes in his notebook his descent into a kind of madness.  It starts on a plane, on the way from London to Los Angeles and with a faint headache.  The story moves from London to Los Angeles and then to Edinburgh, where at long last he thinks he discovers what has been haunting him.  However, others seem more sceptical, in particular his wife, who refuses to have him back.  Nevertheless, once he has discovered the Kilmaron effect, he is able to fight it and finds that he is free from his feelings for every ….   Well, go and read the story.  I’m not going to give it away here.  It’s fascinating.    Every story has its own fascinating twists and turns, life in all its unexpected details.

Well, I’m quite pleased with this list now.  I’m up to date.  Next year I’m going to try and do something different – this is too much hard work!  Unless, of course, I decide to retire…  But I don’t think so.

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