Books not to miss in 2009

I’m never sure how these lists get created. In any case, the Guardian has named it’s books not to miss in 2009. Odd phrasing – not books to read, but books not to miss. Like the best advertising, it suggests an urgency, a tremendous opportunity that could be missed if you’re not fast enough. 

In any case, the one I’m most interested in not missing is Set 2666 by Roberto Bolano. I have not read anything by him yet, but keep coming across the name and have seen good reviews for this book in particular. I might also read In the Kitchen by Monica Ali – I wasn’t a great fan of Brick Lane, but the subject matter of this one sounds interesting. With Hilary Mantel it’s the reverse – I like her as a writer, but have no particular interest in a novel set in Henry VIII’s court. I might check it out anyway.

None of the others really get me that excited about 2009. Iain Sinclair’s book about Hackney, possibly, but the others not really. Anyway, I’m sure there’ll be plenty more good books coming out that the Guardian doesn’t know about yet.

“A Pale View of Hills” by Kazuo Ishiguro

Most of this novel is memory: a woman thinking about her daughter’s suicide and remembering an earlier summer in post-War Nagasaki. Almost nothing happens in the present day. The whole story takes place in the past.

And the story in the past is full of holes. At first this annoyed me but, the more I thought about it, the more I realised how true this is to the story as the woman would have thought about it. Not only are our memories full of holes, but there are also plenty of things we simply don’t want to think about, either because they are too painful (the suicide) or simply because they are obvious to us as we know them already. This is why a lot of things a reader would want to know, for example how the woman ended up leaving her first husband and going from Japan to England, are left virtually untouched. We might want to know, but it’s not where this woman’s mind is going. She’s interested in a seemingly unimportant episode, a fairly brief friendship a long time ago with a woman called Sachiko and her small daughter Mariko. Gradually we realise that the woman is thinking about them as a way of drawing parallels with her own life and understanding her relationship with her daughter. Sachiko just wants to escape from Nagasaki, where the Bomb dropped, where so many died and the survivors are living in tough conditions, and she’ll do anything to get out, even though she knows she is being a bad mother to Mariko.

The guilt comes across gradually, indirectly, but this is all we can expect from an emotionally repressed character, one who states at the outset: “I have no great wish to dwell on Keiko [her daughter] now, it brings me little comfort.”

The writing style is beautiful, restrained, and Ishiguro is particularly good at making things clear without making them obvious, for example a character is saying they are happy, they couldn’t be happier, and yet although there are no overt sings of it, we know they are lying. There are also ideas here that will be developed at greater length in his later novels, for example the old man who is rejected by the younger generation, which became the theme of “An Artist of the Floating World”.

I’ve read all but one of Ishiguro’s novels now and enjoyed all of them. His writing is a little bit similar in all of them, though – even though they are first-person narrators in wildly different settings, they all sound like the same person somehow. But the stories are compelling enough, and the writing beautiful enough, for this not to matter really.

“To have and have not” by Ernest Hemingway

The original New York Times review  in 1937 put it this way:

Mr. Hemingway has been for some years an outstanding figure in American literature; he has influenced greatly men a little younger than himself, and they have paid him the tribute of imitation. Whatever he does is of interest because he has, unquestionably, a very real talent. What has he done with it in “To Have and Have Not”?

It’s a good question, and one that hasn’t really been answered in the 70 years since then. Some have said Hemingway hated the book himself and only wrote it to fulfil some kind of contractual obligation. But how could he be contractually obliged to write an awful book? Even if somebody did set the subject matter, surely he could have produced something better than this?

The main problem with the book is that it is schizophrenic. It’s a cross between an adolescent high-seas adventure story and a social analysis of the effects of the Great Depression. Even if both could be crammed into one book, it’s probably safe to say that fans of one genre are unlikely to be fans of the other.

The writing style, too, is schizophrenic, lurching from first person to third person, from one character’s point of view to another’s. Harry Morgan’s character, too, changes. He starts out as a hard-drinking, hard-fighting Hemingway hero, but later on, as the whole idea of the book seems to change midstream, he becomes more of a Steinbeck-style poor old victim of the system. His wife and children then appear in the book, looking as if they have been grafted on to make him appear more sympathetic. Then rich people start to appear, being vile and self-obsessed but never fully drawn as characters. Their only role appears to be to act as “haves” to contrast against the “have nots”.

Another major problem I had with the book was its racism. You could argue that Hemingway was showing his characters to be racist, but still the constant, overwhelming use of words like “nigger” and “chink” really shocked me and immediately put me off the book. And worse than the words themselves were the way the characters of other races were described as objects more than people, with no characters beyond crude racial stereotypes like lazy blacks and untrustworthy Chinese. They are hardly ever even given names, but just referred to by their race: “the [insert racial slur] said….”

Well, I suppose every good writer has a clunker. I still like Hemingway’s writing, particularly in For Whom the Bell Tolls. So this book did teach me one thing: don’t judge an author by one book alone. If this had been my first Hemingway book, I’d probably never have read another, and as a result I’d have missed out on some fantastic writing.

Inspiration

Mario del Monaco, Nessun Dorma

“Three Stories” by Alan Bennett

All three of these stories have a deeply satirical flavour, with dry, mostly successful humour and pointed observations on the various absurdities and hypocrisies we live by.

“The Laying on of Hands” describes a memorial service for a masseur to the rich and famous, at which everyone (including the priest) is secretly worrying about whether the man died of AIDS. It’s told in omniscient third-person narrative, mostly focusing on the priest’s thoughts and perspectives but also dipping into the mind of a straight-laced canon sitting at the back and occasionally those of other people in the congregation. It deals nicely with the emptiness of church services at which most of the congregation don’t believe in God, and also takes a few swipes at the cult of celebrity, but the main theme is how the characters deal with death – not that of the man who actually died, but the possibility of their own.

The premise of “The Clothes They Stood Up In” is bizarre but very interesting. A staid, late middle-age couple, the Ransomes, go out to a Mozart concert one evening and return home to find that the whole contents of their flat have been removed. Not just the valuables, but every piece of furniture, the fitted carpets, the curtains, the lights, the kitchen appliances – everything. While Mr Ransome seems unaffected through the whole story, Mrs Ransome finds that the loss of all their belongings makes her go out into the world more rather than being imprisoned by her possessions.

“Father! Father! Burning Bright” is a prose version of a BBC TV film from 1982. Bennett says he wrote the story to understand more about the main character, Midgley, who he played in the film. The opening line is fantastic, one of the best I’ve read: “On the many occasions Midgley had killed his father, death had always come easily.” The story goes on to tell the reality of Midgley’s father’s death. Midgley goes to the hospital and waits doggedly for his father to die, determined not to fail him as he has always failed him before. Spoiler alert – look away now if you don’t want to see the ending! The ending is a little predictable for me, and the manner of it a little contrived – he is having sex with one of the nurses and misses his father’s death, incurring one last triumphant smile from his father: he failed again. There’s nothing remotely attractive or appealing about Midgley’s character and the random sex with the nurse just doesn’t feel plausible. But I did like the story overall, particularly the feeling of frustration and injustice. MIdgley is a character you should really despise, but because the world despises him and treats him so badly, you end up feeling sorry for him and being on his side. The hospital staff are wonderfully disapproving, self-righteous, callous and officious, and the whole experience of being Midgley for a while is so depressing that you can understand how he ended up so weak and self-pitying.

One thing I did notice in all three stories is that Bennett’s style works wonderfully when the humour works, but there were a few moments where the jokes didn’t work and the style irritated. In the first two stories, also, there were a lot of fussy comments about young people and their bad grammar and American talk-show style of speech and thought, sometimes with the same examples – complaining about the misuse of “hopefully” for example. They were mouthed through the characters, but felt more like Alan Bennett’s pet peeves. Apart from those minor points, though, I enjoyed these and want to read more by him. I really liked “The Uncommon Reader” too – I read it in the London Review of Books, not sure if it’s the same as the full book-length version as it didn’t seem that long.