Book review: Bookmarks - Various (1974)

Bought at the Waterloo Bridge second-hand book market

Twenty eight writers talk about the books that influenced them (in 1974). Most of them mention having started off with Treasure Island; one or two mention it in order to say they've not read it. Shakespeare is mentioned only positively; Dickens, Chaucer and Hardy get more of a mixed reception. Two people I hadn't heard of, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Greek poet Cavafy, are praised by many. Also mostly praised are many I had heard of: Proust, Conrad, Lawrence, Austen, Waugh, Plato, Freud. I should have read Bookmarks with a memo pad in hand to note down authors and books, but as it is I take away the general reminder to keep reading, broadly and well. And the knowledge that nobody agrees on everyone. Except Shakespeare and Proust in French.

Book review: Kokoro - Natsume Soseki (1914). Or: The frustration of poor editions

The Peter Owen (2007) edition of Kokoro, very kindly lent to me by a friend. 

In Damian Flanagan's introduction to the 2007 Peter Owen edition of Kokoro, by Natsume Soseki - translated by Edwin McClellen - he refers to Kokoro as a masterpiece and warns the reader to brace themselves for a roller-coaster ride. I read the introduction after reading the translation of the novel that follows, and my first thought on beginning the introduction was that there could be few more inappropriate metaphors for the novel than that of the roller coaster, with its implied ups and downs and changes of pace. Not that the novel is without drama or the power to move, but I remembered no such dramatic swings.

However, shortly afterwards it became clear that Flanagan's introduction, unhelpfully, was based on a different translation of Kokoro to that which it precedes. Flanagan refers to quantities of analysis of Kokoro "beyond imagining", including two "ferocious" debates about a couple of short passages in the novel. One of these he says is located in the first paragraph: we are told that the narrator refers to the central character as "sensei" because he cannot bear to use a cold letter of the alphabet to represent his name, the significance of which becomes clear later. But the first paragraph of the translation that follows includes no mention of a single letter, nor the word "cold". We are simply told that the use of "sensei" is found "more natural" than use of a name.

Furthermore, the second of the two debates apparently revolved around a sentence that I can't find in the Peter Owen translation - nor can I find any sentence that distantly approximates it.

Perhaps even more crucially, Flanagan also says that the opening of the novel is "imbued with a striking homoeroticism", and quotes two parts in support of this.

First he says: "When they first meet the narrator writes, "Sensei had just taken his clothes off while I was exposing my wet body to the wind"".

In the translation that follows, this is rendered as: "Sensei had just taken his clothes off and was about to go for a swim when I first laid eyes on him in the tea house. I had already had my swim, and was letting the wind blow gently on my wet body."

And second he says (quoting the novel to begin with): ""It is a step towards love. As a preliminary to embracing the opposite sex, you have moved towards somebody of your own sex like me. [...]Because I am a man I simply cannot give you the kind of satisfaction you are looking for." That word "satisfy" is a key word in Kokoro, occurring with startling frequency."

In the translation that follows Flanagan's afterword, we are given: "But it was a step in your life towards love. The friendship that you sought in me is in reality a preparation for the love that you will seek in a woman. [...] But being the kind of man that I am, I cannot help you to rid your heart of that feeling of want."

Hardly as satisfactory.

In the final sentence of his introduction, Flanagan says that some critics of Kokoro "miss the point entirely", and that far from being about the end of the Meiji era, it is about a man who is prepared to give up his heart in order to transfer it forever into the breast of another man. Having been deprived by Peter Owen of the translation that Flanagan refers to in that very edition, I can't help but feel that I might have missed the point myself.

Book review: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka (2005)

One star seems a bit uncharitable, but two would definitely be too generous. The annoying thing is there are bits about ASHTU that I liked - well, really only one bit, the father - but it's buried under such a will-to-live-sapping heap of such tedium and bitterness that I can in good conscience only give one star.

Oh the tedium! ASHTU may have dethroned The Glass Bead Game as the most tedious thing I have ever read, and TGBG was at least vaguely nourishing. Imagine that annoying person who sits near you at work telling you a story of at-best middling interest in minute detail over the course of about 5 hours. That's how ASHTU reads: things happen in it that could be interesting or funny, but in Lewycka's telling, they just aren't. There's the odd glimmer of microwaved apples and gloop-stuck jam jars here and there, but they're buried in such an entombing mass of desiccated minutiae and formulaism.

Worse still, everyone except the father is painted in such a negative light by the first-person narrator - who herself, in consequence, comes across worst of all. Even when a bartender recurrs after a gap of a few weeks, he's "really let himself go". Engage negativity pump: spray liberally.

I got the sense that this was all based on real-life events, which could have made a good tale, but that Lewycka (and her editor) had been incapable culling the boring stuff or writing well for anything more than a couple of sentences at a time. The narrator certainly seems very pleased with herself: unlike her poor sister, she got to experience The Beatles and feminism, and turned out oh so liberal and stubborn and rebellious. Except, like hell is she anything other than judgemental like an American judge with an afternoon TV slot is judgemental.

Some of the bits about Ukrainian history were nearly interesting, but I recently read If This Is A Man and The Notebook, and ASHTU can't hold a candle to those in terms of WWII-era power. It can't even limply smear a soggy match down a spent strike pad.

Quite how this was so well received is, in all honesty, completely beyond my fathoming power.

Book review: The Notebook - Agota Kristof (1986)

Nice as this edition is, at times you want to be wearing gloves when handling it

The Notebook is the disturbing story of young twin boys growing up quasi-feral and semi-uniquely sociopathic in a WWII-ravaged Hungarian town. Emotionally neglected by their harridan of a grandmother, the twins work tirelessly to perfect their self-reliance and then turn their town into a combined school-of-life and source of plunder, which they then distribute Robin Hood-style to the needy, along with a brand of coldly plotted and violent justice utterly indifferent to the rules of bible and man, based purely on the detached judgements of these all-seeing, all-understanding, self-civilised demi-Gods.

It's sparely written and shocking, but a little too much so, with squalid sex unnecessarily dominating the middle third like a nightmare merger of Tough Mudder and the dark Web. But not even my disgust could stop me tearing through it in about 4 real-time hours of not non-stop reading.

This edition from CB Editions - the first UK print for over 20 years - is a lovely item, with beautiful marbled yellow flyleaves and smooth high-quality paper. It also features a dumb, showboating afterword from Slavoj Zizek that first appeared in The Guardian.

Bathroom windows and Pepsi cups

Lately I keep seeing exquisite beauty in unexpected places.

For example, my bathroom window:

This evening I tossed a Pepsi cup off my seat on the tube, and after pinballing around a bit it came to rest against the lip of the metal grating just inside the carriage doors.

For the next three or four stops it rested there, being rocked just slighty as the doors opened and closed in the nigh-on empty carriage at each of Warren Street, Oxford Circus and Green Park.

It wasn't beautiful in itself, but somehow it seemed imbued with immense potential energy as it rested there unquietly. Almost planetlike. Of course, an 8-gram cup on a 1- or 2-degree slope would actually have negligable potential energy, but because it was resting against the open aperture of a tube carriage - a place from which you yourself would very much not want to be ejected at high speed between stations - its position seemed that much more precarious and momentous and meaningful.

Eventually a father kicked it off at Victoria, thereby relieving both my palpable tension and the guilt I'd been feeling at having unwittingly converted traveller detritus into the (not) very real possibility of catastrophic derailment. Yet even on the platform it retained some of its unlikely power, as person after person daintily avoided the delinquency of an accidental booting.

What does all this unlooked-for beauty mean? I for one am hoping for the rapture...

If I could code I'd ... #1

If I could code I'd ...

Write a feature for a Twitter client that would block all tweets without a minimum, adjustable number of RTs from your timeline. Or, more sophisticated, less realistic version: that would block all tweets RTd less than a certain proportion of each tweeter's average number of RTs.

... but I can't.

Good TV is ruining good conversation

I've since subscribed to Netflix

Back when we still watched TV on televisions, at a time determined by the programme makers and the channel schedulers, we used to go into school or the office the next day and excitedly talk about the latest episode with our friends and colleagues, and then we'd have to wait a whole week to catch the next episode - or months even, if it was the end of a series.

Now that DVD boxsets and internet streaming have come along, we all watch TV at different times. And if you haven't yet seen what someone else has just seen, you either have no interest or you don't want to hear about it because you might watch it when you've done with whatever programme you're currently watching.

Also, as programmes now tend to last for about 60 episodes, all of which are available to us all at once after the programme has wrapped, once we've started something we tend not to watch or do much else until we're through gorging. So once you've established that your colleagues either aren't interested in what you're watching or don't want to hear about it, you've got nothing left to say to them because all you've done every evening for the past three weeks is watch bloody Dexter.

I've just finished watching Breaking Bad, which must have taken up about 50 hours of my life. In filmic terms that's 25 different opportunities to find something in common with people, or in book terms probably around 4 or 5. Instead, conversations have gone:

"Have you seen Breaking Bad?"
"No, I'm watching Game of Thrones."
"Oh."

Good TV is ruining good conversation.