Week Twenty - Jeanette

The Eyre Affair (2001) by Jasper Fforde

Recommended by Alix

My hands were shaking.

I’d been interviewing Steven Collins of The Owl Service for Seasons They Change. Halfway through the conversation, I realised my purse had been stolen. Somehow I managed to complete the interview; very surreal talking of Blood On Satan’s Claw and Vashti Bunyan’s comeback while knowing someone might be racing to the nearest Rhythm ‘n’ Booze for a case of Remy Martin on your dollar.

Outside the pub, I called Alix. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I burbled. I was staying with Alix and her husband Malcolm. ‘I just don’t know what to do’. I didn’t. My security walls were always so high, and I couldn’t believe they’d been breached.

Alix, her voice rock solid, checked that I had enough money to get back to hers (I did; the compassionate Steven had loaned me the fare), advised me to go directly to my bank to cancel my cards, then told me to come right back. That night, she and Malcolm took me to one of their favourite foodie pubs, where the chef too was kind; he kept cooking after the advertised time, and didn’t mind having a vegan sprung on him.

That incident definitely intensified the friendship between Alix and I. Since then, we’ve supported one another over various creative projects, and we’ve even been jilted brides in a video together:

(Alix is a professional actor. I am not. It shows: while she creates a character, I fall off the bottom of a child’s slide and flash my knickers.)

Alix and I have talked of our mutual love for the great English novelists on several occasions. I wonder if that was something behind her recommendation of The Eyre Affair: a nerd’s paradise for Jane Eyre fans that masquerades as a detective story.

I’ve read Jane Eyre but once, and a long time ago. I personally prefer Charlotte Bronte’s last novel, Vilette, yet Jane Eyre is so very striking that I remember a huge amount of the plot, purpose and imagery of it. This was a real help when reading The Eyre Affair; in fact, I’d say it’s essential to have a basic knowledge of Jane Eyre, and ideally a hearty love for it, to appreciate much of this book (and especially towards the end).

The Eyre Affair is set in a quasi-parallel England where supervillain Acheron Hades runs riot, dodos have been recreated, and (more unbelievably) the government is prepared to fund a department devoted to protecting literary integrity. This, SO-27, is where Thursday Next works. She chases Hades as he steals the Martin Chuzzlewit and Jane Eyre manuscripts, penetrates their worlds, disrupts their plots, and kidnaps their characters.

Within twenty seconds of Jane’s kidnapping the first worried member of the public had noticed strange goings-on around the area of page one hundred and seven of their deluxe hide-bound edition of Jane Eyre. Within thirty minutes all the lines into the English Museum were jammed.

In the age of Kindle, this is a very interesting idea. As we travel ever more towards the all-electronic reading experience, what is to stop a Nineteen Eighty-Four-ish control of text in this way? After all, that’s what happened to ancient works. We’re at the mercy of what survives, or what controlling forces choose to let survive. This makes Fforde’s choice of Jane Eyre, and Charlotte Bronte, especially biting. There is a never-proven rumour (first told to me by my sixth form English teacher) that Charlotte, jealous of Wuthering Heights, destroyed the manuscript of Emily’s second novel immediately after her sister’s death. If true, then Charlotte herself is a kind of Acheron Hades.

While it served the plot for Hades to be so overblown, I had a problem with Next’s character. Perhaps satire was Fforde’s intention (and her name does suggest it), but she is so much the spunky-yet-emotionally-vulnerable heroine that I found her, often, completely unrelatable. Her love interest, Landen Parke-Laine, is even worse, and I wish the romantic aspect of the book wasn’t in it at all. Perhaps Fforde thinks he’s created a new Mr. Rochester but, for me, Parke-Laine is both unbelievable and reprehensible. He’s happy to marry someone he doesn’t love, yet equally happy to call it all off for Next if she says the word. Of course, people do sometimes marry people that they don’t love, and don’t marry people that they do love, but I’d wager that this is a fearsomely complex process that almost never works out well. Next and Parke-Laine’s happy splashing in this very real emotional effluent seemed insulting.

(EDIT: I've thought a lot about this in the last few hours. I wondered, was I too guilty of 'happy splashing in very real emotional effluent' in the video I posted above? Being left at the altar (or leaving someone there) must be one of the most traumatic experiences of a life. All I can say is that I felt the video was cathartic, depicted a moment, and was celebratory of how women can help one another through a crisis, while I do feel Fforde's take on ill-advised marriage was insufferably glib.)

There are a lot of ideas in The Eyre Affair. It’s as if, once Fforde decided that he had to break the rules of physics to get people in and out of Victorian novels, he thinks what the hell and does anything he pleases with the rest of reality, too.

            ‘New car, Uncle?’
            ‘No, no,’ said Mycroft hurriedly. ‘I don’t drive. A friend of mine who hires these out was    lamenting about the cost of keeping two, one black for funerals and the other white for weddings – so I came up with this.’

He reached in a turned a large knob on the dashboard. There was a low hum and the car turned slowly off-white, grey, dark grey and then finally to black.

Some vignettes (as above) are charming. And, I’m sure for many tastes, this is the central appeal of the book: the reader is pelted with so many incongruities that it feels almost Pythonesque. However, much like my main criticism of Jonathan Carroll’s The Panic Hand back in week nine, it generally didn’t suit me. I felt sometimes as if I was sitting in Fforde’s brainstorming session rather than reading his novel. I would have loved to understand a bit more of Fforde’s philosophies on impermanence and state support for the arts, on reader interpretation and the culture of literary superfans, all of which were brought up in The Eyre Affair. But it simply felt Fforde would rather get on with his next bright idea.

I’m starting to sound like Andrei Tarkovsky, wanting things to be slower and duller.

To be fair to Fforde, he became more measured in the final Jane Eyre-fixated section, and I really did enjoy that. It would be interesting to know – as this is his first book, and he has written further Thursday Next adventures – what happens to his style. I suspect the multicoloured chaos will ramp up, and that would be a shame for me, because I like him best when he calms down and looks around Thornfield Hall for a while.

Week Nineteen - Jeanette

 Zona (2012) by Geoff Dyer

Recommended by Andrew

‘I’m off to see Tarkovsky’s Stalker tonight’, Andrew texted me last summer. He was in Edinburgh, spending some time at the festival.

‘Oh, Stalker!’ I replied. ‘I have opinions about Stalker. “Enjoy”.’

I shared those opinions when I next saw him. I considered Stalker overlong and indulgent: a great concept frittered away by a director too in love with his own visuals and not with his audience. I related an anecdote that, to me, summed it up: I’d been watching the film, got bored, gone off to make a cup of tea, came back, and exactly the same shot was still on the screen.

Fast forward a few months, and Andrew recommends me Zona, Geoff Dyer’s recent book about his love affair with Stalker. I’m going to have to watch the bleeder again come May, I thought.

However, through Artificial Eye being useless and happily letting important films go out of print (don’t get me started on their treatment of Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Stalker is unavailable on DVD in the UK at the moment. So I did the next best thing; I rewatched another Tarkovsky movie, Mirror.

I first saw Mirror not long after Stalker and vastly preferred it (I’ve also seen Solaris, which I consider the worst of the three). Mirror probably has even less of a plot than Stalker, but there was a warmth to its images: without wishing to sound too pretentious (very difficult to avoid when talking of Tarkovsky), Mirror evoked the curious space of childhood memory and its impact on the present with great sophistication and candour. I liked it even better on a second viewing.

Immediately, in Zona, Geoff Dyer addresses my moans about Stalker.

By any standards it’s a slow start to a movie. Officials from Gosinko, the central government agency for film production in the USSR, complained about this, hoping the film could be ‘a little more dynamic, especially at the start.’ Tarkovsky erupted: it actually needed to be slower and duller at the start so that anyone who had walked into the wrong theatre would have time to leave before the action got under way. Taken aback by the ferocity of this response, one of the officials explained that he was just trying to see things from the audience’s point of view… He was not able to finish. Tarkovsky couldn’t give a toss about the audience.

So I was right about the Tarkovskian arrogance towards the paying public! But how about that static shot when I went off to get a cup of tea?

Often, in Tarkovsky, when we think something is still it’s not; at the very least, the frame is contracting or expanding slightly, almost as if the film were breathing.

Pah. One-all.

Dyer broadly sees the total lack of interest in a cinema audience as a plus point for ol’ Tarkers: it’s exactly because of that attitude Stalker is the achievement it is. Although mostly Dyer was persuasive as to his argument, he annoyed me at one stage:

At first there can be a friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last – and no-one can concentrate on anything – for longer than about two seconds.

This may very well have a kernel of truth in it, yet Dyer’s tone and use of ‘moron-time’ smacks of unpleasant superiority. This was its most obvious example, yet there were other hints that Dyer occasionally didn’t care about his audience, either.

Zona – and I suspect this was the reason Andrew recommended the book to me, rather than simply to argue by proxy about Stalker – is part-autobiography. Dyer not only considers his relationship with the film, but how its various ideas and imagery offer insight into his own history.

The football pools: that, for many British people, was their equivalent of the Room, the thing that would make all their wishes come true. ‘All I’d like to do,’ my mum said with a mixture of pride and humbleness, ‘is go down to the supermarket and buy the nicest piece of steak there. That’s all I want.’

Reading these bits, which increase in frequency as the book goes on, was great, and really helped me understand why Dyer loved the film, and perhaps, also, why I did not. It seems to me that if we only admire a movie for its innovation or beauty, cinema wouldn’t work the way it does, and none of us would have a favourite movie at all, even. But those treasured films, those that do touch us deeply, they set in motion a special chemical reaction. Their content pings off our own yearnings or regrets, loves or hatreds. It’s easy when writing – or speaking – of a film to neglect this, perhaps because we don’t think others will be interested, perhaps because we don’t want to unpick our own muddled feelings, perhaps because its simply easier to praise (or criticise) an audaciously lengthy still shot than to analyse why it affects us so. And this is where I come back to Andrew: in the relatively short time I’ve known him, it’s been his unapologetic and intelligent capacity for introspection, along with an unusual and eloquent means of expressing it, that has had a striking effect on me.

So I can see why Zona has resonated with him. Dyer explicitly applies his own narrative to Stalker, and sometimes this means the structure of the book is messy – many will be frustrated with the digressions via footnotes, everything from a bitch about Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels to missed opportunities for ménage a trois – but I found it a price worth paying. Zona has much more in common with House Of Leaves than, say, with a coolheaded Cahiers Du Cinéma anthology.

Another text from Andrew (yesterday):

            If we ever find a copy of Stalker I demand a gala viewing.

And what did I reply? Has Zona convinced me to sit through it again?

            You’re so ON.

Week Eighteen - Jeanette

A Book Of Common Prayer by Joan Didion (1977)

Recommended by Tom

This is Tonantzin Villaseñor.

Tonantzin is my favourite character from one of my favourite things: Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar stories (a key part of the Love And Rockets comics). I’ve read these strips dozens of times. Tonantzin is a strong and confident woman, who sells fried babosas (slugs, yum) and looks like Sophia Loren. She becomes very politically committed, a stance to which her friends, lovers and family find difficult to adjust.

Palomar’s location is never disclosed: ‘somewhere below the US border’ is all Hernandez tells us. However, we do learn, through Palomar's course, something of the complicated relationship between the US and Central American nations. This most obviously happens in the story ‘An American In Palomar’; it concerns a photojournalist, Howard Miller, who comes to document (and simplify) the lives of the Palomar residents for consumption by the US.

There are very notable differences between Palomar and A Book Of Common Prayer (which I’ll come onto shortly) yet both have a central unhappy idea that wider societal forces, especially the relationship between nations with a history of explicit or implicit colonization, poison individuals and their naturalness with one another. Within a few chapters of A Book Of Common Prayer, I was compelled to pick up Palomar yet again.

A Book Of Common Prayer is set in Boca Grande which is (like Palomar) a fictional Central American location. Our narrator is Grace Strasser-Mendana. Originally from Denver, Grace – like Howard Miller – looked outside the US, fascinated by the ‘other’.

I studied under Kroeber at California and worked with Lévi-Strauss at São Paulo, classified several societies, catalogued their rites and attitudes on occasions of birth, copulation, initiation and death; did extensive and well-regarded studies on the rearing of female children in the Mato Grosso and along certain tributaries of the Rio Xingu, and still I did not know why any one of these female children did or did not do anything at all.

Grace, disillusioned with anthropology, marries a rich Boca Grande man and takes up amateur biochemistry instead, ‘a discipline in which demonstrable answers are commonplace and “personality” absent.’ Her status allows her knowledge of both the high political machinations and everyday gossip of Boca Grande.

Give me the molecular structure of the protein which defined Charlotte Douglas.

Charlotte is another American, yet she is a far more recent traveller to Boca Grande; the locals refer to her as la norteamericana, or sometimes la norteamericana cunt. She is attempting to track down her daughter, Marin, who is being investigated by the FBI for her political activism and terrorist links.

Like Tonantzin, people found it hard to adjust to Marin, a young woman, becoming enmeshed in radicalism. However, whereas Tonantzin explains her ideology (which is then generally dismissed as crackpot paranoia), Marin only really gets to express herself through slogans on a fuzzy tape recording.

This is not an isolated action. We ask no-one’s permission to make the revolution.

These slogans – not explanations, but merely empty signifiers –are not dismissed, but taken very seriously indeed (even when it is revealed that at least one was lifted wholesale from someone else). Marin thus becomes the sum of how other people attach meaning to her, slivers of a fun-house mirror glued together.

Although Charlotte’s physical and psychological search for Marin might be the premise of A Book Of Common Prayer, it quickly ceases to be its point. Instead, Didion creates a completely unforgiving web of human relationships – parental, sexual, communal – within and beyond Boca Grande. Conversations are mannered and conventions often polite, but obviously people want to garrote one another with piano wire.

The first thing to say about this book is that it’s extremely well-written. Magnificently so.

But the second thing to say about this book is that I’m not sure I liked it.

I admired it; I found it to be almost perfectly structured and ferociously intelligent. But its greatest achievement – its pitilessness – was what prevented me from bonding with it.

             They had made that crab bisque in Greenville. She had bought the crabs and Warren had

             shown her how to make the bisque.

‘You’re ruining it,’ she had said. ‘You’re putting in too much salt.’

‘You don’t know anything about it.’

‘Taste it, it’s brine.’

‘Taste it yourself,’ Warren had said, and pushed the wooden spoon in her face.

Unlike Hernandez’s Palomar stories, which invite you, allow you, demand you to care about every single character, even those who appear in only a few frames, and even leeches like Howard Miller, the surgical precision of A Book Of Common Prayer allows for little human sympathy. As I was reading it, it struck me that I would hate to know Joan Didion, because she would find your flaws as easily as a night vision camera finds a fox.

I think this aspect of A Book Of Common Prayer surprised me, given who recommended it: Tom, also known as Thomas Jerome Seabrook, the author of the brilliant Bowie In Berlin. He edited my book Seasons They Change and in the acknowledgements I gave my thanks to him first and foremost. I stated that I couldn’t have written it without him.

This is because Tom’s importance to me and to Seasons was never confined to the physical task of editing text. From the very earliest stages, he listened to my worries, gave me priceless advice, kept me focused and – something I’ll never forget – stood up for the integrity of my work to others. When I submitted a manuscript way over my agreed word limit he got it down to a manageable length without changing my intention or tone. Tom is overflowing with sympathy – and not only for people, but for words, too.

Given that, I think I’m missing something of Didion’s intention. The skill of the woman is such that it must have been a very conscious choice to savagely cut back on the emotional content of what could have easily, and perhaps more naturally, been a melodrama: after all, the story deals in terrorism, sexual intrigue, fractured relationships and political shitstorms. Until I understand why she takes the tone she does – which will require a re-read, plus a wider investigation of her authorial notions – A Book Of Common Prayer is, to me, a perfect heart of marble.

Week Seventeen - Jeanette

The Sisters Brothers (2011) by Patrick deWitt

Recommended by Craig

Fresh from university, what is an English Literature graduate to do?

Work in Oddbins, of course.

Ah, Oddbins. Already consigned to history. Part of a time when we used to go to different shops to buy different things, and where the people who worked in those shops knew about the stuff they were flogging. It seems unbelievably quaint already, but Oddbins really did care that its staff knew their wine: they’d put us on tasting courses, have events where we’d sample new vintages, and quietly accept the odd stock ‘irregularity’.

Craig was Assistant Manager at my branch of Oddbins, Notting Hill. He liked classic cinema and modern literature, he liked singer-songwriters and expensive whiskey. He had the world’s worst memory, but he could reel off scenes from minor Hitchcock movies, and he’d be accurate to the frame.

We hit it off very quickly.

Craig left Notting Hill for Manchester a few months later. I visited him. He had this gorgeous flat in Chorlton with high, high, ceilings and no curtains. It all felt very bijou, well apart from the person in the flat underneath playing The Verve’s Urban Hymns six times a day (no exaggeration). I made Craig a tape (tape!) of the best songs from Elliott Smith’s first three albums; I complained how Elliott had ‘gone rubbish’ with XO. We ate pancakes at a pancake house for breakfast.

We also watched films. Perhaps it was that weekend, or perhaps it was on a later occasion, Craig and I watched Fargo. I’d never seen it, and it was one of his favourites.

It was Fargo that kept coming back to me as I was reading The Sisters Brothers. Something in its manner, its language, its imagery (and, of course, the thought of Craig).

I felt a sharp pain at the long toe of my left foot. I upended and tapped at the heel of the boot, expecting a nettle to drop, when a large, hairy spider thumped to the ground on its back, eight arms pedalling in the cold air.

The Sisters Brothers concerns Eli (who narrates) and Charlie Sisters, two feared hitmen in the American frontiers of the 1850s, a time of gold rush and lawlessness. The pair work for the Commodore, and he has ordered the death of Hermann Warm. As is standard for the Commodore, he doesn’t tell his henchmen what the unfortunate Warm has done, and this is increasingly troubling to Eli.

Despite his profession, Eli is a sensitive man. He has a loyal relationship with his good-natured but useless horse, Tub, and refuses to be rid of him, even when Tub is aged and brain-damaged. Eli is also self-conscious about his weight, and forces himself onto a hated diet.

I ate a small portion of eggs and beans and was still very hungry when I was finished. I sat looking at the greasy plate, wishing, frankly, to lick it.

                […]

The boy returned and asked if I wanted anything more before paying up. ‘Fresh pie this morning,’ he said.

                ‘What kind of pie?’ I demanded. I thought, don’t let it be cherry.

                ‘Cherry,’ said the boy.

These aspects of The Sisters Brothers could easily turn Eli, and the book itself, into something cuddly and safe. But he, and it, is neither. Violence jolts through the brothers’ quest, and Eli is as much a willing part of that as Charlie is.

Charlie himself is hard to like at the start, for he seems to exploit his younger brother, blindly follow the Commodore’s instructions, and rob and kill without compunction. But he has the driest humour, and soon I became very fond of Charlie, too.

‘What’s that? You’re not smiling are you? We’re in a quarrel and you mustn’t under any circumstances smile.’ I was not smiling, but then began to, slightly. ‘No,’ said Charlie, ‘you mustn’t smile when quarrelling. It’s wrong, and I dare say you know it’s wrong. You must stew and hate and revisit all the slights I offered you in childhood.’

The first half of the book is comprised mainly of vignettes such as these: scrapes on the brothers’ way to tracking down Hermann Warm. But when they find their target, the tone of the book changes. The brutality had been plentiful, casual and bloody up to this point. Now it is charged with deep philosophical questions, as Eli and Charlie realise why they’ve been told to murder Warm. The differences between the two halves of the book is akin to the contrast between the kaleidoscope gore of The Evil Dead and the depressing savagery of Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer. Sometimes, with a narrative shift such as this, it can seem as if the author is belatedly trying to tack on a measure of depth to a story, but here it’s exactly the opposite. It feels natural, if upsetting, that the story goes where it does: again, this is something that the Coen Brothers, at their best, are extremely good at.

The other clear reference point for me was Deadwood. I watched the first season of this a couple of years back, and once I got over thinking ‘it’s Lovejoy!’ every time Ian McShane appears, I thought it was fan-fucking-tastic.

'That's what the fuck life is, one vile fucking task after another.'

Yes, DeWitt likes Deadwood very much.

However, I think The Sisters Brothers has a wider appeal than Deadwood, even. It’s readable, it’s got ballast, it revels in moments of black farce and its characters – even the minor ones – are extraordinarily vivid. I can’t think of any literary comparisons for this book; partly this is due to my ignorance of the Western genre, but also its something in the book itself.

I bet this will be a film, and probably an Oscar contender. Read it before the 'now a major motion picture' cover makes you too embarrassed to.

Week Sixteen - Jeanette

The Art Of Travel by Alain de Botton (2002)

Recommended by Mark

Hello from LEAGRAVE!

Leagrave sounds nice, doesn’t it? Perhaps you’re thinking it's a small fishing port on the west coast of Scotland, or a quaint Cornish hamlet accessible only via a meandering B road.

It is neither. It is a soulless Luton suburb, and I am in the bar of a chain hotel, having paid £3.80 for an indifferent (small) glass of red wine and a flickering internet connection.

I’m not finding much artistry in this particular travel experience.

I know that a lot of people don’t like Alain de Botton. His detractors see him as some kind of intellectual parasite who condenses and over-simplifies the ideas of eminent minds for the lumpen proletariat. He doesn’t do much to deflect this reputation. Look at this recent article, 'Ten Commandments for Atheists': who’d ever have thought that being polite was a nice thing to do? Thanks, Alain!

However, I’ve never personally read any of his work; and I do know that de Botton’s recommender Mark needs no commandments (from de Botton or anyone else) to be polite, empathetic or funny. He is one of the two people I’ve known longest on this list. I find that quite upsetting; only two people from my home city that I wanted to get something as simple as a book recommendation from. (Well, there were three, but one didn’t recommend).

Mark used to work on Saturdays at the bread shop down the road (note, ‘bread shop’, that’s the Norwich way. ‘Bakeries’ are for people from Guildford). He was a little bit older, he was in a band, he went to indie gigs at the UEA. I was a young teen, with puppy fat and emotions written all over my face. I loved talking to him, and of course I had a little crush on him. It was one of those early pure crushes: he was way above me and there was no hope of fulfillment, and that was its point. Given that my next crush was to be serious, complex and painful, well, I appreciate those innocent earlier feelings even more.

He even got on TV! Look at this (Mark’s the guitarist with the Mr. Bubbles (??) t-shirt):

Real Universal - Magic Scenes

He left school, and left the bread shop; eventually he left Norwich too, and went on to have lovely children and a gorgeous wife. It was ace to get back in touch a few years ago, and particularly ace to know that he still made music. Now Mark is better known as the subtle and brilliant electronic pop project Mono Life.

Anyway: the past is another country. Here I am, in the Leagrave present with Mr. de Botton. Can he help me find the pearls among the suburban swine?

The Art Of Travel encourages reflection. Why go away in the first place, and how might we get the best from travel? Too often, de Botton says, we simply assume we’ll have a good time on our holidays, and we don’t. He relates his experience of Barbados.

My body and mind were to prove temperamental accomplices in the mission of appreciating my destination. The body found it hard to sleep, it complained of heat, flies and difficulties digesting hotel meals. The mind meanwhile revealed a commitment to anxiety, boredom, free-floating sadness and financial alarm.

He’s in Barbados and I am in Leagrave. It’s tempting to shout: down a couple of rums, and shut up.

But de Botton’s point is important (even if he expresses it in an irritating manner). We want travel and holiday to be entirely transcendental, to take us away from our problems and our normal selves. When we find our normal selves along for the ride – and usually our problems don’t take the hint to stay at home either – it doesn’t matter what the surroundings are.

How do we square this particular circle? De Botton ‘asks’ artists, writers and thinkers. He surveys how great men (and it is only men that de Botton consults) have looked at the foreign and the native alike, and then connects their words and art with various aspects of the travel experience: anticipation, arrival, sightseeing, return. When de Botton concentrates on those he admires, his style transforms. He no longer moans about non-existent problems. He’s enthusiastic about the ideas of those he writes of, and wants his readers to be so, too. It doesn’t come across as cynical or exploitative. And far from being obvious, de Botton uses a wide variety of carefully chosen source material: he’ll quote from correspondence, speeches and minor works as well as the well-known.

If it is de Botton’s aim to open up minds, then I have two words for you: Gustave Flaubert.

The chapter ‘On The Exotic’, where de Botton discusses the work of Flaubert – in particular, Flaubert’s ambivalence towards France and his attraction to the Middle East – left me wanting to abandon the rest of the Two Readers project and immediately read every scribble Flaubert has ever written. How, how, have I never read this man before? My God! He’s hardly Johnny Nobody. On the basis of the material in The Art Of Travel, Flaubert could easily be my favourite all-time writer.

My life, which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love, will turn out to be like everyone else’s – monotonous, sensible, stupid.

                                          (Letter to schoolfriend)

I was really taken, not only with Flaubert’s style, but also with his more general thoughts on life. And this is where credit must go to de Botton for interpreting them in an attention-grabbing and direct way.

[Flaubert] proposed a new way of ascribing nationality: not according to the country one was born in or to which one’s family belonged, but according to the places to which one was attracted. It was only logical for him to extend this more flexible concept of identity to gender and species and for him to declare on occasion that, contrary to appearances, he was in truth a woman, a camel, and a bear.

     

I’ve Madame Bovary sitting on my shelf at home. I’m now so anxious to read it that I’m physically shaking with excitement.

The other ‘guide’ de Botton follows who especially affected me was John Ruskin. The fearlessly sharp tongue this man had! This from his speech to a group of wealthy holidaymakers in 1864:

The Alps themselves you look upon as soaped poles in a bear-garden, which you set yourselves to climb, and slide down again, with ‘shrieks of delight’.

Ruskin was not just being obnoxious (although he clearly relished being so). He was keen to shake people from their apathy, to get them to really, truly, see – not to merely glance, and not to simply understand things as they related to their own egos. And this is what de Botton is trying to do, too; he ends the book by travelling ‘at home’: around Hammersmith, peering at gravy adverts and nosing into office windows.

So let’s have another look at Leagrave.

Nope.

But I’ll have another glass of wine, and shut up.

Week Fifteen - Jude

Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin (1967)
Recommended by Eamonn Forde

Here's a book I finished on Sunday - Sunday! - but haven't written about yet because I've been up to my ears in writing for readies. But write about it I shall. And for some reason I fancy writing about it in the form of a list. So there.

1. This was recommended to me by Eamonn Forde. Now, I met Eamonn through work, sort of – he is a good pal of Andrew Harrison, my old colleague at Word, and old editor (sniff) at Q. Eamonn is The World's Eminent Music Business Journalist ((c) Neil McCormick, 2010). He has a doctorate in pop (true fact). His spiritual mentor is Blanche from Coronation Street. He has a very rude sense of humour and likes "putting" random words "in" quote marks "within" sentences to flag "up" moments of "ridiculousness". He likes Tayto crisps more than life itself.

2. Eamonn recommended me five Ira Levin books, in order of how much he liked them. I picked the second. I did because this novel the source matter for Jeanette's favourite film in the world. When I told her I was reading this, yes, she squeaked a bit.

3. It's very odd reading a story which you know so well in another form. It's unfair to the book, really. I knew what was coming from the off, and all the hints about unpleasantness flagged up early on...well, they screamed off the page like sirens. The book, therefore, seemed more pulpy than the film – but was it really? It was hard to distance myself from images I knew so well in my mind, and broach the characters without putting their words into the mouths of Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes.

4. The book is very faithful to the film in terms of dialogue. Reading it also made me appreciate how brilliant Ruth Gordon is as Minnie Castavet.  And the dialogue is bloody brilliant. It's so easy to get wrong, and sound clunky. But Levin is the master.

5. Roman Polanski's editing, I thought, made his version of the story more eerie. For instance, there's a lot more detail about Terry here, the houseguest of the Castavets, who – and this is no spoiler for those of you who haven't seen it – dies very early on. This made me wonder if books can't edit out details as much, and leave spaces in the story for us to fill in the blanks. Also, my favourite scene in the film (when Rosemary is on the phone in the phone booth to Dr Hill) didn't have my favourite detail in it in this original text: the sudden arrival of a man who stands in front of the phone booth, with his back to the camera, whose intentions aren't clear. It's a terrifying moment that wouldn't have worked in the book. It's made me "think" about the differences "between" different sorts of "text".


                                         

6. There's a bit in the book that didn't make the film about Rosemary going away for a few days to Hutch's cabin, near Brewster. I can see why this section didn't make Polanski's cut, but I really liked it. Levin goes into Rosemary's mind much more in this original story, properly exploring her internal battles about her relationship with her husband. He shows us how she craves independence, but how she feels she should trust people to look after her as that's what women 'should do'. He also shows her acknowledging, more deeply, the fact that he raped her, and how she goes against her better instincts throughout. The book feels much more like a text about feminism than the film, in some ways.

7. I loved how the political climate of the US was pushed a bit more in this book – it really feels like a story from the mid-60s, where the film doesn't as much. I also loved some of the details of Rosemary's earlier life, as a girl fresh to New York from the sticks, and how it gave her back story more depth...although this could also suggest that girls moving to the big city should beware, of course. Like me. Argh!

8.  I liked the eerieness of the inclusion of the papal visit to New York, although I thought the Catholicism sections were a bit too hammy. But Rosemary's dream of the nun early on, and the voices she actually hears...I wish I'd not seen the film at that point. The realisation of its significance later on would have been a "proper jaw-dropper".

9. The ending went on too long. Sorry, Ira. It also made me feel a bit uncomfortable that the idea that a mother's love overcomes everything. It doesn't always. So there. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

10. I really, really liked this book, despite the whole "I've seen the film already" mind-confusions, and I want to read more of Ira Levin now. Although Eamonn's advised me to "NOT read Son Of Rosemary. It will anger you." So I won't. But The Boys From Brazil, The Stepford Wives, A Kiss Before Dying...let me at you.

Week Fifteen - Jeanette

The Divine Comedy 1: Hell (c. 1314) by Dante

Recommended by Louise

‘I hope Thatcher rots in hell,’ is something I’ve heard, or read on the internet, a good few times this week.

When she was in office, people wished her expelled. When she was alive, people wished her dead. Now that she is dead, people wish her eternal torture. Hearing the concept of hell so frequently and fervently invoked helped me reflect on Dante’s epic poem (although it certainly didn’t help me to process my emotions about Thatcher). This week, at least, it seems post-Christian secular Britain is still willing to condemn a sinner to eternal damnation.

I think it’s Dante who is largely responsible for the tenacity of hell in popular culture. While I remember a bit of Satan-chatter in the New Testament, the place itself remained largely unexplored territory. It’s probably Revelation that comes closest, at least in terms of vivid imagery – and Revelation’s not about hell per se (let alone about any kind of narrative coherence). Yet Hell, in contrast to Revelation’s angry gibberish, makes a great deal of logical sense. Dante codifies and classifies hell, finds a place and an inventive method of torture for every kind of sin, and also allows its inhabitants to explain their actions and experiences. He makes hell easy to visualise, natural to fear, and tempting to want people you hate to end up there.

The story – the very deftly-paced story – of Hell is that Dante, aged thirty-five and spiritually adrift, is led by the Classical poet Virgil through the complicated (de)meritocracy of the damned. We gawp with Dante at sights such as he finds in the fifth circle (where the Wrathful dwell):

            At fisticuffs – not with fists alone, but with

            Their heads and heels, and with their bodies too,

            And tearing each other piecemeal with their teeth.

                                                                          (Canto VII, 112-14)

At its simplest level, Hell is a travelogue, a cheap holiday in other people’s misery.

But simplicity can’t be levelled at Dante for long. He didn’t write about hell to amuse or horrify with shocking descriptions. He didn’t even write to warn against straying from God. The Divine Comedy is ranked among the greatest achievements of all humankind because it is such a profoundly lyrical reflection on reason – and particularly on reason’s relationship with the soul, and then with that soul’s relationship with God. It was thus inevitable that Hell led me to slice open to my own innards: my morals, my relationships, my trespasses. Yes, Dante writes from within a Christian worldview, but I found Hell have intense resonance outside of it, too. Free will and consequence, the nature of spiritual fulfillment, the transience of life: they’re not questions we spend nearly enough time on these days.

Still, that’s not to say Hell is only that, either. Another reason Dante wrote was to comment on contemporary Italian politics and, it seems, air some grievances against people he didn’t like. Who wouldn’t? You’re writing about hell, chuck a few enemies into the pit. From what I gather about the Florentine situation of the time, it was a ridiculously complicated mix of petty family squabbles and genuine class struggle, elevated to murderous severity because of the power each faction wielded. The pope and the odd French monarch sticking their respective oars in didn’t help, either. Reading Hell in a week led to no more than a superficial consideration of all this, but one story particularly struck a chord, down in the ninth circle of hell in the region of Antenora, a place reserved for traitors to their country.

Here, we meet Count Ugolino, a double-dealer between the factions, who had been imprisoned on earth with his (innocent) sons. The confined Ugolino relates to Dante how he heard his cell door being nailed up; he then realised he and his sons would starve to death.

I gnawed at both my hands for misery;

And they, who thought it was for hunger plain

And simple, rose at once and said to me:

‘O Father, it will give us much less pain

If thou wilt feed on us; thy gift at birth

Was this sad flesh, strip thou it off again.’

                                                            (Canto XXXIII, 58-63)

Ugolino watches his sons die. He ends his tale by saying ‘famine did what sorrow could not do’. The commentary says this line is a reference to Ugolino’s death, but (thanks, Night Of The Living Dead) I think Ugolino meant that he ate his sons’ corpses. Who knows? Nevertheless, the sad story of Ugolino – where wrong begat wrong begat tragedy begat tragedy – is naught but frantic horror, whatever his region of hell, purgatory, paradise, or earth.

Contributing much to my enjoyment of Hell was Dorothy L. Sayers’s scholarly, and waspishly witty, commentary. Of an earlier Dante work (the Vita Nuova), she writes

If we only had that book to go upon, we might suppose that from his tenth to his twenty-fifth year [Dante] did nothing except circulate sonnets among the intelligentsia of Florence, and moon his tearful way from one emotional crisis to another.

Actually, I can imagine Dante’s recommender, Louise, saying something very similar. For Louise’s intellect is sharper than Sheffield steel. She and I have been acquaintances for a while, but I’d say it’s only really over the last year that we’ve become proper friends. Writing this now, I realise how little I actually know about her, but that’s okay; actually, it’s exciting, because I discover something new every time we meet (and it’s always something dead interesting, too). I do know that she has true personal grace, a strong backbone, and the gravitas of a Wilkie Collins heroine. It’s really not a surprise that’s she’s recommended me my most highbrow book to date.

Just as with Louise, there’s obviously a (hell of a) lot more to discover in The Divine Comedy. After all, it has inspired cultural heavyweights from Alfred, Lord Tennyson to Chris de Burgh (I’m assuming ‘Don’t Pay The Ferryman’ is about crossing the infernal river Acheron, rather than being a mandate to defraud P&O). So, I can think of little way to sum Hell up; it’s better to just quietly exit, murmuring the lines that made me clutch hands to face in awe.

            There the mere weeping will not let them weep,

            For grief, which finds no outlet at the eyes,

            Turns inward to make anguish drive more deep;

            For their first tears freeze to a lump of ice

            Which like a crystal mask fills all the space

            Beneath the brows and plugs the orifice.

                                                                        (Canto XXXIII, 94-9)