The Path to the Spiders’ nest – Italo Calvino

Another Eton mess. Sorry, cheap joke. This short novel by Calvino, his first, was written in 1946, almost immediately after the end of the Italian partisan war. It follows a young (adolescent?) boy, Pin, who gets involved almost by accident in the partisan campaign. Pin is wise beyond his years in some respects, an orphan (we presume, although this is not confirmed) brought up by his prostitute sister, but innocent and naïve in other ways, always searching for companionship and love. This edition of the novel includes an introduction, written later in the 1960’s, in which Calvino apologises for the story’s failings, including its “neo-realism”, and its sentimental ending.

Most of the action of the novel is shown through Pin’s eyes. He has a limited understanding of what he sees, and it is the gap between his relative innocence and the world going on with its business around him, that offers some the amusement of the novel. Don't get me wrong - this is not a novel of compic misunderstandings. While Pin is an innocent abroad, trying to survive among short-fused partisans living in the hills above the unnamed city, he is also very “street-wise”. At the same time he is also short-sighted – he steals a German soldier’s gun without giving any consideration to the likely consequences, for himself or his sister.

Although Pin carries most of the narrative focus of the novel, there is one chapter where the point of view switches to one of the partisan fighters - this chapter, and the switch in particular, jars and disrupts the overall flow of the narrative, simply to give a brief lecture on the politics of resistance. The novel also includes some heavy handed symbolism. A pet hawk has its neck wrung, which I wrongly thought might foretell Pin’s eventual demise. The hawk is a more flexible metaphor for innocence and liberty, killed in the bloody war it gets caught up in (you can see why I thought this might have meant Pin, who also carries a lot of symbolic weight on his young shoulders.) 

The introduction to the novel is in some ways more interesting than the novel itself. Calvino directly addresses the reader, and is very frank about the novel’s genesis and its weaknesses. He avoids the obvious explanation/excuse – he was a young writer just setting out to learnt his craft – and gives a series of false starts, interrupting himself and restarting each time with “This was my first novel...” Through this iterative process he comes to an acceptance that this novel is a very minor part of Italy’s literature of the war. He points out some interesting parallels – for example with Treasure Island. Treasure Island is a very simple children’s novel, with memorable but two-dimensional characters (with, arguably, the exception of the charismatic but evil Long John Silver) and has a young boy as its narrator, caught up in an adventure out of his control. So is this novel also a children’s story? And does that explain why it appears on the Eton list? Probably. Roald Dahl’s autobiographical “Boy” is often taught in state schools for the same reason – tell a child a tale about another child having adventures, and it will capture their attention in a way that other stories by the same author may not. This is one of the secrets behind the success of Harry Potter of course. It confirms my suspicion that the Eton list is not an aspirational piece of showing off, but more in the way of a light, unadventurous summer reading list that a bright 16 year old could probably run through in a couple of months.

And as for this novel? Well it won’t occupy you for long, and its weaknesses are capably pointed out by the author himself (although I would recommend you read the preface after the novel). It is an interesting tale of the partisan war in Italy, but other than that it is little more than a curiosity.

The Shadow of the Wind (2) – a note about some translation issues.

Occasionally when reading this novel I came across a few phrases that jarred, and sounded unnatural. I appreciate that translating is a very difficult process, capturing not just the sense of the original but the poetry, the complexity, and the idiomatic phrasing. I also recognise that any awkwardness of phrasing could be deliberate, to emphasis an aspect of a character’s nature for example. Having said all that, there were a few usages that felt just wrong.

Some examples:

“he had augured that in her lifetime she would behold the death of everything she loved.” (268)

To use “augur” as an active verb meaning to forecast, rather than to simply signify a future event, may not technically be incorrect, but it feels archaic.

“Look here, Merceditas, because I know you’re a good person (though a bit narrow minded and as ignorant as a brick)” (Fermin) page 159,

Translating idiom is fantastically difficult, I appreciate, but “ignorant as a brick” is not an expression I recognise, and the internet hasn’t been able to provide me with any examples. OK, this is Fermin speaking, and his language is colourful, but not deliberately awkward surely?

“The downpour slithered like melted wax” (314).

Slithered is another very active verb – snakes and worms slither. It implies sideways movement, at pace - but melted wax may move sideways, but always slowly.

“What blessed innocence, Daniel, You’d even believe in the tooth fairy. All right, just to give you an example: the tall tale about Miguel Moliner that Nuria Monfort landed on you. I think the wench told you more whoppers than the editorial page of L’Osseratore Romano.” (231)

Just how wooden is this? “Landed on you”? You don’t land a tall tale on someone. And “more whoppers than the editorial page of L’Osseratore Romana” is never going to catch on!

“if he could lie better, he wouldn’t be teaching algebra and Latin; he’d be in the bishopric by now, growing fat in an office like a cardinal’s and plunging soft sponge cakes in his coffee.” (Fermin) (231).

I’ve two issues with this sentence. Firstly, wouldn’t “growing fat in a cardinal’s office” be better? I appreciate “in a cardinal’s office” is different to “an office like a cardinal’s”, but the distinction is slight, and the sentence as written is ugly and confusing – on a first read I thought there was a missing word after “cardinal’s” (hat?). The other issue is with the verb choice. Plunging is not something one does with soft sponge cakes. It is a violent, vigourous movement; surely the right choice would be “dunking”. Now obviously I haven’t read the original Spanish, and there could possibly be a reason why the author wanted us to imagine this priest aggressively shoving his soft sponge cakes into his coffee, but I doubt it.

What does all this add up to? Is this just a massive exercise in pedantry? If these were the only examples, perhaps, but there was a woodenness through the novel that was hard to escape. I sometimes rather fancifully pictured the characters talking as if in a badly dubbed movie. It made the disappointing experience of reading the novel just that little bit worse.

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruix Zafon, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves

This is one of the novels included in the Eton headmaster’s list I wrote about earlier this month.

Let’s start with the nonsensical title, which sets the tone for the rest of the novel. The wind does not have a shadow. Perhaps I am being overly literal, or perhaps that is the point – the title being a euphemism for something that doesn’t exist. The title is also the name of the novel that is the subject matter of the story, a novel that is elusive and hard to pin down, like its author. So the title is, if I am being kind, an ironic, tongue in cheek, self-referential joke.

The same summary could be applied to the rest of the novel. It is written in high gothic style, reminiscent of the early 19^th century gothic, grand guiginol novel. When one of the characters tells one of the many tales within a tale that make up this novel, another character responses that “It had all the makings of a lurid melodrama. “(239). When I read that I felt like responding as another character did when yet another diversionary tale is being spun ““The abridged version…for goodness sake!” (253). There are scenes set in crypts, with mysterious, ghostly apparitions, sinister, spectral figures lurking in the gloom, and so on. (See chapter 34 for the height of this style). The principal plot follows a young man who comes across a novel (the eponymous Shadow of the Wind) by a mysterious writer, Julian Carax. The young man tries to track Carax down, following various clues, and passes through a maze of clues until finally, at the novel’s climax, Carax’s true identify is revealed.

It’s hard to take this melodrama seriously. It seems more in European taste (for example, The Name of the Rose” which is an obvious influence) but is very old-fashioned. The tendency for characters to monologue about their exotic past reminded me at points of the un-improvable scene in Austin Powers, where Dr Evil reminisces about his childhood.

“The details of my life are quite inconsequential... very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds- pretty standard really. At the age of twelve I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum... it's breath-taking- I highly suggest you try it.”

Compare this with:

“This dream was the first of many and they began with that mysterious fever, which some blamed on the sting of a huge red scorpion that appeared in the house one day and was never seen again, and others on the evil designs of a mad nun who crept into houses at night to poison children, and who, years later, was to be garrotted reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards with her eyes popping out of their sockets, while a red cloud spread over the town, discharging a storm of dead cockroaches” (268)

If you like this sort of thing, then obviously this is the sort of thing you will like. But is it well done? Are the characters convincing? Is the narrative compelling? Is this suitable reading for a well-read 16 year-old Etonian?

Well not really, no. The text is repetitive and over-written. There is little to admire in the writing by way of style, although I appreciate that could be in part a question of translation. The plot is ridiculous and predictable, and characters behave as they do without apparent motivation or sense. Women are reduced to cyphers – there isn’t a well developed female character in the book, and those that do appear are all generic and passive. Why this appeared on the Etonian reading list is more of a mystery than that unwound in this novel.

Redeeming features? Well the background was interesting. Post-Civil War Spain, where the fascists remain in control and the Secret Police can still make people disappear, where everyone has lost a family member or friend, was realistically drawn. But that’s largely it. This novel has huge numbers of five star reviews on Amazon, so I am obviously missing something.

This edition, published for the 10^th anniversary of the book’s original publication, contains at the end some “Book Club reading notes”. I doubt if the book was originally written for this market, but there is a childishness, a paradoxical lack of complexity in the characterisation and plot (which for all its detail and length is actually fairly straightforward; all is revealed in a very linear way with the minimum amount of effort from the investigators, and carefully laid out in well preserved diaries and notes when required) which makes this suitable book club material, as well as justifying its inclusion in the Eton "What every 16 year old boy should have read" list.

Reading at Eton

I've written about competitive reading lists a couple of years ago. That sport has been given a new tweak by the retiring headmaster of Eton, who in addiiton to a long list of books on subjects other than literature, has said that by the age of 16 he would expect on of his students to have read the following:

Gulliver's Travels - Swift
David Copperfield - Dickens
The Age of Innocence - Wharton
Atonement - Amis
Never let me go - Ishiguro
The Bonfire of the Vanities - Wolfe
L'elegance du herrison
La sombra del viento
The Master and Margarita
O Crime de Padre Amaro
Boiled Wonderland and the end of the world

Tschick Wolfgang Herrndorf
Nest of Spiders Calvino
Father Amaro de Queiros
Wolf Totem Jiang Rong
Beirut 39 Shimon and Al-Shaykh

There are some striking features of this list - the emphasis on foreign literature compared to English; the neglect of women writers, the focus on the novel to the exclusion of all other forms of literature (Shakespeare, anyone?) and so on. But apart from all this fairly predictable nonsense, something slightly more insidious occurs to me - with some honorable exceptions there's little here that is genuinely stretching. There are also some deliberately obscure texts - Wolf Totem for example is virtually impossible to find in bookshops (I have tried) and has no reviews on Amazon (compared for example to the 800+ for the Shadow of the Wind). I strongly suspect there is some deliberate obscurantism going on here.

Categorising books

Some book bloggers award the books they review marks out of five or ten. Others use a star system. I've always resisted doing this - it seems a bit simplistic - but having racked up a hundred or so reviews I think I have developed a scoring system of my own. It goes a bit like this:

• Brilliant. A classic. Will be read for many decades to come. I don't think any of the books I have read this year fall into this category,but of course some of the "interesting but flawed" books might get promoted after a few years.
• Interesting but flawed. Quite a few of the books I have read and reviewed this year fall into this category, including Will Self's "The Book of Dave", Richard Flanagan's "The Narrow Road to the deep North" and David Mitchell's "The 1000 Autumns of Jacob de Zoet". These are all books that have something interesting to say, and try and look at the art of novel writing with a fresh perspective, but at the same time have weaknesses that are hard to overlook. Over time some of these weaknesses fade, and the reader comes to appreciate the strengths even more. This has happened to me (to a certain extent) with J K Rowling's "The Casual Vacancy", where a bit of perspective has allowed me to appreciate what she was trying to do, and forgive some of the crasser aspects of the novel.
• A dropped ball. A bad book by a good author. For example "Children Act", Ian McEwan; McEwan doesn't stop being a great author by writing a disappointing book, but it's still a disappointing book
• Lionel Asbo. A book with no redeeming features whatsoever - "Lionel Asbo" is the only book in this category, but it deserves one of its own just to emphasise its awfulness
• Why? Books that leave me puzzled as to why the author bothered writing them. Books usually go into this category shortly after I finish them, but often don't stay there, as I slowly (or otherwise) make my mind up about them.
• Dialling it in. A mediocre book by an author who has proven that he or she can write so much better, and where the unavoidable suspicion lingers that the author wasn't trying that hard, or had other things on their mind, such as a possible TV/film adaptation - examples include "How to Build a Girl", Caitlin Moran, "The Black-eyed Blonde" Benjamin Black.
• A guilty pleasure. Books that I ought to be embarassed to enjoy, but which I nevertheless did. Terry Pratchett's work used to be in this category, until I was joined by other adult readers.
• Irritating. "Moab is my Washpot" annoyed me immensely.

More useful than stars or marks out of ten?

The Last Days of Adolf Hitler - Hugh Trevor Roper

Probably the last thing the world needs is another book about the Nazis, but I bought this (second hand) at the same time as the Bullock biography, read it, and it seems daft not to review it for risk of repetition. It does overlap with the later chapters of the Bullock book to some extent, and indeed is cited in it, but is quite distinct in other respects.

This book was originally commissioned as an investigation into (you guessed it) the last days of Adolf, specifically to address the rumours that he had escaped Berlin and was lurking somewhere in South America. The absence of a body, and the Russian refusal to clarify some of the confusion around his last days, fuelled this speculation. Trevor Roper puts this all neatly to bed, and while conspiracy theories linger to this day, unsurprisingly, they have never had the potency one might expect given Hitler's status as the ultimate bogey-man.

To pad things out a little, the book opens with a summary of Hitler's court, describing the principal characters and the bizarre wider cast of astrologers, masseurs, vegetarian chefs and the like. This is reasonably standard stuff, but where this book really takes off is in the almost minute by minute account of the last days of the Third Reich. I couldn't avoid speculating how the British Government might have ended had things gone badly in 1941. Hitler's choices once again seem hard to fathom. if he wanted to fight to the bitter end, why not leave Berlin, join some of the surviving German forces, which remained considerable, and fight on? Instead he holed up in a city destined to be taken by the Russians, and then killed himself rather than being captured.

As a reference work this is second to none. As a read it is well-written and relatively short. If you want to know about Hitler's last days there are probably more up to date accounts available, as well as plenty of documentaries and the like, but nevertheless I am quite happy to have added this to my collection.

A bit more about "A Spot of Bother"

The primary character in Mark Haddon's "A Spot of Bother", Douglas Hall, is 57. Much of the "humour" of the novel derives from his unhinged behaviour as he suffers from a nervous breakdown/depressive episode. I wrote yesterday about how this is in poor taste, as is the humour wrung from people's shock horror reaction to a gay couple kissing. The novel is less than ten years old, but it had more of a 70's sitcom feel to it in these passages. But what I wanted to write about in a bit more detail here is the portrayal of Douglas. Haddon tells us he is 57, but then writes him at least ten years older. He is retired, which of course is eminently possible at 57, but he has pretty much given up on life. He potters around, building a shed, watching videos and taking an interest in bird spotting. He finds the modern world confusing and challenging, and when he has sex with his wife it takes them both by surprise.

57 isn't old.

Why does this matter? Because when the central character is unrealistic, hard to like but also hard to believe in, the whole book suffers. Without a convincing portrayal in this role the rest of the characters struggle. Some are better than others - the daughter Katie for example is well drawn, and the wife, Jean, with her badly kept secret affair was also believeable. But given the caricature that is Douglas and Jean's son Jamie, I wasn't convinced Haddon had ever met a gay man.

Of course, having written the above I then checked the Internet (does it age me that I still capitalise Internet?  Of course it does) expecting to find out that Haddon was gay, but it appears not. Interestingly I found some confirmation of my observations about reviewers - so for example the Sydney Morning Herald said "while the characterisation can't be faulted, A Spot of Bother fails to fulfil its early promise. What initially shapes up as a disquietingly soft stab in the human heart turns obvious and formulaic. Haddon's examination of the contours of love is forensic in its insight but a sentimental undertow proves too alluring to resist" and the Guardian said "it never tries to be much more than good jokes or funny situations....readers could be forgiven for wanting - and expecting - more." Selectively quoting reviewers to support your position is cheating, and I rarely do it, but there was something about the half hearted quotes on the cover that led me to suspect my feelings were shared.

In his earlier career Haddon wrote exclusively for children. The migration from that to adult novels obviously isn't easy, and some of the weaknesses of this novel could be seen as deriving from the habits of writing for children - the cheap laughs, the weakly drawn characters, the tendency towards slapstick. So perhaps rather than seeing this as a follow up novel to "A Curious Incident" it is better thought of as a transition novel from writing for kids to writing for adults?

A Spot of Bother – Mark Haddon

This was Haddon’s second novel, published in 2006 after his hugely successful “A Curious Incident”. I have reviewed his third novel, “The Red House” on this blog previously, and was optimistic that this would be equally readable. Largely it was – the very short chapters and frequent changes of narrative perspective meant the pages passed quickly, and I finished the near 500 pages in a couple of days. This would normally an indication that the novel was well written and enjoyable, but I finished this with a vague feeling that something wasn’t quite right. What could it be?

Well, to start with, there’s that awful title, a cheesy pun (the principal character has a spot which he thinks is cancerous, and which triggers a series depressive episode) reminiscent of a Norman Wisdom film or episode of Some Mothers (“Betty, I’m having a spot of bother”). The author avoids putting much effort into giving the characters a back story, which is sketched in very faintly, simply by making occasional reference to “that time the dog got run over in Rhyl” or “the time we crashed the mini in Copenhagen” (made up examples, but you get the idea). I flicked through the book at random and picked out these examples (not made up this time) and realised that Haddon uses this technique a lot more than I thought:

“several years ago when he had fallen from a stepladder, broken his elbow on the rockery, and passed out, a sensation which he remembered as being not unpleasant (a view from the Tamar bridge in Plymouth had featured prominently for some reason)” (page 1

“He had not felt like this since John Zinewski’s Fireball had capsized several years ago and he had found himself trapped underwater with his ankle knotted in a loop of rope.” (2)

“Betty’s brother, the one who died in that horrible factory accident, had made a hat out of a napkin.” (52)

“”Got pulled over by police on the M5 once…wingwalking on a Volvo roofrack”” (66)

“Coming home from university… spilling that paint over the cat, losing her passport in Malta.” (233)

And so relentlessly on. All families have disaster stories, enhanced over time, which cumulatively build the family history. They are important. But a novelist needs surely to make more of them than this. At first I thought we would get round to visiting these incidents and finding in them the key to the principal characters various neuroses – there has to be a reason why a bit of eczema causes George to have a full-blown nervous breakdown – but it never happens. I don’t mind doing a bit of work to fill in gaps left by an author, but this was too much – the characters were cut-outs who behaved as they did for no apparent reason, take it or leave it.

There is an attempt at farce here, reminiscent of Tom Sharpe. People mix anti-depressants and alcohol with inevitable results, dog poo is trodden in, a toddler’s toy is tripped over, a gay couple kiss and outrage the religious aunt and uncle, and so on. The wedding, which is the drawn-out climax of the novel ends in a fight, sex, and tears, as we always knew it would.

Being charitable, I prefer to think of this novel as a dry run for the much more controlled “Red House”.

PS: like most contemporary novels the cover and back cover are covered in quotes from reviewers. You get the sense that my luke-warm response was shared – the Guardian described the book as “readable” and “brisk”, the Telegraph “entertaining” and the Sunday Times “crisp, light” (like a white wine?). Damned with faint praise.

 

 

Us - David Nicholls

David Nicholls's previous two novels, "Starter for Ten" and "One Day" have both been made into moderately successful films, so I don't think it is being overly cynical to conclude that the setting for this novel - a series of European capitals and art galleries - was at least in part influenced by the author's anticipation of sealing another film deal. Once you open with that cynicism, it is hard to stop. But I think you should. OK, the chapters are all extremely short, designed I suspect for the attention deficient, but the principal character, Douglas, who is also our narrator, is not an endearing character. He is a bore, and a bit of a bully. He is inattentive towards his wife, and positively negligent of his 17 year old son. He knows he has traded up in marrying his artistic wife, and never overcomes that expectation that sooner or later she is going to realise it too.

And so it comes to pass, when shortly before their son leaves for university, and it is suggested, for good, his wife announces apropos of nothing, that she wants to leave him. In a desperate, if photogenic, attempt to save his marriage he takes her on the tour mentioned above, although for reasons hard to imagine he thinks it is a good idea to take their son as well. The tour goes badly from the off, and never recovers.

I thought I knew how this novel would end, long before it did, and I was wrong. Nicholls avoids the cliched happy ending, and quite possibly forfeits the film deal I cynically accused him of engineering earlier. (Although if it does translate to film then they will probably rewrite the ending.)

This is pretty undemanding stuff, not quite chick-lit (or whatever the male equivalent is) but not many steps up either. Nicholls writes quite slowly, so I won't have to make the decision as to whether to bother with his next novel for a while yet, but if I had to make it today I'd look for something a bit more challenging.