This one was not for me. After a while I found myself skim skim skimming to see if there would ever come a time when Caroline Fraser would stop with tThis one was not for me. After a while I found myself skim skim skimming to see if there would ever come a time when Caroline Fraser would stop with this dense thickety intertwining of murder, memoir, industrial history and her incessant Theory of Lead And Arsenic Poisoning, which is, that it infects the brains of certain men and helps to turn them into serial killers, and since the North West of the USA was awash with the stuff in the 60s to 80s, this accounts for the extraordinary number of serial killers operating in that part of the world, in that time.. And for all I know that might be true but the Big Theory was hammered so much it was a case of enough with the lead poisoning, alright, I believe you, stop….
Other factors were in play, of course. The liberalisation of ordinary social behaviour gave these horrible men a limitless supply of victims – hitch-hikers, sex workers, free spirited young people out past their bedtimes.
And the lack of the Big Three innovations in detection which have shut down contemporary would-be serial killers : CCTV, mobile phones and their attendant cell towers (ever vigilant, ever smiling) and of course DNA DNA DNA.
You don’t have to write true crime books in a plain no-frills just-the-facts style – others that don’t include As If by Blake Morrison, Ghettoside by Jill Leovy, Going Postal by Mark Ames and the amazing Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burns. I see most of the reviews of Murderland love it, so you may too, but I didn’t.
Three stars for the obvious enormous work that went into this big book....more
I know, what was I thinking, this dense 600 page history of the popes was going to be a ripsnorting laughaminute festival of fun? Well, kind of. BecauI know, what was I thinking, this dense 600 page history of the popes was going to be a ripsnorting laughaminute festival of fun? Well, kind of. Because you have to admit that the popes were throughout all of the turbulent history of Europe in the thick of it. For instance, for many years there were two of them, a pope and an antipope, both slagging each other off and excommunicating each other. That’s entertaining, surely? It would be like two Taylor Swifts each claiming to be the real Taylor Swift and each going on a world tour to prove it. Then there was the big knockdown dragouts with the Eastern Orthodox mob and the Protestants – the gangs of Christianity. Bound to be some strong street fighting action ! And there was, too.
But well, none of it really came to life, not like, say, I Claudius. I think if you took all the material in this worthy book and gave it to some screenwriters and then HBO made a 12 part Popes drama then suddenly it would spring to life and we would all be goggling at those devilish Arians and their vile idea that since the Father begat the Son then the Son had a beginning of existence and hence there was a time when the Son was not; and we would be binge watching furiously to find out of they really did elect a female pope who (oopsy!) gave birth to a baby one day whilst mounting a horse; and there would be great scenes where Galileo and Pope Paul V had a tremendous staredown about heliocentricity, and there would be some wicked crosscutting between Pope Leo X and his crew selling indulgences and Martin Luther banging up his 95 Theses on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg – there’s loads of drama in all of this.
But not in this (worthy) book. Eventually it became an unending parade of names and events and it was like watching an ants’ nest from a long way away, you just couldn’t tell one ant from another.
Note : indulgences were certificates that a particular sin had been forgiven - so, you paid your ducats and you got a certificate saying that you didn't have to spend 15000 years in purgatory for accidentally murdering your brother. You were forgiven. It turns out that the system was expanded, due to its popularity, and they started selling indulgences for future sins too. So you might think you could accidentally commit adultery at some point in the future. Maybe you were thinking about your new sexy neighbour. No problem, you could buy an indulgence for that too....more
If you’re increasingly reluctant to pick up the novel you’re currently reading, and displacement activity like ironing shirts and replacing cat litterIf you’re increasingly reluctant to pick up the novel you’re currently reading, and displacement activity like ironing shirts and replacing cat litter seem more attractive, it’s a sure sign you should ditch and move on, even though the good angel of literature on your right shoulder is muttering You Know You Love Charles Portis, Just Finish This One And You’ll Have Read Everything By Him, That Wonderful Feeling Of Completism, Bliss, Sunny Uplands…
But it was dull, and there were a thousand Spanish words sprinkled like hojas in otono, and the main character, the American living a lowly life in Mexico amongst the Mexicans, is one we have seen too many times before
Instead of this I recommend watching Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Or reading any one of Charles Portis’ other novels which are all great.
If Luigi Pirandello's other novels are all as irritating as this one I'm surprised he made it to the age of 69. If Luigi Pirandello's other novels are all as irritating as this one I'm surprised he made it to the age of 69. ...more
What’s this you’re telling me? You’re dead? When did this happen? Was it before or after we got married?
I’ve been meaning to tell you… it was before… What’s this you’re telling me? You’re dead? When did this happen? Was it before or after we got married?
I’ve been meaning to tell you… it was before… sorry….
Well we better get you to one of those cryogenic places fast!
Nah, wait till we get to 1939 and I’ll be fine…
But.. but it’s 1992! See? (Points to a calendar.)
Calendar : Hey buddy, that’ll be 15 cents before you can look.
Well of course it’s 1992, silly, but we’re all going back to 1939.
Winston Churchill : We shall wait for you on the beaches, we shall wait for you in the fields.
What do you mean all of us?
The whole world! We’re all moving back in time! Didn’t you notice that eggs are a lot cheaper and the movies are getting better?
But… but… this makes no sense at all!
Wait, I didn’t tell you the best bit. Because I am a precog I foresaw that this would be one of those annoying spoof reviews so I changed the past… it will now be a glowing 5 star rave!
15 bucketfuls of brand names from the 1990s, mostly of sweeties and clothes
5 gallons of Scottish slang – sounds like a lRECIPE FOR ONLY HERE, ONLY NOW
15 bucketfuls of brand names from the 1990s, mostly of sweeties and clothes
5 gallons of Scottish slang – sounds like a lot but it isn’t. (Trainspotting – now that’s a lot. )
Stir in three or four stock characters – the ever optimistic workingclass mum; her feisty has-a-lot-to-cope-with Cora, the daughter; the thieving one eyed but basically decent step-dad, etc
Whisk in some dreams that don’t come true and some that do bittersweetly
Add one tragedy
Namedrops of 90s bands and records sprinkled in to taste
Bake with a chippy attitude and a heartful of hope
**
There was too much Shuggie Bain and The Death of Bees about this book. Everyone rattles on about the author’s grand sparkling new voice but it sounded like a BBC Radio 4 play to me and that is not a recommendation. I'd heard this rueful comical voice a thousand times before. I know a grown man writing as a 14 (through to 18) year old girl is a tough feat of ventriloquism but I didn’t believe the voice of Cora. She was too observant, too street-poetical, too cutesyquirky -
I pulled away from him and sooked up a string of slavers and tried to stop the blubbering. My face was roasty and damp.
I loved early mornings, when the moon was still about. It was a wee wet loo-roll moon up there, hardly seeable – like a finger smear on glass. You just wanted to reach up and squeak-squeak it away with your jumper cuff like
And much else in this manner. At page 127 I couldn’t take anymore. I wished Cora well and tiptoed away....more
The Alps and Himalayas of classical music have loomed over popular music so long I almost stopped feeling guilty that I never listen to the stuff. ButThe Alps and Himalayas of classical music have loomed over popular music so long I almost stopped feeling guilty that I never listen to the stuff. But when this friendly looking guide swam towards my plankton-munching maw I became intrigued. It glittered coyly – one classical music piece per day for a year, cmon, how hard could that be? What could possibly go wrong?
There were two main things that went wrong. One, the writing about the music, and two, the music. I will take them in reverse order.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH CLASSICAL MUSIC
I do love some of it, sure, the easy peasy stuff, the Brandenburg Concertos, Ravel, Planets Suite, Lark Ascending, you know, the usual suspects. But when you want to plunge out further from the shore you need someone like Clemency Burton-Hill to hand you the snorkel and flippers. But what do we find?
- It’s all in a foreign language, German and Italian a lot of the time, the English language is left far behind. I lose my bearings. And all that In D Major, in E flat, allegrettos and maetosos and what all. - It’s 90% instrumental - When they sing they sing in those ghastly “trained” voices which sound like they have been taught to exclude all recognisable aspects of normal human singing and to pretend that the microphone was never invented and they are singing to an audience of ten thousand all of which are hard of hearing; and it goes without saying never sing in English, I mean, who would do that. - When they do leave off their symphonies and sing an individual 3 or 4 minute song they have titles like What a Frozen Little Hand, The Flower that you Threw To Me or The Drunkard in Spring which I might guess do not resonate with modern audiences so much. - It’s all so complex and dense, it’s all so obviously superior in every way to anything I happen to enjoy that I start off feeling already like a little mouse who has wandered by accident into Chartres Cathedral. Eek!
WHAT’S WRONG WITH YEAR OF WONDER
With the best of intentions Clemency sets my teeth on edge on every other page with her chummy toe-curling bonhomie, a dreadful case of trying to turn the kids on to Beethoven by talking their language :
Bach was the daddy, without him there’d be no jazz, funk or hip-hop, no techno, no house, no grime
Puccini, by the way, was a bit of a hit factory
[Talking about Handel in the Strand by Percy Grainger] It’s not going to change the world, but I do find it cheering when it accompanies me on any number of domestic tasks – emptying the dishwasher, putting on a load of laundry, sorting the bins, etc
Wagner, not exactly one to love-bomb his fellow composers
[Talking about Symphony No 9 by Bruckner] Grab a glass of something, run a bath and lock yourself in; stick an eye-mask on and close the bedroom door; download it on to your phone and take a walk; hell, wait until you’re on a train commute
Really, it’s all a bit cringey. It’s not all like that but a little too much of it is. The rest of CBH’s commentary is potted biography and bugeyed breathless enthusiasm. She really really means well.
IF YOU DO GIVE THIS BOOK A TRY YOU WILL BE GLAD TO KNOW THAT SOMEONE HAS ALREADY DONE THE WORK FOR YOU
A big hand for the person who probably painstakingly put together ALL the pieces in this book IN ORDER as a single playlist on Youtube. It was entirely my fault that after about sixty of them they started going in one ear and out the other.
I think I’m just a hopeless lowbrow. For the time being I think I’ll stick to Can I Walk You Home by The Velours, A Thousand Stars by Kathy Young and the Innocents and Sleep Walk by Santo and Johnny. That’s classical enough for me.
I am gloomy as I write this review because I appreciate the effort, high spirits and enthusiasm that created such a grand looking volume. The whole thI am gloomy as I write this review because I appreciate the effort, high spirits and enthusiasm that created such a grand looking volume. The whole thing took a year and was cooked up by CriminOlly, the ever affable Booktuber (in the UK), and author & Booktuber Troy Tradup (in the USA I think). I don’t wanna trash their trash! I really wanted to love this.
But.
Announcing that your book is trash is kind of like saying that your book is an unfunny comedy. Hmmm, why, then, would I read it? Well it must be that the Awesome Trash in this big anthology of 34 all-new stories is the fun, excellent, gobsmacking kind of trash that some bottom-feeding readers would hurtle towards with expressions of murderous glee.
Unfortunately as I read up to page 145 and then stopped, the glee kept draining away along with my will to live. I had to conclude, very sadly, that this trash was not awesome. It was trash. That part of the description is accurate. I think the phrase so-bad-it's-good might be used here, but no, they weren't.
One after another, these brief, rabidly overwritten tales deal in the gruesome fates of horrible people, random supernatural outbursts, violence that ends ironically, and I thought – I am getting a case of déjà vu here. And not in a good way. And it came to me :
[image]
Yes, all this stuff used to turn up in the Pan Book of Horror Stories, a series that damaged my psychology as a weedy adolescent. Now The Pan Books started really well, for ten years they were truly trashily awesome, but then they then went down down downhill faster than a slalom skiier, and even though they were slender volumes, the editor appeared to be collecting many barrels to scrape for the stories he allowed into print. Garbology is just like stories from the last ten years of the Pan Books.
So… I would like to give 5 stars for the whole enterprise, from booktubing to creating a handsome physical whopping anthology, it’s a great thing to have done.
Two stars for the content though, and I am being generous....more
Since I’m a biography fan and I have something of an obsession with very long books, and I love short stories, a 750 page biography of John Cheever seSince I’m a biography fan and I have something of an obsession with very long books, and I love short stories, a 750 page biography of John Cheever seems guarandamnteed to please, especially one that comes garlanded with such blurby burbling as
Quite simply, the best example of literary biography I’ve ever read (Entertainment Weekly)
and
The most exquisite, compelling and heartbreaking life I’ve yet encountered (T C Boyle)
And plus, I already knew that John Cheever had a tortured unhappy life, as all great artists should have…. so, in the words of one of our greatest contemporary philosophers, what could possibly go wrong?
(Note : I’m leaving aside the not small matter of the author and the swirl of accusations made against him. This is not about him, this is about his book.)
You can see inside this book there is an excellent one trying to get out, but suffocating vines and creepers and clinging ivy wholly entangles it, it can hardly be seen, it’s lost, and there’s one single reason for this sclerotic tangle.
John Cheever kept a journal all his life – it ran to 4000 typed single spaced pages – and Blake Bailey was one of only allegedly ten people who read it all. What is the result? Enraptured by this ultimate source of pure Cheever anguished selfreflective gold, he extracts every last possible detail from every one of the 4000 pages and submerges his book in a billion boring tedious details, usually about (not particularly) quirky friends of the Cheevers, or about the many fab get-togethers at somebody’s mansion, or about enraptured months at a writers’ retreat, or about drinking, drinking and more drinking.
I stopped reading three biographies before this one because I hated the person so much (William Burroughs and Patricia Highsmith; and because I just got tired of Anais Nin). This time I liked what I could see of Cheever but I hated the biography. The fans of this book have way more tolerance than me for an ocean of headachy banal detail about John Cheever’s many interchangeable friends and acquaintances and their many apartments in New York and the many many parties they had and the un-naughty things that may have gone on. I’ll stick to the stories. Real life sucks. I always knew it did....more
amateurish, moronic, thoughtless, sadistic, repetitive schlock with no redeeming value whatsoever. What enjoyment there isFrom Too Much Horror blog :
amateurish, moronic, thoughtless, sadistic, repetitive schlock with no redeeming value whatsoever. What enjoyment there is comes in the form of disbelief. You'll be amazed at the lack of any attempt at realism in any aspect. You'll be astounded at the depraved depths to which the author can descend!
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
I only just heard about this 1977 lunatic horror novel and it sounded like fun, so I thought I’d get a nice cheap sleazy looking hopefully stained copy and read it, but I couldn’t because it’s out of print and people are charging CRAZY SKY HIGH prices. But then I found that some kindly soul had done an audio book of it and put the whole thing on Youtube! Problem solved.
PRAYING MANTISES! THOUSANDS OF THEM! THE SIZE OF A MAN!
So here is a short summary of a book you will probably not read.
A man in a boat off a Columbian island observes an earthquake followed by a tsunami. Back on land he then can’t but notice that thousands of giant praying mantises are pouring forth from fissures in the very ground caused by the earthquake. And they are so hungry. So they are eating people.
Our hero is called Dyke and is 25 years old and he has an alarming back story. It seems he has been roaming the world committing all kinds of crimes, torturing people and so forth. He is no boy scout. And he had a disagreement with four of his shady chums and they beat him soundly and he was “robbed of his manhood” eleven years ago. Since then life has lost some of its sparkle. But now, Dyke feels excited and happy again, watching the mantises eat people. One of them even eats his only friend in Colombia – slowly! And it gets his juices flowing! So he decides to become King of the Mantises. That will show everybody.
He lures a mantis by offering it frozen sheep from his extraordinarily large boat refrigerator, then he captures it by using a steel reinforced net which he always carries because he is a tough hunter of wild beasts even though now he is without his manhood.
Dyke’s eyes had a molten steel stare that used to knuckle victims to their knees. His eyes compensate for the zigzag of awful scars all over his face and body. He had jet black shoulder length hair. "But he was a eunuch now. He could never marry". Not even a mantis. We will come to that sad episode.
THEY WERE A DEATH DEALING MANHOOD DESTROYING BOY BAND.
In a flashback we learn that the leader of this boy band was a boy who did not know what kindness was. Ryan Gout was the leader but Pete Stuart was the meanest, he gouged out people’s eyes and his favourite hobby was maiming children just for fun. He would laugh as he did so.
The gang was tired of kicking out old ladies’ brains for fifty dollars. They wanted to steal a million dollars. Pete says he has a bottle of nitro so they can blow a safe. And he knows where one is. So off they go, to Old Man Shield’s place. Whoever he is. They’re going to ring his doorbell, roll him around on the ground and knife him a little. So they do all that and chop up the old man. There is a lot of chopping, two or three pages. “Zeb’s blood red knife followed Pete’s into the heart section.” The old geezer is well dead “yet the boys cut on”.
So they blow up the old geezer’s safe and find a fortune in dollar bills.
After some post-robbery contemplation Dyke decides to rob all the loot for himself. Unfortunately he is discovered by the gang who whip out their flick knives and begin slicing with glee. “I’ll pull his socks off so we can get at his toes”. But it’s not his toes Dyke worries about.
“No don’t cut me there, cut me anywhere, but leave me that!” he whimpers.
But they do cut him there and leave him to die like a dog in the desert.
But luckily some local vaqueros rescue him and patch him up, including blood transfusions.
I’LL CALL HIM SLAYER
I’ll teach this mantis who he is and to come when I call.. I’ll call him Slayer!
Dyke trains Slayer. He figures that it will take two months to fully train him, and also to make “some kind of potion” that will stop Slayer or any other mantis from eating him. At this point Dyke catches a local man stealing from his store of food. He feeds him to Slayer. Ten page description of the ensuing meal. Slayer loves eating people alive, what’s the fun in eating dead people right? And Dyke gets his jollies watching Slayer. It’s a match made in heaven. Dyke wonders what it would be like to be eaten by Slayer – for a long time. “His own death would not exhilarate him".
Dyke makes his repellent potion. Pages about this. Finally, after a long process in which an anteater dies, he smears his arm with this horrible stuff and forces his feet to walk to Slayer’s cage, thinking “What if Slayer bites off my arm and chews it up before my eyes?... I wonder what it’s like watching a beast eat part of your body while you are helpless to prevent the gruesome snack?”
I’m sure we all wonder that from time to time.
“As the mantis stopped to catch his breath” …. Wait a minute, even I know that insects don’t have lungs…. Oh anyway, this is nitpicking…. Dyke muses :
I think I could see Slayer swim in a sea of blood and I could swim in it with him, especially if it was the blood of people, of men, of the four men I hate with all my guts. An ocean of blood wouldn’t sicken me… I could spend my whole life seeing him eat men alive…
Enough! I think I can see where this is going. There will be pages about Slayer eating people and Dyke enjoying it. He will track down the boy band and Slayer will eat them one by one with mean Pete left till last. And finally the potion will wear off and Slayer will eat Dyke. If anybody finished this astonishingly ridiculous novel, written in the same English language that Henry James used to write The Golden Bowl, then maybe they will let me know.
I will never look at a six feet tall praying mantis in the same way again....more
Back in the early 19th century the idea was to bung as many clauses as possible into your sentences – if you could interrupt yourself twelve times befBack in the early 19th century the idea was to bung as many clauses as possible into your sentences – if you could interrupt yourself twelve times before the full stop, that was style. Mostly I enjoy the sclerosis of early Victorian prose, it’s like wading through barb-wired treacle but you knew what you were in for and like spelunking it can be an invigorating challenge.
But Nathaniel Hawthorne - really, this guy is too much. Here he is talking about a little kid who’s already bought some gingerbread from the shop and now he’s returned :
Phœbe, on entering the shop, beheld there the already familiar face of the little devourer—if we can reckon his mighty deeds aright—of Jim Crow, the elephant, the camel, the dromedaries, and the locomotive. Having expended his private fortune, on the two preceding days, in the purchase of the above unheard-of luxuries, the young gentleman’s present errand was on the part of his mother, in quest of three eggs and half a pound of raisins.
This is sickly simpering stuff indeed. “The little devourer”….”his mighty deeds”…”his private fortune”…”unheard-of luxuries”… he is beating this spoofiness to death, it dies horribly long before he gets to the half pound of raisins. He thinks he’s being kindly-funny when he’s being revolting. Well, of course, that was the taste in polite humour back then – patronising little children mercilessly. And he doesn’t stop laying it on with a trowel :
These articles Phœbe accordingly supplied, and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him.
We are taking the whole first page of chapter 8 to hack through all this arch blathering about a gingerbread whale and the fun stuff about Jonah and the red pathway. And he will not stop wringing every last morsel of hilarity from the small boy.
This remarkable urchin, in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, both in respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because he, as well as Time, after ingulfing thus much of creation, looked almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made.
Finally the kid leaves – phew, maybe we can get back on track now.
As the child went down the steps, a gentleman ascended them, and made his entrance into the shop.
Okay – a new character. Ah, wait – in 1850 that meant that you had to spend a page describing what he’s wearing because no one in those days knew what anything looked like.
It was the portly, and, had it possessed the advantage of a little more height, would have been the stately figure of a man considerably in the decline of life, dressed in a black suit of some thin stuff, resembling broadcloth as closely as possible. A gold-headed cane, of rare Oriental wood, added materially to the high respectability of his aspect, as did also a neckcloth of the utmost snowy purity, and the conscientious polish of his boots. His dark, square countenance, with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows, was naturally impressive, and would, perhaps, have been rather stern, had not the gentleman considerately taken upon himself to mitigate the harsh effect by a look of exceeding good-humor and benevolence. Owing, however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about the lower region of his face, the look was, perhaps, unctuous rather than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshly effulgence, not altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be. A susceptible observer, at any rate, might have regarded it as affording very little evidence of the general benignity of soul whereof it purported to be the outward reflection. And if the observer chanced to be ill-natured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably suspect that the smile on the gentleman’s face was a good deal akin to the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his boot-black, respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and preserve them.
My dear fellow goodreaders, this was page 116 and I could take it no more. Congratulations to the steelier readers who finished this novel with their sanity intact. I decamped for the austere pages of Wikipedia where I read the Plot Summary. And ugh, what thin gruel it was. All that for this?
The DNFs come thick and fast. Will I actually finish a novel this year?
And you may find yourself reading a really pretentious book about Talking Heads And you may ask yourself- well...How did I get here? And you may ask youAnd you may find yourself reading a really pretentious book about Talking Heads And you may ask yourself- well...How did I get here? And you may ask yourself Where is that good book about Talking Heads that I wanted to read? And you may tell yourself This is isn’t it!
And you may ask yourself What is all this nonsense? And you may ask yourself Who thought this was worth publishing? And you may ask yourself Am I right?...Am I wrong? And you may tell yourself I’m right!
And you may hear the voice of Jonathan Lethem saying MY GOD!...WHAT HAVE I DONE?...more
The blurb says that the nasty old spinster Cousin Bette goes on a mission to destroy her supercilious condescending family, so I though well, that souThe blurb says that the nasty old spinster Cousin Bette goes on a mission to destroy her supercilious condescending family, so I though well, that sounds fun!
It also says “Cousin Bette is a book in which Balzac is most characteristically and triumphantly himself”. That turned out to be not so much fun because Balzac is an insufferable know it all who obsesses about a) people’s income; b) married men spending fortunes on their various mistresses, some of whom are more than somewhat young looking; and c) the quality of interior furnishing. Well you might say this applies to most authors – they are knowitalls about the world they’re writing about, and they do love to describe rooms and furniture, especially in the olden days because due to a lack of tv nobody knew what anything looked like.
When I checked my review of the only other Balzac I read – Old Goriot – I see it began very badly and tediously and then warmed up and I liked it in the end. But after dozens and dozens of pages of Cousin Bette he was still describing jewelery and mistresses and how if you could flash enough cash you could get yourself any pretty woman you cared to in France in the 1830s. Yourself being a man, of course.
So this is going to be all about hypocrisy and double standards and the awfulness of the rich and the even more awfulness of the many people trying to become rich or trying to pretend they’re still rich. I kind of ran out of patience before the plot got going. This book got to feel like medicine for an ailment I didn't have.
I hope Cousin Bette and her monobrow utterly wrecked this ghastly family and she shouldn’t have stopped there either. She should have formed a group of ninja guerrilla spinsters who could bring down all these lofty misstresstaking grandees with well-aimed poison darts. But I will never know.
As Elvis said
A little less conversation, a little more action, please All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me
American authors in the 20s and 30s loved to write down every last possible detail of American life and two of them did it brilliantly (Sinclair LewisAmerican authors in the 20s and 30s loved to write down every last possible detail of American life and two of them did it brilliantly (Sinclair Lewis and Theodor Dreiser) and another one I have yet to investigate (John Dos Passos). This guy John O’Hara is writing later (1949) but is doing the same vast itemising and this time for me the magic didn’t work. I loved Sinclair Lewis’s ocean of minutiae in Main Street and Babbitt, but in the middle of those books are lovely characters and if you ain’t going to hook the reader with a strong plot, which Sinclair Lewis does not, you need great characters.
Mr O’Hara has the sardonic sociological eye for exhausting telling details (one page on all the courses at a banquet) but he does not have either the plot or the interesting characters. He throws us into the rich smug upper class of Pennsylvania circa 1900 and he thinks that’s enough to set us going on a 600 page novel.
Not for me… I finally (reluctantly) pressed the eject button. I got other fish to fry (tuna, salmon, halibut, mackerel, snapper, hake, trout, sardines, cod, herring and sturgeon).
I found one thoroughly delightful paragraph in this dismal thinks-it’s-so-funny chunk of mid-fifties ultraEnglish autofiction. Here it is - Laura is hI found one thoroughly delightful paragraph in this dismal thinks-it’s-so-funny chunk of mid-fifties ultraEnglish autofiction. Here it is - Laura is here thinking about patriotism :
I went on musing about why it was thought better and higher to love one’s country than one’s county, or town, or village, or house. Perhaps because it was larger. But then it would be still better to love one’s continent, and best of all to love one’s planet.
In Robert McCrum’s book The 100 Best Novels in English we find
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner Scoop by Evelyn Waugh Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
The first two are so-so, the last one is diabolically awful, and yet here they are in a book listing the 100 Best Novels in English EVER. So there is a tradition of critics loving extremely lame tame mildewed comic writing. The Towers of Trebizond fits neatly into this horrible little list. It’s a deadpan travelogue about some posh religious types who think that the thing to do would be to travel to remote north Turkey with an amusing camel and convert the Muslims to the Anglo-Catholic sect within the Church of England. The first 20 pages are almost perversely designed to put off any reader not intimately interested in the 60 major subdivisions of the Protestant faith with which the author makes so much innocent fun and I salute all readers who trudge through that ghastly thicket into the more normally boring travel writing with its endless minor aggravations and endless mild spoofing of every foreigner and endless self-congratulatory self-deprecation that the English used to weaponise so efficiently.
No doctors had to be called to stitch up my sides after splitting them laughing so hard at this book which I gladly DNFed at the half way point....more
This is a strange feverish novel all about Dostoyevsky. Susan Sontag describes the author’s unique style in the introduction perfectly :
Each paragraphThis is a strange feverish novel all about Dostoyevsky. Susan Sontag describes the author’s unique style in the introduction perfectly :
Each paragraph indent begins a long, long sentence, whose connectives are “and” (many of these) and “but” (several) and “although” and “and so” and “whereas” and “just as” and “because” and “as if” along with many dashes, and there is a full stop only when the paragraph ends…. A sentence that starts with Fedya and Anna in Dresden might flash back to Dostoyevsky’s convict years or to an earlier bout of gambling mania…then thread onto this a memory from the narrator’s medical student days and a rumination on some lines by Pushkin
The narrator is unnamed but it's Leonid Tsypkin himself who is interweaving his own pilgrimage to Petersburg to visit Dosto sites with mostly agonising scenes from his hero’s anguished life. So you get 1) Leonard’s travels; 2) Dosto and Anna’s travels and misadventures; 3) flashbacks to Dosto’s early life; and 4) comments on Russian literature all weaving in and out of each other, all written in a breathless helterskelter rush where – dashes – have replaced the humble full stop as if the author had been told he only had three hours to live. So as the prose rushes forward the poor reader has to slow down all the time to try to figure out what is going on. This produced in me a form of travel sickness.
As well as all that, the re-imagining of scenes from Dosto’s life are kind of spurious if like me you happen to have read a couple of years ago Joseph Frank’s magnificent Dosto biography. As Bob Dylan said
And me I wait so patiently, waiting to find out what price You have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice
If they’d asked me for a one word blurb for this back in 1929 I would have said :
"Putdownable!"
If they had asked me today I would have offered :
"UnpicIf they’d asked me for a one word blurb for this back in 1929 I would have said :
"Putdownable!"
If they had asked me today I would have offered :
"Unpickupable!"
It’s a shame – I loved J B Priestly’s next novel Angel Pavement, written only a year after this one. But there’s a relentless sunniness and a ghastly fixed-grin quality about The Good Companions that you often see on the faces of ventriloquist’s dummies. Curmudgeon that I am, this began to wear me down.
JB Priestley took a very leisurely time (260 pages) to introduce me to three characters and get them by various improbable means to all meet up in a cheap & cheerful gaff in a town no one’s heard of. There’s a concert party troupe there (comedians, singers, soft shoe shufflers), all staring glumly into their pallid teacups. They’ve just been stranded out in the cold but still they wouldn't trade it for a sack of gold – yes, left high and dry by their rascally manager who scarpered with the money. But wait! Help is at hand in the form of Miss Brant! Because…
Well it’s all too tiresome. And you've kind of heard it all before. Stretching out before me was the prospect of 400 more pages of show people who smile when they are low, accompanied by a crowd of goodly hearted English jolly working people who perpetrate English stereotypes at the drop of a bowler. So I thought let’s not go on with the show. Not this one anyway.