If you're lucky enough to live to 80 years old that gives you four-thousand weeks on planet earth.
Since finishing, I've reported this fact to numerouIf you're lucky enough to live to 80 years old that gives you four-thousand weeks on planet earth.
Since finishing, I've reported this fact to numerous people and discussed some of the ideas Burkeman explores in the book. For one, he tries to make a case for relief rather than fear. It doesn't entirely work. The platitudes by the end of the book (you can do what you want / the universe doesn't care) isn't so freeing as Burkeman imagines, at least not for me; but I'm grateful for this book, too. Alan recommended it to me in a hope (I think) to stave off some of the existential dread I've had the last few weeks after having a death in the family and sitting beside my first dead body. And life, the choices we make, what we do with our time, these are all topics of great contention. Indeed, this weekend I somehow ended up in a heated debate in a deserted French restaurant with an English friend of my mother's after bringing up this book (though not about the book itself).
(The original Latin word for 'decide', 'decidere', means 'to cut off', as in slicing away alternatives; it's a close cousin of words like 'homicide' and 'suicide'.) Any finite life — even the best one you could possibly imagine — is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.
Burkeman does call upon many philosophers and psychologists. The best investigation was his deconstruction of Heidegger's ideas that we are time, not limited by time. Being-towards-death, etc. '[T]here's no meaningful way to think of a person's existence except as a sequence of moments of time'.
The recent death in my family was not unexpected. Worse still, we were waiting for it. Days of sorting furniture and clearing a flat in preparation to hand it over to the next buyers. For the entire day I felt like Knausgaard clearing his father's place. (I realised once more the comfort of fiction!) So death came at last. We sat in the room talking about her, her life, but also sitting in a strange silence. As I read a scene in de Maupassant's Bel-Ami just last night: we were all waiting for her to make a noise, or sit up again. Eventually, it almost became a commonplace feature of the room, and we even laughed. Then suddenly someone would cry again, as if remembering. She was lucky enough to have more than four-thousand weeks.
So Burkeman reassures us (or tries): live with a little more abandon, enjoy your leisure and think of life as every passing moment rather than a succession of waits for the weekend. That is how time is frittered away. Time is not against us. It's not even with us. It is us....more
4.5. Outrageous for 1885 — all the high Parisian society and drama of Proust but without the Proustian sentences (I adore Proust; this is not better, 4.5. Outrageous for 1885 — all the high Parisian society and drama of Proust but without the Proustian sentences (I adore Proust; this is not better, simply different). Georges Duroy, or Bel-Ami, is a cad, and his novel is a social climber's Bildungsroman. For most of the novel, he has three women on the go at once. He falls in love at the drop of a hat and loses interest faster. It's natural to wait the entire novel for Duroy to get his comeuppance, but Guy de Maupassant hasn't written the novel as simply as that. What does a man who has everything want? Simply, more.
It was the perfect companion as I stayed in Normandy for a long weekend, though it would have been better suited for Paris, of course. Through all the social climbing and playing with women, the novel has many striking existential scenes. At one point Bel-Ami sits in the death room of an old friend and Guy de Maupassant captures it so intensely that I was revisiting a death room from my own life in my mind's eye. Duroy has this rumination beside his friend's body:
Like everyone else, for the space of a few years he had lived, eaten, laughed and hoped. And now everything was over for him for ever. What is life? A few days and then nothing more. You're born, you grow up, you're happy, you wait and then you die. Goodbye! Whether you're a man or a woman, you'll never come back on earth. And yet everyone bears within himself the feverish, hopeless wish to be eternal, each person is a sort of universe within the universe and yet each person is soon completely annihilated on the dunghill where lie the seeds of new life to come. Plants, animals, men, stars, worlds, everything takes on life and then dies and is transformed. And no creatures ever comes back, whether it be a man, an insect or a planet ! [...] He was thinking of flies, which live a few hours, of animals which live a few days, of men who live a few years, of planets which live a few centuries. What difference was there then between them? A few extra dawns, that was all.
And later, at a party, an old poet rambles for pages and pages about death to Duroy, some of which I'll transcribe below.
'Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're looking towards the top and you feel happy; but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It's slow going up but quick going down. At your age, you're cheerful. You're full of so many hopes, which, incidentally, will never be fulfilled. At my age, you don't expect anything — except death [...] Gradually, month by month, hour by hour, I have felt it destroying me, like a house falling into ruins.'
A novel about desire, and perhaps the pointlessness of it all. I'm surprised this isn't mentioned more often in discussions about French classics. ...more
One of those books that feels impossible to give an arbitrary rating to. On the one hand, Kang has written an incredibly deft novel105th book of 2024.
One of those books that feels impossible to give an arbitrary rating to. On the one hand, Kang has written an incredibly deft novel about the Jeju Massacre in 1948, on the other, she has written an abstract novel that reads like sand falling through your fingers. Considering the novel's 400 page weight, there's not much to be said about where the pages go: a large swathe of the novel details the narrator waiting at a bus stop in a snowstorm, then walking through the snow, in the attempt to save her friend's budgie. The final hundred pages or so details the dreamlike investigation into her friend's family history and the Jeju Uprising. It is a book full of quiet but poignant images: a budgie hushing as soon as a cover is thrown over its cage, endless snowfall, shadows moving on walls, logs of wood painted black, a bus crawling through the snowstorm, missing fingers... These images all drift, like a snowstorm itself, and carry us through the incredibly weightless narrative. Like the movie in the novel that is planned but never made, the novel reads like an assortment of slides or images, hauntingly quiet, that flicker before your eyes. I can't say I 'liked' the book; I was unnerved by it, sometimes confused by it, but ultimately impressed by Kang's ability to write a novel about this diabolical historical event in a seemingly directionless and airy narrative. What persists in my mind most of all are the black logs standing in the snow, the shadows on the walls and the silencing of a bird.
Thank you to Penguin for the advance copy for review. We Do Not Part is published in English in the UK in February 2025....more
When we woke up, the whole ocean was full of broken ice. Unbelievable tabernacles floated by, driven by a mild south-we
101st book of 2024.
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When we woke up, the whole ocean was full of broken ice. Unbelievable tabernacles floated by, driven by a mild south-west breeze, statuesque, glittering, as big as trolleys, cathedrals, primeval caverns, everything imaginable! And they changed colour whenever they felt like it - ice blue, green, and, in the evenings, orange. Early in the morning they could be pink.
Surprisingly excellent: beautifully written, well-crafted, well-plotted. This is a slow-burning character-driven fantasy novel. I s104th book of 2024.
Surprisingly excellent: beautifully written, well-crafted, well-plotted. This is a slow-burning character-driven fantasy novel. I say all this as a fantasy sceptic! (Tolkien or nothing, I used to believe.) My friend and colleague (who has read, it seems, every novel ever written, tells me the second book is even better; he also tells me the Tawny Man Trilogy is the best of all 16 (which of course, he's read all of)). I just felt very warm reading this. Some parts have a sense of childlike whimsy, other parts caught me off guard with their emotional weight (and Hobb handles the emotional parts of the novel with great skill, for one of fantasy's many flaws (for me) is the overblown emotion), and other parts are skillfully thrilling. Highly recommended....more
I just read Ørstavik's Love and went straight into this one. I'd never heard of her until I read her name in Knausgaard's sixth volu99th book of 2024.
I just read Ørstavik's Love and went straight into this one. I'd never heard of her until I read her name in Knausgaard's sixth volume, where they are photographed together at a book festival. Interestingly, I guess this a Karl Ove mention, in these very pages: 'Knaus describing you in Book Six'. Norwegians mentioning Norwegians. This is about a relationship with a younger man and I found it lesser to the aforementioned book of Ørstavik. Ironically, it explores love more overtly than Love: particularly how we experience love in our childhood affects our experiences of love in adulthood. Those who are victims of violence in childhood are more likely to be violent. It is about the love that is passed down, or the lack of love. It's meandering, plotless, like Love but considering less impressive. It reminds me of other books about affairs, like the recent Booker-winner Kairos, for example....more
Voted one of Norway's top ten books of the last twenty-five years, Love follows a mother and a son over a single night. Vibeke on he98th book of 2024.
Voted one of Norway's top ten books of the last twenty-five years, Love follows a mother and a son over a single night. Vibeke on her own journey, and little Jon on his. It is the eve of the latter's ninth birthday. Ørstavik has immense control over the narrative which hops from Vibeke to Jon, sometimes sentence by sentence, with little to no overture or indication. The reader must keep themselves orientated for Ørstavik does not waste time holding your hand. There is so much dread throughout the book, but it explores the unconditional love a child can have for their parent. Sometimes that love is misplaced. Technically impressive and poignant....more
2.5. The main problem is that it feels so dated now. I've never seen the film, but for some reason, I always had it in my mind that100th book of 2024.
2.5. The main problem is that it feels so dated now. I've never seen the film, but for some reason, I always had it in my mind that they were zombies, so I was continually jarred when the vampires spoke, or acted like regular humans in the book. From what I've gathered about the movie (posters and conversation-osmosis) this seems quite different. I wouldn't go as far as saying some bits are laughable, but the horror element certainly hasn't survived the last seventy-years since it was published. Vampires are seen very differently now, of course. The prose was fine, but it was very American: Neville was reminiscent of a Stephen King character, making corny one-liners to himself and saying things like, Hold it together, man! Makes my stomach turn. The ending was, at least, interesting, and even now felt subversive. ...more
Shakespearean melodrama with a giant knight to boot. A story of castles, heirs, ghosts and skeletons. Often considered the first got97th book of 2024.
Shakespearean melodrama with a giant knight to boot. A story of castles, heirs, ghosts and skeletons. Often considered the first gothic novel, you can see here all the roots that come later. In that regard, a pivotal novella that changed (invented!) a genre. Walpole supposedly saw a "gigantic hand in armour" in his home, Strawberry Hill House, and thus created The Castle of Otranto. I have always been fascinated with writers who write their dreams and nightmares. Harald Voetmann, the Danish writer, for example, is currently writing a trilogy whose conception came to him all at once in a single nightmare somewhere in Italy. What lies in our subconscious, and what do we do to it when we write it down? Validate it? Release it? Overcome it?
Shelley, Poe, du Maurier, Radcliffe, Lewis . . . They all came from here. ...more
3.5. Surprisingly enjoyable, whimsical, humorous, camp. Very French. I've never seen the stage play. The only thing I knew about it 96th book of 2024.
3.5. Surprisingly enjoyable, whimsical, humorous, camp. Very French. I've never seen the stage play. The only thing I knew about it was the falling chandelier (and pleased to see it happens in the book, though, in a different context). The plot kept me engaged and although the final fifty pages were needlessly drawn out, I found the melodramatics and the ridiculousness endearing as opposed to frustrating. Having no idea where it was going to go, it just got further and further from what I imagined it to be. Raoul was hopeless, but a semi-loveable idiot. I liked the new managers best, who were like a strange double-act of comedy struck throughout the novel. A weird mix of campness, humour and, every now and then, Leroux does give us a tiny glimpse of 'horror', though it's hard to take any of it very seriously. An easy to read and plot-driven classic....more
I'd never heard of Ungar, but my colleague just came back from Prague with this book and put it into my hands. I saw the preface was93rd book of 2024.
I'd never heard of Ungar, but my colleague just came back from Prague with this book and put it into my hands. I saw the preface was written by Thomas Mann, who wrote,
I owe the melancholy privilege, the happy duty of introducing this posthumous collection of Hermann Ungar's work to a German audience, to the fact that I was one of the first to recognise and call attention to the extraordinary talent of the deceased.
And talented he was. A terrifying blend of Kafka and Dostoyevsky, Ungar's stories are full of such depravity, violence, cruelty, strangeness and horror. Though unconnected, numerous narrators sound similar, demented young men who abuse animals or try to master women with force and cruelty. The first story, closer to a novella, is about a young man in a hospice who becomes infatuated with one of the maids and devotes his life to becoming the 'master' of her after failing as a boy to grope her breasts. In the second story, a young man expresses himself by stretching and drowning animals before finally committing a murder. They are all delirious, superbly written (light, with brevity, but also philosophical depth) and haunting. The collected stories towards the end, closer to four or five pages long, have some disarmingly poignant and wistful stories. "The Brothers" presents us with two brothers returning to their hometown on the train, both wishing they could say something to the other, but never quite managing. A story of suppressed emotion. Another, "A Secret War", is about a boy meeting his childhood tormenter after many years. Disturbing stuff....more
2.5. Disappointing. A short story, at best, stretched to a novel. A creepy noise is heard, Arthur Kipps is momentarily afraid, but u94th book of 2024.
2.5. Disappointing. A short story, at best, stretched to a novel. A creepy noise is heard, Arthur Kipps is momentarily afraid, but ultimately gets over it before the next instance comes along, and the process is repeated. I couldn't work out whether Hill was trying to be humorous with her Edwardian pastiche, but I couldn't take anything serious with the style, so maybe she was. In the end, everything is discovered easily and within a few pages before a dramatic (and slightly ridiculous) final page. Forgettable.
Such a complex relationship with this small book: it's stuffy, detached, boring, but has also completely overtaken my mind over the 92nd book of 2024.
Such a complex relationship with this small book: it's stuffy, detached, boring, but has also completely overtaken my mind over the days reading it and since finishing it (on Saturday), I've been exploring it in my head. All the negatives above actually aid the book. The stuffiness made it feel real, like I was reading dusty old travelogues of an arctic explorer. Lovecraft's wordiness sometimes got the better of him, but I was also drawn into descriptions, which were startlingly vivid.
Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the western sky; allowing us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curious sense of fantasy which they inspired as seen in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of iridescent ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation. It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space and ultradimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil things— mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.
And reflecting on the horror, I've come to realise that it is a horror of 'exceptional' calibre, for it is so understated. Why were so many passages unnerving me, particularly when the majority of the story was given to describing the icy wastelands of Antarctica and the jagged structures of ancient, uninhabited alien buildings? Because Lovecraft places the alien not on another planet, but on our own, and the empty forgotten cities are marked with a forgotten and terrible history. He somehow created fear by simply describing a desolate black city surrounded by ice and snow. It is the uncanny perfected.
The more it has sat in my mind, the more I've come to respect it and enjoy it in retrospect. Lovecraft's longwinded descriptions sometimes made me feel impatient, but every time I left the book, I left it a little unsettled. There was a lingering disquiet.
At nearly midnight the other night my girlfriend suddenly remarked that she could not see the cathedral spire out the window. We can usually see it. The sky had a strange remote orange tint and a thick fog had fallen. At once we put our shoes on and headed out. A few drunkards were wandering and yelling, but once we reached the cathedral, there was a strange muffled quality. We could hardly see far ahead of us, and the cathedral spire, even up close, disappeared out of sight into the fog. We walked about for half an hour, and I kept thinking, for some reason, of At the Mountains of Madness, and the slow, meditative, even boring, horror that lay within its pages....more
I've got some Halloween-esque reads for the next few weeks, simply because reading them in, say, July, would be wrong. I've never ce91st book of 2024.
I've got some Halloween-esque reads for the next few weeks, simply because reading them in, say, July, would be wrong. I've never celebrated Halloween in my life as my parents would write it firmly off by calling it 'American nonsense'. Of course, it originated on our side of the pond, but their image of children trick-or-treating was Americanised, and therefore, not wanted for their own children.
So I've never cared about it myself, but now is the best time of year to read about monsters and vampires, so here we are. Carmilla predates Dracula. I saw echoes of the latter in this, including the seemingly homosexual undertones. It has several 'unnerving' scenes, which didn't particularly unnerve me all that much, and that's surprising as I am a wimp and refuse to watch any horror movies, or go to the annual horror event at a nearby farm, where you are interrupted drinking pints of lager to be scared by random workers dressed as supernatural characters. I'd rather just sit in peace with my lager than fight off a man dressed as Frankenstein's monster to drink it.
I enjoyed the short time spent with Carmilla. Vampire hunters are always far cooler than the vampires themselves....more
So ends the three Great Tales. Funnily enough I ended with this one, which, in 1917, on the back of a sheet of military marching mus90th book of 2024.
So ends the three Great Tales. Funnily enough I ended with this one, which, in 1917, on the back of a sheet of military marching music, Tolkien wrote what would later become part of The Fall of Gondolin, and thus put to paper the first thing in his Middle-earth legend. Amazingly, it all began here, with the tale of a beautiful, hidden city being betrayed, unearthed and destroyed by evil. Tolkien made great efforts to rid his work of wartime readings, but it is hard to read the story of this city falling to the hands of Morgoth/Melko and later, in LOTR, the dead marshes, or any of the lands of Mordor, without thinking about the trenches Tolkien must have lived in.
As with Beren and Lúthien, The Fall of Gondolin is aided greatly by Christopher's interjections. There are two long form versions included (which I believe are in HOME (History of Middle-earth) anyway) that Tolkien wrote some thirty years apart, and the rest are scraps, notes and ideas, mostly collected by Christopher and expanded upon. To give an idea of the scope here, Christopher has written two extra conclusions after the first, one as 'The Conclusion of the Sketch of the Mythology' and the other as 'The Conclusion of the Quenta Noldorinwa. Most of the evolution of the story is overly detailed, as with the other Great Tales. Of the three The Children of Húrin is the most 'complete' and formed story. Christopher says it is one of his father's biggest tragedies that he never finished The Fall of Gondolin, but he said the same thing in an essay about his father's work on The Fall of Arthur - so the love and dedication he has for his father blinds him (and who wouldn't be blinded? It would be a gift to have all these tales complete). He even explores why this was never finished and his answer is in one particular 1950 letter to Sir Stanley Unwin, which I may quote in full at the bottom of this review for my own sake as much as anyone else's to keep a record of it. It is a brilliant snapshot.
The Fall of Gondolin has several strengths, one of them being the connectedness to the rest of the legend. Legolas Greenleaf appears, albeit briefly, as does a fantastic throwaway scene when Tuor sees but does not interact with Túrin Turambar. There are some scenes that border on the surreal, trippy visions, that do not feel wholly Tolkien-esque. It is a strange mix, and the early version that does detail the fall of the city is as violent and dramatic as Tolkien gets. Indeed, one quote on the back of my edition says, 'Never did Tolkien write a more sustained account of battle. Makes Jackson's souped-up cinema battles look like tabletop games.' A strange quote, and not wholly true, but interesting as a stance.
So, lots of positives. I've given it three for the same reason I gave it toBeren and Lúthien: the tale is incomplete, the structure is frustrating and despite Christopher's best efforts, nothing makes up for the fact that we are hanging onto unfinished tidbits at times. If you are looking to read something beyond LOTR and The Silmarillion, then I would suggest The Children of Húrin as the best starting point of the Great Tales, simply because it is the most coherent and completed tale. I am unsure whether I will delve into HOME. If you are to read HOME, then these are mostly moot, I believe, as all their fragments are buried deep within its hundreds of pages. It is 12 more volumes of fragments, explorations, glossaries, appendices. Maybe one day.
Now, for that 1950 letter. I cannot italicise the titles while using the quoting feature on GR. All strangely worded sentences are verbatim, and the inconsistencies with capitalising the 'The' before Silmarillion are as seen.
In one of your more recent letters you expressed a desire still to see the MS of my proposed work, The Lord of the Rings, originally expected to be a sequel to The Hobbit? For eighteen months now I have been hoping for the day when I could call it finished. But it was not until after Christmas [1949] that this goal was reached at last. It is finished, if still partly unrevised, and is, I suppose, in a condition which a reader could read, if he did not wilt at the sight of it. As the estimate for typing a fair copy was in the neighbourhood of £100 (which I have not to spare), I was obliged to do nearly all myself. And now I look at it, the magnitude of the disaster is apparent to me. My work has escaped from my control, and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody); and it is not really a sequel to The Hobbit, but to The Silmarillion. My estimate is that it contains, even without certain necessary adjuncts, about 600,000 words. One typist put it even higher. I can see only too clearly how impracticable this is. But I am tired. It is off my chest, and I do not feel that I can do anything more about it, beyond a little revision of inaccuracies. Worse still: I feel that it is tied to the Silmarillion. You may, perhaps, remember that work, a long legendary of imaginary times in a 'high style', and full of Elves (of a sort). It was rejected on the advice of your reader many years ago. As far as my memory goes he allowed it a kind of Celtic beauty intolerable to Anglo-Saxons in large doses. He was probably perfectly right and just. And you commented that it was a work to be drawn upon rather than published. Unfortunately I am not an Anglo-Saxon, and though shelved (until a year ago) the Silmarillion and all that has refused to be suppressed. It has bubbled up, infiltrated, and probably spoiled everything (that even remotely approached 'Faery') which I have tried to write since. It was kept out of Farmer Giles with an effort, but stopped the continuation. Its shadow was deep on the later parts of The Hobbit. It has captured The Lord of the Rings so that that has become simply its continuation and completion, requiring The Silmarillion to be fully intelligible - without a lot of references and explanations that clutter it in one or two places. Ridiculous and tiresome as you may think me, I want to publish them both - The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings - in conjunction or in connexion. 'I want to' - it would be wiser to say 'I should like to', since a little packet of, say, a million words, a matter set out in extenso, that Anglo-Saxons (or the English-speaking public) can only endure in moderation, is not very likely to see the light, even if paper were available at will. All the same that is what I should like. Or I will let it all be. I cannot contemplate any drastic re-writing or compression. Of course being a writer I should like to see my words printed; but there they are. For me the chief thing is that I feel that the whole matter is now 'exorcized', and rides me no more. I can turn now to other things . . .
3.5. Enjoyable, more skilful than Rebecca but not as plot-boiler-y. A great unreliable narrator from du Maurier, and our bookclub d89th book of 2024.
3.5. Enjoyable, more skilful than Rebecca but not as plot-boiler-y. A great unreliable narrator from du Maurier, and our bookclub discussions all centred around what a fool Philip is. It is the sign of a good writer when you blame the character for his actions and not the writer for giving him those actions. I liked the undercurrent of tension all the while maintaining some very mundane scenes. A few scenes reminded me very much of Rebecca, even. The ending left a lot to be discussed, too. A great bookclub book for that reason, so I recommend it for that, if you are in one. ...more