Andrew Blackman

The other day, I picked up a copy of The Times because of the news of J.D. Salinger’s death on the cover. I read about Catcher in the Rye and its skewering of “phonies”, and how Salinger retreated to his home in New Hampshire and ignored the world for about forty years. Then I read the rest of the paper, an unusual thing for me to do these days. I read an article about Britain’s measure of inequality hitting a new high, and why this was not a bad thing. I read about the latest inquiry into the Iraq War, and how the commission is mostly composed of Tony Blair’s old friends. I read about how Blair, surely the very definition of a phony, would appear before the commission and justify his decision. I read and I read, and the more I read, the more attractive the idea sounded. A house in New Hampshire, the life of a recluse, an escape from the lies and shallowness. Reading The Times these days, or any other Murdoch paper, often has that effect on me.

Anyway, I’m rereading Catcher in the Rye this weekend. I read it years ago but can’t remember much about it. My memory’s awful. I’ll post a review when I’m done. RIP Mr Salinger. In an age where self-publicising seems almost compulsory, it’s refreshing to hear of someone who just didn’t bother. There’s even a rumour that he was writing all that time, not for the world or for fame or for approval or for money, but purely for the love of it. What a strange concept.

Andrew Blackman Literary news death, J.D. Salinger, phony

Damien March, a bored BBC journalist on the night shift, suddenly inherits a house on an island off the coast of Cape Cod from his long-lost uncle Patrick. There is a condition, however – he must preserve the house exactly as it is. Given that his uncle was somewhat eccentric, and the house is littered with bric-a-brac (e.g. a collection of ice-cream scoops), this is not as easy as it sounds.

In trying to settle into the house, Damien comes across letters and old manuscripts that reveal more about his uncle than he perhaps wanted to know. One of the stories is about Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s little-known brother, carrying out a vigilante-style murder of a man who is abusing his deaf wife and children. When he meets a deaf woman on the island whose abusive husband died in mysterious circumstances, he begins to wonder if the story is more than just fiction.

I enjoyed the exploration of Patrick’s stories and what they revealed about his life, whether literally or in the subtext: “As I surrendered to the story, I had the odd feeling that I was entering my uncle’s dream life.” I also liked that the unexpected conclusion was hinted at through Patrick’s fiction, some of which is reproduced in the middle of the book. “Paperchase” is an appropriate title, because Damien does come to know his uncle, and in the process to understand more about his family and himself, almost entirely through the paper that Patrick has left behind. Patrick had cut himself off from the family and the rest of the world for many years, so the stories were all that was left.

This was a quick read, and a surprisingly rewarding one. I say “surprisingly” because in the early parts of the book I was not really impressed – I didn’t care about the characters, and the writing was not lively enough to sustain my interest. But it grew on me as the action shifted to the island and the story of Mycroft Holmes, and the ending was handled really well. So by the end, I had a really positive view of the book. It didn’t sear itself into my memory as great books do, but it was certainly a worthwhile and ultimately thought-provoking read.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews award winner, book review, marcel, paperchase, somerset maugham award, theroux

I’ve listed Milan Kundera as one of my favourite authors for a while now, but oddly I’d never read his most famous book until now. It was definitely no letdown – the same philosophical style I’ve come to expect, but sustained over a longer time and with characters that I felt closer to than in other books I’ve read by him.

The story is of Tomas and Tereza, and whether they will stay together despite Tomas’s constant infidelity. Branching out from this central story are other stories, following the lives, for example, of Tomas’s mistress Sabina and her new lover Franz. The central theme is explored through the lives of the various characters. Is it better to be light or heavy? Lives full of responsibility and attachment are heavy and burdensome, but “closer to the earth”, “more real and truthful.” Lives that are light contain no burdens and allow a person to soar,  “his movements as free as they are insignificant”.

Sabina abandons her family and everyone who means anything to her, and ends up in America selling her paintings, making money, doing well and feeling empty. She has no burdens, no attachments, no real meaning or purpose. She composes a will saying she wants to be cremated and her ashes scattered on the winds. “She wanted to die under the sign of lightness”. Tomas, on the other hand, chooses heaviness. He has opportunities to escape from his burdens – he gets out of Czechoslovakia and is living in Vienna, for example, but goes back to find Tereza. He loses his job as a doctor because of writing an article critical of the regime, and is offered several chances at redemption by renouncing his article. But he chooses not to, and so his life becomes harder and harder, heavier and heavier.

By the end of the book, the heavier life comes to seem preferable, to me anyway. It has more sorrow, but that’s because there is more to care about. Lightness, the absence of ties or emotional attachments, is easier on the surface, but ultimately meaningless, and therefore unbearable.

Apart from the main thematic development, there were some wonderful side discussions. I loved the way he talked about “kitsch”, for example. I only new “kitsch” as meaning “bad taste” or “cheesy”, but Kundera uses a very different definition, from the original German so he says: “kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.” Or as he puts it more directly, “Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word.” Kitsch is life without the shit, it’s the pretense that there’s nothing unseemly or unpleasant, it’s erasing anything that doesn’t fit. Communist kitsch is all the parades and the positive, uplifting art that denies the existence of any societal problems. Epitaphs are often kitsch under this definition, denying the existence of pain or suffering or even death itself, concealing it behind euphemisms. As Kundera says, “Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.”

I also enjoyed the “Short dictionary of misunderstood words”, a series of chapters in which Kundera shows how Franz and Sabina think they understand each other but don’t, because they are using the same words to mean different things. They have met relatively late in life, and are old enough to have accumulated their own meanings and associations and memories, of which the other person is not a part. Whereas Tomas and Sabina were young and could create their own meanings together, Franz and Sabina are too old to do this. Or as Kundera more poetically puts it:

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to them.

I thought this was a great insight, and the book was full of them. Kundera is a close observer of the human condition, and always finds fresh, innovative ways of expressing his ideas. I’m glad that I’ve finally read his most famous book, and glad that it lived up to my high expectations. I’ll keep exploring his lesser-known books now.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews book review, kundera, unbearable lightness of being

I’m a bit late to the New Year goal-setting party, but here goes. For my writing, I want to finish my second novel and get it published, and start on a third. I also want to write more short stories and submit them to magazines and contests. For my reading, I want to read a book a week. I think I do this already, but have never really tracked it for a full year to find out if it’s true. So this year I want to make a note of every book I read, and also review it on this site, and I’m aiming for 52 books for the year. I’ve added a new page on the top menu, 2010 reading, where I will post updates.

That’s it. Nothing too difficult – I believe in setting realistic goals and actually meeting them (I only came to this belief after years of pie-in-the-sky New Year’s resolutions that came unstuck by the end of January). What about you? Any goals you’d like to share for 2010?

Andrew Blackman Uncategorized 2010, goals, Interesting snippets, Writing

“Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.”

- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

(thanks to Georgina for drawing my attention to it)

Andrew Blackman Inspiration monday morning inspiration

This is a collection of the five shortlisted stories for the 2008 BBC National Short Story Award. It’s a prestigious competition so naturally the standard of writing in all five stories was very high, even though some were more interesting to me than others.

First up was Guidelines for Measures to cope with Disgraceful and Other Events by Richard Beard. It’s a wonderful parody of a bureaucratic memo delivered to a member of the European parliament who has been caught having an affair. The memo outlines the various options open to him, and in evaluating the pros and cons of each option (denial/concealment/confession, etc.) the story is gradually told. It’s a very clever piece of writing, all in the second person, and with a very satisfying ending. My only problem with it was that the story itself felt a little too familiar – the selfish politician hooking up with a young woman to escape his rich but dull wife. The manner of the telling, though, was masterly.

The People on Privilege Hill didn’t grab me very much. The introduction calls it a comedy of manners, but the people whose manners it mocks are almost extinct. Modern Britain is a world away from this quaint village of canapes and souffles and retired judges getting all steamed up over not much happening at a lunch party. Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe it’s just a long way from the Britain I know as a (relatively) young Londoner. To me the story and the characters in it felt remote, but possibly the characters in my book would feel remote to people of a different background or generation. In any case, the writing was good enough for me to speed through it quite pleasantly, even if it won’t linger in the memory.

Surge by Erin Soros had a very simple premise: some boys in a remote logging settlement decide to climb a 300ft surge tank. It’s really just a childhood adventure, but the sense of danger is really well communicated. Throughout the story there is the ominous presence of abandoned houses that Japanese families had been forced to leave behind – presumably when they were taken to internment camps, placing the story in World War Two, although this is never stated. In the end, the danger comes from an unexpected source, and the relationship with the two siblings is really well drawn.

I think I was a bit distracted when I read The Names by Adam Thorpe. It was an interesting story of an old bottle in France with the names of people who had been in a cafe during the war when the SS walked in looking for someone to take them to a resistance camp, took out one of the men to act as a guide, and shot him when he couldn’t find it. I say I was distracted because although the story was not complicated at all, I seemed to keep losing the thread and having to reread pages. I also didn’t really see the connection with the contemporary story of a Swedish man living in the far north among the Sami, except that he bought the bottle from a beautiful French girl when he was young and I suppose he shot it as a way of letting go of his childish fantasy of going back to find her again.

Last story is The Numbers by Claire Wigfall, set on a tiny Scottish island – perhaps a century or so ago, although it was hard to tell. It’s a fascinating insight into island life, and feels completely real. The “numbers” theme of the title is given a lot of play at the beginning, as we are told the narrator learnt numbers well at school and came to think through numbers – but this is more or less dropped later on, except for numbers being used unexpectedly instead of words (e.g. “…his wife and his 3 young 1s”). I liked the feeling of the story, especially the unusual words (“He came on a gustery afternoon”), and there was a good twist at the end.

Oddly, the book didn’t mention who the winner was, but from the website I discovered it was Clare Wigfall for The Numbers.

Andrew Blackman Uncategorized

The devil is unleashed in Stalinist Moscow. The funny thing is that while the devil kills, maims and causes havoc throughout the city, he is very far from a traditional definition of evil. In fact, the character struck me as being more like an avenging angel, punishing people for various sins such as cowardice, greed, vanity or lust.

There is a further subversion of expectations later in the novel when Margarita makes a pact with the devil to find the character she calls the Master. We are so used to Faustian pacts throughout literature and popular culture that the assumption is that it will work out badly – which it does in a way, but not in the way that you’d expect. The devil is more true to his word than most of the human characters in the book, and doesn’t require much in return for his favours.

Cowardice seems to be chief among Bulgakov’s targets, which is understandable given the times in which the novel was written. In Stalinist Russia, as under any dictatorship, the choice between cowardice and death would have been a frequent one, and the majority necessarily chose the former. There are frequent allusions to Soviet life: sudden disappearances, bureaucratic entities with ridiculous compound names, etc. I suspect that many of the characters are thinly-veiled versions of Russian writers and critics of the day, too, but my knowledge of 1920s/30s Russian literati doesn’t allow me to get the references. Still, it doesn’t matter – there’s plenty more going on here.

In fact, it’s the kind of book that you could probably read several times and get new layers of meaning each time. The character of Pontius Pilate appears throughout the book, including at the beginning and the end, and was the subject of a book written by the Master and a story told by the devil to prove the existence of Jesus to a doubting literature professor just before he predicts (or engineers?) the professor’s decapitation by a tram. Decapitation is a repeated motif, as are sin and punishment.

One thing I found amazing about the book was that I believed in the characters and the action, even when it was absolutely absurd, as it frequently was. I think Bulgakov achieved this by focusing on the ordinary aspects of the situation, not on the absurd. For example, when a cat jumps on a subway car and attempts to pay ten kopecks to the conductress, Bulgakov adds in little details  like the fact that he grabbed hold of a handrail and paid through a window “open on account of the stuffiness”. By reminding readers of familiar things like this, he makes the situation seem more real. I know it probably still sounds absurd when taken out of context like this, but in the book itself it worked, trust me!

Andrew Blackman Book reviews book review, bulgakov, russian literature, the master and margarita

I had a very relaxing holiday, and had time for lots of reading:

Also read, but not pictured, were:

• Global Shift by Edmund J. Bourne
• Commonwealth Short Stories edited by Anna Rutherford and Donald Hannah
• West Indian Folk Tales retold by Philip M Sherlock

Reviews to follow – I have a bit of a backlog to take care of!

Andrew Blackman Book reviews holiday, Interesting snippets

Well, I’m back – finally! The snow and ice here in England delayed my return, so my four-week holiday turned into five. I am now relaxed and even a little tanned, and trying to hold onto both for as long as possible. More about my holiday later, but I wanted to start the new year by thanking Tania Hershman for providing this excellent list of UK and Irish lit mags. I plan to subscribe to several of them, and also submit some short stories I’ve been hoarding for a while.

Happy New Year everyone! What have you been up to lately?

Andrew Blackman Uncategorized Interesting snippets, list, magazines, short stories, submissions