John Updike Dead at 76

We never know we go,---when we are going
We jest and shut the door;
Fate following behind us bolts it,
And we accost no more.

----Emily Dickinson

Last Night at the Lobster

I have to say this was a pretty perfect little book. Only 146 pages so really a novella. It's simple, a sad old mall in New England has a Red Lobster that is closing down. Hardly the stuff of tragedy but somehow it is. The manager Manny who works from opening till the last lights are closed off is the hero and the love he has for doing things right exalts the day and place to something beyond a crappy chain restaurant closing in a crappy mall. It's the story of the people in David Shipler's Working Poor, only fiction. It's a timely book for this economy, a lot of places besides Red Lobster will be closing soon. Hopefully we can all handle whatever comes with at least as much dignity as Manny.

The Clothes on Their Backs

This was shortlisted for the Booker Man and White Tiger won. Both books are pretty insubstantial. The Clothes on Their Backs one reveiwer described as Anita Brookner with sex. Isn't it odd how everyone pooh poohs poor Anita but she is so often a point of literary reference?
Anyway it's the story of a young woman, a daughter of a couple of very timid and sheltered Hungarian Jewish refugees in London (tres Brookner!). She gets to know her uncle who was a rather terrible vicious slumlord when he was younger. Her parents had always refused to tell her any of her family history and the uncle is anxious to tell her the stories of the atrocities he saw in Hungary. The sex is with a young punk who lives downstairs from the uncle.
The main storyline takes place at the time of the National Front movement in Britain with all the skinheads. At the same time the punks are evolving and there is one rather interesting bit where she sees some skinheads approaching and she breaks down the subtle dress code language for both skinheads and punks...drainpipe jeans for punks, the same for skinheads but rolled up to the ankle, safety pins- punks, no jewelry-skinheads etc etc.
It was just OK.

It's All a Blur

I read a lot while I was away. I read White Tiger which won the Booker. It was light and quick but ultimately quite forgettable. Like fat-free Salman Rushdie. I loved Kate Atkinson's Case Histories. It's a mystery genre I suppose but she has such a way with characters and stories that I really enjoyed it. Since my return I read another one of hers. While there Ruth had Scenes From a Museum which I've had unread on my shelves at home forever, I knew I would like it, just never got around to it. It was great, very funny and nasty all at once.

Half a Yellow Sun was all about Nigeria and Biafra and since I know nothing about the situation there it was very illuminating. She writes well and the story was very sad but somehow readable in a way other African stuff isn't. If the horror is too much in your face I find it unreadable. My last book at the beach was Louis de Bernieres' Birds Without Wings, and now I know all about the Turkish/Greek/Armenian thang. I remember reading Corelli's Mandolin by him and loving the richness of his writing. This is quite good too but the central story is not as compelling so it ultimately is not as good a book.

A nice bit however I copied out:

The couple sat side by side on cushions on the floor, quietly eating breakfast from the low table. They munched in happy and enjoyable silence, of the kind that grows like a vine through the long years of a good marriage, so that when everything that needs to be said has already been pronounced, it is mutually understood that there is an intimate silence that has it's own loquacity.

My last book read on the plane was The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley which is a pre-war English story of a young boy visiting a friend in an estate and he ends up delivering secret messages between the young lady of the house and the virile young farmer. Apparently Harold Pinter made a screenplay and it was produced with Julie Christie, Edward Fox and as the 'virile young farmer' Alan Bates. I tried to order it on Netflix but it is not available. It's quite good, reminiscent of the first part of Ian McEwan's Atonement, he is interestingly enough blurbed on the back jacket as having loved the book in his youth. It's also like Lady Chatterley a bit I suppose, without the sex. Oh those virile young farmers!

Coetzee Coetzee Cooo

Youth is the story of a young white South African man who wants to be an artist and moves to London. Even in South Africa, his home, J.M. Coetzee seems to feel out of place. He reminds me of Anita Brookner, in some ways, incapable of connecting, in any real sense, to life. Very un-E.M. Forster with his "Only connect!". In South Africa he feels that "between black and white there is a gulf fixed. Deeper than pity, deeper than honourable dealings, deeper even than goodwill, lies an awareness on both sides that people like Paul and himself, with their pianos and violins, are here on this earth, the earth of South Africa, on the shakiest of pretexts. ....when the ground beneath his feet is soaked with blood and the vast backward depth of history rings with shouts of anger..". In London he feels superior to everyone and no one even notices. He fails to connect or become a great writer in the span of the book.

It ends with the thought that to be a writer "...what more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer together with a readiness to fail and fail again?" The narrator is cold and selfish and convinced that he belongs with a beautiful passionate woman and treats all the other timid plain women he becomes entangled with very poorly. It is like the Philip Larkin poem Wild Oats:

About twenty years ago
Two girls came in where I worked
-A bosomy English rose
And her friend in specs I could talk to.
Faces in those days sparked
The whole shooting-match off, and I doubt
If ever one had like hers:
But it was the friend I took out,

And in seven years after that
Wrote over four hundred letters,
Gave a ten-guinea ringI got back in the end, and met
At numerous cathedral cities
Unknown to the clergy.
I believeI met beautiful twice. She was trying
Both times (so I thought) not to laugh.

Parting, after about five
Rehearsals, was an agreement
That I was too selfish, withdrawn
And easily bored to love.
Well, useful to get that learnt,
In my wallet are still two snaps,
Of bosomy Rose with fur gloves on.
Unlucky charms, perhaps.

Coetzee's narrator wants a bosomy Rose and has trouble realizing he doesn't deserve her. He doesn't deserve to be an artist either, but if the book is halfway autobiographical I suppose he becomes one.

My Winter Vacation

I read quite a few books in the last two weeks:

Half of a Yellow Sun by that Nigerian writer whose name escapes me

Youth by Coetzee

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres

White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

I wrote some comments that I will dig out of my suitcase and post later.