Abort! Abort!

Did I tell you to read Any Human Heart by William Boyd? If so, sorry. Not that it's bad, just that it went on and on ...and on. At some point I realised that it would go on until the narrator reached the age of 83. I stopped at 38.

New York Times Kills Fiction

Last month I renewed my subscription to the New York Times. For a few heady weeks I was on top of it, reading every article and wanting to talk about it all. Poor George, after one particularly long current event laden phone conversation, there was a lull in the conversation, I could hear him sighing in relief. He is not used to having to talk about anything more pressing than 'what's for dinner?" with me. "Do you think they really had nuclear weapons in Syria? " I said. Gentle Reader, I can not repeat his response.

But fortunately for my relationship, reading the NYT and keeping up with it requires eternal vigilance---one moment of weakness, one skim of an article, one memo taken home to read on the train, one dipping into my novel in the morning and---I'm behind. It's like Ursula in 100 Years of Solitude constantly fighting off the ants invading the house in Macondo. She is always bustling through the rooms fighting them off with poisons and her energy. All the characters laugh at her and she seems like a crazy woman obsessed, but she never stops. The minute she dies though, they take over the house. I'll probably be found dead under a load of back issues of the NYT and the New Yorker. Suspect George!

Cranford

I just watched a BBC production of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford. I always loved the book, very unlike all of Elizabeth Gaskell's other serious social issues sort of work, the book was light and fun. The show was 5 episodes and according to the credits based on 3 of her novels...not just Cranford. They must have thrown them in a blender. But still I loved it, anything with Imelda Staunton needs to be watched. She can make you laugh just by looking at her with her tough little frame and piggy eyes and nose and her proud carriage. If I were in Hollywood I would be pitching a romantic comedy with her. She could replace Cameron Diaz! Anyway, there is a reason perhaps I am not in Hollywood and am confined to watching the industry unfold on a 14 inch screen in the front room. Anyway Cranford had Staunton, Eileen Atkins, Michael Gambon, Judi Dench but no Ashton Kutcher. Needless to say it was marvellous.

Old but Great Expectations

Watched David Lean's Great Expectations with Liv in our old movie quest. She actually liked it and acted out all the parts the next day in retelling. Herbert Pocket is played by an extremely young Alec Guiness and she said that whenever he was on the screen she felt safe. As in How Green Was my Valley there is all sorts of awful stuff happening to children. I don't think she'll ever be a candidate for the Lemony Snicket school of children's book with all sorts of nasty things happening to the kids. She likes fairies, small furry animals and happy kids in her books.

We were at Borders the other day getting a book about a fairy and a furry animal and felt quite well read as a mother was looking for the new Penderwick book and Liv got to tell her the name. Then another woman was hunting for the Ivy and Bean books and we got to nod solemnly at each other like literary critics.

Jhumping In

Just read Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of her short stories. Some had already been published in the New Yorker. She's a beautiful writer, as always, although her characters remind me of Anita Brookner's: isolated and removed from life and the humans around them . Too much prolonged exposure to them makes you start to feel itchy and claustrophobic. Makes me long for E.M. Forster to march in and slap them on the side of the head and yell "Only connect!".

Speak Nabokov

Just finished Speak Memory yesterday. Slow going with sentences like "nor am I alluding to the so-called muscae volitantes--shadows cast upon the retinal rods by motes in the vitreous humor, which are seen as transparent threads drifting across the visual field." to liven things up just when I'm nodding off in bed. (I love how he thinks that's a helpful explanation.)
For a lover of straight narrative: there is none. For the eschewer of the lyrical: stay away. But then there are some lovely bits where he describes how real memory becomes eaten up by our narratives until it is no longer a real memory but a part of a story. "houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore, and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own."

Books For Children?

Billed as a Young Adult Novel, How I Live Now by Meg Rossof won all sorts of awards in Britain. I think Adult is the operative word since right as our 15 year old anorexic American heroine gets off the plane in England she meets her cigarette smoking 14 year old male cousin, they hop in a car with him driving and a few chapters later they are having sex. What's so young about that? Anyway it's actually quite a good book set in a very vague future World War situation where the heroine ends up having to survive off the land.

Speaking of actual children's books Olivia and are reading The Penderwicks on Gardham Street and really enjoying it. They're quite good, both the first one and the second. The author obviously read a lot of the same fiction that I did when I was young. It has shades of Elizabeth Enright or E.E. Nesbit, not too trendy or pandering. Very satisfying.