After The Fire, A Still Small Voice
After The Fire, A Still Small Voice was recently featured on BBC 2's The Culture Show 'New Novelists : 12 Of The Best' episode. Evie Wyld is British with Australian family and this is her first novel.
The novel immediately sets itself in 2006, by making a passing reference to the death of Australian wildlife expert Steve Irwin in its opening page; more as a means of setting location and atmosphere than anything else. An Australian story of fathers and sons, the books central character Frank has beaten a retreat to his grandparents long abandoned home following a bad break up.
The novel takes the format of switching alternate chapters between Frank and his father Leon, though Frank's chapters are roughly present day, Leon's take place first in his childhood at the time of the Korean war, which his father fights in and then later the Vietnam war which he fights in.
The book is really a study in the way in which emotional damage is passed along through generations, from Frank's grandfather onward, though the reader can connect with both Frank and Leon as characters, they themselves are disconnected. The remoteness of the characters is echoed through the remoteness of the landscape Frank chooses to live in, and his isolation as a local newcomer.
After The Fire....is a book which has a strong emotional depth without being hard or heavy to read, it's very easy "to get into" and conveys a sense of realistic character portrayals and outcomes. Too many books or films paint happy endings onto stories that real humans wish they could experience but don't because life isn't like that. Life is often broken and unfair and unhappy, the skill here is that Evie Wyld portrays this and succeeds in making her book moving but not depressing. It is thoughtful and reflective and descriptive. I wasn't overly sure about the subplot, which seems not to fit with the main focus of the nature of the father/son dynamic and is a bit unclear and unresolved.
I liked the book well enough, I found the chapters devoted to Frank very atmospheric and would probably read more work by Wyld in the future. 7/10
Monday, 23 May 2011
Sunday, 22 May 2011
Poem #3 The God Abandons Antony by CP Cavafy
So my poem of the month is The God Abandons Antony by CP Cavafy, I fell in love with this poem the second I heard it and it's easily in my top 10 favourite poems. Constantine Cavafy was Greek he lived in Alexandria in what was then the Ottoman Empire and briefly lived in Liverpool as a child. He died in 1933 at the age of 70. I recently found an old edition of Cavafy in a tiny bookshop in Camden and was chuffed with myself. The translation was slightly different to the one I was acquainted with, and it's the translation I know better that I am posting.
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
I think this poem is amazing, and it's really special to me.
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
I think this poem is amazing, and it's really special to me.
Book #40 The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
The New York Trilogy
The New York Trilogy isn't a trilogy in the sense that Steig Larsson's Millenium Trilogy is a trilogy or The Lord Of Rings is a trilogy, it's three extended short stories 'City Of Glass', 'Ghosts' and 'The Locked Room'. It's another example of metafiction, which I wasn't expecting, I can't remember who recommended it to me in the first instance or what they said about it. Whilst the use of metafiction is totally unintrusive in 'The Things They Carried', you knew it was there but it didn't effect the story, it is so intrusive in 'The New York Trilogy' that I think it probably counts as an example of 'breaking the fourth wall' or if it doesn't quite technically fit the criteria, it comes very close.
I hate it when authors break the fourth wall, I like to become immersed in the story, the characters, and pretend at least for the duration I read it that I am a visitor to the world about which I am reading. I don't like the authors wagging finger appearing in my face and saying 'this isn't REAL you know, it's just a STORY'. I know that already, I know the difference between fiction and non fiction.
I think one of the central discussion points of the trilogy is on the nature of authorship, and whether the story is more important than its author and the author is essentially irrelevant. In 'City Of Glass' Daniel Quinn is a formerly successful poet who following terrible tragedy now writes mystery stories, churning out one a year under the pseudonym 'William Wilson'. He receives a phonecall in the dead of night looking for a private detective named Paul Auster whom he then impersonates. Essentially all Auster has done here is use his own name as a character name but the effect is nonetheless jarring. A separate character who coincidentally also shares the name Paul Auster appears later on. I didn't like it. In the last story 'The Locked Room' the question of authorship arises again. A man publishes the work of his missing, presumed dead, friend and is asked whether he would consider writing a few more novels under his friends name, the public being none the wiser. I wondered briefly if Paul Auster wasn't a real person and that was part of the point but it seems that he is.
'The Locked Room' is actually quite a good story, but in it he re-uses several character names from 'City Of Glass' including, at one point, Paul Auster, and I just found this approach really very irritating. The characters in The Locked Room are not the ones from City Of Glass either they just have the same names. I think he's trying to make another point with this and that is that the names don't matter only the story. In Ghosts, Auster replaces every character name with a colour, which sounds like a small thing but actually makes it quite hard to read.
I wonder if a lot of reviews at the time praised Auster for playing with formats and BREAKING NEW GROUND, but I found something quite arrogant about it, a tone which suggests he thinks he's a better and more innovative writer than he actually is. The sense that he's writing for the critics, and the literary world at large. The first two stories are genuinely confusing, and I didn't really "take away" much from the book having finished it. I felt quite "so what?" about it.
In the first story Quinn meets a young woman reading one of his mystery novels, when she tells him she's finding it average without knowing he's the author, he leaves, because he is afraid he might punch her in the face. I kind of had the same feeling towards Auster throughout. A disappointment 5/10
The New York Trilogy isn't a trilogy in the sense that Steig Larsson's Millenium Trilogy is a trilogy or The Lord Of Rings is a trilogy, it's three extended short stories 'City Of Glass', 'Ghosts' and 'The Locked Room'. It's another example of metafiction, which I wasn't expecting, I can't remember who recommended it to me in the first instance or what they said about it. Whilst the use of metafiction is totally unintrusive in 'The Things They Carried', you knew it was there but it didn't effect the story, it is so intrusive in 'The New York Trilogy' that I think it probably counts as an example of 'breaking the fourth wall' or if it doesn't quite technically fit the criteria, it comes very close.
I hate it when authors break the fourth wall, I like to become immersed in the story, the characters, and pretend at least for the duration I read it that I am a visitor to the world about which I am reading. I don't like the authors wagging finger appearing in my face and saying 'this isn't REAL you know, it's just a STORY'. I know that already, I know the difference between fiction and non fiction.
I think one of the central discussion points of the trilogy is on the nature of authorship, and whether the story is more important than its author and the author is essentially irrelevant. In 'City Of Glass' Daniel Quinn is a formerly successful poet who following terrible tragedy now writes mystery stories, churning out one a year under the pseudonym 'William Wilson'. He receives a phonecall in the dead of night looking for a private detective named Paul Auster whom he then impersonates. Essentially all Auster has done here is use his own name as a character name but the effect is nonetheless jarring. A separate character who coincidentally also shares the name Paul Auster appears later on. I didn't like it. In the last story 'The Locked Room' the question of authorship arises again. A man publishes the work of his missing, presumed dead, friend and is asked whether he would consider writing a few more novels under his friends name, the public being none the wiser. I wondered briefly if Paul Auster wasn't a real person and that was part of the point but it seems that he is.
'The Locked Room' is actually quite a good story, but in it he re-uses several character names from 'City Of Glass' including, at one point, Paul Auster, and I just found this approach really very irritating. The characters in The Locked Room are not the ones from City Of Glass either they just have the same names. I think he's trying to make another point with this and that is that the names don't matter only the story. In Ghosts, Auster replaces every character name with a colour, which sounds like a small thing but actually makes it quite hard to read.
I wonder if a lot of reviews at the time praised Auster for playing with formats and BREAKING NEW GROUND, but I found something quite arrogant about it, a tone which suggests he thinks he's a better and more innovative writer than he actually is. The sense that he's writing for the critics, and the literary world at large. The first two stories are genuinely confusing, and I didn't really "take away" much from the book having finished it. I felt quite "so what?" about it.
In the first story Quinn meets a young woman reading one of his mystery novels, when she tells him she's finding it average without knowing he's the author, he leaves, because he is afraid he might punch her in the face. I kind of had the same feeling towards Auster throughout. A disappointment 5/10
Saturday, 21 May 2011
Book #39 Naked by David Sedaris
Naked
Naked, published in 1997 is the second book by David Sedaris I have read having read Me Talk Pretty One Day, a later work, some years ago. All of Sedaris' work comprises of anecdotal, autobiographical short stories. A comic writer many of his stories are genuinely hilarious, but comedy is a personal taste thing and I found the stories overall in this one less amusing than I did the previous book I'd read, which isn't to say that was the case with every story.
In this book Sedaris tackles such diverse topics as his time on a nudist colony, his Greek grandmother, his volunteerism in a psychiatric hospital, his sister Lisa's friendship with a prostitute, a pornographic novel discovered in their home, Lisa's first period and her marriage, and his childhood issues with his homosexuality and OCD among others.
I felt when reading 'Me Talk Pretty One Day' that Sedaris' childhood made anyone's seem dull and tame, and 'Naked' expands on this, the man's life is full of incident and wild stories to tell at dinner parties, whilst what happens to David the majority of the time is unfortunate and often cringeworthy, you feel slightly envious that he had all these experiences. It beats the heck out of childhood Saturdays spent traipsing around garden centres.
The funniest stories this time round for me were 'The Drama Bug' a story in which Sedaris becomes taken with Shakespeare and begins to address his family in Shakespearean Language, which genuinely made me laugh aloud, The Women's Open : the story of Lisa's first period which distinguishes itself for Lisa's reaction to her father in the car. Cyclops, the story of the way in which parents project the worst case scenario outcome onto everything you do; I also liked True Detective an episode in which David tries to establish who is wiping their bum on the bathroom towels among other crimes and finally my favourite The Incomplete Quad chronicling Sedaris' friendship with a disabled student at university, and their various attempts at using her disability for financial gain, getting away with shoplifting and hitchhiking, really funny.
Some of the stories though are actually quite sad, the fact that nobody really liked his grandmother Ya-Ya, and the story of his mothers diagnosis with terminal cancer. Funny or sad, these are stories of a large, chaotic family and the sort of emotions and relationships that occur within a family dynamic, and as such should be very identifiable with a lot of readers. I think like me, other readers will like certain stories better than others and perhaps will like ones that I wasn't too keen on, and dislike ones that I enjoyed.
I struggled with maybe three stories in the book, C.O.G, Naked, and Something For Everyone which made the last section of the book a bit of a "go slow" as these were longer stories which I didn't really find interesting or funny. Like most short story collections you take to some stories and not to others which then makes the book rather a patchy experience. I don't know if I'll read a third collection of his stories, I think it's important that there was a long gap between my reading this book and Me Talk Pretty One Day because I think if you read all his stuff on top of one another it would become a bit samey and irritating.
I do wonder how his family, his brothers and sisters who are still living feel about having themselves and their childhood exposed in such a way, I read that an adaptation of Me Talk Pretty One Day was blocked after Amy Sedaris, herself a writer, voiced concerns to David about how their family would be portrayed.
Overall, I really enjoyed some of it and some of it bored me so maybe we'll say a 6.5/10
Naked, published in 1997 is the second book by David Sedaris I have read having read Me Talk Pretty One Day, a later work, some years ago. All of Sedaris' work comprises of anecdotal, autobiographical short stories. A comic writer many of his stories are genuinely hilarious, but comedy is a personal taste thing and I found the stories overall in this one less amusing than I did the previous book I'd read, which isn't to say that was the case with every story.
In this book Sedaris tackles such diverse topics as his time on a nudist colony, his Greek grandmother, his volunteerism in a psychiatric hospital, his sister Lisa's friendship with a prostitute, a pornographic novel discovered in their home, Lisa's first period and her marriage, and his childhood issues with his homosexuality and OCD among others.
I felt when reading 'Me Talk Pretty One Day' that Sedaris' childhood made anyone's seem dull and tame, and 'Naked' expands on this, the man's life is full of incident and wild stories to tell at dinner parties, whilst what happens to David the majority of the time is unfortunate and often cringeworthy, you feel slightly envious that he had all these experiences. It beats the heck out of childhood Saturdays spent traipsing around garden centres.
The funniest stories this time round for me were 'The Drama Bug' a story in which Sedaris becomes taken with Shakespeare and begins to address his family in Shakespearean Language, which genuinely made me laugh aloud, The Women's Open : the story of Lisa's first period which distinguishes itself for Lisa's reaction to her father in the car. Cyclops, the story of the way in which parents project the worst case scenario outcome onto everything you do; I also liked True Detective an episode in which David tries to establish who is wiping their bum on the bathroom towels among other crimes and finally my favourite The Incomplete Quad chronicling Sedaris' friendship with a disabled student at university, and their various attempts at using her disability for financial gain, getting away with shoplifting and hitchhiking, really funny.
Some of the stories though are actually quite sad, the fact that nobody really liked his grandmother Ya-Ya, and the story of his mothers diagnosis with terminal cancer. Funny or sad, these are stories of a large, chaotic family and the sort of emotions and relationships that occur within a family dynamic, and as such should be very identifiable with a lot of readers. I think like me, other readers will like certain stories better than others and perhaps will like ones that I wasn't too keen on, and dislike ones that I enjoyed.
I struggled with maybe three stories in the book, C.O.G, Naked, and Something For Everyone which made the last section of the book a bit of a "go slow" as these were longer stories which I didn't really find interesting or funny. Like most short story collections you take to some stories and not to others which then makes the book rather a patchy experience. I don't know if I'll read a third collection of his stories, I think it's important that there was a long gap between my reading this book and Me Talk Pretty One Day because I think if you read all his stuff on top of one another it would become a bit samey and irritating.
I do wonder how his family, his brothers and sisters who are still living feel about having themselves and their childhood exposed in such a way, I read that an adaptation of Me Talk Pretty One Day was blocked after Amy Sedaris, herself a writer, voiced concerns to David about how their family would be portrayed.
Overall, I really enjoyed some of it and some of it bored me so maybe we'll say a 6.5/10
Friday, 20 May 2011
Book #38 The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld
The Interpretation of Murder
Personally, I feel like the Crime genre is in a bit of a slump and nothing new has come out of it in a while. Authors seem to try and make their crime novel stand out by writing increasingly graphic, distasteful crimes or by making the investigator individually eccentric in some manner. By in large though they follow similar patterns.
Rubenfeld, (a Yale University lecturer with a first novel) puts his 'new take' on a crime thriller by making the main character psychoanalyst and society gentleman Stratham Younger, a disciple of Freud. He also places the novel in 1909 the year of Freud's first and only visit to America, thereby making Freud and Jung, historical people, fictional characters. There is of course a modern trend for this now, taking a well known person (long dead) and fictionalising them. It often leaves me wondering how fair it is, whether I would like a fictional and probably inaccurate depiction of myself bearing my name in some future novel, and which living people from this century will be subject to this treatment in our grand-children's time.
The twist with the focus on the psychoanalysis side of things is that Younger with Freud as a mentor begins to analyse a young woman who has been victim of an appalling crime using the tricks of their trade to get her to remember what happened. Younger's story is told in the first person, whilst the second strand, focusing on the ongoing investigation being run by a detective and a coroner is done in the third.
The book is a bit cobbled together, a bit too many ingredients in the recipe. A crime, the famous man and his famous visit, a couple of lacklustre love stories, a few thinly sketched similar villains, several twists and a quite over the top denouement, which strikes you as rather theatrical and camp.
In addition you've got all the sexual deviance, which after the original crime just seems to be there for sheer titillation, the presence of Freud and therefore his sexual theories providing a handy excuse for its presence. It also had that certain crime cliche of the Agatha Christie era, "a sinister Chinaman" How dated.
I was reading the review of some other book on Amazon, and one reviewer described it as being on 'the Richard and Judy list of shame'. This book too, was a Richard and Judy selection. What I think the reviewer meant was that although Richard and Judy do not choose low-brow fiction nor do they choose high-brow fiction meaning that their selections tend to fall in the middle, neither one thing nor the other. A little original perhaps, but also not too challenging, not too offensive and a little bland.
Consequently the writing reflects this.
There are some interesting points, the various facts about the thoughts on psychiatry in that era, the impact of Freud on American culture and Younger's curious obsession with Hamlet, but all in all it's messy. It has a sequel 'The Death Instinct' which I picked up quite accidentally a few weeks ago, because I had an opportunity for a 3 for 2 and it was the nearest thing to hand. I'm not really sure if I'll bother with it though, it's a bit of a "won't get those hours back" scenario.
5 or 6/10
Personally, I feel like the Crime genre is in a bit of a slump and nothing new has come out of it in a while. Authors seem to try and make their crime novel stand out by writing increasingly graphic, distasteful crimes or by making the investigator individually eccentric in some manner. By in large though they follow similar patterns.
Rubenfeld, (a Yale University lecturer with a first novel) puts his 'new take' on a crime thriller by making the main character psychoanalyst and society gentleman Stratham Younger, a disciple of Freud. He also places the novel in 1909 the year of Freud's first and only visit to America, thereby making Freud and Jung, historical people, fictional characters. There is of course a modern trend for this now, taking a well known person (long dead) and fictionalising them. It often leaves me wondering how fair it is, whether I would like a fictional and probably inaccurate depiction of myself bearing my name in some future novel, and which living people from this century will be subject to this treatment in our grand-children's time.
The twist with the focus on the psychoanalysis side of things is that Younger with Freud as a mentor begins to analyse a young woman who has been victim of an appalling crime using the tricks of their trade to get her to remember what happened. Younger's story is told in the first person, whilst the second strand, focusing on the ongoing investigation being run by a detective and a coroner is done in the third.
The book is a bit cobbled together, a bit too many ingredients in the recipe. A crime, the famous man and his famous visit, a couple of lacklustre love stories, a few thinly sketched similar villains, several twists and a quite over the top denouement, which strikes you as rather theatrical and camp.
In addition you've got all the sexual deviance, which after the original crime just seems to be there for sheer titillation, the presence of Freud and therefore his sexual theories providing a handy excuse for its presence. It also had that certain crime cliche of the Agatha Christie era, "a sinister Chinaman" How dated.
I was reading the review of some other book on Amazon, and one reviewer described it as being on 'the Richard and Judy list of shame'. This book too, was a Richard and Judy selection. What I think the reviewer meant was that although Richard and Judy do not choose low-brow fiction nor do they choose high-brow fiction meaning that their selections tend to fall in the middle, neither one thing nor the other. A little original perhaps, but also not too challenging, not too offensive and a little bland.
Consequently the writing reflects this.
There are some interesting points, the various facts about the thoughts on psychiatry in that era, the impact of Freud on American culture and Younger's curious obsession with Hamlet, but all in all it's messy. It has a sequel 'The Death Instinct' which I picked up quite accidentally a few weeks ago, because I had an opportunity for a 3 for 2 and it was the nearest thing to hand. I'm not really sure if I'll bother with it though, it's a bit of a "won't get those hours back" scenario.
5 or 6/10
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
Book #37 The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
The Things They Carried
After the difficulty I had with Crow Country, the next book I picked up: Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried' could not have been more different. It's been lounging round my house unread for what must be about three years now and I finally took pity on it, call me a mental person but I feel sorry for books that aren't read and wonder if they feel sad. That's how alive books are to me, they aren't just words that someone made up, between two hard covers lie whole worlds, people we could never meet, places and times we can never experience for ourselves.
In 'The Things They Carried' O'Brien takes us to a period of history and an event that only men of a certain age and nationality will ever experience, the US invasion of Vietnam, and shares it. O'Brien is renowned in the States as the foremost contributor to Vietnam veteran literature, having prior to the publication of this book released a memoir of his experience as a young soldier 'If I Die In A Combat Zone, Box Me Up And Ship Me Home' and a Vietnam war based novel 'Going After Cacciato'.
'The Things They Carried' blurs the distinction between the memoir format and the novel format, apparently deliberately. "Tim O'Brien" is the narrator of the novel, he became a writer following leaving service and is 43, just like the author, but the "Tim O'Brien" of the novel is a fictionalised version of the self. In the novel O'Brien talks about the difference between "story truths and happening truths" and it is clear that O'Brien uses 'The Things They Carried' as a vehicle to tell stories that portray truths of the experience without necessarily being factually accurate. Some people would say that this is a short story collection but I think it hangs together as a novel made up of episodic tales.
The title The Things They Carried has a literal meaning in terms not only of their backpacks and weaponry, but their mementos from home. It also has the figurative meaning of what they carried with them from home when they came into the war in their minds, what experiences they carried with them in the duration of their service and what they psychologically carried on going home. It is tough to know if it's the real O'Brien or the fictional O'Brien who speaks but he described never really being one to tell stories to friends and family about the war but has never stopped writing about it. The writing has become his dialogue and his therapy it seems, and yet there is no overwhelming feel in the writing of a desperate or bitter man. Just of a man with a great ability to tell the stories of the era and the stories they told each other at night in their foxholes.
If my experience reading Crow Country was plodding and exasperating, reading The Things They Carried was the exact opposite. I would have read this book in one single sitting had it not got so late. It was phenomenal, truly. Gripping, beautifully constructed and written, with not only a sense of place and time but a great sense of the psyche. The psyche of what turns young men into soldiers and how they cope or are damaged by that psychologically. What it is like to be a soldier not just in terms of times of incident and battle, but the daily trudging grind of patrol alongside men who may perish or whom you may count on to ensure you don't. What it is like to be "in" a war.
There was a great section around page 81 and I feel I must quote it as an example of how great the writing is
I had a hard time picking out where to start and finish that quote as the writing around it is equally fine.
This book is an experience which awakes the senses and evokes the atmosphere. Without wanting to make a crass allusion to popular culture, you can smell the napalm. I think that this, though a shorter book, is the best piece of war fiction I've read since I read Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks; though this is of course, an earlier book. But what makes this a bit more special is that Tim O'Brien's voice is the voice of a man who actually went there and lived to tell the tale.
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Read this book please. 10/10
After the difficulty I had with Crow Country, the next book I picked up: Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried' could not have been more different. It's been lounging round my house unread for what must be about three years now and I finally took pity on it, call me a mental person but I feel sorry for books that aren't read and wonder if they feel sad. That's how alive books are to me, they aren't just words that someone made up, between two hard covers lie whole worlds, people we could never meet, places and times we can never experience for ourselves.
In 'The Things They Carried' O'Brien takes us to a period of history and an event that only men of a certain age and nationality will ever experience, the US invasion of Vietnam, and shares it. O'Brien is renowned in the States as the foremost contributor to Vietnam veteran literature, having prior to the publication of this book released a memoir of his experience as a young soldier 'If I Die In A Combat Zone, Box Me Up And Ship Me Home' and a Vietnam war based novel 'Going After Cacciato'.
'The Things They Carried' blurs the distinction between the memoir format and the novel format, apparently deliberately. "Tim O'Brien" is the narrator of the novel, he became a writer following leaving service and is 43, just like the author, but the "Tim O'Brien" of the novel is a fictionalised version of the self. In the novel O'Brien talks about the difference between "story truths and happening truths" and it is clear that O'Brien uses 'The Things They Carried' as a vehicle to tell stories that portray truths of the experience without necessarily being factually accurate. Some people would say that this is a short story collection but I think it hangs together as a novel made up of episodic tales.
The title The Things They Carried has a literal meaning in terms not only of their backpacks and weaponry, but their mementos from home. It also has the figurative meaning of what they carried with them from home when they came into the war in their minds, what experiences they carried with them in the duration of their service and what they psychologically carried on going home. It is tough to know if it's the real O'Brien or the fictional O'Brien who speaks but he described never really being one to tell stories to friends and family about the war but has never stopped writing about it. The writing has become his dialogue and his therapy it seems, and yet there is no overwhelming feel in the writing of a desperate or bitter man. Just of a man with a great ability to tell the stories of the era and the stories they told each other at night in their foxholes.
If my experience reading Crow Country was plodding and exasperating, reading The Things They Carried was the exact opposite. I would have read this book in one single sitting had it not got so late. It was phenomenal, truly. Gripping, beautifully constructed and written, with not only a sense of place and time but a great sense of the psyche. The psyche of what turns young men into soldiers and how they cope or are damaged by that psychologically. What it is like to be a soldier not just in terms of times of incident and battle, but the daily trudging grind of patrol alongside men who may perish or whom you may count on to ensure you don't. What it is like to be "in" a war.
There was a great section around page 81 and I feel I must quote it as an example of how great the writing is
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At it's core perhaps war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive, the grass, the soil - everything. All around you things are purely living and you among them and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out of the skin awareness of your living self - your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There's a kind of largeness to it a kind of godliness. Though it's odd you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly as if for the first time you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.
I had a hard time picking out where to start and finish that quote as the writing around it is equally fine.
This book is an experience which awakes the senses and evokes the atmosphere. Without wanting to make a crass allusion to popular culture, you can smell the napalm. I think that this, though a shorter book, is the best piece of war fiction I've read since I read Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks; though this is of course, an earlier book. But what makes this a bit more special is that Tim O'Brien's voice is the voice of a man who actually went there and lived to tell the tale.
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Read this book please. 10/10
Tuesday, 17 May 2011
Book #36 Crow Country by Mark Cocker
Crow Country
I got this book well over a year ago when I ordered everything on a recommended list after a Readers Day (Yeah, I do stuff like that!) As far as I recall it was recommended by the poet David Constantine but it could have been his wife Helen, or someone else entirely. I found it residing sideways on a shelf this morning and thought I'd give it its turn - I have too many books, far too many, bought and unread.
I have to say that this is the first book since The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen to truly challenge the 'Finish what you started' aspect of the Roz Reading Challenge as a whole. I truly did not know if I could finish it, even when I only had 40 pages left. I hated reading this and couldn't wait to finish it, it was painful, it all began to blur into just words. I did however, finish it.
Mark Cocker is an ornithologist who specialises in crows. He's a crow man, they're his favourite birds, and the book is about his observations of them in the Yare Valley, Norfolk, other parts of Britain and their general history.
I want to be 100% fair to it and say: If you are an ornithologist, a twitcher, someone who enjoys Springwatch or nature programs in general, you will probably like this book. Not only does Cocker's genuine love for his subject matter shine through, extracts of it have a real poetic quality to them and he occasionally references poems featuring crows. In Chapter 17, Cocker talks about bird-watchers being defined as 'sad' in contemporary culture, but just because I don't identify, doesn't mean I think he's sad, my interest in poetry for example, or indeed in writing reviews on the Internet that I'm not sure anyone is actually reading might equally be classed as sad. I merely do not share his passion.
My grandfather had a bunch of crows that sat on his roof and basically waited for the scraps that came with punctual regularity. He used to clang a metal pan as a signal that the food was out, they were pretty obese crows, I suppose in the end. We did wonder if they mourned him when he died. I guess he was a crow man. My interest in crows is probably nil. I found the book torturous, arduous and deathly dull, it is less than 200 pages long and I had a genuine struggle to read it. I have read very little non fiction ever prior to this year and this book reminded me exactly why.
As Natural History books go, I can sort of tell that for those interested in the matter this would be a special book, and so my dislike for it is not based on the fact that it's a "bad book" it's probably an excellent book just not my cup of tea. In fairness to it I am not this books audience, and it's probably heading to the nearest charity shop. If my grandfather were still living though, I think he might have liked it.
Sad to say 3/10 for me, but for those who like birds it's probably a 7/8
I got this book well over a year ago when I ordered everything on a recommended list after a Readers Day (Yeah, I do stuff like that!) As far as I recall it was recommended by the poet David Constantine but it could have been his wife Helen, or someone else entirely. I found it residing sideways on a shelf this morning and thought I'd give it its turn - I have too many books, far too many, bought and unread.
I have to say that this is the first book since The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen to truly challenge the 'Finish what you started' aspect of the Roz Reading Challenge as a whole. I truly did not know if I could finish it, even when I only had 40 pages left. I hated reading this and couldn't wait to finish it, it was painful, it all began to blur into just words. I did however, finish it.
Mark Cocker is an ornithologist who specialises in crows. He's a crow man, they're his favourite birds, and the book is about his observations of them in the Yare Valley, Norfolk, other parts of Britain and their general history.
I want to be 100% fair to it and say: If you are an ornithologist, a twitcher, someone who enjoys Springwatch or nature programs in general, you will probably like this book. Not only does Cocker's genuine love for his subject matter shine through, extracts of it have a real poetic quality to them and he occasionally references poems featuring crows. In Chapter 17, Cocker talks about bird-watchers being defined as 'sad' in contemporary culture, but just because I don't identify, doesn't mean I think he's sad, my interest in poetry for example, or indeed in writing reviews on the Internet that I'm not sure anyone is actually reading might equally be classed as sad. I merely do not share his passion.
My grandfather had a bunch of crows that sat on his roof and basically waited for the scraps that came with punctual regularity. He used to clang a metal pan as a signal that the food was out, they were pretty obese crows, I suppose in the end. We did wonder if they mourned him when he died. I guess he was a crow man. My interest in crows is probably nil. I found the book torturous, arduous and deathly dull, it is less than 200 pages long and I had a genuine struggle to read it. I have read very little non fiction ever prior to this year and this book reminded me exactly why.
As Natural History books go, I can sort of tell that for those interested in the matter this would be a special book, and so my dislike for it is not based on the fact that it's a "bad book" it's probably an excellent book just not my cup of tea. In fairness to it I am not this books audience, and it's probably heading to the nearest charity shop. If my grandfather were still living though, I think he might have liked it.
Sad to say 3/10 for me, but for those who like birds it's probably a 7/8
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