Diary Of A Nobody
Diary Of A Nobody is the private diary of one Charles Pooter, an ordinary anonymous clerk, chronicling his everyman middle class life in which he gets frustrated with tradesmen and servants, is embarrassed by his son, pleased with his own jokes and goes through ups and downs with his friends Cumming and Gowing who are always coming and going.
The novel is often amusing and diverting but is neither as laugh out loud hilarious or as amazing as I expected. A portrait of the cringeworthy incidents in the small life of the unremarkable ordinary person, it was a massive hit in its day, as people identified with the day to day annoyances of running a household made humorous and as a piece of schadenfreude.
The fact that the Grossmith's wrote it as one voice is remarkable because it flows as if it were one writer. Ultimately, I thought it was OK, and it passed an afternoon for me, but the funniest or best book ever?
Not really.
It's passed out of copyright now so it's free on Kindle, so you may as well give it a go if you've got one!
6.5/10
Showing posts with label Middle-Class. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Middle-Class. Show all posts
Monday, 15 October 2012
Sunday, 19 August 2012
Book #73 Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
Swimming Home
In Swimming Home by Deborah Levy, another contender for this years Booker, popular poet Joe Jacobs is on holiday with his wife, daughter and a couple they are friends with in Nice, when their privacy is intruded upon by one Kitty Finch who they find floating naked in their pool.
At first it all seems like an honest mistake, Kitty regularly holidays here too and has just got her dates confused, that's all, she's happy to go to a hotel, Isabel Jacobs, Joe's wife offers to put her up when no hotel can be found. But it doesn't take long for either Joe or Isabel to discover she is just another fan looking for the poet's attention.
What would make the book lose its general credibility is the group tolerance of Kitty, a clearly unbalanced individual, but Levy sidesteps the issue of Kitty's continued presence by giving the lead characters of Isabel, Joe, and Nina reasons to want her to remain.
If mentally unbalanced Kitty has intruded upon their lives and is manipulating them as their neighbour, who has dealt with Kitty's psychological problems before suggests, so too are they using Kitty, manipulating her; Nina idolising her, hurting her mother by choosing this stranger over her at a pivotal moment in her life, Joe has no interest in helping her develop as a poet, he wants what he gets from all his groupies & rather than Isabel being Kitty's victim, Kitty is Isabel's, invited in and thereby exploited to do exactly what Isabel needs her to do.
Swimming Home is really compulsive to read, an active page turner and its really accessible as a novel, there are great moments in the prose which I really, really liked such as this description of psychiatrists :
Swimming Home comes from a very, very small publishing house called And Other Stories, which relies on subscribers to exist, so it's a triumph, a really great thing to see one of its books up for the Booker. Like many however I could have done without the fawning Tom McCarthy introduction, I skipped it because it was fawning but I am told it gives away aspects of plot which is an unforgivable thing to do to a reader 8/10
In Swimming Home by Deborah Levy, another contender for this years Booker, popular poet Joe Jacobs is on holiday with his wife, daughter and a couple they are friends with in Nice, when their privacy is intruded upon by one Kitty Finch who they find floating naked in their pool.
At first it all seems like an honest mistake, Kitty regularly holidays here too and has just got her dates confused, that's all, she's happy to go to a hotel, Isabel Jacobs, Joe's wife offers to put her up when no hotel can be found. But it doesn't take long for either Joe or Isabel to discover she is just another fan looking for the poet's attention.
What would make the book lose its general credibility is the group tolerance of Kitty, a clearly unbalanced individual, but Levy sidesteps the issue of Kitty's continued presence by giving the lead characters of Isabel, Joe, and Nina reasons to want her to remain.
If mentally unbalanced Kitty has intruded upon their lives and is manipulating them as their neighbour, who has dealt with Kitty's psychological problems before suggests, so too are they using Kitty, manipulating her; Nina idolising her, hurting her mother by choosing this stranger over her at a pivotal moment in her life, Joe has no interest in helping her develop as a poet, he wants what he gets from all his groupies & rather than Isabel being Kitty's victim, Kitty is Isabel's, invited in and thereby exploited to do exactly what Isabel needs her to do.
Swimming Home is really compulsive to read, an active page turner and its really accessible as a novel, there are great moments in the prose which I really, really liked such as this description of psychiatrists :
Or this quote about knowledge :A bad fairy made a deal with me, give me your history and I will give you something to take it away
knowledge would not necessarily serve them, nor would it make them happy. There was a chance it would instead throw light on visions they did not want to see
Swimming Home comes from a very, very small publishing house called And Other Stories, which relies on subscribers to exist, so it's a triumph, a really great thing to see one of its books up for the Booker. Like many however I could have done without the fawning Tom McCarthy introduction, I skipped it because it was fawning but I am told it gives away aspects of plot which is an unforgivable thing to do to a reader 8/10
Friday, 10 June 2011
Book #44 Night Waking by Sarah Moss
Night Waking
Night Waking ended up on my Kindle after it was recently listed in The Guardian's "Fiction Uncovered" selection for "overlooked writers deserving greater recognition".
A couple, Anna and Giles spend time in the remote Hebridean ancestral home of Giles' family, doing up a cottage to rent for tourists, whilst Giles watches puffins for his academic research and Anna, an Oxford Fellow, attempts to write a book on the treatment of children in the 18th Century. This may sound blissful but the couple have also brought with them their demanding young children Raph and Moth. When planting trees in the garden with their boys, the couple discover the skeleton of an infant.
The story which focuses on Anna, is a reflection of the problems of modern motherhood as Anna struggles to manage childcare, housework, her book and a good nights sleep. I believe many female readers will identify with the despair of being woken at 3 am for yet another recitation of The Gruffalo. Whilst Moss shows well how the glossy picture of motherhood and its difficult realities do not match up, mothers experiencing a day to day list of menial, repetitive, tasks; the repetition of these tasks occasionally becomes a little Gruffalo-like for the reader. Giles, the husband, is shown in a nearly entirely negative way, of the careless, clueless aristocratic male who is useless unless bribed with sex to look after his own children. Whilst Anna is clearly a woman on the edge, he is lacking in depth of characterisation. His slight repression, disdain of processed food and lack of household contribution, seeming to be the sum total of his personality.
The second strand of the story which tries to use the past to paint the picture of how the infant came to be in the garden, is interesting, but underdeveloped although it used to good effect in the story's conclusion when the last of its secrets are revealed.
I think too that this is a strikingly middle class book, with strikingly middle class, first world problems. Whether the author seeks to do this in a critical way or whether this is an accidental reflection of her own lifestyle, and she sees no irony, I am unsure. But her characters gripes like lack of internet and mobile coverage, are hard to sympathise with when they are so much more fortunate than most. I think it may appeal to the harassed professional working mother, but perhaps not, if they seek to read for escapism rather than a grim echo of their own toils.
Personally, I felt that the secondary characters, the Fairchild family, whose function really is to serve as interaction for Anna were far more interesting, their problems being more, well, like problems. The difference being that while Anna worries that her kids aren't eating her homemade bread, Judith Fairchild is worrying that her kid, hopelessly depressed at the state of the world, isn't eating at all whilst Judith, increasingly purposeless, is descending into alcoholism.
I do think that Night Waking has its place, and isn't badly written, though it certainly didn't fly along for me. This is the second book in the challenge to use a Hebridean island as location, and I wondered whether 'Hebridean' may just be becoming an easy byword for remote, windswept, mysterious; so that writers don't really have to work on a sense of place and atmosphere. Neither though, would I say it was a terrible book or a terrible idea. It's alright, but not special. 6/10
Night Waking ended up on my Kindle after it was recently listed in The Guardian's "Fiction Uncovered" selection for "overlooked writers deserving greater recognition".
A couple, Anna and Giles spend time in the remote Hebridean ancestral home of Giles' family, doing up a cottage to rent for tourists, whilst Giles watches puffins for his academic research and Anna, an Oxford Fellow, attempts to write a book on the treatment of children in the 18th Century. This may sound blissful but the couple have also brought with them their demanding young children Raph and Moth. When planting trees in the garden with their boys, the couple discover the skeleton of an infant.
The story which focuses on Anna, is a reflection of the problems of modern motherhood as Anna struggles to manage childcare, housework, her book and a good nights sleep. I believe many female readers will identify with the despair of being woken at 3 am for yet another recitation of The Gruffalo. Whilst Moss shows well how the glossy picture of motherhood and its difficult realities do not match up, mothers experiencing a day to day list of menial, repetitive, tasks; the repetition of these tasks occasionally becomes a little Gruffalo-like for the reader. Giles, the husband, is shown in a nearly entirely negative way, of the careless, clueless aristocratic male who is useless unless bribed with sex to look after his own children. Whilst Anna is clearly a woman on the edge, he is lacking in depth of characterisation. His slight repression, disdain of processed food and lack of household contribution, seeming to be the sum total of his personality.
The second strand of the story which tries to use the past to paint the picture of how the infant came to be in the garden, is interesting, but underdeveloped although it used to good effect in the story's conclusion when the last of its secrets are revealed.
I think too that this is a strikingly middle class book, with strikingly middle class, first world problems. Whether the author seeks to do this in a critical way or whether this is an accidental reflection of her own lifestyle, and she sees no irony, I am unsure. But her characters gripes like lack of internet and mobile coverage, are hard to sympathise with when they are so much more fortunate than most. I think it may appeal to the harassed professional working mother, but perhaps not, if they seek to read for escapism rather than a grim echo of their own toils.
Personally, I felt that the secondary characters, the Fairchild family, whose function really is to serve as interaction for Anna were far more interesting, their problems being more, well, like problems. The difference being that while Anna worries that her kids aren't eating her homemade bread, Judith Fairchild is worrying that her kid, hopelessly depressed at the state of the world, isn't eating at all whilst Judith, increasingly purposeless, is descending into alcoholism.
I do think that Night Waking has its place, and isn't badly written, though it certainly didn't fly along for me. This is the second book in the challenge to use a Hebridean island as location, and I wondered whether 'Hebridean' may just be becoming an easy byword for remote, windswept, mysterious; so that writers don't really have to work on a sense of place and atmosphere. Neither though, would I say it was a terrible book or a terrible idea. It's alright, but not special. 6/10
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