While it’s still January, and beginning of the year, I’d like to take the opportunity to write a little bit about what I read in 2019. These will in no way be reviews, just recollections and impressions, coloured by the failings of memory and unadorned by the critical faculties which some people bring to an exercise like this. I know what I like, but often have difficulty expressing it, so this is a challenge in some ways, although what I have to say will sometimes be more about the circumstances in which it was read than about the work itself.
In no particular order – neither chronological nor in order of enjoyment – here they order. (And it’s probably worth stating that this list may even be incomplete: I don’t write down what I read as I read it.)
At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson is the book I read while recuperating from an operation on my nose which allowed me to breathe better. I had been told to not exert myself and had to constantly flush out my nose by squirting water up my nostrils and while the circumstances could have been a lot worse I was in need of consolation and distraction and Bill Bryson provided it, as he has done so many times before, and indeed had done with this book (it wasn’t the first time I’d read it). Sometimes you need a comfortable old cardigan type of book, and the chatty yet extremely well informed style was just perfect. He’s always interesting because he is always interested and frequently very funny, even when explaining a complex historical, scientific or economic process.
Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead by Paula Byrne was an addition to my collection about Evelyn Waugh, who had a fascinating life, mixing with fancy people, and being generally hard to like and even less likeable as he got older. This book was partially about the models for the main characters in Brideshead and it was unexpected to read that the man who Lord Marchmain was probably based on spent some time in Australia, and while he was living in Sydney he stayed at a historic house which my wife Laetitia and I visited about a year ago, and that one of the men he befriended, both personally and in business, was an entrepreneur who had himself been involved in the background when the sport of rugby league was established in Australia. The possibility that these two interests of mine – Waugh and league – might have even the most tenuous connection would have seemed remote before reading this.
Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited by Philip Eade is yet another addition to the collection.
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke is a sort of stream of consciousness work which felt like hard work to get through, and this was disappointing as I had really looked forward to reading some of Rilke, who is best known as a poet although I think his output included the whole range of literature types. On the level of the sentence there are some beautiful phrases and very well composed scenes of death and disease and ghosts and generally dark things. I often say that my reading preference is not terribly plot-heavy stories, but maybe there can be too little plot, even for me. I would like to read this again, in smaller instalments, in a quiet environment nothing like a crowded bus or train.
Valmouth, Prancing N_gger, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli by Ronald Firbank made me feel like a real failure, as a reader. I didn’t finish it, which is unusual for me. Apparently Firbank was an influence on a range of people who flourished in the 1930s, including Waugh (there he is again) and Hemingway. From an almost scholarly point of view it seemed worth having a look at some stories by this writer, to get an idea of what he did, how he did it and how the work of others might have been shaped by what he did. But it was all so arch – the only word I can come up with, and I’m not sure if I’m actually using it correctly – the characters all being so witty and devastating and implying so much by saying so little that was obvious that it just seemed like too much effort to really work out what was going on. Which is shameful to admit, I suppose, but maybe life’s too short to struggle to the end of a book just so you can say you weren’t defeated by it. (I’ve taken one letter out of the title in order not to offend anyone who might read this.)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark made me feel better after the struggles with Rilke and Firbank. This perfect little book, so dense and poetic, so dark and funny has become a go to for me when I finish reading something and can’t decide on the next big challenge. It’s now on my to be read regularly list.
Sicilian Uncles by Leonardo Sciascia is a collection of short stories which I had read part of the previous year and which I finished reading in 2019. I wish Sciascia was better known, but even if that never happens away from the Italian reading public, I will certainly read more of him. The Day of the Owl, about Sicilian corruption and organised crime, was a masterful short novel where concision and the silences (what is left out) said more than some writers say in many pages.
Two Stories and a Memory by Giussepe di Lampedusa is the only other work available to be read by the author of The Leopard, one of my favourite novels. These pieces are chiefly of interest to fans of the author, I suppose, but are little gems in their own right. A brief few pages of memoir, a lovely short story with unexpected fantasy elements, and a fragment of what was intended to be a novel – reading these leaves you wanting more, but maybe if you can write The Leopard, that’s enough.
Point Omega by Don DeLillo was sparsely written and full of layers of meaning, only some of which were available to this reader. It was mysterious but ultimately unsatisfying as I wondered if it was trying too hard to hide its reason for being. But strangely this didn’t make it unenjoyable to read. DeLillo is so assured and so subtle and he uses language so very well. The experience of reading this made me want to read more.
King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild is a work of history which I had hoped would be informative on a subject I knew little about but beyond that had few expectations. But it was truly excellent account of how the Belgian Congo colony was set up, as King Leopold’s personal possession, not a Belgian possession, at least initially, and how it operated, which was utterly appallingly, the mistreatment of local African workers cultivating rubber just beggars belief at times. In the story we learn about several characters, including the dastardly Henry Morton Stanley (of “Dr Livingstone, I presume” fame), Roger Casement, a British Empire diplomat and humanitarian who later became a martyr to the cause of Irish freedom, and a couple of candidates for who Conrad’s character Mister Kurtz might have been based on.
Chasing Lost Time: The Life of CK Scott Moncrieff by Jean Findlay is a biography of the soldier and spy and translator who worked on Proust’s very big novel, which reminds me: I should really read some more of that soon.
A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor was written by a young English man who walked across Europe to Istanbul in the 1930s. I loved it. I so want to read the second part, and more of his work. He’s one of those English people who tells you that he wasn’t very good at school but seems somehow to have acquired very deep historical knowledge and the ability to speak several languages. It’s really first-class travel writing, which makes you feel a little sad that so many parts of Central and Eastern Europe were irrevocably changed by being exposed to the Nazis and then the Second World War and then the Soviets.
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is a book I had wanted to read for some time. It had the dreamlike qualities I had been led to expect, the language expert, even musical at times, and the use of “we” as narrator simultaneously unusual and utterly right for the story. But there was something missing for me. Perhaps my expectations were too high. Again, it might be better to re-read this away from public transport.
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood, a sort of feminist allegory about a group of women imprisoned at a remote location, is another one I had wanted to read for some time. It didn’t disappoint, and I want to read more of Charlotte Wood now.
Collected Poems 1909 – 1962 by TS Eliot felt like scratching an itch which has been getting itchier for a little while. I’ve never really read much poetry and would like to know more about it and understand it better. A cultured person should be interested in poetry, I’ve always felt, and this seemed a good place to start. There are the poems we read at school, but many others here too, and I read them all, some of them more than once, and liked some of them a lot and others not at all. I wonder if I’m a good poetry reader and want to be better, so have decided to read more this year. We’ll see how that goes.