august-september 2018 books…

The Hearing Trumpet (Leonora Carrington): I recently watched a television documentary on the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Definitely not my cup of tea when it comes to art, but she came across as a fascinating individual nevertheless. Somewhat predictly, she writes as she paints – revelling in the unexpected and with extraordinary imagination. The novel is the story of 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, who is given the gift of a hearing trumpet only to discover that what her family is saying is that she is to be committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos… (you get the general idea). To be honest, there were whole sections of the book (ie. those that echoed a fantasy, ‘Alice in Wonderland’-like world) that I just found boring, but there were also sections and characters (like Marian and her friend Carmella) that I found surprisingly funny. It’s also a tender book about disconnections – about old age (“people under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats”!); about people unable or unwilling to hear each other; about how we hear and how we don’t. Interesting.
WTF? (Robert Peston): I’ve previously put two separate posts on my blog, so I’m sure you don’t want me to repeat myself! I’ll simply say that I found it even-handed, engaging, richly-argued and inspiring… and very readable. A brilliant book.
Birdcage Walk (Helen Dunmore): Helen Dunmore, who lived in Bristol for more than 40 years, died last year. This is the third novel of hers that I’ve read, but what has particularly drawn me to her writing is her book of poetry “Inside The Wave”, which was published shortly before her death (I must have read it more than twenty times to date and find it constant food for thought). The Birdcage Walk in this novel is a very real place, here in Bristol – it’s the cemetery (which still exists) of St Andrew’s church (which was bombed to rubble in WW2 and the church is now merely a footprint). It’s set in the final years of the 18th century - a time which saw a frenetic building boom in the city (with builders and developers competing against one another and borrowing heavily to buy up land). But in 1793, war was declared between Britain and France and the building boom collapsed and bankruptcy was rife. The story is about the daughter of a forgotten writer (her mother) who married one of these builder/developers. We know nothing of the writer herself (none of her work now remains) apart from a gravestone “raised on the 14th July 1793 In the Presence of her Many Admirers”, together with an image of a quill pen and “Her Words Remain Her Inheritance”. It’s a novel about a particular period in history but also about the ways in which the individual vanishes from historical record. It’s both poignant and powerful. Dunmore was an excellent writer and I very much enjoyed this book.
The Age Of Innocence (Edith Wharton): I’m a great admirer of Wharton as a writer. This novel, first published in 1920, is set in 1870s within a very American, East Coast, upper class world. It presents a rather disturbing picture of a social system that provided a rigid code of Old New York society where convention and protocol dominated (I think there’s a description in the book that describes it thus: “rich and idle and ornamental societies”). The story centres on an upper-class couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of the bride's cousin, plagued by scandal, whose presence threatens their happiness. I don’t want to spoil the narrative, so I’ll leave it there. Not exactly my cup of tea perhaps – although Wharton's attention to detail and its portrayal of how the 19th-century East Coast American upper class lived (and, ultimately, the struggles to reconcile the old with the new) is utterly fascinating… and she writes quite beautifully.  
Death In Venice/Tristan/Tonio Kroger (Thomas Mann): A book of three short stories (written in 1911, 1902 and 1903 respectively). “Death In Venice” is one of my favourite films, but I had never read Thomas Mann’s book. It didn’t disappoint (and reinforced my huge admiration of Dirk Bogarde’s portrayal of Gustave von Aschenbach)! Maybe it was because I knew the story so well, that I found reading it so compelling? I found “Tristan” (the interplay of characters within a sanatorium) almost as enjoyable, but frankly found “Tonio Kroger” tedious by contrast. For me, a common theme seems to be the struggle of the creative artist to make sense of, at times, the meaninglessness of existence… but that might be a little too negative! I’ve got Mann’s much longer novel “Buddenbrooks” sitting on my bedside table (apparently about the decline of a family!), but have yet to pluck up the courage to make a start!