About my reading in 2009

It’s time for my annual stock-taking of last year’s reading.

I have finally found a translation of Dante I can get on with by Allen Mandelbaum. Thus equipped I embarked on “la Divina commedia” the Italian of which is far too difficult for me, so I need my Virgil to guide me through its circles. My game plan was to read the translation of each canto and then read the Italian knowing what it was going to mean. This worked well for “Hell” which is absolutely wonderful and one of the greatest works ever written. The reputation of the whole of the Divine Comedy rather rests on this ‘tour de force’, for to be honest “Purgatory” and “Paradise” are really to be admired rather than enjoyed. So I gave up on the Italian for the second and third books.

Mandelbaum has also written a fine translation of Virgil’s “Aeneid”, so it seemed appropriate to read that too. I did a hundred lines or so of it in Latin at school but had never read the whole thing. Again it ended up being something of a labour of love as the whole work’s reputation in this case too rests on the better known parts of it, in particular the Fall of Troy, Dido and Aeneas, and the descent into Hades. Much of the second half, when Aeneas gets to Italy, is frankly tedious.

While on the works of the Ancient World, let me mention some more of Plutarch’s lives in the Penguin collection “Fall of the Roman Republic”, notably that of Caesar.
Then I had a go at Plato. I’m a great believer in actually reading authors whose names are often bandied about by people who have never read a word by them. “Republic” is a fascinating book with parts that are inspirational and others frankly odd and definitely no longer on the political agenda. Like any attempt at constructing a “utopia” it at some stage rather parts company with human reality. Still it contains some of Plato’s most important ideas in particular on “forms”. “Symposium” is less weighty and a bit tricky for a modern reader to get on with as the “love” it discusses is homosexual to begin with before getting onto “love” of philosophical truth. Plato is surprisingly enjoyable to read as the “dialogue” is a lively and endearing way of presenting ideas, with some scene-setting, questions and answers, and points of view set up to be knocked down.

Moving on to more modern essays, I read Thoreau’s iconic “Walden” on his life as a recluse in the forest by Walden pond. It really is rather fine as a mixture of practicality and philosophical musing with some nice lyrical descriptions of nature.
Virginia Woolf’s short auto-biographical pieces collected in “Moments of being” give an insight into the author’s odd upbringing and how it influenced her view of life.

One of the best things I read this year was Primo Levi”s “I sommersi e i salvati”. Levi’s “If this is a man” is one of the essential works of the 20thC, describing in a dispassionately objective way how he survived incarceration at Ausschwitz. 40 years later in “The drowned and the saved” he revisits the experience and writes a grippingly sincere analysis of human behaviour, what actually motivates people, the nature of weakness and pointless violence, how memory works, what it is to be a survivor and much more, in a deeply honest, human and moral work, that gives us his interpretation of what happened to him which he arrived at after much consideration. Anyone moved by “Se questo è un uomo” should also read this.

However, I spent most of my time in 2009 reading novels.

In the area of recent English novels there was Coe’s “The rain before it falls”, for once not a comic novel and quite moving, and Rushdie’s “The Enchantress of Florence”, in the historic, magical and funny vein he mines so well.
Julia had wanted me to read Graham Swift’s “Waterland” which she had studied for her bac. I enjoyed it as a well constructed family saga set in the Fens that muses on the nature of history. Even better, though different in its style as it imitates the vernacular, but not in its technique of gradually revealing hidden truths from the past, is Swift’s “Last Orders” (of which a good film was made a few years ago with the cream of British actors).

I read two early Graham Greene novels, “A Gun for sale” and “It's a battlefield”. Both are set in gritty 1930’s England. I continue to enjoy Greene’s eye for sordid everyday detail, dialogue and motives. It makes his efficiently written thrillers with their unexpected twists and ironies among the finest in the genre.

I’m not really a habitual reader of thrillers, but at Clara’s encouragement I succumbed to the international publishing phenomenon which is Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy and read the first two volumes “the Girl with the dragon tatoo” and “The Girl who played with fire”. I enjoyed the first one immensely; the second I found a bit thin at times, as in stretched too far. Still he writes a gripping story with some good characterization that keeps you turning the pages. At the same time he takes the lid off Sweden which is often too goody-goody in its presentation of itself to the outside world and we discover a country as corrupt and seamy as anywhere else.

At the lighter end of my reading list from last year there was another of McCaul Smith’s Lady Detectives’ series set in Botswana “Happiness and blue shoes” - as always a guaranteed feel-good read.

This year’s new Dickens for me was “Little Dorritt”. I liked the BBC adaptation in 2008 and perhaps it was still too vivid in my mind colouring my mental images as I read, not that this is necessarily bad, I was just aware of it. “Little Dorritt” is one of Dicken’s most satisfying novels, though I won’t attempt to summarize it here.

In the thick novels department, I’d never read any Henry James before, so I had a go at “The Portrait of a Lady” which some regard as his best and the much shorter “The Turn of the screw” whose story I am familiar with through Britten’s opera. In both cases I found myself repeatedly thinking “get on with it man”. James suffers from chronic long-windedness, he seems permanently self-conscious of being a “master of style”. This initially felt like a good thing for about forty pages but then it got on my nerves. Nonetheless, I did stick with “Portrait” to the end and it becomes worth it when things start to go wrong for the heroine and nastiness comes to the fore. Another odd thing about James is that there are pages and pages which are too divorced from the physical world, he is altogether too prissy and intellectual for my taste.

Proust is also a long-winded master of style, but he is infinitely fascinated by how we perceive the tangible world and how that influences our thought processes. Over the summer I read Alain De Botton’s “How Proust can change your life” and that decided me to start a serious attempt on “A la recherche du temps perdu”. I re-read “Du côté de chez Swann” which I enjoyed much more the second time around, but then slowed down considerably as I proceeded through “A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs” and started “Le côté de Guermantes”. So I am now 1000 pages into it with a mere 2300 left to go. Proust is not an easy read and is best taken in small doses, digested and reflected on. It’s not unlike doing a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle: images start to emerge slowly and fit together into a greater picture, but sometimes you just sit staring at the same piece for ages (that is in itself a Proustian metaphor by the way).

If you have read “About novels” you will have seen my list of 12 favourite novels. I re-read three of them last year, and thoroughly enjoyed them again: Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s lover” (I also read “The Virgin and the gypsy”); Dicken’s “Great Expectations”; and Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge”. You can check out my comments on them in that blog posting.

In the re-reading department was also Stendhal’s “Le Rouge et le noir”, which I see now is the quickly flung off inspiration of a young man; Rabelais’ “Gargantua” and “Pantagruel” which have some genuinely laugh out loud passages, belying the works’ seriousness (their “substantfique moelle”); and Mann’s “Death in Venice”. The last was my gesture towards German: the first chapter is virtually unreadable, but I think it’s intended as a parody of von Aschenbach’s constipated style, as Mann’s own is much more accessible afterwards. Spanish is represented in 2009 by Garcia Marquez’ “La Increible y triste historia de la candida Erendira y de su abuela desalmada” (the title is a programme in itself) one of his lesser but still enjoyable works.

Finally as I didn’t know it and was going to see it performed in Dutch with English surtitles (!) I read Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”. It’s a play that is rarely put on and you can see why: it’s early and full of over the top violence (rape, murder, mutilation, canibalism), but it nonetheless somehow hits the spot in Shakespeare’s unerring sense of what works dramatically.

So that is a quick romp through over thirty titles I read last year, not a bad crop but there’s till so much to be harvested.