About my reading in 2010

At the start of the New Year I like to reflect on the books I read during the previous year.

My biggest reading achievement last year was to get to the end of Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu”, completing the 2000 pages of the remaining 5 volumes “le Côté de Guermantes”; “Sodome et Gomorrhe”, “la Prisonnière”, “Albertine disparue” and “le Temps retrouvé”. See “About Proust” (September 2010). Proust is not an easy read, but in the end definitely worth it.

My other big project was to reread Thomas Hardy. I had started with “the Mayor of Casterbridge” in 2009 and in 2010 I went on to read all of his other major novels: (the first four of these being new to me) “the Trumpet Major”, “Under the Greenwood tree”, “A pair of blue eyes”, “ the Wellbeloved”; (and re-reading) “Far from the Madding Crowd”, ”the Return of the Native”, “Jude the Obscure”, “the Woodlanders” “Tess of the d'Urbervilles”; and also the volume of short stories “Life's little ironies” and some of the poems. See “About Thomas Hardy” (January 2011). Hardy is undoubtedly one of the greatest novelists in any language.

Last year some of my favourite contemporary authors in English had new novels out, which I can recommend, if you like these writers’ work.

“Last night in Twisted River” is a good John Irving family saga with his favourite usual ingredients of growing up in 1950’s New England, bizarre twists of fate and comic sexual scenes.

Ian McEwan’s “Solar” is also in comic vein, and even if not one of his best novels certainly an entertaining read, especially in the Arctic adventure of its hapless anti-hero, Beard, a philandering Nobel-winning scientist cruising on his past reputation and heading for his come-uppance.

Jonathan Coe’s “Terrible privacy of Maxwell Sim” is another comic novel with an anti-hero as its central character. Coe uses the narrative technique of gradually revealing, through other people's accounts which Maxwell Sim discovers, the formative events that have shaped him, and made him the terribly lonely man he is. More generally Coe describes the kind of dysfunctional relationships between ostensibly close people which have always existed but have recently worsened in our modern society due to its growing obsession with electronic rather than human contact.

My next three novels read in English are modern and foreign.

Adiga’s “the White Tiger” is a funny and easy to read sort of literary equivalent to the film “Slumdog Millionaire” about how to survive desperate poverty in modern India.

Larsson’s “Girl who kicked the hornet's nest” is the third thriller in his “Millenium Trilogy” about the extraordinary Lisbeth, victim of society and computer hacker, set in present day Sweden. It certainly keeps you turning the pages, but I have to say that I found book 2 less convincing than book 1, and book 3 less than book 2. For me there’s more to a good book than this.

Pamuk’s “My name is Red” is a novel I know a lot of readers have found difficult, which I find surprising as it does have a simple linear chronology and though the point of view changes constantly it is always clearly indicated. It has the structure of a “whodunnit” as well, but its exotic historic setting in 16th century Istanbul and the reflective passages in it on the nature of art and the difference between East and West may well delay the plot too much for some. I myself found it quite original and satisfying.

Under the heading of classics in English I read Hawthorne’s “Scarlet letter”, which is an efficient telling of a good story on the familiar theme of how true feminine virtue wins out over the hypocrisy of society.

My two new Shakespeare plays last year, read before seeing them for the first time, were “Measure for measure” and “King John”, both unjustly neglected and with some fine scenes which are among the Bard’s best.

I move on to my foreign language reading: my French was amply served by Proust; my German came off rather poorly with an unsuccessful stab at Nietzsche’s “Also sprach Zarathustra”, without doubt one of the hardest texts I’ve ever tried; while my Italian stretched to two novels recommended by Clara; and my Spanish ran to no less than four novels.

Giordano’s “la Solitudine dei numeri primi” (“The Solitude of Prime Numbers”) is a European best seller about a young man and a woman in present day Italy who both have their own terrible traumatic pasts and who ought to be close to each other yet sadly remain alone.

Mazzantini’s “Venuto al mondo” (as yet untranslated) is quite a complex novel (not always well written, but involving) about one woman’s struggle to have a child even if she has to adopt one, the horrors of civil war in Bosnia and the life force that can overcome them.

The Mexican writer Rulfo’s “Pedro Paramo” (1955) is regarded as a classic of modern Spanish fiction, but I couldn’t really get into it, what with it’s unclear delineation between the real and the hallucinatory (the living and the dead in a ghost town) and its lack of any real story worth telling.

Then the more recent Mexican Laura Esquivel’s “Malinche” did have a potentially interesting story to tell, that of the life of the native woman who acted as Cortez the conquistador’s interpreter and therefore betrayer of her people, but I was seriously disappointed and felt a great opportunity had been missed.

Ruiz Zafon’s international bestseller, “la Sombra del viento” (“Shadow of the wind”) is a thriller set in the unlikely world of second-hand booksellers in Barcelona at the time of Franco. It is a really beautifully written book telling a great story with some good psychology in the characterization and it deserves its success.

His follow-up prequel, “el Juego del angel” (“the Angel’s game”), I still found enjoyable but less credible.

So as you can see, my reading in 2010 was dominated by novels even more than usual with them totalling 27 out of 34 completed books.

In the unduly negelected area of non-fiction, let me then mention two good books by Alain De Botton which I referred to in my entries to this blog last year: “the Pleasures and sorrows of work”, see “About work” (October 2010); and “the Consolations of philosophy”, see “About philosophy” (November 2010). De Botton writes an enjoyable book, which he likes to illustrate wittily, he has a direct and humorous style. He is careful to relate the points he makes to everyday experience and he never fails to be thought provoking.

While on my trip to Turkey last autumn I read an autobiography published in English in London in the 1950’s by an exile, Irfan Orga, “Portrait of a Turkish family” which was truly fascinating.

Lastly, in the area of economics, Skidelsky’s “Keynes: the return of the master”, confirmed my respect for one of the greatest original thinkers of the last century (maybe I’ll get round to the “General theory” this year).

So quite a few books there, but this year it’s perhaps time to read something other than novels !

About downstairs

One of my New Year's resolutions is to draw and paint more often. Long dark rainy winter evenings suggest interiors as a suitable subject. So, in something of a new departure, we present sketches of home, downstairs.

Staircase

Sitting room 1

Sitting room 2

Kitchen

Dining area

Monstera

About clothes

This is the time of year when the sales are on. I buy a lot of my clothes at the sales. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s the only time of year at which they’re being sold at something approaching their correct price, that is without a huge mark-up. So maybe instead of writing this piece I should be dashing out there to the shops right now braving the heaving throng hunting around for bargains. Or maybe not. You see, being a man, I first ask myself the question: do I need any new clothes ? And, to be honest, the answer is no. My wardrobe and drawers are full. Also, I like to think that “style never goes out of fashion”.
I have more clothes than you could shake a proverbial stick at. I never get round to wearing them all, there are some items I’ve forgotten I owned. Moreover, the more clothes you have the less quickly you are likely to wear them out.

Indeed, does anyone wear out clothes these days, you may ask, before we simply get fed up of them in our Western affluent society ? Well I do actually. From protracted riding of my bike to work I actually wore through the seat of some woolen trousers before the summer. It took me some time to find an identical pair; I was pleased to discover the exact same pair of Marks and Spencer’s luxury dark blue trousers in wool and cashmere at their branch in... Ankara. I was disappointed when they closed their Brussels shop ten years ago. When such a standard item was getting past it, I used to just go down there and get the same again, I’m talking about plain white shirts, undies, socks and the like which require no careful choosing. M & S also sell garments in genuinely different sizes, so you don’t subsequently have to pay someone else to hem them and finish them for you. I now have to wait for a trip to England to stock up on basics.

My most basic clothes do actually get so frequently worn and washed that they start to fray and develop holes, so need to be regularly phased out and replaced. Fortunately I don’t change size much, so that in itself doesn’t give me too much of a reason for buying new clothes. Nonetheless, round about this time of year (which may not necessarily be a good plan, what with post-Christmas flab) I do go through the wardrobe and weed out trousers and jackets that are, shall I say, becoming uncomfortable. I also have an unfortunate tendency to mysteriously acquire indelible food stains on some items, especially light-coloured polo shirts, so they have to be replaced, while their predecessors are moved down the hierarchy from the category “smart” to “lounging around home” to “climbing, gardening and decorating” and finally, when no longer fit to wear, to “cleaning the oil off the bike chain” or other uses as rags.

It seems then that I have a fairly utilitarian attitude towards clothes. To tell the truth I don’t particulalry enjoy shopping for them and am glad when someone else takes the trouble to make me a gift of them. When I do go shopping for clothes myself, I like to check the composition of the fabric on the label, having a preference for natural fibres, cotton and wool.

I also try to run a “one in, one out” policy to counter my natural inclination not to get rid of anything. Any new acquisition should entail the giving or thowing away of an equivalent older item to make room for it.

Clothes are very important to a lot of people, especially women, at least judging from those in my own family, who seem to spend a lot of time shopping around for them and a lot of money buying them.
“Kleider machen Leute” or “Clothes make people”, runs one popular saying. The clothes we wear contribute a lot to that all important first impression we make. A lot of our pigeon-holing of others takes place on the basis of attire and it can be quite literally a “smart” move to dress up for a first encounter especially if it’s for professional purposes or meeting the in-laws.

Ultimately though “Clothes make people” is a saying which reflects the superficiality of society and people’s judgements of others. On the one hand, I’m not sure I value the opinion of someone who judges me so quickly as to categorize me on the basis of what seems to me to be something of only secondary importance. On the other hand, the fact that someone is prepared to make an effort to respect the dress code for an event, does show a desire to join in and play the game. That is actually quite important as a form of social interaction, it implies that you care about and respect what others attach importance to. There’s something grand about a wedding celebration in any culture where the guests have deliberately gone out of their way to be smart. People do genuinely like to fit in and not to be over-dressed or under-dressed. In the end, even Bohemians have dress conventions.

It always amuses me at important political meetings to see how the dress code for ministers is impeccable suit and for journalists and cameramen as scruffy as possible - no chance of confusing the two groups there. As interpreters there is always a chance that we may have to get in the room with the ministers, so we are expected to dress accordingly. Jacket and tie are “de rigueur” for men.
I have to admit that I actually quite like that as it helps me define my professional persona and so has an influence on how I present myself. I guess a doctor looks more serious in a white coat, a mechanic in blue overalls, an undertaker in a dark suit and a policeman in a uniform. Again, it’s part of the game and here there really is an element of clothes making the people.

However, the idea that beyond their chosen professional persona people’s personalities are more generally defined by their clothes strikes me as rather preposterous. This notion is nonetheless the main spring of the very popular British TV series “What not to wear”, where an attempt is made to demonstrate that you can change someone’s personality merely by changing his or her wardrobe. To be fair, the programme concentrates a lot on getting people to come to terms with their actual body shape and to dress accordingly, rather than pursuing some mistaken ideal or hiding from themselves. Anything that helps someone to come to terms with their own personality and to be confident about who they are is laudable. Still I think there’s a limit to what clothes can do to change you, while they do almost certainly reflect a personality you already have. There are things we would never wear because “it’s not me”, most usually by association with the dress code of some social group we would rather not identify ourselves with, or by a desire not to make ourselves an undue centre of attention or even ridicule.

Personally I don’t worry about whether “my bum looks big in this”, or whether, because I’m wearing the same jumper as six months ago, someone might think I’m no longer drawing a large salary cheque. My main aim is to be comfortable, clean and dressed practically or appropriately for my intended activity.

So what do I wear?

It is axiomatic that the working man dresses up at weekends and the professional man dresses down.
So let’s start with what I wear to work.

A very large section of my wardrobe is devoted to what I wear to work, even if that accounts for a small proportion of my time, bearing in mind that I tend to change straight back out of it as soon as I get back home, but will put it back on again if the formality of an occasion requires it, such as a wedding or an opera première.
And so, looking into my wardrobe behind me, I appear to be the owner of no less than 9 suits and 12 jackets of varying weights and colours, though generally on the sober side - we’re talking blue, grey and brown. To accompany them I have over 40 serviceable silk ties (that’s not including those that passing fashion has now relegated to the “joke / fancy dress” box). Such is the accumulation of middle age that the younger me would never have believed.

In fact, I don’t mind ties, the secret to not being constricted by them is to buy shirts that have a loose collar to start with. I do like collars, I like to keep my neck warm and most of my tops have a collar anyway. I had to wear a tie everyday at grammar school in England, so it’s something I’m used to, like the rain. My school tie was a particularly vile number, brown with a pink stripe. Mindful of it I tend do dislike any tie with diagonal stripes, though I do have a few. They’ve been something of a fashion recently, I suspect because they are associated with a British public school gentleman’s education, something worth dissociating yourself from in my opinion. Mainly I just find them boring, a bit of a missed opportunity when your tie is the only original thing you wear as a smartly dressed man at work. Perhaps it’s the streak in me which makes me prefer figurative to abstract art that makes me fond of a tie with a little motif, preferably from the natural world but definitely not to do with horse-riding. We used to get given ties at work as presidency gifts, some are even quite wearable, but the worst offender was the mid-1990’s British pizza grenade job allegedly designed by schoolchildren (one now for the joke tie box which I feel I must share with you).

Well that certainly put the “yuck” in UK.

On the whole, having lived with an Italian for over twenty-five years, I like to think I’ve got the hang of the difficult arts of colour combination and pattern co-ordination of which I was blissfully ignorant in my student days. I also like to think that I’m always well turned out, but in an understated way that is not seeking to be the centre of attraction, which is after all in keeping with my station.

The one item that really distinguishes me from others at work is my sleeveless v-neck jumper. As someone who cycles to work, exposing myself to the elements and changing temperatures, which by the way also includes the vagaries of air-conditioning in the booth, I need to modulate my layers of clothing quickly and easily, so the slipover woolen sleeveless jumper is comfortable and practical to this end and as they make good Christmas presents I now have about eight different shades of them. This works well for me as I don’t wear anything under my work shirt, which is usually white and crisply ironed (though not by myself), as it would be a hassle to remove a vest from beneath one when I’m too warm. While I wear a jacket to work I usually take it off once I sit down in the booth, but keep my little wooly on.

I most often wear a jacket and trousers but upgrade to a suit as soon as the meeting gets more “important”, as in presence of a minister etc.
Generally, the beauty of a jacket is that it has lots of pockets and since I’m not into handbags I find this very practical, so I like to wear one when travelling, even if not for work, just for the sake of being able to stow away conveniently various essentials.
For the same reason I’m very fond of a black fleece waistcoat with zip pockets especially when it’s a bit cool and I’m not quite sure how well heated is the place I’m going to.
I love pockets and as a man I’ve never quite understood what it is women seem to have against them.

I see I’m moving on to what I wear in my free time. Still slightly in the direction of work clothing, I suppose, there’s “smart casual” which is what I put on when I’m going out or am invited round to someone’s for dinner and generally consists of recent acquisitions deemed by my wife to be more presentable than slouching around home wear.
I suspect though that the real me, or the one that comes without any propitiating of the gods of conventionality and formality, is reflected by what I wear around home.
The thing about being at home is that there are always bits of housework or repair jobs to be undertaken which I will do immediately without first considering whether they will lead to stains or rips and which, therefore, in theory ought to require prior changing and in practice often lead to grief over irreperable damage. It’s a good idea, therefore, for me to wear older clothes when at home. More deeply, though, I’m one of those people who like comfort clothes, familiar or even fetishistic items, which from repeated wearing have become second nature and comforting to put on. Sadly, of course, they wear out and I can never find quite the same one again, so I have to transfer my allegiance to some other garment. This explains why I frequently appear to be wearing the same thing in photos of a certain period.

One thing I’ve not worn for well over twenty years is jeans. I admit that as a student I virtually lived in them and indeed many people of my age continue to wear them in the mistaken belief that it makes them look younger than they are. However, in my book, jeans are merely badly cut trousers made from an inferior material. Denim is too hot in the summer, not warm enough in the winter and won’t dry out once wet. I favour woolen trousers in the winter, cords in mid season, light cotton and linen in the summer. Consequently I have rather a large number of pairs of trousers, which incidentally I hate to be tight as I spend a fair bit of time sitting down. At the height of summer I move into shorts, these days on the long side, but definitely not to be worn in the big city, even in the tropics, that’s just too much the naff tourist for me.

On the other hand I tend to wear short-sleeved cotton polo shirts the whole year round, varying the thickness of what I wear over them when it’s not summer, but usually something also with a collar. I prefer them on the large side so that air moves freely under them when it’s hot. I don’t feel the need to wear any T-shirts advertising my musical tastes, political affiliations, sporting achievements, cheap humour or brand allegiance. I would feel slightly uncomfortable with such a limited definition of my personality and so prefer initial anonymity.

As I enjoy being out of doors I have a fairly extensive collection of purpose made clothes for hiking, mountaineering, cycling and skiing. I used to be sceptical about “technical” garments or more particularly about people who seem to spend a fortune on the right gear but don’t actually spend much time exercising. Over the years though I’ve come to own quite a few such garments and the investment has always been rewarded with the satisfaction of the comfort of wearing a garment specifically designed for an activity. For example, I wouldn’t dream of cycling a significant distance without tights or shorts that have a padded seat. Also I swear by the light-weight quick-drying polyester tops which I wear as the layer next to my skin for all my outdoor activities; they keep me warm and dry, even if they get smelly.
I also own a large number of fleeces and, you guessed it, anoraks (mainly Goretex).
In fact, as I’m so used to cycling around town, I hardly ever wear a long coat but usually some form of jacket that still covers all of my back when bent over the handle bars. My recent favourite during the cold spell has been a short black well-padded warm coat which I bought on a visit to Stockholm in September last year when it was already so cold I needed to get something warmer. Now the Scandinavians really know how to do a serious winter garment and I love the details on this one designed to keep you warm.

Finally, I should include a paragraph on footwear. As someone who walks and cycles a lot I believe in sensible footwear. The first thing I do with a pair of shoes in a shop is to turn them over to see what the sole is like. My shoes tend to be solid and long-lasting, so I don’t own that many pairs compared to other members of my family. Nonetheless I want them to look passingly elegant so they can be worn on all occasions. My favourite pairs are of a traditional Austrian design, bought in Vienna but actually hand crafted from quality leather in Italy. They are a satisying combination of robustness and smartness. In the summer I like a pair of Italian mocassins. Around home I wear Teva sandals. For outdoor activities I have several pairs of hiking boots and trainers, but I wouldn’t usually wear them around town unless conditions are particularly adverse.

So that’s what I wear. However, I’m not sure how much insight it gives you into my character.

About Thomas Hardy

I first read Hardy nearly twenty years ago, as a somewhat younger man then, and recently it felt like it was time to revisit him as he had left a favourable impression. So over the last year I have re-read all of Thomas Hardy’s major novels plus a few I hadn’t read before.

Hardy appeals to me as a novelist who combines straight old-fashioned good story-telling with quite a modern sensibility. This mixture of old and modern is typical of the late 19th century in which he lived. He writes of Wessex, a rural England which he is all too aware is in the process of disappearing with the coming of a more urban age and advance of the railways. He also describes a society still suffering under the constraints of a prudish Victorian morality of which he clearly disapproves and which to the modern reader may now seem ridiculous.

Hardy sets his novels in Wessex, a fictionalized South West of England in which, though the place names are changed, the locations are recognizable. It’s the area where Hardy grew up and later chose to spend most of his life: it’s the area and environment he knows best and can describe most accurately. Wessex takes many different forms: from the various lush and harsh agricultural landscapes of “Tess of the d’Urbevilles” and “Far from the madding crowd”, to the brooding Egdon Heath of “Return of the Native”, to the provincial towns of “Jude the Obscure” and “Mayor of Casterbridge”, to the woods of “the Woodlanders”, to the coastal watering holes of “the Trumpet Major” and windswept cliffs of “A pair of blue eyes” - to name but a few of the settings. All of these Hardy describes with consummate mastery and a fine eye for the changing details of nature through the seasons. He typically begins by painting a broad sweep of landscape in which human beings first appear as a detail: man is shaped by his environment, which is one of the many forces of fate that bear down on him. One of the sheer pleasures of re-reading Hardy is to savour the beauty of the descriptive passages.

While Hardy lovingly describes farming before mechanization, celebrates old countryside festive traditions, such as dancing and play-acting, and likes to play up a certain rustic charm among the minor characters, Wessex is no rural idyll. There is grinding poverty, drudgery, ignorance, strict class divisions, injustice, dishonesty, eviction, adultery, rape, unwanted pregnancy, drunkenness and so on. Basically all of human life is here. Hardy’s characters are drawn from ordinary rural folk and yet act out the great dramas of human existence.

The greatest of these is of course love, or more accurately sexual attraction between men and women. If you read a lot of Hardy novels one after another, you come to see that the fundamental plot of many is the same: A loves B; B loves C; C loves D. Somewhere along that chain marriages are concluded (often willed by would-be social-climber parents) and usually work out badly as it’s not the outcome one of the two really wanted. Hardy may be forever writing love stories, but he doesn’t do happy endings. He continues to tell the difficult story of what happens after two people get married and try to live together, he doesn’t sentimentally stop at “A married B and they lived happily ever after”, because C and D are still in the picture. Hardy tells the truth (or at least his own from experience) that many marriages are unhappy, and let’s not forget that in those days you were generally stuck in them. Much of the unhappiness can also be attributed to the constraining morality of Victorian society, most notably in “Tess” and “Jude”. This society is described by him as contradicting the natural order of things, thereby making his heroines and heroes unnecessarily miserable.
The increasingly hostile reception of these late novels by (a perhaps hypocritically) offended society led Hardy to give up writing in the genre and to concentrate on poetry and verse drama.

The constraints of society and its conventional morality are but one more of the forces of fate working against us. As a young man Hardy lost his faith in a beneficent God and came to see life more as does Gloucester in “King Lear”:

“As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods -
they kill us for their sport”

Hardy writes a great story that keeps you turning the pages. His plots are characterized by unexpected twists and yet they are borne along by an inexorable logic which is rooted in the personality of his characters whose psychology he draws so convincingly. Even if sometimes you find yourself willing them to speak up for once instead of suffering in silence out of timidity, or to stay just a bit longer so as not to miss someone, so that the crisis might be avoided, the whole point is that fate has ordained it to turn out this way, however stupid, pointless or ironic it may seem. Hardy called one of his sets of short stories “Life’s little ironies”, where he treats this kind of situation in more comic vein, but mainly his novels are a tragic depiction of life’s great ironies.

And yet for all that, I wouldn’t describe Hardy’s novels as depressing. There is something uplifting in the long-suffering tenacity and unconventional virtue of the repeatedly wronged Tess. Even Henchard, who in the brilliant opening scene of “the Mayor of Casterbridge” starts the action by the most despicable act of selling his wife, somehow manages to earn our sympathy by trying to reform but ultimately failing because he cannot escape his past and the flaws in his character that made it.

Hardy gives us an insight into human nature and relations that transcends the rural setting of Wessex making his stories still ring true in our modern age. Most often in Hardy’s novels things don’t work out as his characters hoped and planned, which often is the way in real life. Yet even so there is a force in them that suggests life is worth living all the same.

About “About being here” (4)

Dear Reader,

“About being here” is a series of occasional essays about myself and my experience of life. It now starts its fourth season.
As each year’s crop has become smaller, this year’s ambition will be to settle on equalling last year’s ten pieces. Still, I like to think it’s quality rather than quantity that counts.

I've also decided to change the font and character size, to what I actually use when writing, which is partly a function of my declining eyesight.
So if you’re stil out there reading these posts, I hope you will enjoy this next series.

And I can promise a surprise.

ABH