booklit

Part of the joy in reading books for a second, third, umpteenth time is that you can come away with an improved understanding. One book I read a few years ago was Patrick Süskind’s The Story Of Mr Sommer (1991). Back then, I remember being underwhelmed by its relatively simple story and, to be honest, none of it really added up. It was the title, presumably, that hampered my experience of the novella as I went in expecting, as suggested, a story about the eponymous Mr Sommer. In doing so I now realise that I missed the point, a point which I feel a reread has sorted out.

Told many years hence, the novella deals with the narrator’s ” old tree climbing days”, those spent growing up in the village of Unternsee, one of many villages running along a lakeside. While the book spans a number of years, the main events are brought to mind by the enigmatic Mr Sommer, resident in the next village, who everyone knew although no one had ever bothered to speak with him.

What makes Mr Sommer memorable, and a vibrant hook for the narrator’s memories, is his penchant for walking:

He would often leave home before daybreak, as the fishermen out on the lake at four in the morning would confirm, and often not get home till late at night, when the moon was already high in the sky. In that time he would cover astonishing distances. To walk right the way round the lake, a distance of some twenty-five miles, in the course of a day was nothing out of the ordinary for Mr Sommer. To make two or three trips into town a day, six miles each way - no problem for Mr Sommer! When we trotted off to school at half past seven in the morning, still rubbing sleep from our eyes, we would encounter a fresh and alert-looking Mr Sommer who had already been walking for hours; coming home tired and hungry at lunchtime, we would be overtaken by Mr Sommer, eating up the ground with enormous strides; and on the evening of the same day, when I took a last peep out of the window before going to bed, I might see the tall, lanky figure of Mr Sommer hurrying shadowly by on the lake road.

While the reasons for Mr Sommer’s perambulatory feats are discussed (claustrophobia? a nervous twitch?) the answers are little more than hearsay and speculation. All around him there’s a sense of loneliness, and in this questions of how we treat others arise. That no one makes the effort to say hello or enquire after his wellbeing leaves Mr Sommer merely trudging on in life, with nothing to experience or stop for, other than necessary distractions like eating and sleeping. It’s the sort of life that can only end in tragic circumstances.

Of the narrator’s life, or where he begins anyway, childhood seems a fun time, one where each day is taken up by the fun of climbing trees and the pretence of flying (”…if I’d just unbuttoned my coat then and held my coat tails in both hands and spread them like wings, why, then the wind would have picked me up altogether, and I would have soared off School Hill with the greatest of ease…”). Soon, though, as with any coming of age story, the coming of age part has to happen.

The Story Of Mr Sommer features a short string of remembered scenes that come together to show the foibles of growing up. Here we have the first stirrings of love with a classmate (”I could have gone on looking at that face for ever, and I did look at it whenever I could, in lessons or during break. But I was careful to do it discreetly, so that no one saw me looking, not evenCarolina herself, because I was terribly shy.”) and, thanks to a gross scene with his piano teacher, a lesson how mean people can be.

That’s life, however, and Süskind cleverly spins all this into a thread about bicycles that runs through the story. When starting out, the narrator has trouble believing such a thing could never support him when it can’t support itself freestanding, but repeated attempts - be it on the bike or in life - soon lead to  confidence:

I don’t remember how long it took me to master the dark art of riding a bicycle. All I remember is that I learned it by myself, with a mixture of unwillingness and grim resolve, on my mother’s bicycle, on a slightly sloping forest track where no one could see me…And one time, after many failed attempts, surprisingly suddenly really, I cracked it. I could move - in spite of all my theoretical doubts and my powerful scepticism - freely on two wheels: a mystifying and proud sensation.

While the narrator got nostalgic, I couldn’t help feeling similar, thanks to the sprinkling of watercolours interspersed with the text, thanks to French artist Sempé. It recalled for me a childhood spent reading the books of Roald Dahl - The Twits, say, or Matilda - all illustrated by Quentin Blake. The Story Of Mr Sommer, however, no matter how lightly the prose makes it seem, is for an older age group, because of darker themes that appear towards the end.

And what of Mr Sommer and his story? Well, this reread showed that the story I was looking for was never there, that it was a mystery, and that’s how it was intended. As a reader you want to understand the character, to ask him why he walks so relentlessly. But when the ending looms and you want to reach out, it’s already too late. There’s been so many chances before and each one not taken.

It’s a mistake to subtitle Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without A Country (2005) with “a memoir of life in George W. Bush’s America” since a) it’s not much of a memoir; and b) its range is wider. What it is, then, is a collection of essays covering a range of topics, most of which initially appeared in the In These Times magazine. I did have reservations in reading this since I’d read Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and didn’t enjoy his style at all. But with non-fiction I was willing to take another chance.

A Man Without A Country is a book that deals tangentially with aspects of Vonnegut’s life - his humour, his creativity, and his humanism - but the larger canvas centres on the issues of the day, namely the environment, politics, and war. As a swansong it’s perhaps not the greatest contribution to American letters, being a cobbled together collection of essays that seemingly Vonnegut wasn’t up to the task of editing, but it has its moments.

The first couple of pieces focus solely on the man, about how being the youngest in the family makes humour the way to be appreciated. Then Vonnegut moves on to the arts, discussing how he want to be a writer, noting, with his trademark humour:

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts.

Beyond the personal, Vonnegut moves on to a thin creative writing lesson accompanied by some amusing graphs showing events in the works of Shakespeare and Kafka, amongst others. But where the book is most enjoyable is when discussing issues that matter to others. On the subject of cigarettes, for example, he jokes about suing the American tobacco companies for not giving him cancer and, at the time of writing, he was eighty-two, saying:

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Vonnegut’s disdain for the Bush administration is clear but A Man Without A Country doesn’t really hit new ground, being much in line with public sentiment. Nor does it offer any persuasive reasons for others to change their ways in the wider world, as regards the planet’s state. His pot shots here and there are effective but his kindly tone soon soothes their blow and undermines there seriousness.

In one chapter Vonnegut tells of letters receieved and his replies to the questions therein, one of which sums up his attitude to life, on the being asked for reassurance that everything will be okay:

“Welcome to Earth, young man,” I said. “It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, Joe, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of: Goddamn it, Joe, you’ve got to be kind!”

It’s the balance of optimism and pessimism that make Vonnegut’s writings here enjoyable and while he jokes for the most part, he makes it clear that he has lost faith in humanity (”I think the planet should get rid of us. We’re really awful animals.”) and the future looks bleak thanks to the mass indifference shown, pushing it to the point that we are not so much facing a man without a country as a planet without man. And I think Kurt, who’s up in Heaven now, would quite like that.

Ryu Murakami is an author I’ve been aware of for a while now, partly because of his literary namesake, Haruki Murakami, and also through noting a positive response to his In The Miso Soup, translated to English in 2005, although I’d never really felt the need to read his work. Then, by chance, I discovered that a film I like, the teeth-gritting Audition (1999), was based on one of his short stories and he had, in fact, written the screenplay, too. Well what else could I do but hunt down the man’s books after all? And in doing so I choose Piercing (2007), published in Japan in 1994, on the basis that I preferred its cover over In The Miso Soup’s.

Billed as “a dark psycho-thriller” by the Daily Mail and by the Times as “creepy and gripping”, Piercing is certainly that. Or, perhaps, was. It’s been thirteen years between the original and the translation and in that time Asian cinema has enjoyed wider popularity, especially the more violent material, and as a result, the novel’s effect is lessened as the content is what’s expected of Japanese thrillers of this ilk, and therefore it comes across as more schlock than shock. Still, if you can pleasd innocence of Japanese cinema in recent years, then the novel’s intended effect may apply.

Kawashima Masayuki lives with his wife and newborn child in their apartment, which doubles as his wife’s class for teaching bakery to locals and is therefore “permeated with the buttery smell that for Kawashima had come to symbolise happiness.” While to all extents and purposes they are a happy couple, Kawashima suffers a form of panic attack and for the last ten days, with the wife asleep, has found himself standing over his child’s cot with an ice pick, sweating:

Every time he studied this instrument, with its slender, gleaming steel rod that tapered down to such needle-like sharpness, he wondered why it was necessary to have things like this in the world. If it were truly only for chopping ice, you’d think a completely different design might do. The people who produce and sell things like this don’t understand, he thought. They don’t realise that some of us break out in a cold sweat at just a glimpse of that shiny, pointed tip.

It’s an implausible scene, the type you’d expect in movies, and there’s a knowing reference thrown in to Basic Instinct, to show that Murakami knows exactly how implausible it is. But he doesn’t care, this is a thriller after all, and so Kawashima’s panic attacks inspire real fear for himself and of what he is capable:

You wouldn’t do something like that, you would never stab the baby, he told himself hundreds of times, but the voice inside him never stopped replying: I just might.

The fear that he may harm his own child leads Kawashima along a dangerous road as, like the major players in this Piercing, he has a past, and the only way to protect his child is to take himself off elsewhere and what begins as a sadistic urge soons becomes a feat of meticulous planning, horrifically mixing the inhuman with the mundanity of everyday living:

There was no way to be one hundred per cent sure of not getting caught - this had been his first thought on waking - but merely wounding some woman was out of the question. If she lived, she’d surely go to the police, and that would be it for him. He’d mulled over such problems while brushing his teeth and washing his face.

The story builds from there, chapter by short chapter, and then, when all hell breaks loose, Piercing opens up into a non-stop catalogue of cat-and-mouse drugs and violence that, in a single chapter consuming half the novel, leads to a conclusion that’s hard to accept, yet strangely fitting.

The piercing of the title, while it could relate to puncturing someone with an ice pick, relates to the thoughts of Kawashima’s eventual target, a young woman who has pierced her own nipple, but these reflect the novel’s wider concerns:

To be able to choose your own pain - it’s a little scary, she thought, but it’s wonderful, too.

Murakami’s delivery is deadpan throughout, never passing judgement on the events in his novel, regardless of how wrong or stupid they seem, as if to say, this is the story, accept it. Sadly, it’s too pulpy to stir a sense of wrong or right in aligning with characters, but the weaving in and out of their perspectives is done well, increasing the dramatic irony with each incident, and is what makes Piercing particularly gripping and worth having a stab at.

My previous experience of Nadine Gordimer was with last year’s Booker longlisted Get A Life. That book, to me, was so full of stunted sentences, lacked narrative focus, and was excruciatingly boring that it’s a wonder I would want to read another. But, sometimes, to get the measure of a difficult author (and being a Nobel laureate is usually a good marker of being one) you have to go back to previous works when the style was not so prevalent. With July’s People I don’t think I went far enough back as there were still many of the stylistic tics I hadn’t enjoyed in Get A Life, but this novel was a better and more coherent read.

July’s People is set after the Soweto Uprising in a South Africa where the situation has become anarchic, with white people being forced from their homes, sometimes killed. The Smales family, Bam, Maureen, and their three children believe themselves “lucky to be alive” when they escape to rural South Africa and stay in a mud hut as guest of their servant, July.

It is here, away from the city, that the Smales come to realise the difference between the white and black people of South Africa, for where they are all about the money, the poor have different needs:

She saw how when she or Bam, who were completely dependent on these people, had nothing but bits of paper to give them, not even clothes - so prized by the poor - to spare, they secreted the paper money in tied rags and strange crumpled pouches about their persons. They were able to make the connection between the abstract and the concrete.

July’s People shows the descent of the Smales family as they try to make what they can of their life amongst the poor black community. While July remains servile to them, the gulf between white and black people is slowly dissolved to the point where it is the white family who is found to be helpless while the black people are resourceful to the last. In a life where everyday necessities such as toilet paper, sanitary towels, and groceries become luxuries, the Smales make an effort to understand their new environment but ultimately remain trapped, never quite knowing how to get out.

Mercifully, the prose in this novel is much easier to read than Get A Life (and, I presume, later Gordimers). And while the dialogue can still throw you sideways for a moment, it’s quite easy to regain the thread. Stylistically, rather than use quotes, Gordimer has opted for dashes opening and closing speech. During periods of extended interaction between characters it can be a tad unwieldy, but is ultimately readable. There is also the occasional fragmented sentence but nothing untoward that really hampers the text.

In fact, July’s People has much enjoyable writing. When Maureen, our window on the world, isn’t philosophising, there come a series of descriptions that evoke the difficulty of trying to live a normal life in a world outside your comfort zone, and of how natural that world is:

They made love, wrestling together with deep resonance coming to each through the other’s body, in the presence of their children breathing close around them and the nightly intimacy of cockroaches, crickets and mice feeling-out the darkness of the hut; of the sleeping settlement; of the bush.

Gordimer also takes time in the novel to find stylistic flourishes, such as the initial car journey when the Smales flee their lives - a piece of writing that wonderfully captures the bumpy journey off road and the angst of the ordeal as a whole:

People in delirium rise and sink, rise and sink, in and out of lucidity. The swaying, shuddering, thudding, flinging stops, and the furniture of life falls into place. The vehicle was the fever. Chattering metal and raving dance of loose bolts in the smell of the childrens’ car-sick. She rose from it for gradually longer and longer intervals. At first what fell into place was what was vanished, the past.

My reading of July’s People was very much like that car journey. There were moments where I found my mind drifting as I read it, not taking much in, but, as I warmed to the prose style, I found myself finding more and more of it followable. Those lapses, however, may have lost the novel’s full effect for me but it’s certainly piqued my interest for some more of Gordimer’s work, for it’s a great mix of gritty reality and symbol all wrapped up in a style of her own making.

Not many books can claim to have been filmed on more than one occasion although as Hollywood becomes more of a recycling plant than a hotbed of imagination that will soon go out the window. Published in 1984 as Het Gouden Ei (The Golden Egg), Tim Krabbé’s short psychological thriller was filmed in 1988 as the brilliant Spoorloos, which suffered that greatest indignity of cinema in 1991: the American remake.

Rex and Saskia are in love. Very much so. And one day, while driving through Europe, they stop at a petrol station in France. Saskia, offering to drive the next leg of their journey to Nuits-St-George heads into the shop to get Rex a beer. She doesn’t come back. Just vanishes.

Eight years later and Rex is in love with Lieneke, is pondering making her his bride, but he can’t let go of Saskia. If she was to come to him now he would go with Lieneke. But it’s the not knowing that continues to haunt him. Then, one day, a man arrives and offers Rex the chance to find out what happened to his former love.

Having seen both movie adaptations I was already aware how this novella was going to conclude (although the US remake had a different ending; or, more specific, had an extra ten/fifteen minutes tacked on; the same director though) but, given my love for the idea, that wasn’t going to stop me. The idea itself (girl gets kidnapped, lover mourns) isn’t all that original; it’s the clinical calculation of the kidnapper, a man called Raymond Lemorne, that makes it worthwhile. His journey to test himself as an angel of death (in opposition to his capacity as hero years before in a river rescue) is what makes the book. The decisions he makes, the planning, the revelations, the planting of alibis, etc. all combine to make him the real star of the book.

The language, however, is crap. It’s good and punchy in that thriller way, but the translation isn’t all that good: it’s full of incorrect words (Rex calls Saskia his wife despite their lack of marriage) and is littered with exclamation marks. In the narrative! According to Wikipedia the book was translated in 1993 (Random House) and again in 2003 (Bloomsbury). If the translation of the Bloomsbury is anything to go by, the 1993 edition is either really shoddy or definitive.

The characters suffer from that bane of most thrillers: lack of development. In The Vanishing plot is king. For a 115 page novella more could have been made of Rex’s grief, the mysterious Lemorne, and the triangle between Rex, Lieneke, and the missing Saski to merit this being an interesting novel.

Overall, though, I’m letting my love of the story cloud my judgement. It’s a great story with a horrific denouement. I would recommend the original Dutch movie, Spoorloos, though, over the actual book.

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

Thus begins The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel; a tale spanning Afghanistan in the seventies to its part in the Twin Towers, passing the Soviet invasion and Taliban rule along the way. The story involves the narrator, Amir, trying to gain his father’s respect by attempting a triumph in the local kite fighting competition. Hassan, his friend and servant, helps him but a life-changing event, for which Amir blames himself, occurs which sees their lives take different paths. When the Soviets attack Amir and his father flee to America via Pakistan where they begin a new life. Amir grows up, graduates, marries, but the thought of his guilt sees him return to Afghanistan, now under Taliban rule, in order to trace Hassan and to right the wrongs of that day in 1975.

Despite the first chapter, a page at most that could be cut, the book begins nicely and sets the stage. Kids play, Islam encourages regular prayer, and the village teems with life. The story continues and we learn about the Hazara, the lowly Afghans used as servants, and how Amir’s playmate, the hare-lipped Hassan, is of this caste. Hassan represents everything the narrator wishes he could be: brave, honourable, and willing to stand up for himself. When Amir needs something, Hassan provides, when Amir is in trouble, Hassan takes the blame, and when Amir is bullied Hassan takes the beating.

It is during this time that Hosseini is at his strongest which, in my opinion, is still rather weak. His characters are alive in their own environment, the play between them is realistic, and the dialogue is nicely garnished with a sprinkle of Farsi. We are also invited to sample Afghani culture as we tour houses and schools, sample the food, visit the cinema, and smile during the kite fighting competition. The only problem here is that the description is so matter of fact that it seems the narrator is listing what he remembers without commenting on any emotional impact it may have caused.

In much the same way that the Soviet attacks caused a downhill surge in the quality of life, the book takes a tumble. Amir’s life in America is a section of approximately seventy pages which, thinking back, seems tagged on. It was as if it were written once the novel was complete and tucked in the centre simply to lengthen the text. Nothing that happens here bears any relation to the rest of the story with the exception of the characters and where the ending is located. I wonder, perhaps, if this part were added to make it not so completely foreign to the mainstream American market.

After the American section the novel doesn’t improve. Amir returns to Afghanistan to right his wrongs and the story becomes more of a catalogue of Taliban atrocities than the emotional narrative it could have been. Eventually, after a series of ridiculous coincidences, the story returns to America where it, thankfully, concludes.

I found the narrator to be too perfect in his recollection of times gone by. Every detail is rendered with incredible certainty, including dreams where he’s not quite coherent, and the descriptions are without sentiment. Nostalgia has never been so dry. Cliché is used prolifically within the narrative although the middle aged Amir does make light of this. He doesn’t, however, seem to realise that his own life story has graced so many movies and books already that, despite being the only Afghan protagonist I know, he is already hackneyed.

The Kite Runner is not a book that I can recommend and I disagree with the critics that are quoted as saying the book was “emotional” when it was so cold that it would take more than a poppy field ablaze to melt its boring heart.