‘All the Names’ by Jose Saramago – A Central Registry of Records for the Living and the Dead

 

‘All the Names’ by Jose Saramago   (1997) – 238 pages             Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa

Jose Saramago was one of the few modern authors who could fully imagine complete meaningful allegories which he did time and time again. I have read a lot of the work of Saramago who I consider an absolute master of fiction, and ‘All the Names’ is another deeply intelligent work. However I found reading its long sentences and longer paragraphs rather slow going.

Of all of the works of Jose Saramago that I have read so far, ‘All the Names’ is the one that I have found to be the most difficult to read. For readers new to Saramago, my recommendation would be not to read ‘All the Names’ until you have read a few of Saramago’s other novels. ‘Blindness’ was a best seller; it has been a gateway into Saramago’s work for many people. I have found his two novels based on religious figures, ‘The Gospel According to Jesus Christ’ and ‘Cain’ to be quite accessible and enjoyable. Saramago’s amazing novel about fellow Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, ‘The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis’, is another entertaining strong passage into his work.

However we are here today to discuss ‘All the Names’ which is probably the most metaphysical of all of Saramago’s work.

Our main character Senhor Jose, no last name, is a lowly clerk in the Central Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths. Above him are senior clerks, above the senior clerks are the deputies, above the deputies is the all powerful Registrar. Each level of management must keep their employees operating quietly and smoothly, thus not causing any problems for the next upper level of management. If you have ever worked in a business or government office, you know all about the bureaucratic decision-making process here.

In the Central Registry’s filing system. The records for the dead are kept separate from those for the living. That means that when any person in the living section of records dies, a clerk must retrieve their record from the living section and take it to the vast rarely-accessed dusty dead archive.

With all this trafficking between the living and the dead, you can easily see the allegorical possibilities here, and Saramago takes full advantage of them. ‘All the Names’ is profound as all of the work of Saramago is profound.

Our main character Senhor Jose becomes captivated with the search for an unknown woman when he comes upon her record in the living section. His quest for this woman begins quite humorously, but soon turns into a desperate obsession which interferes with his work life at the Central Registry. The Registrar sees certain actions that Senhor Jose takes as “mistakes committed against oneself, born of loneliness”.

‘All the Names’ is indeed profound.

“Senhor Jose both wants and doesn’t want, he both desires and fears what he desires, that is what his whole life has been like.”

As Senhor Jose descends ever deeper into his compulsive obsession to find this woman, the reader gets long interminable paragraphs, some several pages long, of conversations with himself or, more absurdly, with the ceiling of his room. This is where I started to have problems as these expressions of the inner turmoil of his mind went on and on with little relief for the reader. I found all these lengthy machinations of Senhor Jose’s mind rather tedious to read.

 

Grade:    B

 

 

‘The Great Mistake’ by Jonathan Lee – The Man Who Got Things Done

 

‘The Great Mistake’ by Jonathan Lee  (2021)  –  289 pages

 

I pride myself on knowing a lot about United States history, but I had never heard of Andrew Haswell Green before. Green is the primary character of ‘The Great Mistake’. He was a New York City lawyer and city planner and civic leader, and he was responsible for many of the things New York City is famous for including Central Park, the Bronx Zoo, the New York Public Library, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Green was also responsible for consolidating the five boroughs of New York into one city. At the age of 83, he was shot to death outside his home on November 13, !903.

‘The Great Mistake’ alternates between two modes, a fictional biography based on details from Green’s life and the police investigation into the circumstances of his shocking death.

The power of ‘The Great Mistake’ is in its individual sentences. The sentences are subtle and expressive and have a dramatic immediacy that puts you on the side of our hero Andrew Haswell Green. If you are the kind of reader who values fine evocative sentences, by all means read ‘The Great Mistake’.

“The concert of barely connected moments that make up any life.”

If you can write lines like that, congratulations, you are a writer.

The entire novel left me quite moved. Our author Jonathan Lee finds the words and the scenes to express truths that are not often expressed. Green was a man who had to overcome circumstances which became all too apparent to him in childhood in order to accomplish what he did. Whether we are aware of it or not, each of us has had a childhood situation which has shaped most of our entire lives. That childhood situation includes:

Our parents attitudes toward us

Our own interests and proclivities

Our relations with our brothers and/or sisters

Other factors

“Did anyone in the heavens really believe in him, Andrew Green, this awkward boy below, his spirit, his potential for good? His own question frightened him into muteness, the kind of silence the living rarely know, the moon hanging sullied by smoke in the sky, filthy with the expulsions of men.”

Central Park, New York City

Later Green leaves the childhood farm for New York City.

“To be a gentleman in New York, one needed an education. To obtain an education in New York, one needed money. To obtain money in New York, one needed to be a gentleman. The city formed its circles.”

‘The Great Mistake’ was a very poignant and meaningful reading experience for me. Jonathan Lee finds the words and the scenes to express truths that are not often expressed.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

 

‘Barcelona Dreaming’ by Rupert Thomson – Day and Night Life in Barcelona

 

‘Barcelona Dreaming’, stories, by Rupert Thomson (2021) – 215 pages

 

Rupert Thomson lived in Barcelona, Spain, from 2004 to 2010. Thomson created the first draft of these three stories while still living in Barcelona.

Barcelona is a seaport on the Mediterranean in northern Spain. It is in a region near the Pyrenees called Catalonia and they speak their own language Catalan. It is the fifth largest city in the European Union with over five and a half million people, and in many ways it resembles the towns and cities along the southern coast of France and the French Riviera more than the rest of Spain.

The three stories are “The Giant of Sarria”, “The King of Castelldefels”, and “The Carpenter of Montjuic”. I suppose Sarria, Castelldefels, and Montjuic are place names in or near Barcelona.

The stories are all written in the first person. Each is about 70 pages long, and I would consider them long stories rather than novellas. All of the stories center around somewhat odd offbeat relationships between men and women.

In the first story, a woman in her forties tells of her love affair with a young guy in his early twenties from Morocco. She lives in a fashionable section of Barcelona; he lives in a slum where mostly illegal immigrants live. While one of her friends try to dissuade her, she continues the affair.

“I felt the part of me that might have questioned what I was doing fly off into the night, fast as a flung stone.”

In the second story, it’s the other way around. A 65 year-old man tells of his affair with a Brazilian woman in her thirties who has a 10 year-old son.

The third story is not about an affair. A man becomes friends with another guy who lives in his apartment building who intrigues him.

“What if in a roundabout, almost allegorical way he was trying to warn me about himself? At first glance, he might seem open and accessible, someone you could talk to, but he was capable of unexpected and terrifying transformations.”

These stories share a distinctive enigmatic exotic atmosphere which I suppose is Barcelona. That some of the same peripheral characters float through the three stories somewhat loosely ties them together. Notice that on the cover above are the words “a novel”. Hardly.

These stories capture the lives of these diverse characters in this city of Barcelona without trying to instruct us with a moral or any other lesson. I’m too old to learn anything so I actually prefer fiction that doesn’t try to teach me lessons.

 

Grade:    A-

 

 

‘Secrets of Happiness’ by Joan Silber – A Lot of Random Persons Doing a Lot of Random Things

 

‘Secrets of Happiness’ by Joan Silber   (2021) – 274 pages

 

‘Secrets of Happiness’ is filled with men and women and their always frenetic activities. All this signifies very little. The characters in these very loosely linked stories go to the far reaches of the world, usually far south eastern Asia, and get involved in myriad affairs, but nothing has any real impact.

As far as I am concerned, all the characters could have been named what’s-his-name or what’s-her-name. They were all quite interchangeable.

An insignificant peripheral character in a previous story becomes the main protagonist in the next story. This is a valid stance as every person’s existence is significant on its own terms. However each story is an accumulation of near arbitrary events and movements for these people without any underlying motive.

The novel is divided up into seven sections each from a different character’s perspective except that the first and last sections are from a character named Ethan’s point of view.

The title ‘Secrets of Happiness’ is supposed to be the unifying factor that turns these loosely linked stories into a novel. So what are the secrets of happiness? About the only guidance that I found in this novel is to follow your own proclivities. However there is a line of dialogue in the book that contradicts that advice:

“People think that if they are honest about their cravings, it makes anything OK,” I said. “That’s a fallacy of modern life.”

The onrush of incidents and forever more, more minor characters leaves no room for any real depth. All we are left with is a surface word-picture of frenetic activity and scattered casual acquaintances.

There were a couple of individual lines which I did enjoy in this “novel”:

“She’d been an English major in college, perfect preparation for not having a job,”

“My mama so poor the ducks threw bread at her.”

However, overall, I found this work off-putting. You can read the more favorable reviews of ‘Secrets of Happiness’ after you read mine. There are some out there.

 

Grade:    C-

 

 

‘The Dictionary of Lost Words’ by Pip Williams – She Grew Up With the First Oxford English Dictionary

 

‘The Dictionary of Lost Words’ by Pip Williams (2021) – 359 pages

 

“This book began as two simple questions. Do words mean different things to men and women? And if they do, is it possible that we have lost something in the process of defining them?” – Pip Williams

‘The Dictionary of Lost Words’ is a very traditional substantial novel, and that is not at all a criticism. It is also a very perceptive and impassioned story.

The time is the early 1880s. Six year-old Esme is the daughter of one of the lexicographers, the men who are assembling the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Her mother died in childbirth, so the men allow her to stay around in the Scriptorium or as she calls it, the Scrippy, where her father and other men are at work putting together the dictionary. Even as a young child, Esme develops an early liking of words and their meanings.

A family maid Lizzie takes care of Esme as Esme grows up, and the bond between them becomes like that of a mother and daughter. The maid’s way of talking is much different from that of the learned Oxford men who are working on the dictionary.

“The world ain’t like the Scrippy, Essy. Words don’t lie around waiting for some light-fingered girl to pick them up.” She turned and gave me a reassuring smile.

”That’s just the point, Lizzie. I’m sure there are plenty of wonderful words flying around that have never been written on a slip of paper. I want to record them.”

Esme develops a life-long interest in the common words that were excluded by the Oxford authorities because they were used by the poor or by women. Some of the words Esme hears from Lizzie and Lizzie’s friends are not in the dictionary because they have never been written down. Some of the words are Old English words written even by Chaucer but are excluded by the Oxford men as being “obscene”.

One of the tamer examples of a word that is excluded is a “git”. The word is now in the Merriam-Webster dictionary defined as “British; a foolish or worthless person”. Another word that was lost is “knackered”.

The first Oxford English Dictionary took over 40 years to complete, Each of its twelve volumes was published as it was completed. When Esme grows up, the Oxford men allow her to work on the dictionary, not as a lexicographer but performing other necessary tasks. Along the way, Esme compiles her own list of words that have been excluded from the dictionary.

And also along the way, we get Esme’s own dramatic and poignant life story.

Some of the Oxford lexicographers are more dogmatic than Esme’s father or the head editor, Dr. James Murray, and in time Esme learns to tell these men off:

“You are not the arbiter of knowledge, sir. You are its librarian.” I pushed Women’s Words across his desk. “It is not for you to judge the importance of these words, simply to allow others to do so.”

I found ‘The Dictionary of Lost Words’ to be a very satisfying stimulating read that raised some issues about language and words that need to be raised.

“The Dictionary, like the English language, is a work in progress.” – Pip Williams

 

Grade:     A

 

 

‘The Mission House’ by Carys Davies – An English Gentleman in India Today

 

‘The Mission House’ by Carys Davies (2021) – 258 pages

 

What does one read after the exceptional ‘The Promise’?

‘The Mission House’ is nothing like ‘The Promise’. That is why it is the perfect follow-up read after ‘The Promise’. After I finished reading ‘The Promise’, I started and gave up on a couple of novels. That is what usually happens after I read an extraordinary novel; the next can never measure up. ‘The Mission House’ has the distinct advantage that it is nothing like ‘The Promise’. Where ‘The Promise’ is loud and angry, ‘The Mission House’ is reticent and quiet and almost gentle. The strengths of ‘The Mission House’ are almost the complete opposite of ‘The Promise’.

Vive la différence.

‘The Mission House’ is not at all sensational; it is life-affirming. It is about redemption at the individual person-to-person level. It is at the one-to-one level that saving souls occurs. Davies’ fiction is not about religion; it is much deeper than that.

Although Carys Davies is a writer born in Wales and now living in Edinburgh, her previous excellent novel ‘West’ takes place in the United States. ‘The Mission House’ takes place in a town in the hilly thus cooler region of India.

An Auto Rickshaw

‘The Mission House is a quiet little novel about a man traveling to India seeking redemption. We gradually, gracefully find out about our main protagonist, Hilary Byrd. After leaving England, first he escaped the hot, damp, crowded southern part of India and found this high grassy plateau town. Since he doesn’t drive, his main means of travel is the auto rickshaw which are in general use throughout India. Later we find out that Hilary has lost his longtime job as a librarian in England and is at loose ends seeking something from life he has not yet found. With his shy reserve, Hilary gives off an aura of being unmoored and lost. Despite his restraint, somehow he establishes a small network of friends in this Indian town. His letters back to his sister in England reflect his new-found good spirits.

“It was the combination of the strange and the familiar that suited him.”

I really liked the style of ‘The Mission House’ with its short chapters and its understated pleasures. Like I said before, it’s the near opposite of ‘The Promise’, but each of these two are excellent in their own ways.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

 

‘The Illustrious House of Ramires’ by José Maria de Eça de Queirós – “It isn’t worth letting bad politics spoil a good supper.”

 

‘The Illustrious House of Ramires’ by José Maria de Eça de Queirós  (1900)  346 pages                              

Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa

 

I have become an Eça de Queirós aficionado, and I believe a lot of others would do well to be Eça de Queirós aficionados also.

Consider the renowned Portuguese fiction translator Margaret Jull Costa. She has made an excellent career of translating the best in Portuguese fiction. So far she has translated 12 works of José Saramago and 12 works of Javier Marias and has translated other works of such writers in Portuguese as Machado de Assis, Paulo Coelho, and António Lobo Antunes. She won the Portuguese translation prize for translating ‘The Book of Disquiet’ by Fernando Pessoa. ‘The Illustrious House of Ramires’ is the eleventh fiction by José Maria de Eça de Queirós she has translated.

José Saramago who was no slouch of a novelist himself has called Eça de Queirós “Portugal’s finest novelist”. I tend to agree with Saramago.

Here is a line from ‘The Illustrious House of Ramires’:

“None of us can really be judged guilty by a God who made us such fickle, fragile creatures, so dependent on forces over which we have even less control than the wind or the sun!”

Goncalo Mendes Ramires, the Nobleman of the Tower, is the scion of the Ramires family which has been prominent in Portuguese history since the 10^th century, even before the Portuguese kings. He is writing an heroic novella about one of his ancestors and has come to the conclusion that the main occupation of those glorified legendary ancestors had been murdering people.

A childhood friend of Goncalo has risen to be an influential Portuguese politician, and much to Goncalo’s chagrin and dismay, this guy is pursuing an affair with Goncalo’s married sister. It is a fictional case history of how political power debases people, how men (and women) are so easily corrupted by a despot.

“Your letters? What did you say in your letters? That the governor is a despot and a Don Juan? Do you really think he was wounded by that? No, he was delighted.”

I must say that ‘Illustrious’ did give me some valuable insight into recent United States history.

But what happens when Goncalo himself is offered an influential position by this governor scoundrel? Will he himself succumb to the temptations of power?

Although I found ‘The Illustrious House of Ramires’ to be quite impressive, I would not recommend it as the place to start with Eça de Queirós. It starts out somewhat slowly before building up to its rousing climax. You probably won’t want to start with ‘Eça de Queirós’s masterpiece ‘The Maias’ either since it is over 600 pages, but I would recommend either the short novel ‘The Relic’ or the even shorter novella ‘The Yellow Sofa’ as a good starting point for this outstanding writer.

 

Grade:   A-

 

 

‘The Promise’ by Damon Galgut – A Lively Account of Four Deaths in an Afrikaner family

 

‘The Promise’ by Damon Galgut  (2021) – 269 pages

 

“The Promise’ is the devastating story of an Afrikaner family through about thirty years starting in 1986 with the mother Rachel’s death and funeral. Each of the four chapters deals with another death in the family, yet ‘The Promise’ is not at all gloomy or morose. Sometimes it is lurid and over-the-top with frightful imagery. It’s personal. Damon Galgut is heavily invested in this story.

There is something brilliant in the way Damon Galgut continuously and quickly shifts the focus from person to person here, each with their own vivid, frequently shocking, insights into what is happening. Sometimes the point of view shifts to minor walk-on characters like a homeless guy named Bob who sleeps outside the church where one of the funerals is being held. These people are by turns angry, sarcastic, nasty, stubborn, and petty, just like regular human beings. The son Anton says to his father on his father’s deathbed:

“You were an alcoholic shit to my mother before you found religion and after that you were a sober kind of shit.”

It’s not for the squeamish. The detailed description of the cremation process here might make one decide against cremation, but the alternative is also shown not to be very attractive either. There are a lot of gross scenes including opening up the coffin in front of the funeral attendees to make sure the correct dead person is in it. We get a full description of the decaying body and its attendant smells.

Sometimes the vantage point even darts to an animal who wanders into the picture. Here is how Galgut sets the picture:

“In the various rooms downstairs, everything is inert, except for the occasional scuttling insect, or is it a rodent, and the tiny expansions and contractions of the furniture. Pitter, patter, creak, creak.”

I forgive Damon Galgut all of his faults – his purple prose, his deliberate gruesomeness and crudity, his morbid fascination, and the mean turns he puts his characters through, because in the end ‘The Promise’ is near perfection. It’s rude and crude and outrageous, and that’s what makes it a stimulating read.

I guess I can reveal “the promise” since it is explained early in the novel. On her deathbed, the mother Rachel has decided to give one of their properties to their black housemaid and nurse Salome, and the father Manie has promised to do so.

As a side benefit to this intense and wild story, we get some major insights into the South Africa of today. I will let you read those for yourself which I urge you to do.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

‘The Doll’ by Ismail Kadare – A Portrait of His Mother

 

‘The Doll’ by Ismail Kadare    (2015) – 175 pages                  Translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson

 

The doll in ‘The Doll’ is the mother of Ismail Kadare. The first-person narrator is named Ismail Kadare who becomes an aspiring fiction writer. Yes, this is an auto-fiction. Young people today who wish to write auto-fiction could learn a lot from this old master, Ismail Kadare. The tone here is cheerful throughout.

Here is the situation of Kadare’s parents which he describes in ‘The Doll’. His father is from one of the old, staid, and elite families of the city of Tirana in Albania and they live in a large intimidating ancient mansion. His mother, only 17 when she married his father, comes from a home of gypsies, birds, and violins, After her marriage, the young bride must move into this cold grim old house of her husband’s family and she must contend with the chilliness of a disapproving mother-in-law who “had a reputation both for tight-lipped severity and for wisdom”.

“Houses like ours seemed constructed with the specific purpose of preserving coldness and misunderstanding for as long as possible.”

However, despite appearances, it was Kadare’s mother’s family who had more money than his father’s family.

‘The Doll’ is a novel of families and their in-laws played out in a rapidly changing Albania, for the years covered are those when Communism and earlier the rigid regime of Enver Hoxha fell.

Kadare probably could have written an entire novel about this early fierce family situation but instead he moves on to his own marriage much later which was again beset by in-law problems.

As Ismail grows up and becomes famous in his literary career, his mother interacts with the playwrights, movie directors, etc who come to their house.

The events of this novel are somewhat too scattered to be entirely successful as fiction. It becomes a book of somewhat random reminiscences.

And I never quite figured out the significance of the doll analogy for his mother.

Ultimately for me, this was not one of Kadare’s more successful novels. The focus seemed somewhat too scattered.

 

Grade:    B

 

 

‘Sorrow and Bliss’ by Meg Mason – A Charming and Amusing Novel about Crushing Depression Issues

 

‘Sorrow and Bliss’ by Meg Mason (2021) – 337 pages

 

The title ‘Sorrow and Bliss’ suggests that this is an emotional roller coaster of a novel, and that it is. However the novel maintains a wry droll tone throughout.

First, we have our first person narrator, Martha.

“Unless I inform you otherwise, at intervals throughout my twenties and most of my thirties, I was depressed mildly, moderately, severely, for a week, two weeks, half a year, all of one.”

Martha has had rather a bohemian London upbringing with a poet father and an aspiring sculptor mother. Here is her mother talking:

“…but all I’ve been trying to do, all these years, is take rubbish and turn it into something beautiful and much stronger than it was before. I’m sorry if that’s a bloody metaphor for everything.”

Martha also has a close best-friend relationship with her sister Ingrid. The family is financially supported by their well-to-do aunt Winsome (“win some, lose some”) and uncle Rowland.

Then we have the boy Patrick who is a friend of the family and has been “always just there” since Martha was 13.

Martha has an early short unfortunate marriage to Jonathan. As her cousin tells her afterwards,

“I wish marrying a total fuckwit was the worst life-choice I’d ever made.”

Sometimes Martha is really funny. By avoiding all the stultifying analytic terminology usually associated with mental illness, our author presents us with a real emotional human being in Martha who is dealing or not dealing with her mental problems. Despite her manifest psychological issues, Martha manages to be both charming and witty as the narrator of this novel.

“That I’m not good at being a person. I seem to find it more difficult to be alive than other people.”

Both medical and mental diagnoses make a person’s private situation seem all so cut-and-dried, so well-defined and predictable. One forgets that under that short phrase of a diagnosis there is still a real human being struggling with whatever problems their crushing condition creates.

When Martha notices that the female marriage counselor she has been seeing is no longer wearing her wedding ring, Martha stops going because “It’s like having a fat personal trainer”.

I hope that I have conveyed my pleasure in reading the sentences in ‘Bliss and Sorrow’ by the quotes that I have included.

Martha’s story takes a very dark turn as stories about people with severe mental problems tend to do. However Meg Mason maintains this wry deadpan tone throughout ‘Sorrow and Bliss’, a major accomplishment.

 

Grade:   A

 

 

 

‘The Plot’ by Jean Hanff Korelitz – A Crime Thriller About the Writing of Fiction

 

‘The Plot’ by Jean Hanff Korelitz (2021) – 320 pages

Our main character in ‘The Plot’, Jake Finch Bonner, had his first novel listed in the New York Times New & Noteworthy section. His second was nowhere near as successful. Now, having not written much of anything for three years, he is teaching creative writing at the small Ripley college campus and desperately trying to come up with a subject for another novel. Jake Finch Bonner has been relegated to “the special purgatory of formerly promising writers”.

“What was out there, in 2013, for a writer whose two tiny patches of real estate on the great cumulative shelf of American fiction were being left farther and farther behind with each passing year?”

Where can Jake possibly find an engaging plot?

Our author here of ‘The Plot’, Jean Hanff Korelitz, knows this publishing industry whereof she writes. We get a cynical but entirely realistic take on the book writing, publishing, and reviewing industry.

“People don’t realize you can’t copyright a plot.”

Beyond plagiarism or plot-theft, this story raises a fascinating question. What if an author wrote a work of fiction, and, accidentally or not, it resembled the real life story of someone so extremely closely and that person didn’t like the way their life was presented?

‘The Plot’ itself pushes many of the buttons required to be a best seller. It’s got a brisk jaunty style and a catchy unique ultimately scary plot and it’s not so deep as to scare ordinary readers away. And then Jake finds romance. Later, at its climax, it has spine-tingling suspense. What more can a reader ask for?

The plot of ‘The Plot’ is not very deep and quite improbable. No, this is not the next ‘Madame Bovary’, but it is bestseller-y enough. Last week, ‘The Plot’ was number 13 on the NYT bestseller list. This week it is missing from the list. I will be watching the list for the next few weeks.

Stephen King called ‘The Plot’ “insanely readable”. Yes, this is a novel that could give even Stephen King a run for his money. Think ‘Misery’.

 

Grade:   A-

 

 

My Method for Writing These Reviews of Fiction

 

After writing these fiction book reviews for almost twelve years now, I’m finally ready to describe the method I use. Here is a short description of my approach. For better or worse, this is my method.

First I put in a ridiculous amount of concern into selecting the next work of fiction I am going to read. I try to maintain several balances in my reading such as classic or new, male or female, novel or play or story collection or even poems, an author whom I am familiar with or an author who is new to me. Also I try to maintain geographical and racial and time period diversity. Of course a perfect balance in my reading would be a much too constraining goal, but I do keep all of these factors in mind when selecting my next work of fiction. At the same time I try to find something that I actually do want to read.

And then I will start reading. However, I may quickly or slowly find that the current work is unsuited for me. I give up on these unsuitable books, because there is always something else I want to read. I won’t write reviews of those works which I don’t finish.

What happens when I do land on a suitable book?

As I read, I write down notes about the work, some of which I may use later. I will write down quotes from the book, especially those quotes that reflect the particular flavor or qualities of that work. If it’s a humorous work, I will look for a funny quote, etc. I will include those quotes from the work in my review that will give those reading my review the style of the writing.

I try to find a meaningful adjective or adjectives that describes the style of the work in question. Recent adjectives I have used to describe books are “deadpan”, “self-obsessed”, “jaunty”, “confessional”, “passionate”, “pleasant”, good-natured”, “off-putting”, “angry”, “brutally direct”, “intense”, “authentic”, “honest”, “a sad disturbing read”. Later I will look up these adjectives in the thesaurus to find other words that might even better describe the work. The trick is to make it seem as though those adjectives don’t sound like they were stolen out of some thesaurus. 🙂

After I finish reading a work, I will wait a couple of days until I “recover”. I don’t know if waiting a couple of days is a good or bad thing, but it is something I must do.

When I do write the review, I usually try to include a short phrase in my review title to capture the spirit of the work.

My review will always contain short descriptions of the basic situation and characters without giving away any of the plot.

Then I will discuss issues that the work of fiction raised for me. These are not necessarily judgmental, but sometimes they are. The issues usually reflect the effect that the work had on me. Also I will usually include my extraneous thoughts concerning the work.

Finally I will give a grade to a work which is in itself a rather harrowing experience, grading a work of possible art. I don’t feel that the grade that I give has to necessarily reflect what I have written in the article.

One of my main criteria for evaluating a book is how enthusiastically I return to reading it after I have put it down a few times. Sometimes I just cannot express my doubts about a fictional work but will still downgrade it anyhow.

So that’s my method. What method do you use?

 

 

‘Trio’ by William Boyd – Filming A Movie in Brighton in 1968

 

‘Trio’ by William Boyd (2021) – 312 pages

 

‘Trio’ gives us a nice mix of interesting characters and clever plots. William Boyd’s fictions are usually rollicking reads with lots of memorable persons and events. Perhaps he is not the most original or most deep or most intense of novelists, but I have usually found his novels to be pleasurable adventures to read, and ‘Trio’ is no exception.

William Boyd has been a dependable read for me over the years. Boyd can juggle the situations of each of a large group of characters and keep me entertained with their various stories. Boyd has a talent for making characters and scenes come alive on the page. This is no small talent, a talent for old-fashioned story telling.

This is not a novel with a lot of or any fascinating quotes, but the plot of the story and the interesting way William Boyd tells the story propels the reader forward, keeps the reader reading at a breakneck pace.

It starts out as a fairly light almost comedy, but the three (a trio) main characters’ lives gain resonance and poignancy as the novel progresses.

The movie being made is a typical swinging Sixties English movie entitled ‘Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon’, perhaps a little too ridiculous for a movie title.

Twenty-eight year old lead actress Anny Viklund has fallen in love with her current leading man Troy Blaze who is four years younger than she is. However a previous boyfriend causes trouble for her on the set.

Talbot Kydd is the producer of the film. He has a wife and two children, but he cannot deny that he has an underlying sexual attraction toward men. This is treated as just another feature that some of the characters in this large cast of characters have. There is no judgment or approbation, it is just there like everything else.

Elfrida Wing, the director’s wife, is a fiction writer. She had published some early novels, but for ten years she has suffered from writer’s block. She has now started a new novel called ‘The Last Day of Virginia Woolf’, after a long dry spell. The river Ouse at Sussex in which Virginia Woolf drowned and the house that Leonard Woolf still lived in in 1968 are nearby. Our author Elfrida actually gets into the River Ouse at one point.

I found ‘Trio’ to be a lively and enjoyable read.

 

Grade:    B+

 

 

‘Hold’ by Bob Hicok – “Who can explain lonely to ants?”

 

‘Hold’, poems by Bob Hicok (2019) – 104 pages

 

Words are Bob Hicok’s playthings, and he loves to play. This is the second of Hicok’s lively poetry collections which I have read.

Will you appreciate Hicok’s humor? I suppose it depends if you think the following lines are funny.

“My Way” should only be sung underwater,

so the narcissism is softened a bit by drowning.”

I am going to quote you the first sentence of the poem “Waiting is the Hardest Part of Waiting” which is in this ‘Hold’ collection, and it will give you some more indication whether or not you will like these poems:

“I like the way your nose wrinkles

when you confuse a coping saw

for a coping mechanism and cut a duck

out of balsa to float on the lake and keep

the mallard with one wing company

badly, in that your duck has the shape

and soul of a potato.”

And then there is this great line in the poem “Baby Steps” about Bob Hicok’s father:

“Joy isn’t a hat I ever saw him wear”

Hicok’s mind moves so fast from one thing to another it is difficult to keep up with him. Many of the poems I did not fully appreciate until multiple readings. However then I really did appreciate them, and that is saying a lot for any poems.

Sometimes he goes completely off the rails, but that is partly the fun of this poem collection.

In a few of his more political poems, I missed some of his usual whimsy and they seem somewhat pedestrian and overly polemic although I agree with most of his positions. Hicok is plenty aware of the problems of putting politics into poems:

“Now I’m stuck, as politics

and poetry get along about as well as lips

and soldering irons, hawks and wet cement;”

Sometimes the playfulness of the words doesn’t match the seriousness of the poem’s intent, but that’s OK. Bob Hicok takes chances.

“What is it about poetry that it refuses to die no matter how often TV shoots it in the head?”

 

Grade:    A-

 

 

‘Long Live the Post Horn!’ By Vigdis Hjorth – Introspection at Its Most Nordic Miserable

 

‘Long Live the Post Horn!’ By Vigdis Hjorth (2013)  196 pages              Translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barsland

 

Much of  ‘Long Live the Post Horn!’ transpires in Oslo, Norway, home of our first person narrator, Ellinor:

“Saturday morning in Oslo in late November. Morose people with their heads bowed against the cold. Slush under neath my feet and oppressive sky above my head. My chest felt tight and there was a blinding, enervating light in the shops mixed with Hammond organ music everywhere. Rushing people, their eyes frantic, humiliated, and wounded.”

The inner thoughts of our first person narrator Ellinor are often as gloomy as the Oslo weather, but sometimes we are all beset with such doubts. The usual fiction process is to remove any self-doubts from the main characters to achieve a more sprightly and lively read. Instead Vigdis Hjorth has loaded up young woman Ellinor, with misgivings about her approach to life.

“I hadn’t made much progress, I was just as inadequate as I always had been.”

Ellinor is one of three members of a public relations team for Kraft-Com. The team’s new task is to convince the Norwegian public that a postal directive from the European Union should be rejected. This new postal directive would allow competition in postal service, the downside being that competitors would try to cut costs by cutting wages and services and thus ultimately reduce the mail service, especially for remote northern areas of Norway.

This novel was published in English recently, soon after Donald Trump and his Postmaster General Louis DeJoy deliberately damaged the United States Postal Service in order to interfere with the mail-in voting process. Now that was really dismal.

The Post Horn

Ellinor does have a boyfriend Stein to whom she composes the following letter:

“I feel my life is too banal for despair. That our relationship is too trivial and not passionate enough for our despair. What do we do with our despair if our lives are too small to contain it?”

She tears up the letter and doesn’t send it.

Very little actually happens, and everything that does happen is filtered through this depressed woman Ellinor’s reverie. For the first three quarters of ‘Long Live the Post Horn!, we have a woman lost in self doubt. But then the novel finally does build to a somewhat jubilant climax.

This is Nordic literature with a vengeance.

 

Grade:    C+

 

 

‘The Bottle Factory Outing’ by Beryl Bainbridge – “an outrageously funny and horrifying novel” – Graham Greene

‘The Bottle Factory Outing’ by Beryl Bainbridge    (1974)  –  219 pages

 

So much of literature today seems designed to placate everyone who reads it. ‘The Bottle Factory Outing’ will placate no one; it is uncompromising in its starkness and its gallows humor. It’s sheer originality is amazing; I doubt that there would be anyone else who could write a novel quite like ‘The Bottle Factory Outing’.

It is the story of two women, Freda and Brenda, who room together and work together in the same wine bottle factory in London. I picture the two women as both in their late twenties or early thirties. Freda is big, blonde, and aggressive while Brenda is more hapless and self-effacing, yet it is Brenda who was previously married.

They are the only women who work in the bottle factory besides an older Italian woman Maria. The factory is owned by Paganotti, an Italian entrepreneur transplanted to England, and most of the other employees are Italian men. Freda has her eyes and her heart set on fellow worker Vittorio.

“It’s not so much that I want him, she thought, but I would like him to want me.”

Beryl Bainbridge

Meanwhile Brenda is beset by the unwanted fumbling attentions of the plant manager Rossi or what we would call sexual harassment today.

“She couldn’t think how to discourage him – she didn’t want to lose her job and she hated giving offense. He had a funny way of pinching her all over, as if she was a mattress whose stuffing needed distributing more evenly.”

The novel centers around a Sunday outing for the workers in the bottling plant. I won’t go into any of the details of the shocking plot so that you can discover it for yourself.

‘The Bottle Factory Outing’ is a deadpan comedy like nothing you have ever read before. Somehow Beryl Bainbridge manages to keep a straight face while telling us this outrageous story.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

‘The Book of Embraces’ by Eduardo Galeano – Imprisoned for Writing in Support of the Downtrodden

 

‘The Book of Embraces’ by Eduardo Galeano (1989) – 272 pages          Translated from the Spanish by Cedric Befrage

 

‘The Book of Embraces’ is a collection of short passionate vignettes or word pictures. Most of the items are about people who actually lived and events that really happened. It is a collection of short scenes or ideas for us to contemplate. Here are parables, paradoxes, dreams, anecdotes, and fragments of autobiography. I would classify this book as an enlightened journalism. These brief texts are illustrated with line drawings by Galeano himself.

Galeano had started out writing more traditional history, fiction, and analyses of Latin America with his ‘Open Veins of Latin America’ and his ‘Memory of Fire’ trilogy. However later he decided the more fragmentary style of writing was more effective in getting his messages across. I found this method quite compelling; for me, it does qualify as literature of a high order.

“I write for those who cannot read me: the downtrodden, the ones who have been waiting on line for centuries to get into history, who cannot read a book or afford to buy one.”

In the 1970s Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Peru were all ruled by United States-sponsored dictatorships. These dictators ran roughshod over the people they were supposed to be governing. Many of the people who opposed these dictators were “disappeared”, in many cases taken up in airplanes and dumped into the ocean. Eduardo Galeano was imprisoned for his writing in Uruguay, and when he was released he fled for exile in Argentina in 1976. However in that same year there was a bloody military coup in Argentina and Galeano’s name was added to the list of those condemned by the death squads. Galeano escaped again, this time to Spain.

“Yes. Yes, finally, I fled away from Argentina also, because—I couldn’t stay in Uruguay, because I don’t like to be in jail, and I didn’t stay in Argentina. I could not, because I didn’t want to lay in a cemetery, because, as I told you before, death is very boring.”

Eduardo Galeano, who died in 2015, was known for the courage of his directness and outspokenness in defying repressive Latin American regimes. He was also known for his love of and his writings about soccer.

Here is a fine example of one of these vignettes called “System/1” which also could be used to describe the Trump years in the US:

“Functionaries don’t function,

Politicians speak but say nothing,

Voters vote but don’t elect,

The information media disinform,

Schools teach ignorance,

Judges punish the victims,

The military makes war against its compatriots,

The police don’t fight crime because they are too busy committing it,

Bankruptcies are socialized while profits are privatized,

Money is freer than people are,

People are at the service of things.”

In one short section called “Paradoxes”, Galeano writes, “North American blacks, the most oppressed of peoples, created jazz, the freest of all music”.

Finally, in 1984, Galeano was able to return to Uruguay.

“The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret: every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.”

Eduardo Galeano is a good place to begin to understand Latin America and its history of brutal repression.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

 

‘The Perfect Nine’ by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o – The Eternal Verities

 

‘The Perfect Nine’ – The epic of Gikuyu and Mumbi by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (2021) – 227 pages

 

I’m going to start with some lines from ‘The Perfect Nine’:

“The trinity appears in many states of being.

Father,

Mother,

Child.

The trinity of Birth.

Birth,

Life,

Death.

The trinity of Life.

Morning,

Noon,

Evening.

The trinity of Day.

Yesterday,

Today,

Tomorrow.

The trinity of Time.”

This is brilliant. I have never encountered such a profound meditation on the number three before. This is religion without the excess baggage. Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o reaches for the eternal truths that all religions share.

The words seem etched in stone rather than written.

‘The Perfect Nine’ is an epic that deals with the timeless verities, the continuation of life from generation to generation. It is based on the lore of the Gikuyu people of Kenya. These are the origin stories that have been told and retold from the early days.

One unusual feature of this saga is that the women are at least as heroic as the men.

It is an ancient tale of Gikuyu and Mumbi.

“They faced hazards big enough to shatter the hearts of many.

Their bodies trembled, but their hearts remained unshaken,

For Gikuyu and Mumbi had robed themselves with hope

And fastened themselves with courage and had moved on.”

They now have ten daughters. The youngest Warigia is born with crippled legs.

When the daughters get to be of marrying age, 99 male suitors arrive. Each daughter must select the suitor who is right for her.

“The birds hopped up and down in their nests, letting forth their rapturous song,

As if whistling advice to the man and woman that

They too should set up their own nest there, under the trees.”

As a test, the daughters and their suitors must go on a hazardous journey to the Mountain of the Moon. They must contend with several ogres that threaten their existence. Several of the suitors are lost along the way.

This primitive heroic poem is by turns joyful and elegiac.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

 

‘The Mystery of Henri Pick’ by David Foenkinos – “Merely Pleasant”

 

‘The Mystery of Henri Pick’ by David Foenkinos (2016) – 281 pages           Translated from the French by Sam Taylor

 

‘The Mystery of Henri Pick’ is a playful French literary mystery. It is not a world-changer but instead an amusing interlude. After reading the intense stories in James Baldwin’s ‘Going to Meet the Man’ which were passionate and insightful and angry, I was ready for something that was “merely pleasant”.

In the town of Crozon in Brittany there is a library where would-be authors can take their manuscripts that have been rejected by one or many publishers and have never been accepted. Somehow Delphine who is a literary agent for a publishing house comes across one of these rejects, ‘The Last Hours of a Love Affair’ by one Henri Pick, and believes she has found a best-seller. Henri Pick is the owner of a pizza shop in Crozon who has died a couple of years ago, and his wife and daughter are quite shocked that he had literary ambitions.

The story in the rejected manuscript blends the last moments of a love affair with the death throes of Russian writer Alexander Pushkin after he had been shot in a duel. Delphine believes this is a surefire hit if handled the correct way.

“Delphine had realized that the best way to publicize the novel was to talk about it as little as possible, to let a feeling of mystery surround it, perhaps even a few false rumors.”

‘The Mystery of Henri Pick’ makes good-natured fun of the world of books and writers. There is much tongue-in-cheek literary humor here about publishing or not publishing books, marketing books, and writing fiction itself. There are even subtle mischievous jokes about famous French authors including Michel Houllebecq and Laurent Binet. This novel is too light and fluffy to be called satire.

We are introduced to a merry-go-round of characters. We get to know these characters superficially, all on the surface. Although there are break-ups of old romances and the beginnings of new romances, none of these are at all intense. In ‘The Mystery of Henri Pick’, David Foenkinos views the lives of his multitude of characters through rose-colored glasses. This is a lighthearted novel.

I enjoyed it. Just as with all of those paintings of the French Impressionists, one can never underestimate the power of the “merely pleasant”.

 

Grade:    B+

 

 

 

‘Going to Meet the Man’ by James Baldwin – A Fearless Artist

 

‘Going to Meet the Man’, stories by James Baldwin (1965) – 249 pages

 

I wanted to read more James Baldwin, and I had read a lot of good things about his collection of stories, ‘Going to Meet the Man’. It did not disappoint.

These are deep stories with an acute and often angry understanding of the predicaments of his characters. One theme in each of these powerful stories is our refusal to really know other humans and to accept out differences.

The subjects of these eight stories are wide-ranging, and whatever the subject that James Baldwin takes on, he approaches it with an insightful humane intelligence.

“It’s always been like that, people always try to destroy what they don’t understand – and they hate almost everything because they understand so little.”

The early story ‘The Outing’ is about a church outing when the members of the church and a few others take a boat trip up to Bear Mountain where they would spend the day. Since it is a church outing the pastor Father James preaches to those who came along.  Johnnie, the son of the Deacon of the church, is attracted to his male friend David. David is more interested in the girl Sylvia who is an upstanding member of the church than in Johnnie. Neither Johnnie nor David has committed to the church, thus they are both unsaved. Can this almighty God forgive Johnnie’s “sin”?

I found this story to be powerful and caused me to eagerly read the following stories.

These lines from the story “Previous Condition” resonated with me:

“Acting’s a rough life, even if you’re white. I’m not tall and I’m not good looking and I can’t sing or dance, and I’m not white; so even at the best of times I wasn’t in much demand.”

Many of the stories confront the racial prejudice which the characters must contend with, being a black person in the United States. There is justifiable anger in the shabby and sometimes much worse treatment these characters face every day. However in the story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon”, our main protagonist escapes to Paris where racial attitudes are different.

 

In “Sonny’s Blues”, one man finds his escape through music:

“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

‘Going to Meet the Man’ finishes with the devastating title story depicting the lynching of a black man in a small southern US town, told from the harsh view of the white deputy sheriff who is overseeing the proceedings.

There has been a James Baldwin revival lately, and the compelling stories in ‘Going To Meet the Man’ are strong examples of his eloquent insight into daily life.

 

Grade:    A