Between 'The Day' And 'Deep-Night Clarity'

I finished reading a collection of Saul Bellow stories last night. Most books by Bellow, there's rarely a page where something doesn't resound or resonate, where something doesn't ring a bell. I was reading 'Cousins' the last in the collection I have and, what with the sun flung well below the horizon some-many hours previous, I was flagging — when Bellow struck this one. It was more like an alarm bell:

Sleep is out of the question, so instead of going to bed I make myself some strong coffee. No use sacking out; I'd only go on thinking.

Insomnia is not a word I'd apply to the sharp thrills of deep-night clarity that come to me. During the day the fusspot habits of a lifetime prevent real discovery. I have learned to be grateful for the night hours that harrow the nerves and tear up the veins—"lying in restless ecstasy." To want this and to bear it, you need a strong soul. [1]

Review: For Esmé — With Love And Squalor by J. D. Salinger (1953, 215pp)

This review contains a few excerpts from the book but doesn't spoil any surprises.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have a confession to make. The Catcher In The Rye was a very important book for me. I read it one summer as a still tender nineteen-year-old, working in a quiet pub, saving for my move to university in the autumn. I'm sure many of its readers will know what I'm talking about when I say the novel's narrator Holden Caulfield seemed to perfectly embody my own naive cynicism while simultaneously showing up everything that was wrong with it.

For Esmé — With Love And Squalor is the UK title for a collection of Salinger's short pieces, which in the US is simply called Nine Stories. All nine will be of interest to anyone who was impressed or moved by Salinger's most popular novel, but they might also provide an interesting taster for readers who've yet to be swayed by The Catcher In The Rye's often earnest admirers.

Snow Day

With all this beautifully disruptive and prohibitive snow about, I've been reminded on several occasions of one of my favourite books.

Philip Larkin's A Girl In Winter is a vivid portrait of England and a warming love story that unfolds slowly and sensuously. I'd like to write a review so that I could explain just why I think this novel is worth reading but, as I don't have time, I'll have to settle for sharing a meteorologically relevant passage. This is in fact the book's opening:

There had been no more snow during the night, but because the frost continued so that the drifts lay where they had fallen, people told each other there was more to come. And when it grew lighter, it seemed that they were right, for there was no sun, only one vast shell of cloud over the fields and woods. In contrast to the snow the sky looked brown. Indeed, without the snow the morning would have resembled a January nightfall, for what light there was seemed to rise from it.

It lay in ditches and in hollows in the fields, where only birds walked. In some lanes the wind had swept it up faultlessly to the very tops of the hedges. Villages were cut off until gangs of men could clear a passage on the roads; the labourers could not go out to work, and on the aerodromes near these villages all flying remained cancelled. People who lay ill in bed could see the shine off the ceilings in their rooms, and a puppy confronted with it for the first time howled and crept under the water-butt. The out-houses were roughly powdered down the windward side, the fences were half-submerged like breakwaters; the whole landscape was so white and still it might have been a formal painting.

Review: The Chequer Board by Nevil Shute (1948, 278pp.)

This review is fairly safe to read if you haven't read the book (i.e., it doesn't give away any major plot points or twists in the story) but offers an interpretation for those who have.

Those familiar with Nevil Shute through his more famous books probably won't be surprised to hear that aviation, engineering, and entrepreneurship all feature in The Chequer Board, which nevertheless presents a story told in his usual, accessible style.

Mr Turner is a British war veteran who has lately been having fainting fits. He goes to see a specialist called Mr. Hughes who tells him that there are pieces of shrapnel from an old war injury lodged irretrievably in his brain and that, as a consequence, he doesn't have long to live. He begins to think about what he would like to do with his remaining time and reminisces about the hospital where he initially received treatment for his wound. He remembers the three patients he shared a ward with: two Englishmen — a commando wanted for murder, a snobbish pilot with an unfaithful wife — and an American — a black man who has slit his own throat and also stands accused of rape. When he realises he doesn't know what happened to them he decides to find out and, with the assistance of his somewhat sceptical wife, to see if he might be able to help them in some way. It's a simple premise but one that Shute uses to build a complex narrative of interlocking stories.

The Chequer Board manages to address racial tension, considers and compares Buddhism alongside Christianity, and successfully depicts something of British character, all in under 300 pages. It must have been a somewhat unconventional book upon its publication in 1948.

List: Things Nabokov 'Loathed'

This post is just for "fun", while I make final adjustments to my next review. (By "fun", I mean highbrow "fun".)

A few days ago, I was lucky enough to catch a documentary on Vladimir Nabokov called How Do You Solve A Problem Like Lolita? (At the time of writing, it's still available on BBC iPlayer — allegedly until 24th December.) Its focus is on whether his most notorious work is a 'morality tale' or the 'fantasies of a dirty old man'. Presented by Stephen Smith, an able and likeable arts journalist, it visits some of the places where Nabokov lived and worked and provides a nice introduction to some of his writing, all the while keeping its central question in mind — but also, more importantly, in check. The question is, of course, one that has been answered by many critics before and is answered again in this documentary but, as Smith explains, the public perception of Lolita is still that it is somehow a 'pervy book'.

But never mind all that. D. G. Myers has written a far better appraisal of the book than I could ever hope to. The documentary begins with clips of Nabokov apparently giving a long list of things he loathes — among them 'vulgar movies' and 'such things as jazz'. I wondered if there was a definitive list anywhere and, when I couldn't find one online, I took it upon myself to try and put one together.

Review: The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (1967, 206pp)

This review is fairly safe to read if you haven't read the book (i.e., it doesn't give away any major plot points or twists in the story).

Although the title of this post gives the publishing date 1967, The Third Policeman was actually written sometime between 1939 and 1940. It was O'Brien's second novel, and after it was rejected by publishers he claimed to have lost the manuscript. It was made available to the public after his death.

The fact that The Third Policeman was written some two decades before the 1960s only makes it seem all the more groundbreaking for its time. It's nonetheless an accessible book, considering. The main story follows the narrator — an unnamed murderer — into an absurd world full of strange characters and odd devices. So far, so Alice in Wonderland.

As he finds himself getting increasingly lost, however, he takes comfort in the equally eccentric ideas of a philosopher named de Selby, with whom he's apparently obsessed. These ideas emerge primarily via footnotes that appear throughout the book. One in particular spans eight pages and outlines in some detail a bitter but amusing rivalry between scholars of de Selby. Long, comic footnotes and endnotes are the much remarked upon trademarks of the more recently deceased David Foster Wallace, yet here was O'Brien using a similar technique back in the Ireland of the 1940s.

Small Boats

This summer gone, I was in Mongolia — the trip itself is another story entirely. But while I was out there, I promised myself that when I returned to England I would do some things to make my life a bit more fulfilling. One thing was to go swimming on a regular basis. Another was to stop drinking, at least until Christmas. And yet another was to stop writing a journal and get on with some real writing. That is, stuff that I'd be comfortable to have other people read.

I've been keeping journals since I was seventeen. They are very personal, private things and most of them are boxed up in storage. However, over the last couple of years I've found that whenever I sat down to work on something, I'd often write about it in my journal before or after. It got to the point recently where I was writing the journal instead of doing the actual work. Spending time in a country that hasn't ever really had an industrial period makes a lot of things back here seem absurd.