So I’m currently spending a month traveling around Southern Africa and thought I’d take War and Peace with me as it’s big and a classic.
My god but it’s so boring…has anyone read it, and if so, does it get interesting at some stage?
This post is probably for Philip K ■■■■ fans only, and if that isn’t everyone, why not, he’s probably THE most influential writer of fiction since the late 50s. I’ve just finished “The Search For Philip K. ■■■■” by his much maligned third wife, Anne R. ■■■■, a book that’s been around a long time but I’d been avoiding because I’d assumed it was her “F— You Phil” revenge book, which would be fair enough too considering the ways he used and misused her as the template for the quintessential PKDickian ■■■■■ wife in so many of his novels. It sort of starts out that way too but, you know what, I think the writing process reminded her that she loved the ■■■■■■■, despite it all. She states early on that she expects the die hard fans to protest but this is going to be the unapologetic feminine perspective, and the wife’s perspective and the victim of physical and psychological violence’s perspective.
Unlike her husband, she is not a natural writer and the text is uneven and even klunky at times. She attempts to cover his whole life, something Lawrence Sutin’s “Divine Invasions” does far more effectively, but she’s at her best when she’s the primary source. ■■■■ emerges from her text as one of the great mind fuc kers of all time, both inside and outside of his fiction. And his fiction, it turns out, even at its most esoteric and exotic, is heavily autobiographical. Anne pinpoints the people, places, events and even actual conversations and domestic scenes that he used to construct what I had assumed were essentially purely imaginative Sci Fi works-and it’s ■■■■■■ fascinating for the true fan. “He played with our lives as well as his own, turned us into fictional beings, and melded us into universes of his own creation.” And it wasn’t all post relationship either, when they were together he would regularly read to Anne passages where he had painted her unsympathetically, as if eager to document her reaction for his next novel. It makes you realise how difficult it must be to be married to a writer, especially one who so shamelessly and callously looted his own life and the lives of loved ones in the name of fiction.
If he did it for money, he got short changed because the only time he really made any money was post Blade Runner the movie, near the end of his life, and in typical PKDickian fashion, having lamented all his life about lack of money, he then complained bitterly about the Midas curse of new found wealth. If he did it for honour, he lucked out too as he was lumbered early on with the genre label stigma, and the pulp Sci Fi label stigma at that, and like the great comedian who yearns to play Lear he tried and failed to crack the literary market with “straight” novels no one would publish until he died (And frankly it’s a pity they weren’t lost too.)
I would say the book has broadened my view rather than changed it, for me he has always been the most claustrophobic of writers, probably reflecting his own agoraphobia, with his constant need to draw things close and manipulate their movements and emotions – just like many great writers I suppose. It’s hardly surprising he did the same thing in his private life.
One thing I learnt was that the middle K, which I knew stood for Kindred, was his mother’s maiden name so it seems his mum gave him something more than a whole series of personality disorders that proved so useful in his professional career, maybe the book needs a sub title, “The wife blames the mother.”
Now if I can just find out which of my kids has swiped my copy of “The Man In The High Castle”, I can reread it before the new TV Series hits our screens. I expect the screen version to be terrible.
“Phil was a unique super-being who made my life wonderful for a while and then terrible for a while.” Anne R. ■■■■.
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Just finished the latest Reacher book. I want his babies.
Just finished the latest Reacher book. I want his babies.Contact Tom Cruise (I know, not a good joke at all)
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Just finished Joseph Kanon’s “Los Alamos” and have to confess to being underwhelmed. It’s been widely lauded as a quality crime thriller set against the real historical backdrop of the development of the bomb. For mine it needed more thrills, more crime and more of Los Alamos. He relies too heavily on dialogue to advance the plot and the obligatory, and frankly clichéd, love story should have been a minor sub plot rather than central to the story and its dénouement. The sex scenes are so forensically Playboyish that they had to be written by a bloke, reinforcing my view that women write much better sex than men. And someone should have told him that the “death defying car chase to save the object of affection from the evil doer” set piece is a hackneyed variation on the “and then I woke up” ending.
I am being a bit hard I suppose, it was his debut novel and he does write very well in places and he knows his Los Alamos stuff. I suspect he wanted to weave the “real” characters more intricately into the plot, especially Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty, around who espionage rumours continue to swirl, but as a novice author he felt restrained; he certainly hints at a deeper corruption without actually revealing much of it.
I don’t know, it’s been very successful but for mine, too much idle chatter and too lovey dovey.
I’d be interested to know if anyone has read his other stuff and their take on him.
“Otto and Anne Frank’s Diary”?? Somehow that doesn’t sound right.
But “It’s not about the money.” Really.
I’ve just finished reading the last of the four novels comprising the Raj Quartet, by Paul Scott. There was a version on TV many years ago under the name of The Jewel in the Crown, which is the title of the first novel. The basic subject of the novel is the British in India at the end of the period of Imperial rule, and the novels cover the years from 1942 to 1947, when India became an independent nation. There’s a huge cast of characters and a number of significant events, but the central event occurs in the first novel, in 1942, when a young English woman, Daphne Manners, is raped in a derelict park by a group of men. Six Indian men, including one named Hari Kumar, are arrested, but no trial eventuates.
Hari Kumar is one of the principal characters of the quartet, although he really appears only in the first novel. He is an Indian who has been brought up in England as an English boy, attending a public school like Eton, playing cricket for the school and having a full English classical education. His name is anglicised to Harry Coomer. At the end of his schooling his father loses all his money and Hari is left completely destitute. He is brought back to India by an aunt, unable to speak any Indian language and regarded with distrust by the Indian population, to whom he has become an outsider; and at the same time invisible to the white population, to whom he is just another black face. He is a brilliant character, the quintessential man lost between two worlds.
What actually happens on the night of the rape is never fully explained, but it becomes apparent that Hari and Daphne Manners had fallen in love and met in the park by arrangement, and made love. The rape occurred after they had made love, when a group of men discover them and overpower Hari and attack Daphne. Hari is targeted by the District Superintendent of Police, Ronald Merrick, who regards him as a troublemaker and conceives a hatred for him.
The plot is far too long and complex to summarise. The novels are beautifully written. The author adopts many different forms of narrative, there are many shifts of time, point of view and style of writing; each one of them is perfectly executed. The reader is occasionally puzzled about something for a while but the puzzle is always eventually resolved and the thread is never lost. The politics of the period are explored in great depth, and a constant theme of the work is the different perceptions held by the British and the Indians of the nature of British rule. There are many long and complicated passages of explanation and argument, but without exception they are worth taking the trouble to read carefully so that they are fully understood.
One of the great things about the novels is the understanding Scott displays of human beings, as well as historical events. The books are written through a number of different sets of eyes: those of Paul Scott himself, whose voice recounts the first part of the first novel; Edwina Crane, a spinster missionary who witnesses the murder of the Indian teacher who tries to protect her from a band of thugs (not Thugs); Sarah Layton, the daughter of a colonel in the Indian Army who is a prisoner of the Germans; Barbara Batchelor, another spinster missionary who has great psychological insight despite being generally regarded as a silly old woman; Guy Perron, a slightly rebellious sergeant in the Indian Army who has been to the same school as Hari Kumar. All of these are deeply and sympathetically understood.
It’s a really brilliant piece of work. It was written between 1965 and 1975. Paul Scott was an Englishman who spent many years in India and wrote many novels set there, none of which come anywhere near these four in quality. According to Wikipedia, he suffered for most of his adult life from undiagnosed amoebic dysentery and dealt with it by drinking a bottle of gin a day, which may explain why many of his novels are not much good. He was eventually treated at about the time he began writing the Jewel in the Crown, and the sharpness of the quartet may perhaps be accounted for by the fact that he was no longer perpetually drunk. The quartet was generally well received, although not everyone admired it; his next novel after the quartet was called Staying On, and was about two relatively minor characters from the quartet who “stay on” in India after independence and experience the world they knew crumbling slowly about them; Scott won the Booker Prize for that novel, but probably only because he’d written the Raj Quartet.
It’s a masterpiece. One of the great works of the 20th century.
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My better half read “Netherland” by Joseph O’Neill a while ago and thought it was way too “blokey” for her liking but opined that I would love it. In some ways O’Neill occupies the same modern milieu as Michel Houellebecq, one of my guilty literary pleasures, but sans the nonchalant racism and mysogyny that animates and stains the latter’s work.
“Netherland” sweeps across all sorts of themes and storylines including New York’s post 9/11 experience, life in the freak show that is the Chelsea Hotel(and a very expensive freak show), and the struggles of trying to hold together a family separated by the Atlantic and unmet expectations. O’Neill, an Irishman who bears an uncanny resemblance to the great George Best, does it all with wit and flair and wisdom.
But so do lots of others. What makes this book special is cricket…in New York of all places because the most compelling part of the plot is the attempt to expand the underground culture of cricket that exists in the outlying Asian and West Indian communities around Manhattan. O’Neill, clearly a cricket nut, passes on to the narrator, Hans van den Broek, a deep passion and respect for the game of flanneled fools. This transplanted Yankee hybrid of the game, is a therapeutic metaphor for order in a destabilised life and a source of essential identity, but you can ignore all that and just marvel at O’Neill’s knowledge and love of the game as he draws Hans into the web of the mysterious and charismatic Chuck Ramkissoon who lectures that the U.S. “is not fully civilised” until he has directed it to “embrace the game of cricket”. All sorts of shenanigans ensue. Near the novel’s end one of the characters observes that “There is a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket.” Maybe, but they still showered O’Neill’s novel with praise and awards.
My better half was right as usual.
I’ve just reread “The Man In The High Castle” because I wanted the refresh my hazy 30 year old recollections of ■■■■’s only Hugo Award winner, and that injustice is another story. I wont say much about this relatively short novel because I suspect people are watching the 10 episode series, with another series projected, which will obviously involve a fair bit of padding, other than I found its fugue like individual quests and alternative history compelling and psychologically disorientating, like much of his fiction.
Now I have seen the opening 10 minutes of the TV series and I’ll make a one observation, none of it happens in the book where the action doesn’t even visit New York. I get the feeling there might be fair bit of improvising going on.
I've just reread "The Man In The High Castle" because I wanted the refresh my hazy 30 year old recollections of ■■■■'s only Hugo Award winner, and that injustice is another story. I wont say much about this relatively short novel because I suspect people are watching the 10 episode series, with another series projected, which will obviously involve a fair bit of padding, other than I found its fugue like individual quests and alternative history compelling and psychologically disorientating, like much of his fiction. Now I have seen the opening 10 minutes of the TV series and I'll make a one observation, none of it happens in the book where the action doesn't even visit New York. I get the feeling there might be fair bit of improvising going on
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Blade Runner was very different from the original book, and in my opinion much better.
Well I’ve just watched the first episode of “The Man From The High Castle” in its entirety with my better half and I can say with confidence that it is worth watching but only because my better half, who knows about these things and threatened to throw things at me if I mentioned the book one more “■■■■■■■” time, said it was. I hardly ever watch films or tv so personally I wouldn’t know. I didn’t mind the way the show wrestled with ■■■■’s narrative and I finally twigged to the Joe Blake character and realised he IS based on one of the novel’s characters, and I think I’ve picked how he’s going to morph into his Italian Stallion template. I don’t mind the acting, and I don’t mind the New York Nazi vistas. And I’ll even put up with the gratuitous violence. But this is a book thread so I have to say it. "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy " is not a ■■■■■■■ movie, even if it is a vintage reel to reel, it’s a BOOK. Can’t modern audiences cope with the idea of a provocative and degenerate novel. Maybe the Nazis won after all.
I feel old. But, funnily enough, I’m sort of glad I’m old. Sometimes.
If you’re looking for a ripping sea yarn that’s novella length and free on Gutenberg you can’t go wrong with Joseph Conrad’s “Typhoon”. Captain McWhirr has to be one of literature’s great accidental heros, and he’s surprisingly free of the sorts of xenophobic excesses so prevalent in the modern world.
One warning though, if like me you’ve suffered a few lengthy rough crossings it has the potential to make you seasick.
Reading Bill Bryson’s Road to Little Dribbling, which is Notes From a Small Island 20 years on.
I enjoy Bill Bryson…his views are so similar to mine. What a great place Britain would be if they just understood a scintilla about service. It’s as if the sufferings of the Blitz are deeply ingrained in people unto the seventh generation. They really enjoy their misery.
His comparison between British shop-people and Americans is wonderful. One gives you no service whatsoever, the other drowns you in it.
Reading Bill Bryson's Road to Little Dribbling, which is Notes From a Small Island 20 years on.I enjoy Bill Bryson…his views are so similar to mine. What a great place Britain would be if they just understood a scintilla about service. It’s as if the sufferings of the Blitz are deeply ingrained in people unto the seventh generation. They really enjoy their misery.
His comparison between British shop-people and Americans is wonderful. One gives you no service whatsoever, the other drowns you in it.
In England when you go into a shop, you are first of all greeted with a facial expression that says, “Oh God, another ■■■■■■ one,” and then you are made to feel as if you have to justify your request for whatever you want. They only seem genuinely happy when they announce that what you’ve just asked for is out of stock.
I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the Blitz. I think it’s more to do with a fear of being punished for doing something wrong. The basic attitude seems to be, I’d better be defensive and hostile to people I meet because they’ll probably be hostile to me, especially if I make the slightest mistake. Nobody seems to have twigged to the idea that if you’re nice to someone and smile at them, they just might be nice to you and smile back.
In Australia, in general, the attitude on meeting a stranger, in any context but particularly in shops, is exactly the opposite: I’m here to sell you things, and you’re here to buy them, so what could be better? It’s one of the very best things about living here.
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Currently for Ben Aaronovitch’s next book in the ‘Peter Grant’ series
Currently for Ben Aaronovitch's next book in the 'Peter Grant' series
That’s been put off til next May or something hasn’t it?
Reading Bill Bryson's Road to Little Dribbling, which is Notes From a Small Island 20 years on.I enjoy Bill Bryson…his views are so similar to mine. What a great place Britain would be if they just understood a scintilla about service. It’s as if the sufferings of the Blitz are deeply ingrained in people unto the seventh generation. They really enjoy their misery.
His comparison between British shop-people and Americans is wonderful. One gives you no service whatsoever, the other drowns you in it.
In England when you go into a shop, you are first of all greeted with a facial expression that says, “Oh God, another ■■■■■■ one,” and then you are made to feel as if you have to justify your request for whatever you want. They only seem genuinely happy when they announce that what you’ve just asked for is out of stock.
I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the Blitz. I think it’s more to do with a fear of being punished for doing something wrong. The basic attitude seems to be, I’d better be defensive and hostile to people I meet because they’ll probably be hostile to me, especially if I make the slightest mistake. Nobody seems to have twigged to the idea that if you’re nice to someone and smile at them, they just might be nice to you and smile back.
In Australia, in general, the attitude on meeting a stranger, in any context but particularly in shops, is exactly the opposite: I’m here to sell you things, and you’re here to buy them, so what could be better? It’s one of the very best things about living here.
I remember going to a burger joint in Oxford St in 1997…ordered the chili burger, and what I got was a pattie with chili sauce on it…and ordinary chili sauce too. Cost about 12 quid…service was woeful…and they slap a non-optional 12.5% tip on. Admittedly I have had very good experiences in England too. But they stand out.
Reading Bill Bryson's Road to Little Dribbling, which is Notes From a Small Island 20 years on.I enjoy Bill Bryson…his views are so similar to mine. What a great place Britain would be if they just understood a scintilla about service. It’s as if the sufferings of the Blitz are deeply ingrained in people unto the seventh generation. They really enjoy their misery.
His comparison between British shop-people and Americans is wonderful. One gives you no service whatsoever, the other drowns you in it.
In England when you go into a shop, you are first of all greeted with a facial expression that says, “Oh God, another ■■■■■■ one,” and then you are made to feel as if you have to justify your request for whatever you want. They only seem genuinely happy when they announce that what you’ve just asked for is out of stock.
I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the Blitz. I think it’s more to do with a fear of being punished for doing something wrong. The basic attitude seems to be, I’d better be defensive and hostile to people I meet because they’ll probably be hostile to me, especially if I make the slightest mistake. Nobody seems to have twigged to the idea that if you’re nice to someone and smile at them, they just might be nice to you and smile back.
In Australia, in general, the attitude on meeting a stranger, in any context but particularly in shops, is exactly the opposite: I’m here to sell you things, and you’re here to buy them, so what could be better? It’s one of the very best things about living here.
I remember going to a burger joint in Oxford St in 1997…ordered the chili burger, and what I got was a pattie with chili sauce on it…and ordinary chili sauce too. Cost about 12 quid…service was woeful…and they slap a non-optional 12.5% tip on. Admittedly I have had very good experiences in England too. But they stand out.
Yep, the UK is definitely the worst value-for-money place in the entire world, especially when it comes to food. You ay a fortune and you generally get crap.
Finished how to win friends and influence people, currently on the naked CEO by Alex Malley then have brave by Margie Warrell lined up
Oh, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody, GRRM has admitted that Winds of Winter won’t be finished in time for the target April release date after all.