booklit

For the last few years, I’ve been aware of Robin Jenkins’s books, notably his best known work, The Cone Gatherers, as they were perennials on the Scottish Books shelves of local stores. Of the man, however, I knew nothing and was surprised to find that he died as recently as 2005. Surprised for the silly reason that his books were in the Canongate Classics series, which also featured Scotland’s favourite book, Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, who died way back in the 1930s.

Now, with a 21st Century makeover, a number of Jenkins’ books seem destined to light up the aforementioned store shelves, taking their bleak covers and injecting a bit of needed colour. One such title is The Changeling (1958), set around the time of writing that, fifty years on, now seems a world away. But while the world it describes has passed into history, its themes remain as constant as…as…well, Jenkins’ books on store shelves.

The life of Charlie Forbes, a middle-aged English teacher, has amounted to little more than dreams of promotion. Mocked by others for his ability to see the good in everyone, his altruistic nature, like that of the Good Samaritan in the book’s opening sentence, lends itself to the needs of others, even if it brings further disdain:

‘I’ve come to the conclusion, Mr Fisher, that it isn’t enough to draw my salary, and at four o’clock each day turn my back and retreat to my suburban sanctuary.’

‘I’m sure none of us do, Charlie.’

‘I have done so. I speak only for myself. Here, as I see it, is my chance to atone. Mr Fisher, I propose to take Tom Curdie with my family to Towellan this summer. It seems to me the experience might give the boy some support in the battle he has constantly to wage against corruption. I am here to seek your advice.’

Faced with that vast, sanctimonious, aggressive pout, the headmaster grew peeved. Originality of most kinds he distrusted, but original goodness most of all.

Tom Curdie is one of Forbes’ pupils, a “deprived morsel of humanity”, who unlike all the others in his class comes from Donaldson’s Court, “one of the worst slums in one of the worst slum districts in Europe”. While everyone believes Curdie’s smile is that “of a certified delinquent”, Forbes sees it as stoic, the smile of a boy intent on not letting his lot get him down. To give the boy a taste of a better life, and despite much derision, Forbes hits on a plan to take the boy away with his family to their summer retreat at Towellan.

The notion of summer sits bizarrely alongside the novel’s content - where a Glaswegian holiday ‘doon the water’ conjures up images of sandcastles, rock, and pestering rock pools, The Changeling is like a rock pool where turning over stones reveals nastiness in the dark. And each subsequent overturning only adds to events, leading up to the bleak conclusion.

Within the novel there are mentions of the title, referring to young Curdie, likening him to

…the changeling of Highland legend, that creature introduced by the malevolent folk of the other world into a man’s home, to pollute the joy and faith of family.

Pollute it, he does, though not directly. One incident where Curdie shoplifts, so as not to get to comfortable with this new taste of life, leads the family into a descent that they’ll do well to get out of. While his daughter, Gillian, finds complicity with the boy she initially dislikes, Forbes finds his own prejudices exposed, and his wife grieves over the lack of trust shown to his own children apropos the introduction of the slum child.

To his credit is the way that Jenkins manages to get inside the head of each of his characters, flitting between them unsentimentally, letting us know what they think and how they feel. But, sometimes telling every last detail without leaving hidden depths to the characters, lets the novel down in areas, as does, having dated a bit, the grandfatherly tone:

Tom knew very well that the majority of children were far more fortunate than he, but he had never envied them. Envy, like pity, was not in his creed. What he hoped to do or to become was apart altogether from what others did or became. To have been envious would have been to become involved and so weakened. His success, if ever it came, must owe nothing to anyone.

With Jenkins’ unrelenting grip on his characters in The Changeling, he tugs the narrative’s strings so tight that you wonder how he crams so much in, be it the exploration of the changeling legend by way of myxomatosis or of showing the class differences and attitudes in each direction. But it’s the questions that the novel throws up that make it an interesting read. Having given Curdie a taste of a better life, is it right to return him to the slums of Donaldson’s Court? Where else could he go? And even if Jenkins’ denouement is a tad unconvincing, it certainly feels right.

The overarching theme of The Changeling is that of misplaced charity. Forbes seems to live in a cocoon, safe from everyone else, convinced that his way is right. While others scoff at his big heart, that big heart isn’t always considering appropriate reasons and, as the old adage goes, what goes around comes around, proving you don’t need “malevolent folk of the other world [to] pollute the joy and faith of family.”

At the beginning of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler there is a passage on the various types of books we meet in our lives, such as those we haven’t read, those we needn’t read, and those we plan to read. One of the more obscure categories is books that fill you with sudden, inexplicable curiosity, not easily justified, and it’s to this category that I assign Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole (1970), published in English for the first time. Well, perhaps not inexplicable, as its strange premise and eye candy cover help justify the curiosity.

That strange premise sees a linguist, Budai, heading to a conference in Helsinki where he is due to make a presentation, only to wake from the airplane, still hazy, finding himself hustled onto a bus and shuttled to a large hotel. Only then does he realise that he’s not in Helsinki. As to where he is, well that’s a different story, because nobody seems to speak his language, or any of the others his linguistic background allows him.

…he was without friends, acquaintances, indeed documents, and to all intents and purposes, utterly on his own, in an unknown city of whose very name he was ignorant, where no one spoke any language that he could understand even though he knew a great many languages, and where he had yet to find anyone with whom he might exchange a word or two.

One person with whom he has an exchange is the beautiful blonde elevator-operator, although verbally it doesn’t amount to much. Her name is Epepe - although it may be Bebe, Tetete, Egyegye, or Tchetche, he finds it hard to make her out. Budai finds himself drawn to her, not just for her beauty, but because in this indifferent world, Epepe is the only one that seems to acknowledge him, even if their interactions are brief and ultimately frustrating:

They had got round to greeting each other by now and there were occasional signs that she was showing some interest in him too. Twice she addressed Budai as he was about to get out and he smiled and shrugged to show he had not understood. The crowd in that narrow space gave no time for explanations and he was quickly swept away by the others getting off.

Even though he keeps coming back to Epepe, Budai regularly ventures beyond the hotel, into the unnamed metropolis itself:

….the street was no less crowded than the hall, its tide of humanity swirling, flooding, and lurching this way and that. Everyone was in a hurry, panting, elbowing and fighting to get through; one elderly woman in a headscarf kicked him as hard as she could on the ankle and he received a good many more blows on his shoulders and ribs. The traffic in the roadway was equally packed, the cars nose to tail, now stopping, now starting, making absolutely no allowance for pedestrians, as if they were stuck in some eternal bottleneck, engines continually reving, horns furiously blaring…

While this “never-ending rush hour” conjures images of a dystopian cityscape, Karinthy still brings humour to its bleakness, notably through Budai’s explorations. There are queues everywhere and while citizens may find themselves lining up for their everyday rations, they also wait their turn to sit on park benches and, in one comic scene, Budai, takes in a brothel, hoping to communicate there, and finds hordes of men knocking at the door, hurrying him up.

Added to the bleakly comic tone is an undercurrent of melancholia which haunts the novel. Each page, simmers with frustration and helplessness. When Budai thinks he may have a solution, an array of problems announce themselves, his troubles continually cascading into further torment. Nowhere is this more felt than in a huge centrepiece chapter that shows all Budai’s attempts to understand the language spoken around him.

There’s little dialogue throughout the book - indeed, when the local dialect is described as “a language without discernible inflections, a continual jabbering” - there’s little need for it, although Karinthy does allow some of the nonsense (’Chetchenche glubglubb? Guluglulubb?‘), if only to knowlingly frustrate the reader too. And the large passages of text unbroken by dialogue mirror the daunting nature of the city, a mass of bricks unending.

Like anything that could elicit comparisons to Kafka, there’s an element of horror amongst the absurdity, notably as Budai observes a fight breaking out a subway station:

Could it be that they themselves could not understand each other, that the people who lived here employed various provincial dialects, possibly even quite different languages? In a particularly feverish moment it even occurred to him that each one of them might be speaking his own language, that there were as many languages as there were people.

If it isn’t Hell, it’s certainly a private hell for Budai, and while certain events echo the Hungarian revolution, there are other hints that, beyond the narrative’s veil, there could be more autobiographical elements at work, perhaps even a cameo from the author’s father, the writer and translator, Frigyes Karinthy.

Originally published under the name Epepe, for the aforementioned elevator-operator, a bold and appropriate decision has been made to change the title to reflect the larger scope of the novel’s setting. In doing this we find the city is our anchor, rather than the girl, and in this city that Budai deems “an equation without known quantities”, Metropole more than adds up to the sum of its parts.

Although it was his first novel, Vladimir Nabokov’s Mary (1926) was not translated until 1970, and one can well imagine the author peering over translator Michael Glenny’s shoulder as he rendered the Russian into English, suggesting changes here, le mot juste there. Either way, it all comes down to an apprentice piece by Nabokov that serves to demonstrate the early development of one of his major themes in later works: memory.

Less tricksy than later works, Mary is an extremely tight narrative centred around Lev Glebovich Ganin, a Russian émigré, uprooted by the revolution, currently living in a Berlin pension. Stuck in Berlin, and similarly stuck in a dull relationship, he spends his time dreaming of escape, of moving on with his life. All around him, also resident in the pension, are a number of fellow Russians, similarly displaced, who act as cyphers to Ganin’s predicament, while still showing enough character to be strong in their own right.

Of these residents, Aleksey Ivanovich Alfyorov provides the spark of the novel when one day he shows a photograph of his wife, Mary, to Ganin, who immediately recognises her as his lost love from many years before. And with the revelation that she is due to arrive in Berlin on Saturday, Ganin becomes preoccupied with his past with Mary, convincing himself that she may still be in love with him.

While Ganin’s memories recall the ealier time, his idea of what happened would seem to colour the reality, as in one scene where she submits herself so easily that one can’t suspect element of fantasy:

‘I am yours,’ she said, ‘do what you like with me.’

Like his country - a past irretrievable; no future in sight - Ganin’s state of flux allows him to find comfort in his recollections of Mary, and he finds himself delving so deep that the delights of the past are much stronger than the reality of the present:

It was not simply reminiscence but a life that was much more real, much more intense than the life lived by his shadow in Berlin. It was a marvelous romance that developed with genuine, tender care.

That Mary is only a few days away in arriving to see her husband, so Ganin spends those days idly dreaming of her. It would seem from all that happened between them there was never a dull moment. And if there was, Ganin won’t let it cloud his vision:

And although his affair with Mary in those far-off days had lasted not just for three days, not for a week but for much longer, he did not feel any discrepancy between actual time and that other time in which he relived the past, since his memory did not take account of every moment and skipped over the blank unmemorable stretches, only illuminating those connected with Mary. Thus no discrepancy existed between the course of life past and life present.

With Ganin having trapped himself in the past, it therefore seems appropriate that he should, in the drab pension, be equally trapped. Other residents, such as the elderly poet, Podtyagin - who can’t return to Russia and whose French visa proves consistently problematic - find themselves similarly static.

Where Mary comes alive most is in Nabokov’s descriptive ability and the musings on memory. Not reaching the heights of Lolita - or, indeed, coming close - it comes down to what the author chooses to show. In one scene Ganin returns to his childhood, the brightness of the details coming to the fore, accompanied by nostalgia, and the notion of what was lost then comes back, once more, to Mary:

‘And where is it all now?’ mused Ganin. ‘Where is the happiness, the sunshine, where are those thick skittles wood which crashed and bounced so nicely, where is my bicycle with the low handlebars and the big gear? It seems there’s a law which says that nothing ever vanishes, that matter is indestructible; therefore the chips from my skittles and the spokes of my bicycle still exist somewhere to this day. The pity of it is that I’ll never find them again - never.

All that Ganin can hope for is to meet Mary once more and for them to run off together, to France, and continue there lives there. The only problem is that her husband is still very much on the scene. That, and the girl of his past is a malleable, comforting image compared to whoever she could be today. The ultimate joy is the ticking down to Saturday and Mary’s arrival, leaving a delicious question mark over Ganin’s head and the reality of the remembered relationship.

Following on from the 25th Anniversary ‘Booker Of Bookers’ in 1993, comes the 40th Anniversary ‘Best Of The Booker’, in which a panel of judges have saved the public the bother of whittling down all forty-one eligible titles to a more manageable six. Or, to put it another way, ensured that Life Of Pi, which would likely top a proper public vote, can’t win.

The shortlist, then, is:

• The Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1995)
• Oscar And Lucinda, Peter Carey (1988)
• Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee (1999)
• The Siege Of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell (1973)
• The Conservationist, Nadine Gordimer (1974)
• Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie (1981)

The panel of judges were the biographer, novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning, (chair); writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup; and John Mullan, Professor of English at University College, London.

In addition, Glendinning said:

‘It was a great experience, revisiting all the Booker and Man Booker Prize winners, and very tough arriving at the shortlist - but we really feel that the six novels we picked represent the best fiction-writing of the past forty years and that each one of them will stand the test of time. As to which of the six is the most important, and the most enjoyable, the Best of Booker - that is up to the readers to decide.’

While I’ve only read one of the titles listed, the list seems fair by all accounts, as all of the titles share a certain reknown that many other Booker winners don’t (Paul Scott’s Staying On anyone?) but I’m saddened to see that Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day didn’t make the final cut. Perhaps this shows what we’ve known all along regarding Booker judging panels in that they are out of touch with the readers. But we all know that the most popular book isn’t always the best book otherwise Harry Potter books would have been regular candidates for the regular Booker. So public be damned. Although it will no doubt come to pass that Midnight’s Children, as it was in 1993, will continue to reign as the Best of the Booker.

One other thing: it is strange to see Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist listed as potentially the Best of the Booker since it couldn’t hold its own against Stanley Middleton’s Holiday, back in 1974, when both books scooped the prize. Middleton, where are you now?

Whittled down from over 100 titles to a longlist of 17 announced in January, the titles were again reduced in March to a final 6. And now, in a ceremony this evening, the winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has been announced. The 2008 Prize has gone to Paul Verhaeghen for his own translation from the Dutch of Omega Minor, published by Dalkey Archive.

Since the £10,000 prize is split between both author and translator, Verhaeghan is eligible to the full amount but, instead, declined the money, much as he had done with the Flemish Culture Award. Instead, referencing the war in Iraq, he has asked for the money to be donated to the American Civil Liberties Union because:

“Withholding the tax portion of those 10,000 pounds from the US Treasury will shorten the war by a mere eye-blink-its cost is currently 3,810 dollar per second-but the ACLU can use that money to great effect in their legal battles against torture, detainee abuse, and the silence surrounding it.”

You can read his full non-acceptance speech on the Dalkey Archive site.

There’s not much I can say on the book as I’ve not read it. I’ve not even seen a copy in any book stores although I’m sure that will soon change. I’m a tad unhappy with myself for not reading it - or, indeed, any of the six shortlisted titles - as I had intended to do. But as one of my countrymen once said, “the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley” and I’ll just have to accept that.

If anyone is interested in discussing Paul Verhaeghen’s Omega Minor, there’s a thread on it over on the World Literature Forum. There’s also one on the subject of the prize itself.

When it comes to Jorge Luis Borges, I’m more aware of him and his contribution to letters than I am versed in him. A few short stories from Labyrinths is about as far as I’ve delved, but his legacy extends far beyond his own works and he has, in some form, appeared in the works of others. As Jorge of Burgos in Umberto Eco’s The Name Of The Rose or Zampano in Mark Z. Danielweski’s House Of Leaves. In both instances the character, like Borges, is a blind man

Borges became blind in later age and would ask people to read for him. One of the many who did just that is Alberto Manguel who, when sixteen, received the request and would read books and poetry aloud to Borges for the next four years. In With Borges (2006) Manguel reminisces over this period of his life, giving accounts of the man himself interspersed with fragments of narrative, both of which combine to provide an interesting, if slight, portrait of arguably Argentina’s greatest writer.

It’s an intimate picture, depicting the close relationship between the two, Manguel admitting the influence Borges had on his understanding and appreciation of literature:

…the conversations with Borges were what, in my mind, conversations should always be: about books and about the clockwork of books, and about the discovery of writers I had not read before, and about ideas that had not occurred to me, or which I had glimpsed only in a hesitant, half-intuited way that, in Borges’s voice, glittered and dazzled in all their rich and somehow obvious splendour.

And while Manguel does talk of his experiences, much of the book is given over to the character of his mentor, a man to whom books were everything (”his world was wholly verbal: music, colour and form rarely entered it”) and, far from being a writer, was the perfect reader of the world:

For a man who loved to travel but who could not see the places he visited…he was singularly uninterested in the physical world except as representations of his readings. The sand of the Sahara or the water of the Nile, the coast of Iceland, the ruins of Greece or Rome, all of which he touched with delight and awe, simply confirmed the memory of a page of the Arabian Nights or the Bible, of Njals Saga or of Homer and Virgil.

It’s fascinating to imagine this, the imagery of man who can’t see. Yet in his head were words - passages of prose, lines of poetry; always retrievable - being constantly edited, reshaped, and rewritten. Manguel sprinkles his recollections with a few anecdotes about Borges’ capacity for recollection and composition, and how he used it to satisfy a wry sense of humour.

Amongst all the facts and stories, one of the more interesting - and surprising - aspects of Borges, Manguel notes, was his library:

For a man who called the universe a library, and who confessed that he had imagined Paradise ‘bajo la forma de una biblioteca‘, the size of his own library came as a disappointment…

But what was in it contained “the essence of Borges’s reading” - encyclopaedias, dictionaries, volumes of epic poetry, and novels by Joyce, Kipling, Chesterton - and Manguel also provides a sizeable list of those Borges rejected (e.g. Proust, Balzac, García Márquez).

Manguel finds space to talk about Borges time with Adolfo Bioy Casares (”the most important relationship in Borges’s life”) and, talking of their collaborate efforts, the Casares’ home life, and the magnitude of their conversations, in aspects of science, religion, and the arts. There’s even a funny story regarding the death of Casares’ dog that, in true Borgesian humour, complements the themes that dominate his literature.

Amongst all the names - of friends, of books - Manguel recalls more poignant moments spent discussing the other infinities of life. Like being a tiger. But at the same time hints at moments of cruelty and casual racism. Overall, though, Borges comes in for much praise - not just for his work, but for renewing the Spanish language by way of borrowings from other tongues. Interestingly, though, he is remembered as a man who had little regard, in a physical sense, for his own work. That he should go down as a reader of the world over one of its writers certainly feels apt. On whether history remembered him at all, he was indifferent:

…it was his work, his material, the stuff on which his universe was made, that was immortal, and for that reason he himself did not feel the need to seek an everlasting existence. “The number of themes, of words, of texts is limited. Therefore nothing is ever lost. If a book is lost, then someone will write it again, eventually. That should be enough immortality for anyone.”

Although, only sixty pages in length, Manguel uses each one effectively and produces a wide ranging picture of a man, his city, his loves, his hates, and his philosophy. In Borgesian terms it need never have been written at all:

“[Borges] likes to imagine a universe in which magazines and books are not necessary because every man is capable of every magazine and book, of every story and every line of verse. In this universe…every man is an artist and therefore art is no longer necessary…“

He was a man that could cheat death by being infinitely possible: in life, in literature, and in memory.

In my love of books I’ve been a member of many book related communities on the web these past five years. Most of these tend to be general book forums, encompassing as much as possible. To me, this can lack focus and while it can encourage larger membership, the chances of two or more people reading - or at least having knowledge of - the same book is less than a focused subject.

Aside from the general book forums, there are communities online for thrillers; communities for sci-fi, horror, and fantasy; communities for romance; and even communities dedicated to a specific series of books or author. Nowhere online did I find an online forum for the discussion of translated literature.

So to this end, I’ve created World Literature Forum, which I hope will offer an area of the internet for people to discuss, review, recommend and publicise translated works. Fingers crossed.

In a world where books come and go at a seemingly increasing rate, so fast that by the time the Booker, Costas, and Orange have been won, attention turns to the next year’s hopefuls, praise be to the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. This is one award that feels more laidback, if only because the titles making its longlist, as regards publication, are quite a bit behind the crowd.

Nominations to the longlist come from participating libraries worldwide, which gives the award a unique slant, since titles in other awards typically are nominated by their publishers. And what a longlist it was, coming in string with a phenomenal 137 titles. Who’d be a judge? But judges there are, and they’ve whittled down the list to a more manageable eight.

The shortlist for 2008 is:

• The Speed Of Light, Javier Cercas
• The Sweet And Simple Kind, Yasmine Gooneraratne
• De Niro’s Game, Rawi Hage
• Dreams Of Speaking, Gail Jones
• Let It Be Morning, Sayed Kashua
• The Attack, Yasmina Khadra
• The Woman Who Waited, Andreï Makine
• Winterwood, Patrick McCabe

Of the titles, half are in translation, which is something else that makes the IMPAC Dublin an interesting award. But while it offers up a number of titles that may have been missed first time round, there’s still the sense that in the fast moving world of publishing, the titles, no matter how timeless they may come to be, are a little dated. Whoever wins won’t care, though, as the prize is €100,000 (split 75%/25% to author/translator in instances of translated works).

The winner will be announced on 12th June, 2008.

Having had the experience of reading Gordon Burn’s fiction - Fullalove, a novel about a hack journalist intruding on the bereaved to get a story - and his non-fiction - Best And Edwards, a literary account of the lightning quick and slow burn deaths of Duncan Edwards and George Best - and favouring the latter, it now seems Burn is intent on blurring the lines between both as his new book, Born Yesterday: The News As A Novel (2008), is exactly as the subtitle implies: the news…as a novel.

It’s a strange conceit, taking real life events and making a fiction of them, but in a roundabout way that’s exactly what happens everyday in the newspapers, on television, on radio. So here, with “the curiously intimate knowledge the world garners about an unknown figure” Burn, with himself as narrator, finds himself obsessing over important news stories and reporting back not the truth, but what susbtitutes for truth these days.

The news. Always something - usually unpleasant - happening far away to a stranger; to somebody else, somewhere that we’re lucky not to be.

The news, in this case, is predominantly focused around July 2007, in which Britain underwent “a summer of disappearances, absences, some voluntary, others not” and its cast of characters should be recognisable to anyone who followed the larger news stories of the year: Kate and Gerry McCann, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, John Smeaton, and Kate Middleton. Add to these the stories of floods, foot-and-mouth outbreaks, and meaningless stabbings and shootings and it shows the bleak landscape of a year fresh in the memory.

As is common in Burn’s work he turns his attention to the notion of celebrity and works with Warhol’s dictum that everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. And the fifteen minutes of many characters here come by horrific circumstances.

With John Smeaton (”working-class, Scottish, plain-talking man of the people”) it’s the terrorist attack on Glasgow airport and his taking the fight to a flailing terrorist that elevates him in the public eye, first as a media sensation, then political pawn:

By his second visit to number 10 in October, SuperSmeato was wishing he could just stay at home with his Xbox for a week. Have a few nights in his own bed. Even better, he would be up in the north of Scotland, fly-fishing. His mobile would be back at home, switched off, and nobody would know where he was.

In opposition to Smeaton’s media rise, there’s the tale of the McCanns, Kate and Gerry (”controlled, collected, articulate, focused”) who sought to use the media to help find their missing daughter, Madeleine, only to find themselves, because of the way the presented themselves, turned against:

‘We’re normal people,’ Kate McCann protested when her family’s transition from being unknown to well known, and the perks that come with the transition - a hotline to senior members of the government, for example - were just starting to raise resentments: the first signs of a backlash were beginning to become apparent in eruptions of public volatility and paranoia.

The largest news story running through Born Yesterday, however, is the handover of office from Tony Blair (”One minute [he] was part of the national static, and the next he was gone.”) to his Chancellor, Gordon Brown (”an analogue politician in a digital age”). Where the Blair government was much like the media in spinning on the truth to its own ends, always presenting an optimistic mask, Brown’s tenure started differently:

The crises that piled up around Gordon Brown in his first weeks of office - the attempted terrorist attacks on London and Glasgow, the summer floods in the midlands and the north, foot-and-mouth: fire, flood and pestilence, a marvellous start for a son of the manse, as a number of people pointed out - these gifts from the gods required him to be thunder-faced, decisive, dogged, statesmanlike. The one thing they didn’t require him to do was the thing he had always had a problem with: they didn’t require him to smile.

As narrator, Burn is regularly out and about, and in the opening scene is walking through a park sometimes frequented by Margaret Thatcher and it’s here that we get the first sense of the novel’s purpose:

In office, Mrs Thatcher never read newspapers. She only read what her press secretary Bernard Ingham told her was in them. Out of office, though, the rumour mill insists she has all the papers brought to her every morning, when she sets about them with a marker pen, highlighting idiocies, striking through innaccuracies, furiously scribbling comments and corrections in the margin.

One can only assume that Burn himself echoed this action, working his way through the news of 2007 to produce Born Yesterday and instead of making corrections, made connections. For while it ultimately means nothing, he can’t help but linger on the fact that Gordon Brown, Madeleine McCann, and the first suspect in her disappearance, Robert Murat, all have problems with their eyes; or that Gerry, Kate, and the terrorists in Glasgow and London were all, to some extent, involved in the medical profession. In getting behind these connections, Burn offers up musings that add depth to what we get from newspapers, television, and radio:

It is often said that today’s abundance of media images create a screen between the individual and the world, and that this is the source of the feeling we all increasingly have of seeing everything but of being able to do nothing. The media gives us images of everything - but only images.

Despite how high profile the stories recounted in Born Yesterday are, they still make for compelling reading in the way, Burn as prose stylist, evokes the misery of somehow being involved. Sometimes it can venture into duller territory, when providing backstory, but overall its a interesting work, full of memorable characters, literary references, and an excellent eye for detail. By giving an account of exactly what was going on in 2007, it must surely be the definitive state-of-the-nation novel.

Here begins my Roth odyssey. And where better to start than the beginning? So, with that obvious logic in mind, the first in an oeuvre spanning twenty-eight books (a mix of fiction and non-ficton; of standalone and series novels) is Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a novella of around one hundred pages that won the National Book Award in 1960. Bundled with it are five more short stories, each complementing the greater work in theme and style. One may assume by its length that this was Roth stepping up, stretching those muscles in search of a novel.

In reading around the book it’s interesting to note that it caused controversy in its day for the unflattering portrayal of some Jewish characters. But with Roth himself coming from a Jewish background, and the stories showing hints of autobiography, it would seem he was at least in a position to be critical about the Jewish lifestyle. Of particular delight, is that in almost fifty years it has lost none of its bite.

In Goodbye, Columbus there’s a young Negro who comes regularly to the library where Neil Klugman works and sits each time with a book of Paul Gaugin’s exotic paintings, dreaming of Tahiti (”That ain’t no place you could go, is it?”). It’s a fitting metaphor for the novella’s main focus, the summer relationship between Neil, a poor boy from Newark, and Brenda Patimkin, a spoiled girl whose father, having laboured at his business, has moved the family on up from Newark to an affluent suburb.

Neil gets invited to the local country club twice: first by his cousin, where he meets Brenda; then by Brenda herself, after asking her out. Despite their social differences, they come together - Brenda doesn’t ask many questions - and find their fondness for each other growing:

We came back to the chairs now and then and sang hesitant, clever, nervous, gentle dithyrambs about how we were beginning to feel towards one another. Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them - at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them. We whipped our strangeness and newness into a froth that resembled love, and we dared not play too long with it, talk too much of it, or it would flatten and fizzle away.

That the froth only resembled love is no doubt fitting for this coming of age story. Given the frequency with which they engage in sex in her parent’s house, it’s clear that lust is more appropriate. Regardless, it fills a summer. But all good things come to an end and the ultimate breaker in the relationship is perhaps dated for readers of a more promiscuous age, eliciting more shoulder shrug than shock. Nevertheless, one can’t forget the novella is of its own time and, riding a wave of strong writing and excellent dialogue, it does it well.

The coming of age theme is reflected by way of Brenda’s athletic brother, Ron, introduced in said pool “like a crew-cut Proteus rising from the sea.” Ron’s at that stage in life where marriage is on the mind, but he’s nostaligic, looking back to past glories. Aside from music, his favourite record is a recording of his last day at school (”‘Big Ron’s last game, and it’ll be some time bef