Blah Blah Blah: A Blog About Books

Updates to ‘Great Books’ lists

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:55:33 +1100

I’ve gone through my three different lists of great books and made some updates based on my recent reading. I’m horrendously bad at updating this page (which is probably the fault of Facebook), so most of the books haven’t been mentioned on the blog. Maybe someday I’ll get around to writing about them.
I’ve decided to keep each list at 100 entries, so that means for every book I’ve added I’ve taken one off. In some cases that’s simply been a matter of replacing one book by a particular author with another by the same author, as I’ve done with AS Byatt and Hilary Mantel, both of whom published stunning books last year in The Children’s Book and Wolf Hall (which I did manage to write about).
Most of the changes have occurred on the ‘living authors’ list as I read mostly contemporary stuff, but my resolution for 2010 is to read lots of older authors, so there will be further changes to the ‘dead authors’ list as the year progresses. I’ve eliminated some of the double-ups of authors as I’d prefer to have just one work listed for each author.
All of the lists are accessible through the links at the top of the front page of the blog. Click through and have a look, why don’t you?

Wolf Hall

Tue, 8 Sep 2009 22:45:02 +1000

I read Beyond Black a couple of years ago after it was longlisted for the Booker, and was impressed by Mantel's dark humour. Now I’ve just finished Wolf Hall, which is the favourite to take out this year's prize and has just been included on the shortlist.
The novel follows Thomas Cromwell between the years 1527 and 1535, with a brief first chapter looking at his rather grim childhood. Cromwell was the son of a blacksmith and brewer who fled his abusive father and England, joining the French army and fighting in Italy. He later became a lawyer and Cardinal Wolsey's right hand man. Not only did he survive Wolsey's demise after the cardinal was unable to arrange a divorce for Henry VIII, but he prospered, going on to become Henry's closest advisor. The novel closes after the death of Sir Thomas More with Cromwell still very much in favour (before things turned sour a few years later and he was executed).
For anyone who has read or seen Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons the novel is fascinating, thoroughly altering that play's views on the characters. Cromwell is the most sympathetic character here and More (who plays a significant, but not huge, role in the novel) something of a hypocritical bastard. Mantel implicitly acknowledges the impact of the play and there are several references to Cromwell feeling like he is in a play when he encounters More, and suggesting that More is the one writing the lines. Mantel also slyly includes a number of oblique echoes of Shakespearean lines and phrasings that give the feeling of these people and times laying the ground for the emergence of Shakespeare.
Finishing the novel left me with a sense of the poverty of Bolt's depiction of events, which is probably not fair given the much more limited scope he had to work with in the confines of the stage (Mantel's novel is 650 pages long), but all the same there is a real richness to the novel that Bolt's work just doesn't have. I've taught Bolt's play a few times and it works well in schools partly because it's so easily simplified and many of the lines so pat. Mantel's novel (again, not just because of its size) is not so easily contained.
Mantel has a really distinctive narrative style that I'm not exactly sure how to describe. It's a limited third person narration that closely follows Cromwell's thoughts, but it persistently refers to him as 'he' rather than 'Cromwell' or 'Thomas', which brings it closer to his perspective. She also has a terrific sense of humour, most of which she bestows on Cromwell who gets some truly wonderful lines.
Read it.

IBSC Conference Presentation

Thu, 9 Jul 2009 21:11:33 +1000

For attendees of the workshop I delivered at the IBSC Conference at Lindisfarne College, Hastings, on Friday 10 July 2009 here is a link to further information about my forthcoming book, Poetry Reloaded. Note that you can download a sample chapter and an information sheet about the book.
Cambridge University Press: Poetry Reloaded
Also, here is the best representation I can give of my presentation. I can’t put up the Keynote presentation, because the file is absolutely enormous, so instead below is a PDF which preserves the look of the slides, but jumbles up the graphs, and a PowerPoint which will enable you to see the graphs but generally looks pretty terrible. On neither will you be able to view the film clips, but you can find them readily on YouTube in most instances. Also included is a PDF of the handouts. Enjoy!

Poetry Reloaded - IBSC Conference.ppt

An Imaginary Life

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:39:36 +1000

Hot on the heels of reading his new novel, Ransom, I recently finished Malouf's 1978 novel An Imaginary Life, and I've put in a few excerpts from the novel below to give you a taste of the prose. These are all connected with the landscape, which is an incredibly strong presence throughout the novel, as it is also in Malouf's other novels.
To give a brief overview of the novel, it is narrated by the poet Ovid who has been exiled by Augustus from Rome to the village of Tomis (now Constanţa in Romania, on the Black Sea coast) for crimes that are not specified. Malouf is speculating within the bare bones of what is known about Ovid's life, which is basically very little. Ovid struggles to adapt to his new environment and the rugged lives of the inhabitants, whose language he cannot speak. Eventually he catches sight of a wild boy (referred to as 'the Child') while out hunting with the men of the village, and he becomes fixated on him, convinced that he is somehow the same wild boy he caught a glimpse of as a child, some fifty years earlier. Against the wishes of the villagers he wants to capture the child and bring him back to civilisation. Given the nature of Ovid's most famous work, Metamorphoses, changing from one state to another is a constant thread throughout the work, and there is certainly much speculation from the villagers about the boy's animal nature that might transform him at any moment.
The novel, as with everything I've read by Malouf, is stunningly beautiful. His prose is a finely crafted vehicle for conveying a remarkable vision of the relationship between humans and their environment.
Here are the extracts:
It is the desolateness of this place that day after day fills my mind with its perspectives. A line of cliffs, oblique against the sky, and the sea leaden beyond. To the north, beyond the marshy river mouth, empty grasslands, rolling level to the pole.
For eight months of the year the world freezes. Some polar curse is breathed upon the land. It whitens overnight. Then when the ice loosens at last, and breaks up, the whole plain turns muddy and stinks, the insects swarm and plague us, hot mists steam amongst the tussocks. I have found no tree here that rises amongst the low, grayish brown scrub. No flower. No fruit. We are at the ends of the earth. Even the higher orders of the vegetable kingdom have not yet arrived among us. We are centuries from the notion of an orchard or a garden made simply to please. The country lies open on every side, walled in to the west and south, level to the north and to the northeast, with a view to infinity. The sharp incline of the cliffs leads to sky. The river flats, the wormwood scrubs, the grasslands beyond, all lead to a sky that hangs close above us, heavy with snow, or is empty as far as the eye can see or the mind imagine, cloudless, without wings.
But I am describing a state of mind, no place.
I am in exile here.
...
How can I give you any notion – you who know only landscapes that have been shaped for centuries to the idea we all carry in our souls of that ideal scene against which our lives should be played out – of what earth was in its original bleakness, before we brought it to the order of industry, the terraces, fields, orchards, pastures, the irrigated gardens of the world we are making in our own image.
Do you think of Italy - or whatever land it is you now inhabit - as a place given you by the gods, ready-made in all its placid beauty? It is not. It is a created place. If the gods are with you there, glowing out of a tree in some pasture or shaking their spirit over the pebbles of a brook in clear sunlight, in wells, in springs, in a stone that marks the edge of your legal right over a hillside; if the gods are there, it is because you have discovered them there, drawn them up out of your soul’s need for them and dreamed them into the landscape to make it shine. They are with you, sure enough. Embrace the tree trunk and feel the spirit flow back into you, feel the warmth of the stone enter your body, lower yourself into the spring as into some liquid place of your body’s other life in sleep. But the spirits have to be recognized to become real. They are not outside us, nor even entirely within, but flow back and forth between us and the objects we have made, the landscape we have shaped and move in. We have dreamed all these things in our deepest lives and they are ourselves. It is our self we are making out there, and when the landscape is complete we shall have become the gods who are intended to fill it.
...
I fall asleep almost immediately, and dream. What I half thought in the woods yesterday, while we were watching the Child, is true. We have all been transformed, the whole group of us, and become part of the woods. We are mushrooms, we are stones - I recognise my companions. I am a pool of water. I feel myself warm in the sunlight, liquid, filled with the blue of the sky; but I am the merest broken fragment of it, and I feel, softly, the clouds passing through me, their reflections, and once the suddenness of wings. Slowly it grows dark. A breeze shivers my surface. And as darkness passes over me I begin to be afraid. My spirit hovers somewhere close and will, I know, come back to me when I wake. But I am afraid suddenly to be just a pool of rain in the forest, feeling the night creep over me, feeling myself grow cold and fill with starlight, feeling the temperature drop. I consider what it might be like to freeze. I imagine that. But only at the edges of myself, as the first ice crystals click into shape. It is fearful. What would happen to my spirit then? I lie in the dark of the forest waiting for the moon. And softly, nearby, there are footsteps. A deer. The animal's face leans towards me. I am filled with tenderness for it. Its tongue touches the surface of me, lapping a little. It takes part of me into itself, but I do not feel at all diminished. The sensation on the surface of me is extraordinary, I break in circles. Part of me enters the deer, which lifts its head slowly, and moves away over the leaves. I feel part of me moving away, and the rest falls still again, settles, goes clear. What if a wolf came, I suddenly ask myself? What if the next tongue that touched me were the wolf's tongue, rough, greedy, drinking me down to the last drop and leaving me dry? That too is possible. I imagine it, begin drawn up into the wolf's belly. I prepare for it.
Another footfall, softer than the first. I know already, it is the Child. I see him standing taller than the deer against the stars. He kneels. He stoops towards me. He does not lap like the deer, but leaning close so that his breath shivers my surface, he scoops up a handful, starlight dripping from his fingers in bright flakes that tumble towards me, and drinks. I am broken again. The disturbance is fearful, a noisy crashing of waves against the edges of me. And when I settle he is gone. I am still, reflecting starlight. I sleep. I wake.

A Heart So White

Tue, 7 Apr 2009 22:13:12 +1000

I just finished A Heart So White, the first novel that I’d read by the acclaimed Spanish writer Javier Marías, and I really liked it. It's a very simple story if you pare it back to its bones, and very formal in conception, with its repetitions and revolutions. You'd almost call it contrived (and it was a bit predictable towards the end because of that), but you encounter so few novels with such a clear sense of the overall architecture that you can forgive it. In a way it's like a sort of maximalist poem.
The simple plot of a just-married translator who discovers some sort of dark secret in his father's past to do with his wives is fleshed out with with digressions on subjects such as the nature of marriage, the intricacies of working as a translator/interpreter, the dating agency scene and, of course, Macbeth. Marías can go on for pages and pages on any of those seemingly diverse subjects. But then he starts knitting together the different skeins and you can all see it starting to take shape in front of you. Highly recommended. I look forward to reading some more Marías.