I imagine a big divide out there between people who love Rendell’s mysteries and those who prefer P.D. James’. The first caters to people more interested in social, middle-class and rather provincial issues, while the second excels in higher levels in the society. Inspector Wexford vs. Adam Dalgliesh, who wins? The first is a family man with 2 adult daughters, the second a poet and detective with a female friend but not much more for a personal life. Actually the divide must not be that large, since I follow both with pleasure, but it depends on my mood.

I won’t tell you much about the plot of The Veiled One, because the investigation on a woman’s murder in a supermarket basement parking seems very trite at the beginning, only to develop into a web of characters, possibilities and feelings that is as complex as real life. Inspector Wexford is in good shape, but I’d suggest you start with another from the series if you don’t know him at all.

Instead of a proper review, I prefer musing over those imaginary British places I got so familiar with. To tell the truth, I never spent much time in the British countryside in real life. A shame indeed. As a foreigner I went mainly to London, a few times on the South coast and that’s pretty much it. Yet thanks to many writers, I imagine myself knowledgeable in small towns’ Britain. The problem is, these places aren’t anywhere on the map!

• Kingsmarkham is the provincial town where Inspector Wexfor works and lives.
• Wessex is an imaginary county in Thomas Hardy’s novels, but when I checked on Wikipedia I found out that it actually existed in history!
• St. Mary Mead is the quaint little village where Miss Marple investigates
• Badger’s Drift is another quaint little village where Caroline Graham’s Inspector Barnaby investigates his first murder (followed by others dramatized in Midsomer Murders)

What is it with British little villages to have such a high mortality rate? Please help me find other examples!

This won’t be a proper review, but I have to confess from the beginning my deep, deep admiration for this collection (should this post be cut short by one of Baby Smithereens’ demand, at least you’ll know the most important message). As soon as I finished this book, I got 2 other collections routed to me from Bookmooch. It’s a great discovery, and a chance encounter.

I didn’t know Ethan Canin had been hailed a literary star in short stories, indeed I’d never even heard his name before a lukewarm review by NYT Michiko Kakutani on his recent novel “America America” (given Kakutani’s usual bite, even lukewarm might be worth a read?). I needed a fix of short story and like for a wedding, something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue: I immediately had to get this short story collection from Bookmooch (as for the blue, the palace thief cover is blue in the edition I got).

The title story is the best in the collection indeed, a model in story-telling and character building (I heard it’s being made into a movie, but I don’t think it can remained as low-key and subtle on the big screen as on the page), but the first story, Accountant, drew me in: how often are you riveted by a story about a very dull middle-aged man who tells about his career disappointments? The tour de force even includes some twist about a baseball legging (as many foreigners I don’t understand anything about baseball, much less how a baseball legging can be special…) but I won’t spoil the suspense here.

It’s very rare indeed that a writer manages to picture without cliches the middle-aged man’s psychology and make them really into complex, aching characters. I would nearly say that Canin’s characters in this collection are the male counterparts for Alice Munro’s characters… And given how much I love Munro’s book, that’s no small compliment.

Posts van andere blogs overnemen is niet direct m’n ding, maar deze kon ik niet laten liggen. Ief zette een tijdje geleden een post op z’n blog over Zuji, een low-cost online reisbureau, maar zoals we allemaal weten is low-cost vliegen iets van 1998. De stijgende olieprijzen hebben de enige USP van deze categorie reisagentschappen de kop ingedrukt. Zuji kan niets doen aan die stijgende prijzen, dus is er maar één oplossing: de andere producten goedkoper maken. Een product lanceren buiten je eigen categorie is normaal a big nono, maar deze is (voor mij allesziens) écht genius.

If you ever decide to read Pierre Bayard’s challenging book on Agatha Christie, beware: you might not be able to read another mystery of hers the same way as before… I actually experienced a tiny but nagging feeling of frustration as I read this mystery: I wasn’t as satisfied with its resolution as I probably would have been without Bayard’s book.

I guess Agatha Christie must have challenged herself to set her mysteries in any closed space she could think of, where strangers mingle without knowing each other: hotel, train, boat… and here a plane. During a flight from France to Croydon, a passenger gets killed, apparently by a poisoned dart fired by an Indian blowpipe… Can you imagine such an improbable scenario? Every passenger on board is immediately a suspect, including fellow passenger Hercule Poirot.

The unintentional fun aspect of the book was about air travel around 1935: the first class cabin had several attendants serving meals like in a restaurant, for which apparently you paid separately, and the luggage compartment wasn’t overhead or in a hold but grouped together in the cabin. Rich people were apparently getting used to this new means of transportation, but their maids usually traveled separate, by boat and train. No mention of delay or security measures or cramped seats or air rage (unless murder is considered as such?)…

Of course I enjoyed Poirot’s little quirks and all the twists and turns of the investigation too, focusing on equally improbable objects: a bee, a cup with two spoons, a flute, an empty match-box etc. All these clues make quite a Surrealist list, don’t they? The whole fun was to see how each of them found its place in the puzzle.

I listened to Death in the Clouds on audio-book and not being able to turn pages back and forth was slightly annoying, because there were many suspects and, being a visual person, I couldn’t remember all their names (Maybe because I heard it in multiple installments whenever I had to feed the baby).

[spoiler ahead] I found the motivation and psychological aspects of the murder (the “why”) well mastered but I was frustrated with the “how”. The murderer was supposed to slip into the toilets, put a doctor gown that would resemble a flight attendant’s uniform to avoid being spotted, then go to the victim’s seat under the pretext of bringing her a spoon and stick the dart into her neck, release a bee out of a matchbox, then go back to the toilet and undress… Am I the only one to find this convoluted and plain impossible to do? I know air travel has changed a lot since 1935, but just try changing clothes in a plane’s toilets…

Let’s begin on a personal note: Saturday was our first trip to the local library with Baby S in tow… While I am certain children have to start a literary education early, it seems that 3 weeks old is maybe too early… After a few calm minutes rolling among bookshelves in the pram, Baby S. decided he had enough of these strange things and asked for a change of air… When I say “ask”, you can imagine that he has already pretty strong arguments to make me yield soon. Of course, I just had time to give back borrowed books and not to take fresh ones (sigh). Baby S. seems to be more of a outdoorsy type for the moment.

So, before I throw myself into a guilt-trip and speculate if books are a lost cause for this kid, I’ll conclude on a more positive note:

• go to the library with a list of books in mind and check on the internet database beforehand if they are on shelves (so it’ll take instants to find them even if Baby S. howls needs fresh air).
• don’t be afraid of the librarian’s glare while you drop borrowed books on the desk as fast as possible and flee: no, I haven’t stolen anything, I’m trying to preserve the library’s silence and he should appreciate it.
• if library trips become less frequent than before, it’s a great opportunity to read all those unread books on our own shelves, or ask for more from Bookmooch.

Taylor’s Wreath of Roses weren’t what I expected at all. I’d read Angel and loved her biting sarcasm and wit, here the tone is melancholy if not downright depressed. Three friends, Liz, Camilla and Frances, used to spend summer vacations together every year (Frances used to be Liz and Camilla’s teacher or governess), but as time goes by, they seem to drift apart from one another, or maybe their friendship was a pure chance encounter and not based on anything deep. Since the previous year, Liz has married with a minister and got a child, she seems lost and frail (maybe baby-blues?); Frances who loves painting, kind of lost her momentum and made only very dark paintings, realizing her own mortality; Camilla, single and bitter, seems bored to death by her life working in a school. Most of the story is told through her point of view, as she throws herself in the arms of an adventurer, an unknown man met by chance at the train station.

The novel opens with the suicide of a stranger on the rail tracks and ends… well, in a kind of muted tragedy. Every woman seems deeply unhappy, but maybe it’s only because Camilla sees them through her own depressed perspective. The conclusion seems to be about loneliness and the impossibility to really get to know people around you, which is far too blue for me now. People change, and while you can’t expect your friends to stay forever like they used to be, it’s no reason to stay alone. I couldn’t really relate with any of them three, but I did like the character of Morland Beddoes, a quiet man who fell in love with Frances’ paintings one day when seeing one by chance in a gallery, and who comes to meet her at last after exchanging letters with her for years. He seems like a nondescript man, but reveals a nice, open-minded heart that gives good pieces of advice for those three lost women.

Is it possible that I exchanged literary neurons for motherly neurons? I feel all rusty: it seems so hard to sit in front of the computer and write a review today after nearly 3 weeks away from books… Anyway, as the book was really one of a kind, I ought to push myself a little harder. By the way, if you haven’t read Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd, first go and enjoy this classic mystery. Come back when you’re done. This essay is the ultimate spoiler… but also much more.

[So, for those who are still here after my stern warning:] How often have you read a suspenseful mystery and tried to second-guess the sleuth’s investigation? How often have you guessed the criminal right? But more importantly, how often have you disagreed with the sleuth’s conclusion and felt that the murderer was actually someone else? If you’re like me, your answers would sound like: a/ all the time; b/ sometimes; c/ never. Because we’re basically taught to trust the sleuth and follow him blindly. But maybe we shouldn’t.

Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd is very famous because it uses the writing device of the unreliable narrator to its extreme: most of you remember that the murderer is actually the narrator, Dr. Sheppard, who has conveniently chosen to “forget” a few of his actions, and distort the meaning of his reactions. The traditional ending has Poirot gather all the suspects and unmask the doctor, who later confesses in a letter to Poirot. But how can we be so sure that Poirot got it right? After all, the scenario for the narrator’s involvement seems pretty convoluted… rather forced upon him. Sure, you can re-read the whole book to find out the parts that have cleverly been omitted by the narrator, but motive, plausibility, and personality are all wrong. Poirot seems obsessed by the narrator up to the point of lacking objectivity.

On the other hand, Bayard comes up with facts that Poirot apparently chose to ignore, facts that could point towards another culprit: the doctor’s sister, a nosy spinster that had ample time and knowledge to commit the crime. The narrator would be guilty of blackmail only, and his sister Caroline would have killed Roger Ackroyd because he threatened to expose him. The narrator’s confession would then sound like a desperate attempt to protect his sister. I must say that Bayard’s alternate reading of the novel is pretty convincing.

In a larger view, Bayard argues that Poirot is not as spotless a detective as he seems to be. Bayard even claims that Poirot might be delirious, paranoiac, in the psychiatric sense of the word, forcing truth into his devious view of the world and excluding everything that doesn’t fit. Poirot accuses the doctor and pushes him towards death without ever considering he might be wrong. In particular, he never investigates Dr. Sheppard’s sister and even doesn’t ask her about her alibi on the murder’s night: how extraordinary an omission, isn’t it? Christie wrote in her autobiography that she had so much fun writing about Caroline Sheppard that she later was an inspiration to create Miss Marple. So Bayard’s brilliant conclusion reads the whole novel as a hidden confrontation between Poirot and Miss Marple, where both would be cunning and possibly evil, and getting away with murder.

I wasn’t overly enthusiastic with the first Perry I tried, but the more I persevere the better I like them. This is another Charlotte and Thomas Pitt investigation, this one much darker than Resurrection Row (which was written earlier). This time, it deals with the Victorian taboo of homosexuality, male prostitution and child abuse. And to make the picture complete, the stigma of syphilis. Not completely what you first imagine about Victorian London, but that’s what the series is about, uncovering the seediest aspects of this very proper, class-dominated society.

The only part that doesn’t convince me is Charlotte’s character. She is an aristocrat married to a policeman (a lower class), and thanks to this strange position, whenever her husband gets stuck in his investigations, especially as the police is unwilling to meddle into any upper-class scandal, she steps in and saves the day. This part seems utterly unrealistic, as far as my readings on Victorian society have informed me. Her marrying below her position would have made her a pariah and it’s very doubtful anyone from the upper-class would have agreed to receive her, much less to talk to her about private secrets. On a more personal note, I can’t help but find her a bit self-righteous. But of course, without her, the novel would be completely stuck, so I guess I’ll have to suspend my disbelief a little deeper…

I’ve come across the library collection of BBC audio-books and I love them, now that I’m home most of the time! Technology-adverse me has yet to invest in such a modern thingy as an i-pod… or even a portable CD-player… yes folks, I still have a portable cassette player that works… I hear you gasp!

I’ve listened to BBC dramatizations of Ellis Peters’ and PD James’ novels, but I rather have the original book read to me unabridged. Dramatizations are just like TV without images, it’s not the same feeling as a book.

Lately I’ve listened to Agatha Christie’s Elephants can remember (1972) and Lord Edgware dies (1933) read by Hugh Fraser (the actor who plays Hastings in the TV series). Both were a lot of fun, and listening to them made me realize a lot of double-entendre that had escaped me when I’d read them as a teenager. I was an intensive consumer of Christie’s mysteries back then… it was like having an ice-cream binge, you’re not very selective and careful about texture and flavor when you just swallow one after the other.

I especially liked how Poirot highlights his role as an outsider in Lord Edgware Dies… : because he’s a foreigner, what he’s told does not matter as much as if he was British. I think it tells a lot about the British mentality of that time, all the more as the plot around Lord Edgware has a lot of innuendos about English and American differences (Lady Edgware being an American actress who married a British Lord and who wants to get rid of him).

In Elephants Can Remember, the mood is slightly melancholic. Christie was already 82 when she wrote this, and it has a lot to do with old people going down memory lane and remembering past crimes. It takes a long time to understand why anyone would be interested in solving a mystery that happened about 15 years before (this part is a bit shaky, in my opinion), but it soon becomes a case where everyone misremembers circumstances and throws the investigation in a totally new direction.

This novel features Poirot but also Christie’s comic alter-ego, amateur sleuth-cum-mystery writer Ariadne Oliver. I love how Christie lets her speak about mystery writing, how her imagination runs wild with the slightest dramatic hypothesis. The opening scene at a literary luncheon is very funny when shy Ariadne doesn’t know how to accept her readers’ compliments and tries to pull through with polite platitudes. Then a total stranger asks her the question that will kick off the whole investigation: “I’ve always wondered… Did her father kill her mother or did her mother kill her father?”. This is such a good opening line, don’t you think?

PS. I’ve just realized that Lord Edgware Dies was known in the US as Thirteen at Dinner. I wonder why Christie’s titles had to be changed when they crossed the pond…

I’d never heard of Rosamond Lehmann (1901-1990) before Danielle mentioned her among her Virago books. Dusty Answer was her first book and a bestseller, considered shocking and modern. Today, I hardly can understand why, but I got some clues within the middle part. Lehmann had a complicated life (some early parts being told as fiction in this novel) and was loosely associated with the Bloomsbury group. I wouldn’t certainly compare her with Woolf, but rather with Katherine Mansfield in such a story as The garden party.

Dusty Answer is centered on Judith Earle, a bright, lonely young heiress who gets absorbed by the only young people she’d known since childhood, a group of cousins, 4 boys and a girl living (or at least staying for holidays) next door. When she was a child, she looked up to them and mainly to Charlie, the family son. But Charlie is killed during WWI just after having married the only girl of the group. There’s no true feeling of camaraderie uniting the 3 remaining young men, the young widow and Judith. They all have their own life and interests and are quite forgetful of their lonely young neighbor.

Judith, on the contrary, is fascinated by them and desperately seeks their attention. The 4 young men are very different from one another and Judith falls in love with each of them in turn, but disappointed every time. I must say I couldn’t understand why she found them so glamorous. Of course, lonely as she was, she didn’t know any better, but they all come out as pretty shallow poseurs, except reliable but boring Martin (who meets a tragic fate).

In the middle section, Judith goes to study in Cambridge: this is an interesting portrayal of an all-girls community. I guess it was the scandalous part of the novel, notably by alluding to intimate, lesbian friendships. Judith develops an intense friendship with Jennifer, a brilliant but complicated girl, who ends up as disappointing as the 3 young men.

Eventually I don’t think I was expecting that kind of novel. It has a strong impressionist, emotional feeling, many parts in stream of consciousness style, parts where memories and facts are intertwined, but it remains an unfinished coming-of-age novel, probably too related to Rosamond Lehmann’s personal experience to draw a definite conclusion at the end. I would have been interested to learn more about the mother, a distant character who could definitely explain why Judith comes out so dependent unto other people, and I was expecting a stronger ending.

I throw in the towel. I wanted to read Desarthe after the awesome collection of Birth stories by contemporary French female authors. Desarthe’s piece was called “Months, Hours and Minutes” and was quite moving. Our local library branch had several novels by Desarthe (she’s quite famous here in France) and I chose at random this “unimportant secret”. But random obviously didn’t work.

I’m not quite an adept of experimental writing. I like to get some things right (the Where-When-Who at least) and I’m very traditionally-minded when it comes to plot. Too much maybe? But I like to discover new styles too, and I want to give a book a fair chance… I went as far as page 100 out of a total of 200 and I still couldn’t understand anything. There are at least 6 main (unrelated) characters who seem to bump into each other at random. What made me stop my endeavor was a 7th main character suddenly thrown into the story around page 100, in the course of a relative sentence. Come on, if this person played such an important role, why not introduce him earlier on? I’ve lost track of any secret in this book, may it be important or not.

I browsed through French lit-blogs to see what I am missing in this book. Some people say that it’s magic, that there is a Jewish atmosphere. I didn’t pick it up at all, because people are just floating around in shapeless surroundings. Some people are as dismayed as I am (so I’m not the only one to have a problem here, at least it’s comforting). Nothing makes me care about the various characters and there’s no such thing as a real story. That’s a few problems I just can’t forgive in a book, unless there’s something else truly exceptional. I’m just no that into avant-garde, maybe I just need a good mystery with nice cardboard characters and a worthwhile secret to discover.

As part of my discovery of (slightly?) forgotten mystery writers of the old days, I should probably have started to read Ngaio Marsh with another title. When In Rome is a late title of hers, and I’m not really convinced by the mix between the 1970s atmosphere (stereotyped by psychedelic fashion, drugs, sex and student unrest) and the typically 1930s mystery setting. I kept imagining the characters harboring wide ties, huge plastic glasses and polyester flared pants and… it distracted me too much.

The mystery per se is structured in a classical way: a motley group of foreigners (mainly British, but Dutch as well) have paid for a high-class tour of Rome led by a very dubious character, Sebastian Mailer. From the very beginning we get to know him as a depraved drug addict, in close relations with the Roman underworld, a blackmailer (therefore his last name?), possibly gay (slight homophobic allusions, but it was 1970 alright). Most participants (a retired major, a lady and a couple of other aristocrats… your typical tourist group indeed!) have been lured by the presence of famous writer Barnaby Grant, but the latter is less than enthusiastic about the day. As they visit an ancient crypt (the famous closed room with a lot of sudden darkness), Sebastian Mailer disappears. Marsh recurrent inspector Roderick Alleyn, who joined the tour incognito to uncover Mailer’s participation to an international drug ring, takes the lead of the investigation.

I wasn’t convinced by the drug ring subplot… It obviously rang like a concession to the period, but it really looks like your old grandma’s view of the experience – and after all Dame Marsh was really 75 when the book was published! Her descriptions of what exactly happens in the hashish bars in Rome are more than elusive and makes you smile benignly… You won’t get raunchy scenes with Dame Marsh, and I must say that character developments seemed more artificial than in an Agatha Christie mystery, in my opinion.

But overall it was highly entertaining because of the pure mental mechanism of the closed chamber murder, which Marsh masters to perfection. We can’t care less if we’re in a Roman crypt in the 1970s or a library in a British mansion in the 1930s… it’s a Cluedo game (I’m told it’s called Clue in the US??) and it’s fun up to the resolution. I’ll probably try another, earlier mystery of hers. Can anyone suggest a good title?

I remember reading Lu Wenfu’s The Gourmet more than ten years ago (before going to China) and finding it very incisive and funny. It spoke so well of food that my stomach immediately started to long for some long noodles in clear broth… It was a novella rather than a full-length novel and I really recommend it to all who have an interest in food or Chinese history or both.

That one, apparently not translated into English yet, is much more ambitious in length and scope and I must say right now that I couldn’t read every page to the end. It was like a Chinese classics, with a huge number of characters, all related by complex family links and love or business interests, and spanning over a very long time (from the 1940s, before the Communists came to power to the late 1960s at the start of the Cultural Revolution).

At the opening of the novel, Xu Dawei, a wealthy, liberal young man decides to share some rooms of his family house with 7 friends (Chinese traditional mansions for rich families have many buildings and courtyards, so that different branches and relatives can live together yet separated). Among these students attracted by a bohemian lifestyle: a musician, a painter, a young man interested in foreign-style parties and dances etc. The narrator is the youngest of these friends and, as I understand, is based on Lu Wenfu himself.

The tone at the beginning of the story is that of traditional Chinese comedy, where rich and poor people are described with their petty weaknesses and quirks (notably all their schemes to get and keep a room in the house), so that the picture is very vivid and the pace brisk (I’m thinking of the sweet and sour theatre drama Tea House by Lao She). Soon afterwards these young men, all intellectuals, fall in love and the tone becomes more elegiac. What happens to them all is actually the common fate of intellectuals in the second part of 20C in China: being accused of communism by nationalist government, then being denounced as reactionary by the Communist power, they fall from disgrace to disgrace and can’t escape their fate. I must say that I lacked the courage to follow their ordeal in details (humiliations, denunciations then forced exile into the countryside), but it’s not the author’s fault, just that I wasn’t in the right mood for this book.

I wonder if this book will ever be translated in English, because it seems more of a book for Chinese readers, because they’re more apt to decipher all the hidden historical and literary references (the house with the garden is obviously based on the classics Dream of the Red Mansion etc.) and more used to this multi-level plot. But as a non-Chinese reader, you can’t help but share the feeling of bitterness and sorrow over this lost generation of intellectuals. When I was in China, I often wondered who and where these people were. After such a harsh life, they’ve learnt to live below the radar and young people dismiss them as fuddy-duddy, useless remnants of another time.

After re-watching David Suchet as Hercule Poirot and Joan Hickson as Miss Marple, I set about to re-read one of Christie’s mysteries (maybe 15 years after the first time) and I enjoyed it just as the first time around, like a cake you remember eating in your childhood and you would find again now in a bakery by chance.

It also struck me as readable on different levels. [Beware, possible spoilers ahead, although I won’t tell the plot and murderer’s name]. It was written not so near the end of WW2 but the overwhelming feeling is one of grief for the old world and bitterness about the new society. An interesting point is that the first chapter is seen from the old butler’s point of view, a nice way to have us understand the family dynamics and but also an unconventional view from “below the stairs” that departs from traditional rules of mystery-writing. Indeed, you may remember the so-called Sayers Rules, or the even more explicit rules established in 1928 by S.S. Van Dine (another forgotten mystery writer) that states:

   11. A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.

(you may raise an eyebrow or two at this peculiar distinction: servants can’t be considered fair play in a mystery, because they just can’t be considered on an equal footing with their masters). But here this choice of point of view is actually telling a lot: the war has confused social classes and people literally aren’t who they’re supposed to be anymore. Masters don’t have money, they have to work and sell their property, servants can choose where they prefer to work and aren’t so devoted anymore. In this mystery, the older generation complains a lot about the younger one’s weaknesses and moral flaws, but both generations essentially share the same: lazy, grasping, cold-blooded, over-ambitious etc.. The main difference is that the young generation’s means can’t keep up with their weaknesses and that they might act out more easily, including resort to crime. The social upheaval caused by the war may also lead some people to try to regain what they’ve lost, including through violent means.

This re-reading made me wish to read more about the social or psychological innuendos of classic mysteries. I heard about a book by French literary critics and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard called “Who killed Roger Ackroyd?” that sets about to review Agatha Christie’s famous novel and contest Hercule Poirot’s conclusion as to who is the killer. At the very least, it should be a daring book! I ordered it from the central library, we’ll see…

Cross-posted at A Curious Singularity

When I was a kid, Roald Dahl scared the hell out of me, with some creepy stories like Matilda or the Witches. I was specially haunted by black-and-white ink drawings by Quentin Blake (I guess they were originally coloured, but I had the cheap paperback version), and it stopped me from going much further into Dahl’s books. I’m happy, more than twenty years later, that A Curious Singularity gives me the opportunity for a second look!

And the second look proves just slightly less scary than the first, even as a grown-up! There’s something creepy and ominous right from the start, or at least from the third paragraph on:

“his manner so bland that it was hard to believe he wasn’t purposely inflicting a nasty private little torture of his own on the unhappy lady. And one thing he must have known - that she would never dare to call out and tell him to hurry. He had disciplined her too well for that. He must also have known that if he was prepared to wait even beyond the last moment of safety, he could drive her nearly into hysterics. On one or two special occasions in the later years of their married life, it seemed almost as though he had wanted to miss the train simply in order to intensify the poor woman’s suffering.”

The relationship between the mousey Mrs. Foster, who has an “almost pathological fear of missing a train, a plane, a boat, or even a theatre curtain” and her husband, this “diminutive but still quite dapper old man with the huge bearded face” is nothing short of passive-aggressiveness. They look harmless enough from the outside but their private life must be hell — Oh, but when it’s mentioned that “few people came to visit them” in their “gloomy place”, it may be that they can’t really hide their behaviour in front of guests either…. The story tells of a period that seems far away, where wives were obedient and fearful, where people had four servants and where airport formalities took half an hour (lol), yet I’m sure we all know some dysfunctional couples like them, who put a strain wherever they go with nasty little remarks in public. The tension builds up quite nicely and the twist at the end… mh, I won’t say more about it. I didn’t find it openly funny, but I kind of liked that perfect Mrs. Foster was able to exact a calm revenge and enjoy her stay in Paris…

I’m so happy Litlove recommended me this writer and this novel, it’s a complex book but one I won’t forget for a while. Because it isn’t available in English as far as I know, I will tell the story at length (spare the resolution) because I feel it’s quite worth it. Lambrichs is a philosopher and trained in psychoanalysis as well as a novelist: you can feel all that throughout this strange novel and the result is difficult to classify in any single genre: psychological thriller? essay on family heritage, on our ability and limits to reinvent ourselves outside of heavy family background? Warning against the medical ethic under a fictional pretext? crime story? science-fiction even?

The narrator presents himself under the most benign light, as a professional ob-gyn with a wife he loves and a beautiful daughter. But soon the mood darkens when he recounts his grim childhood in a small, bleak farm in Normandy, with an abusive father, a terrified mother who doesn’t show any love and a mentally handicapped sister. A bright student, he leaves home to study in Paris, but that very day, his sister makes open sexual advances to him and he discovers at the same time that his father has for years committed incest on his sister, with his mother’s complicity. Yes, I know, it’s horrible. It’s not told in a voyeuristic way but it’s still quite disturbing to read. Because he hasn’t been able to turn his sister away, he’s a kind of accomplice too and he doesn’t show any courage, never confronting his father but just making sure his school results are good enough so that he’ll never need to go back to the farm.

At the very beginning, I got scared because the narrator seemed quite a chatterbox. He is a highly educated man and proclaims from the first paragraph that he has lived through so much he doesn’t care if he dies. This kind of cliché may be off-putting but Litlove’s effusive recommendation encouraged me. Soon I found out that this chatterbox had an extraordinary compelling power. The constant flow of his intelligent and moderate voice makes the most terrible tragedies completely understandable (if not acceptable).

The only distance that we readers are encouraged to take is through brief intermissions in which we learn that the narrator sits in jail for a shocking (unnamed) crime and is actually writing his life story to convince his attorney. The relationship between the female attorney (who has her own issues) and her client soon develops into a fascination, a complicity, and a kind of flirt.

The narrator as a young man falls in love with the woman he boards with in Paris, a young widow he marries after he becomes a doctor. She falls into a deep depression when she learns that she can’t bear him a child. Resolved to do anything to keep her, the doctor receives a proposal from his boss at the hospital to attempt to clone his wife under the pretext of a normal fertility treatment. Yes, I know, how could I believe this for a minute?

The narrator’s mellow voice helps stretch our disbelief, that’s for sure, but the cloning part of the plot is seen under a strictly medical light, as a treatment just a little more extreme than IVF, so that it doesn’t feel like a SF fantasy. The operation is successful, but contrary to the boss’ hope, the father doesn’t want to disclose the secret of his daughter birth because he not only fears publicity but also his wife’s betrayed reaction. The daughter grows up into a beautiful young girl looking quite like her mother, which reopens the door to secret incestuous desires.

The narrator’s view on clones (is it Lambrichs? It’s difficult to make it out) is unexpectedly optimistic, worlds away from Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, for example. The narrator’s take is that a person’s self builds itself with her own history and experience and not only her genetic heritage, so that the daughter is quite different in character from her mother. The only problem is that she’s eerily aware, somehow, of her own lack of family background (she refuses to call the ob-gyn her father, for example). But then the story ends up in tragedy, somehow refuting this optimistic view.

I don’t quite know how to take this book, because the narrator is so seductive that you end up agreeing with anything he says, even if you realize in the end that he may have been a monster and lying all along. It’s quite manipulative (a clever art of writing indeed, all the way until the last pages’ twist!), so a very disturbing read both in form and content. I can’t help but recommend it anyway, but it’s not a light book for fun!

Murder on a Kibbutz kept me riveted to my sofa (with plenty of snacks within reach) for most of last weekend. As everybody knows since Agatha Christie, traditional mysteries love close communities: the number of suspects is definite, motives for hatred abound, everybody knows other people’s dirty secrets, a random act of violence by a stranger is excluded and betrayals make the plot development even more suspenseful. In this respect, a kibbutz makes a perfect setting for a mystery indeed!

Before I’d started the book, what I knew about kibbutz was simplistic: that such communities were born in Israel out of collective and socialist ideals of equality and harsh work in the desert. I’d never spent a second thinking about what it implied in terms of daily life: to relinquish your free will to the collective decision, to live in a kind of extended family without privacy, where petty concerns and jealousies, as well as grand philosophical considerations flourish.

Past the few first pages where I was lost by the foreign names and the complex family relationships, the mystery served as a fascinating introduction to some aspects of Israeli life. In part, it’s also a police procedural, and as far as I read, Israeli policemen seem very different from their British or American counterparts. The postmortem investigation is left to the chance of a recent Eastern European immigrant scientist who barely speaks Hebrew, and much time is wasted as the inspectors try to convince their colleagues and the kibbutz members to follow simple investigation instructions. It makes the mystery slower but I think it’s also interesting to see that in other countries, police has to justify its every step for fear of scandals (I don’t really know how realistic this is, but I chose to assume so).

Kibbutz life comes out under a less than glorious life: a matriarchal world where a few older women decide, in the name of their own ideals, that the family unit is a backwards concept, that children have to be reared together by childcare specialists so that women can achieve true equality through work, that parents get to see their own children only half an hour a day and leave them to spend the night at a “children house”. Individuality is denied (children dress up by taking anything from the clean clothes pile, they don’t have their own clothes) and expresses itself only through odd ways (the way to cut vegetables) Sometimes it looks like a sect, but the author isn’t biased against the system altogether and stresses out the kindness and selflessness of the kibbutz members who have chosen such a life.

Now, I’m pretty convinced that I won’t apply to a kibbutz (even for holidays) anytime soon, but I’m quite eager to apply to the central library for the other mysteries by Ms. Batya Gur (this one is part of a series with the same police inspector). After the Nordic thriller hype, maybe it’s time for Near-eastern mysteries!

I’m not a memoir fan, nor a big memoir reader – in this field, Mr. Smithereens is better qualified than I: maybe there’s something I missed in Salter’s Burning the Days. And I haven’t read enough Salter before getting to this book. But enough excuses: all in all, I didn’t really get to “feel” Salter in this book, that is, understand who he is and why he’s chosen such an unlikely path for his life: a pampered child from a Jewish family in New York, he studied at West Point and in a most unlikely way, became a perfect soldier, then chose to serve as a pilot and fly in the Korean war.

This makes up for more than half the book, and the rest of the books covers Salter’s encounters after he became a scriptwriter for Hollywood and a writer. But I was disappointed because nowhere does he explain how he decided to make such a huge career switch, nowhere do we get to understand how he came to writing at all (was he bored by the army life, scared, disenchanted?), how writing fulfilled (or not) different aspirations than his first career. He seems to write a memoir basically to remember people he’d met, but I didn’t know any of them, so all the fun was missed for me.

Don’t you sometimes dream that a writer had written a different book out of the very same rich material? I may sound presumptuous but I really kept thinking “what a shame!” almost all the way. Anyway, I’ll probably stick to Salter’s fiction next time.

I don’t have much experience, but it seems that part of the process of expecting a baby means learning to do everything slower: walk, work, do chores… but also read. I often find myself daydreaming in front of a book now, or sleeping over a book (with the deep, red crease mark on the cheek that is so unglamorous when you wake up, you know?) Or is it maybe the book’s fault for not being griping enough? No less than 4 books are now on my bookstand, and as I am no closer to finish any of them soon, I thought I’d better mention them right now: 

I took My Dream of You by Nuala O’Faolain, because I have fond memories of her Chicago May, that I read last year. I understood that My Dream of You was her first novel, and I find some proof in the book, as Chicago May seems a lot more accomplished. There are some common points between the 2 novels, among which the Irish background, the feminine point of view, and the weaving of past historical events with a narrator that also interrogates her own personal past.  

While Chicago May’s narrator could well be O’Faolain herself, in My Dream of You, it’s distinctly an imaginary narrator, a middle-aged, unattached single Irish woman named Kathleen De Burca who goes through a midlife crisis when her gay best friend and colleague suddenly dies. She decides to resign from her job as a travel writer and go back to Ireland she left after high school, to investigate an obscure love affair during the Potato Famine (around 1845) between an Irish servant and an English married woman of the gentry. Because information is very lacking and her investigation turns disappointing, De Burca turns to fiction to imagine the feelings of the two historical characters, soon to be contradicted by facts. It was also a strong point of Chicago May, to blend, as honestly as possible, fiction and facts to make historical figures more real. In this novel, the balance is not yet completely achieved, as De Burca’s personal story takes the foreground while the affair sometimes feels like a mere pretext to historical consideration on Irish history. I may sound harsh but I don’t intend to. It’s quite nice to read really, although at the beginning, I didn’t find myself very engaged by her main character. 

I also have James Salter’s memoir: Burning the Days. For the moment, I can hardly imagine that the author is the same person who wrote this magnificent short story collection: Last Night. I’m now following Salter as a young student at West Point, where he tries his best to fit in, but I still have my doubts. Also, as I am reading it in French translation and Last Night in English, his voice is completely different and has thrown me off balance. I’m not too sure yet if I’ll finish it, considering I very rarely read memoirs. 

In a sudden foray into SF, I took Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle from the library. I have heard of it for quite a long time, because I’m loosely interested in alternative history (I’ve never been a great fan of SF anyway). The hypothesis is that WWII was eventually won by Germany and Japan and the US are occupied by Germany on its East Coast, by Japan on its West Coast. We follow different people living in the Japanese zone, where the I-ching book of divination is widely used to take decisions. 

I find this one very difficult to immerse into. After more than 2 weeks, I haven’t yet crossed the page 50 threshold, because characters are very diverse and huge paragraphs of information have to be absorbed before feeling at ease with the alternate historical background. As much as I would like to read this book to its end, I’m feeling a bit discouraged by now. Did anyone of you read it? Is it worth it? I discovered that for some stupid reason, I’ve confused Philip K. Dick with Philip Kerr, the author of Berlin Noir, a very dark and brutal thriller in pre- and post-Nazi Germany. It sometimes frightens me how distracted I am getting. 

I’m also reading Iris, the memoir by Iris Murdoch’s husband. It’s not that it’s particularly difficult to read, or that it’s not good, but I find it quite sad (memories alternate with the evocation of Iris Murdoch Alzheimer disease). I’ll post quotes soon, because there are very good paragraphs about marriage and love, especially as Murdoch and her husband had a very personal conception of marital bonds. 

I’m sorry I don’t have as much time as I wish these days to write and read blog posts, but as soon as I’ll be in maternity leave, I’ll have plenty of time to catch up. I miss you guys! I wish you all Happy Easter!

My meeting with Marina Tsvetaeva is pure literary luck. In general, I’m quite frightened by Russian writers (even a short story like Gogol’s The Overcoat was enough to scare me away). I’m not familiar with Russian emotions, logic and world views (if such things ever existed). I’ve shied away from all the masterpieces and just gathered bits and pieces from Anna Karenina, never allowing myself to be absorbed into the story. 

But Marina Tsvetaeva is special. I remember reading about her in Nina Berberova’s autobiography, Italics are mine, but both women are very different from one another, despite belonging to the same generation (Tsevaeta was born in 1892, Berberova in 1901) and both fleeing the Communist revolution to stay in Paris in very difficult circumstances in the 1920s-1930s. Berberova is strong, her memoirs are full of biting anecdotes, sometimes even cruel towards her fellow emigrants. Tsvetaeva seems a lot more sensitive and fragile.  

This book is not a collection of poems, but several poetic evocations of her childhood and family. Just consider the beginning of this extraordinary biography: the confrontation of little Marina and the Devil in her sister’s bedroom where she seeks refuge to read forbidden books. We never know for sure who is this creature and why it appears to the child, but the image is very vivid and detailed: 

The Devil sat on Valeria’s bed – naked, his skin grey, a mastiff’s skin, his eyes white-bluish like those of a mastiff or a Baltic baron’s, his arms were held straight along his knees like a peasant woman from Riazan on a photograph or a pharaoh at the Louvres, in the same pose of tireless patience or indifference. […] His main distinctive features weren’t the legs, the tail, the usual features, but the most important was his eyes: uncolored, indifferent and inexorable. I recognized him first by his eyes and I would have recognized his eyes without seeing anything else.

No action, he sat, I stood and – I loved him. 

There are a lot of play between words like dog (mastiff is “dogue” in French) and god, and she seems very impressed with the evocative power of words from an early age, in a wealthy family where people spoke Russian, French, German fluently. 

The other stories are no less interesting. Mothers in Tsvetaeva’s world are cruel and jealous of their daughters’ freedom and youth. They are very controlling and abusive. I guess this is really the reflect of a generation that saw the extinction of the rigid 19C society and the emergence of modernity. 

My mother has inundated us with music. (And from that Music turned into Lyricism we never emerged into daylight). My mother has submerged us like a flood would. Exactly like the paupers’ hovels along all the large rivers, her children were condemned from birth. My mother has inundated us with all the bitterness of her thwarted carrier, of her thwarted life, she has inundated us with music as if it were blood, the blood of a second birth. I can say that I wasn’t brought “ins Leben” (to life), but “in die Musik” (into the music). 

The third story focuses on her relatives who died in their prime from tuberculosis, while their father got to survive them and live nearly until his 90s into the new Communist regime. The old man is compared to Chronos, the Greek god who is said to have devoured his children in Hell. His young and wealthy wife, who married him for money, accepting (perhaps by lack of knowledge) to sacrifice her life, is another of these controlling mothers I mentioned earlier. There are beautiful metaphors that compare her to Hell goddess Proserpina, who is said to eat Pomegranate, while the young woman wore garnets (same etymology in French and Russian). 10 year old Marina is haunted by this couple’s dead young daughter, up to the point of falling in love with the evocation of the young woman, getting very emotional every time her name is ever mentioned, looking for her everywhere. 

Some lines remind me of Proust, especially for this hypersensitivity that is sometimes seen as typically feminine. Something that I associate with the generation that grew up just at the turn of the century. Their world ended with WWI and the new world that emerged after these turmoils could not accommodate their sensitivity and nostalgia for the lost world.

I have said earlier my difficulties with Alfred Doblin’s German classics, Berlin Alexanderplatz. But I also have abandonment issues, just about as deep as those Stefanie described recently: I just can’t give up on a book, especially when it has been deemed an “important” book, or a classics. I even have the impression that blogging made my problem more serious. Some might call it plain stubbornness or snobbery, but if I don’t read such a book to the end, I feel guilty and I forever keep the bitter feeling that I missed something, or at least, didn’t give it a fair chance.

That said, Berlin Alexanderplatz didn’t become any easier. The first few books (out of 8 ) were a mismatch, a collage of city impressions, a bit like an expressionist movie by Fritz Lang. When Franz Biberkopf comes out of prison and back to Berlin, it’s not the Roaring Twenties in Germany after the defeat, but a city where prostitution, petty crime and latent political subversions (both from anarchists, communists and Nazis) go hand in hand with the modern urban development: department stores, media frenzy, tramways and crowds all day round. 

But after a while, the very innovative construction of the novel is replaced by a more linear plot, inspired by mythology, both Christian and Greek. Biberkopf wants to redeem himself after his crime (he killed his girlfriend with an eggbeater in a violent frenzy), but will he yield to temptation? Three times he fails and falls back into violence and crime. Eventually he changes, and the end is kind of hopeful, but knowing what awaited German people in the next few years after the book publication, I wouldn’t be so sure. 

Biberkopf is a character you can’t pretend to like. He’s a bit slow-headed, naïve, and devoid of evil intentions, but he’s a brute at heart. The only way he felt better about himself when he came back to Berlin was by raping his former victim’s sister (then offering her meat as a present). It took me a while to understand what was going on in this scene and even longer to come to terms with it (sex scenes aren’t explicit, even if they surely have shocked the 1930s reader). I also have problems with all the women depicted in the novel. They’re prostitutes who gladly give money to their pimp (Biberkopf is one too). Their character is purer than the male characters, but they participate to the moral corruption of this whole world. They’re essentially victims, but they keep coming back to the men and call their relationships “love”. Maybe I’m too much of a 21C woman to read such a book. 

I was also very surprised to see the difference between Doblin’s Berlin and, say, Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, what both are supposed to happen around the same period. I can’t really push my comparison very far, but to me, Doblin’s Berlin is all noise, despite the collage. It’s mostly rendered with dialogue in working-class slang, something that makes translations always difficult. Isherwood’s Berlin is mostly visual (maybe because Isherwood didn’t completely master German?). Isherwood’s Berlin is also more romanticized, and even if it may be less real, I still prefer it to the darker, Doblin version. 

On a lighter note, check out this website to see how a designer worked with Fassbinder’s movie Berlin Alexanderplatz to create the DVD graphic cover.

Transitioning from Philip Roth to Ann Lamott seems pretty much like doing splits: I’m not flexible enough to find a clever way.

I’m an old Ann Lamott fan since the day I found Bird by Bird on a “take one leave one” bookshelf in a hostel’s common room in Beijing. Of course I took it, and I’ve long since forgotten what I left instead. The place was called the Bookworm, and for a while my group of writerly-inclined friends and I gathered there for a weekly critique meeting. Of course, that made conditions ideal for me to fall in love with the charming, direct, warm style of Lamott nonfiction. 

Bird by Bird was a writing guide, Operating Instructions is actually Lamott’s diary, beginning with her son’s birth until his first birthday. It is very refreshing and candid and poignant. Just what I needed after reading pages and pages of technical information in “What to Expect when you’re expecting” and the likes. I would compare it to the literary equivalent of an American hug (something we French people don’t really know how to react to): slightly rough and unsettling because of its unexpectedness, reaching out to you despite all the barriers your upbringing and politeness set, but essentially well-meant and incredibly warm. Some pages made me very emotional. 

Of course, there is a little too much about faith and God to make me fully comfortable with the book. But it doesn’t really overshadows the story’s strength. At last, a non-sugarcoated account of the upheavals brought by a newborn! I really needed her honesty. At some points, physically and emotionally exhausted by sleep deprivation and endless colic screams, she contemplates the idea of putting the baby outside the house and seeing whether it would survive on its own. Of course she doesn’t do it. 

Lamott is very far away from my world (a single, former drug-addict and alcoholic and a white born-again Christian in an African-American church)and she never tones her radical, liberal indignations down (I had to remind myself that when she hates George Bush, it’s GB Senior, not the present one!), but I totally could relate to her as a person and a writer. I admire her ability to make fun of the most harrowing moments.

How stupid is this? I’d planned to talk about one particular short story in this collection that I loved, but I’ve brought the book back to the library, and now I don’t remember the title and even the author’s name! Talk about pregnant women’s absentmindedness… 

Oh well, I can proceed by elimination. I’ve finished this short stories collection a few weeks ago, and I must say not all of them have stuck with me in the same way. To put it plain, I found the collection a bit uneven. The anthology’s ambition was to let the (French) reader discover some Japanese contemporary short story writers, meaning essentially post-1945, but also pre-1990. A large chunk is therefore missing: you don’t get to see any young people of today’s Japan, influenced by internet, fashion fads, economic and moral crisis. Too bad. 

Famous Kenzaburo Oe makes a contribution with a story that is very far from his usual prose, insofar as it is very grounded in the 1960s reality and not really personal. Other authors rang a bell, like Dazai Osamu (a realistic, pessimist post-war writer) with his story “Bizan”, or Miyamoto Teru with “A Sun-Drenched Road” (a Japanese friend had offered me year ago a very good collection named “Les gens de la rue des rêves”, which apparently hasn’t been translated into English yet). 

This anthology was interesting because of the very diverse perspectives on young people: first love and disappointments, first physical relationships, boys group emulating each other in violence, relations to parents and home, etc.. But there were several stories I just couldn’t relate, notably the last one, Water Colors by Mieko Kanai, because its writing was so experimental that I wasn’t sure what really happened (doesn’t that ring a bell with my current reading of Berlin Alexanderplatz? Uh-oh, maybe it just confirms that I’m not getting experimental novels at all, may they be Japanese or German…). 

The story I liked most was (now I’ve found it) Kamikôchi by Kita Morio (a writer born in 1927, says Wiki). Kamikôchi is a place in the Japanese Alps, now a popular resort, but a kind of inaccessible region by road until recently. The short story takes place at the end of WWII, when Japanese people realize that defeat is inescapable. The narrator is in his late teens. He was supposed to leave his family who has taken refuge far from the bombed-out cities in the countryside, to join his school/university, except that the country is in disarray and the school is just abandoned. The young man, together with a friend, decides to visit Kamikôchi and climb a famous peak there. On their way, they rest in a local ryokan, where the owner welcome them out of admiration for the narrator’s father, a famous writer and poet. The young man discovers his father under a new light, gets sucked in his poetry as he progresses through a wonderful nature. He also gets to think of his estranged mother in a new way.

The story is a lot more subtle than my brief summary: I think it’s more about this moment in adolescence when you get to realize that your parents are human beings, sometimes great, sometimes fallible, and not only parents. This is a theme that also runs through Philip Roth’s Plot against America, which I’ll review another day soon (hopefully).

I’m so late about reviewing books that I’ve finished a while ago, it’s terrible! How am I going to catch up without being unfair with some books? 

After Margery Allingham in December, I set about to discover another nearly-forgotten mystery writer (at least, unknown to me), this time an American writer, Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958). The Circular Staircase made her fame, so that’s where I started.

The book starts on a great paragraph: 

This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous. For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable; for twenty years I had had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the carpets lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered with brown linen; for as many summers I had said good-by to my friends, and, after watching their perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet in town, where the mail comes three times a day, and the water supply does not depend on a tank on the roof.And then–the madness seized me.

When I look back over the months I spent at Sunnyside, I wonder that I survived at all. (…) 

Hadn’t I read the publication date, I’d have thought it had been written in the 1920s. Young people dash off in cars, people use the telephone, country manors have electricity (albeit not 24h/24) and young girls are very carefree and independent-minded, in a way that reminded me of the Great Gatsby’s parties (sleazy, decadent behaviors aside). Wealthy Americans really lived before WWI with much more modern comfort than their contemporary on the other side of the pond! 

The story was deliciously quaint and sometimes naïve in the twists and turns of the plot. It didn’t take me much to figure out what was going on in broad outlines, but there was still enough suspense (noises in the dead of the night, mistaken characters, even a nightly visit to a graveyard that borders on the gore, but no disgusting detail is provided) to sustain my attention up to the end. I liked the narrator, a wealthy spinster in her 50s (I guessed as much since she took care of her orphaned niece and nephew, who are in their early 20s) who goes through life without much worry and with a ridiculous live-in companion, but I really couldn’t take her seriously. 

That said, don’t expect something half as good as an Agatha Christie’s, just to name an author Rinehart was compared to during her lifetime. The psychology and the plot is nowhere as deep and twisted as in her British counterpart’s novels. Apart from the narrator, the other characters are sometimes mere caricatures, not fully two-dimensional. Servants are gullible and superstitious, especially black ones (Rinehart doesn’t escape the dyed-in-the-wool racism of her times), and the police is very complacent and passive.

I don’t mean to smash the book by expecting too much of it, but I think it should be better read as a piece of literature history, a milestone in the building of modern crime fiction, than as a masterpiece that could measure up to the crime stories that have followed it.

Upon finishing Gunter Grass’ Peeling the Onion, I was convinced that I urgently needed to read Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin, because Grass praised the book so much and found it very influential for his own work. I must say I felt sort of shy when Wikipedia taught me that, first, it was supposed to be reminiscent of Joyce’s Ulysse (scary!), and, second, that the book had been adapted by Fassbinder (very scary!) into a movie that runs for no less than 15 ½ hours in length (ooh!). I even wasn’t deterred when I had to make a special request at the central library to get it (apparently it’s not that often that someone wants to read this book). 

It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve started to carry it around during my commute, but, let’s face it, despite my efforts I haven’t reached the page 100 yet. It’s been a very long time since I’ve been so challenged by a book. I can’t even start to tell you the story of this book. 

As far as I understand, the principle is that the book is built on a collage to replicate the impression of a vibrant city life. Dialogues, pieces of science books, description of random people within a crowd, ads, street shouts, songs, everything gets mingled, only juxtaposed without explanation. While the book is addressed to a reader, one is never sure who does the talking, as Doblin uses (overuses?) multiple points of view. Yesterday night I even read a page written from the point of view of cigarette smoke that is let out of a café onto the street, looking from above at the people drinking and partying, and this morning the focal point was just a ray of light! I’ve never read anything like that. 

In Wikipedia, Doblin is classified as an expressionist, and somewhere else I read he was a futurist. From what I gather, the working-class and petty criminal underworld he describes reminds me of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, and of paintings by Otto Dix (especially low-life, prostitutes and crippled war veterans), but the writing makes it very difficult for me to understand what’s really going on. 

Among this continuous crowd (Alexanderplatz hardly ever gets quiet), there is a main character, Franz Biberkopf, just released from prison. He seems to be a loser. He had this resolution of becoming an honest man after his release, but we can already tell it will be difficult for him to. As for the rest of the cast, they come in and out of the set like in a very populated soap opera, so I can’t really tell yet who is who. 

If Internet didn’t exist, I guess I would have abandoned this book already a while ago. But instead, I’ll try to hang on a little longer, with the help of whatever online information is available. Any reader of Doblin out there?