By Willem Elsschot (1933)
Cheese is just wonderful. A hapless clerk tries to make it big by becoming the exclusive Edam agent for the whole of Belgium (and the Grand Duchy). Problem is he hates cheese, and business too. Kafka is the obvious comparison, and I’m not sure the fact it’s so funny makes it less of a cheese-nightmare.
By Stella Gibbons (1932)
Cold Comfort Farm is a weird book. Immediately dated but seemingly timelessly funny, and with turns of phrase that are probably immortal now (“something nasty in the woodshed”), a sophisticated society girl takes out to save her romantically doom-laden rustic family in darkest Sussex.
My initial impressions (whoa, this is modernist, unreliable narrator) were somewhat deflated when it turns out that the protagonist basically telling them to buck up and start wearing fashionable clothes is in fact the unironic solution.
But reliably amusing and well-written.
By Ian Dunt (2020)
A real achievement. It’s ambitious – I started off thinking he’d bitten off a bit more than he could chew. It’s both very contemporary – up to the minute even – and a sweeping history of the liberal tradition.
Does a remarkable job considering this scope – even for well-known parts of the story or figures like John Stuart Mill, brings out wonderful details that (I at least) just wasn’t aware of – like he effectively co-wrote much of his work with his partner, then wife, Harriet Taylor, and was dedicated to the rights of women. Not to mention bringing in really interesting guys like Benjamin Constant, who I’d plain never heard of.
By Tim Moore (2004)
I keep returning to Tim Moore, since in theory he’s right up my street, disappearing on ridiculous self-inflicted adventures which just so happen to go wrong in entirely foreseen ways. In this one he walks a donkey along the Santiago de Compostela.
It did have quite a few of the things that frustrate me, including the totally accidental I didn’t intend to turn this into a book because that’s my job wackiness, and his tendency to give up and get his wife to fly over and bail him out, which I swear happens in every book and completely deflates the sense that things are out of control.
Nevertheless, reliably funny, and being forced to get along with his fellow pilgrims stops him sinking into misanthropy which can be a problem in his other books.
By Edmund White (1973)
I’ve just finished White’s first book, Forgetting Elena – this is the book that Nabokov called “remarkable”.
It is something else. An apparent amnesiac, who doesn’t even know his own name, plays out several days on an idyllic island, attempting to piece together his identity in a sort of utopian society ruled by infinite shades of etiquette.
Combines dreamy psychedelia with really precise poetic language
By Edmund White (2020)
I’ve been meaning to read some Edmund White for a while – given that White got a very rare enthusiastic recommendation from my favourite writer. Amusingly, for a long time I confused him with E.B. White, creator of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little – they are emphatically not the same guy!
I definitely enjoyed this, the immersion into unfamiliar worlds is very well done – I partly like all the technicalities on practically how saints are made.
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe (2012) and Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe (1994) by Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum’s recent book is so good, I’ve been working my way through her back catalogue.
Two books about the “borderlands” of Europe – Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Hungary, Belarus and Moldova – their crushing and Sovietization following 1944, and subsequent re-emergence in the 90s are excellent if you have an interest the region, its history, and the recent destablilisation.
Pure joy, and the best non-fiction book I’ve read this year
The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends by Anne Applebaum (2020)
So I’ve been on a massive Anne Applebaum kick for the last couple of weeks. A very long time ago I’d read her history of the Gulag, an extremely jolly read, and subsequently forgot about her.
The best political, and one of the best nonfiction books, of the year. This is a million miles away from the often tiresome hot takes of the internet punditry.
Beam’s carelessness reaches an apogee in the Boston Globe article Nabokov was such a Jerk.
It’s not worth dwelling on much of the content: there’s little there of substance. But I shall take a look at the claim that Beam makes regarding Doctor Zhivago. Zhivago is important to this story, as while Nabokov hated the book for artistic and political reasons, Wilson latched onto it. “A black cat came between us … Doctor Zhivago” as Nabokov explained.
This follows up in detail on the review of Alex Beam’s The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the end of a beautiful friendship. You can read my (not entirely positive) review here.
The dust-up of the feud, and the spectrum of reviews, seems unsatisyingly damning for Beam. So, as a final word on the exchange, he brings in a deus ex machina in the form of Alexander Gerschenkron. We are told that Gerschenkron – the “known as ‘The Great Gerschenkron’ … a mythic figure … feared no-one, not the Bolsheviks, not the Nazis … certainly not Vladimir Nabokov”. In Beam’s account, Gerschenkron attacks every aspect of Onegin – the translation, the commentary, and the scholarship in a “merciless takedown” – Nabokov never replied, and quietly incorporated his changes into the revision.
This account should trouble us, as it brings convenient closure for Beam and allows him to avoid having to examine the scholarship in detail. How accurate is it?