Oh I love Trollope too and am also a big fan of Rural Hours and Laura Thompson's Agatha Christie biography. I enjoyed your recent podcast conversation with James Marriott and you actually made me want to read Le Morte d’Arthur - Derek Jacobi reading it sounds brilliant! Thanks for the recommendation.
Couldn't agree more about Laura Thompson's biography of Agatha. She really gets the author, being sensitive to the tone and the nuances, and something not everyone understands: the subtlety of Christie's apparent simplicity!
Excellent capsule review of Flesh. A modern, minimal revision of the kind of tale once told by Stendhal or Balzac (say, Sentimental Education or Lost Illusions). István, the main character neither likable nor dislikable, yet I hoped he’d fare well and doubted he would. I particularly liked the drama, which when it happened, just happened. Little notice given. One of my favorite books this year (and if this shows up as a duplicate comment it’s because I’m typing in a place with unreliable wifi).
I go into this a little in another comment here. In more detail:
-- Political motivations. There's so much to argue about politically these days, and lots of people are burned out before the flames of anything truly apocalyptically awful have even personally licked at their own hides, if they ever will, so the safe Booker play is something about how we can all get along.
-- Life on ISS is good for that goal, but in absolutely the wrong way for fiction. Space-station astronauts are selected for various (figuratively) stellar qualities, but among the most important is natural comity. When a space agency has down-selected to half a dozen candidates but can only send one on the next mission, ability to get along with others can be make or break. So what are the chances of a conflict-driven plot based on ISS? Pretty much zero.
-- The author was asked about the structure of her novel and since it covers a Day in the Life of ISS, and there are 16 orbits in 24 hours, she said it was 16 orbits. So it's sort of the opposite of that stupid-but-strangely-also-brilliant TV series "24", in which the 24-hour aspect may offer a way to cluster scenes, but the overall story has real structure despite (tick-tick-tick) "events happen in real time."
-- The result in Orbital is what I might call a thinly fictionalized New Yorker non-fiction piece. And yet those can be done by some writers (John McPhee was a master at it) who somehow bring in a real feeling of movement and . . . story. As far as I could tell, all Orbital had was "beautiful writing." I suppose someone could look at all the space-related nonfiction I've written over the last 20+ years, and at the fact I'm writing fiction these days (though without having read what I write), and tell me, "Oh, I'm sure you'll love Orbital. It's exactly YOUR kind of novel." No. It's exactly not.
On the strength of what you say about Flesh, and your drive-by marksmanship on Orbital, I think I'll order Flesh.
Orbital didn't even feel like novel, just a names-changed-for-no-real-reason New Yorker-style nonfiction. I think I browsed maybe five pages, and gave up. And this is me talking: I've been writing about space for years. I think the Booker was politically motivated. With all the geopolitical strife and the ideological bickering over it, they wanted something lulling about international cooperation, with some vaulting vision thrown in, and Orbital was "beautiful writing." It won't start any friendship-breaking arguments. As a conversation-piece book, it's like a way to talk about the weather, and, better still, from above it!
How you describe the style of Flesh works for me. I'm a late bloomer in fiction: pushing 70, started five years ago, except for some teen-years dabbling. In the time I have left in life, I may not be able to master that style in longer works.
So if our tastes align enough to see Orbital the same way, and you found Flesh praiseworthy despite a lack of "beautiful writing," I'll give it a try. And again, this is me talking--I read almost no contemporary literary fiction, and I'm in pandemic-penury I'm still digging out of, so I haven't ordered a book in years.
My own self-indulgent takeism on "contemporary literary":
Just read it. Didn't mind the spoilers at all. Delightful that Flesh robs Thackeray blind but with a clever twist. I was assigned Vanity Fair in college. It looked like a chore but I emerged somewhat awe-struck. Good steal.
I tend to avoid the perennial first-novel temptation to go autobiographical; my current first-novel project is close-third on a central character who I love, but who would probably regard me (if she was real) with a bit of amused contempt. The Republic of Letters review of Flesh makes me wonder whether I could actually write more of myself into fiction. At some point, anyway. Not now.
The spoiler details make Istvan more relatable, although my relationship quandary might be more an issue of exactly who is keeping whom. Like him, things keep happening to me, and although I can plan a go-bag for leaving my wretched life, I somehow never get it together to pack one. Flesh may afford me opportunities for theft, in a way that allows me to laugh at myself in some summing up. The older you get, the more you need those laughs. Some people may be depriving themselves of years of later life by not finding a way to them, suffering terminal sourness as a comorbid condition. We've all met the type.
I usually agree with most of your opinions when you review new novels. But I must say that I totally disagree with your positive opinion of Flesh. You comment that “Few novels can present a protagonist who is non-agentic without becoming dull.” But for me, that was exactly the problem with this novel. I also thought the plot was totally unbelievable. A wealthy, well educated woman is attracted to a poor Hungarian man working as a driver, who answers every question with “okay,” and doesn’t seem to have a thought in his head. I could accept the idea that she might have an affair with someone like that as an exotic adventure. But marry him? I don’t think so. And I know that Szalay’s writing style is minimal, or as you put it, “flat,” and “spare,” but he uses the word “okay” at least a thousand times. I got so tired of hearing “okay” as an answer to every question or comment. As Szalay would say it, you thought the novel was okay. And several others thought it was okay. But I didn’t think it was okay. I guess we will all have to be okay with different opinions, and accept the unbelievable characters as okay, and accept the plot as okay. And accept boring minimal writing styles as okay. So have an okay day and enjoy reading okay novels.
All the okays might be daijobu with me. I've spent half my adult life in Japan, having arrived with a career change in mind: from software engineer to translator of engineering documents, and thereafter free to live anywhere in the world, working over the wire. I did enough full-time Japanese language study to bootstrap myself into the bottom of the translation food chain, but not enough to get fully acculturated. Only to discover that translation of engineering documents wasn't any less miserable than software engineering. I also learned that, even if you're low on the translator food chain, taking overflow from other translators, the client wanted you IN Japan. So much for my dreams of travel freedom. By then, still in chronic culture shock, I'd come to slightly loathe Japan. And Japanese. (I've normalized it a lot more since.)
Then I became one of those pathetic long-stay gaijin, in a semi-slacker position of running a guest house for foreign visitors and I ended up speaking far more English than Japanese, thus doggishly dumb in many native-speaker Japanese conversations except for the most formulaic. I've probably answered "daijobu" as frequently as Istvan says "okay", for lack of the ability to say much more, even when I desperately wanted to.
Shame on me, of course, for not keeping up with Japanese study, but I think I get this about Istvan. Many readers won't. It's probably a more common condition than most people know. And it can be an isolating one. Dean Martin, a decent comic actor, and apparently fluent in English on screen, had to be fed a lot of his lines because he actually wasn't. He was also noted as dining alone a lot. It figures.
It does have its comic aspect, though, in a cross-cultural marriage. When I was growing up, my sisters and I used to laugh at how Desi Arnaz would explode into Spanish at Lucille Ball. We used to call him "Ricky Retardo." Well, now I AM a Ricky Retardo.
The plot, I think, is supposed to be more of a parable than a realistic plot, but I do think he blurs that line. The attraction didn’t seem unrealistic to me, as they were similar ages etc. People do have affairs. I can see that your patience for the dialogue might wear thin, but I felt that he kept good control of a character who really didn’t have a lot to say sometimes and was often caught between drifting from inertia and from real determinism. As Julianne was saying somewhere, the form was also interesting.
It never occurred to me to think of the plot as a parable. That’s an interesting idea, and I will give that due consideration. I did think that the affair was believable. I feel that the plot broke down when they married. I will just add that I’m growing tired of minimalist writing. For me, one of the joys of the novel as an art form is in its ability to use beautiful and elaborate language to convey an insight into the nature of our world. Bring back the writing style of Henry James and Proust!
I have a copy of the Alexandria Quartet at my bedside. It has a lot of beautiful and elaborate language. Insofar as the reading of literary novels involves the ownership of status-signaling conversation pieces, if nothing else, this allows me to climb up a bit in the eyes of others. I can say that Durrell conveys a lot of insight into the nature of our world, with beautiful and elaborate language.
But here's the thing: he doesn't convey it. You have to dig for it. And don't bring a flimsy shovel for the digging. James conveyed a lot about /a/ world. Proust, about /another/ world. But "our world"? Like, the planet?
Maybe I got through Justine only because I'd traveled in the Middle East, and other post-colonial contexts, cheaply, which brought more demimonde to light than most tourists see. Durrell could be called "Orientalist", but I think he was more the opposite, in exposing colonially-inflicted wounds and the sorts of wounded people who are attracted to the open, running sores. For all the exoticism in Justine, what got me through it was the occasional shocks of recognition.
I slogged through Justine, appreciating the beautiful writing but hating a lot of the opacity of it, exasperated by the incredibly stilted dialogue, and annoyed by the metafiction of leaving stray bits of the corpse of a previous attempt at a Justine novel as central features of long paragraphs.
Yay, I got through Justine! On to Balthazar! Where the writing gets more straightforward and conventional, recounting events more serially, with dialogue more natural, and yet . . . that's where I bogged down. Yes, right where it got easier. It began to seem more like a travelogue, or James Michener-esque inch-deep ethnography.
So what happened there? The publishing industry, I think.
We have a lot of fun here on Substack with Big Five bashing and schadenfreude over its current slump in literary fiction, but these industry problems are probably nothing new. Durrell wrote The Black Book, with its unmistakable signs of genius. But that book was about the rot of a corpulent Britain. It was Durrell's parting shot of disgust at his home country--/a/ world--before going to "live by one's wits in the Levant." Which sounds romantic and risky, but basically, it's being an English teacher abroad--safe, but dull.
When the publishers gave Durrell an advance, but got back a virtually uneditable Justine, they may have panicked. OK, lots of beautiful and elaborate sentences, but readers are gonna choke! Quick, get the reviewers to praise it to the skies! Put Durrell more under the editorial gun for a sequel and get something more readable out of him. Those who got through Justine may goose the midlist sales of it by telling the more frustrated readers among their friends that Balthazar is easier, but really, one /must/ read Justine first.
Beautiful and elaborate writing? I love it at its best, which is typically when it's about /a/ world, not "our world.". But as a goal in itself, in a books-as-conversation-pieces literary culture, it may do more harm than good.
Orwell's Burmese Days, not a great novel perhaps, but a good one, is more helpful than Durrell in understanding "our world." (Sorry, but it's not ours except as an inheritance of stolen goods.) Burmese Days got kicked to death by British critics, and got hated in British-colonial Malaya. Decades later, the translation into Bahasa Malaysia won a literary prize in Malaysia. Orwell had committed the sin of being honest and clear, of conveying real insights, about "our" world. Which means exposing ugliness. That world is no longer "ours", and if some of the better fiction is now coming out of post-colonial worlds, that's no mere coincidence.
I can easily imagine Durrell complaining to his editors that the glowing reviews for Justine were written by people who didn't really get what he was trying to say. If so, perhaps he was politely told to shut up, and by the way, you're late in sending us the next chapter of Balthazar. Or, hey, you can always go back to teaching English abroad. Your choice.
Oh yeah, agree on that, but as minimalism goes, this is the good stuff. Good minimalism is still good! For me, the step-son stuff was the weakest part.
Maybe the parable isn't felt so easily when there's a combination of spare style and contemporary detail--it primes people for more realism. Cautionary for me. I tend to write near-future dystopian stories, which may help readers past this misperception. The prophetic narrative stance can imply a parable mode, though there are also credibility costs that go with the territory.
I love your minimalist review of books - straight to the point. A deck chair is ideal for reading old classics, such as Trollope. Laura Thompson's Nancy Mitford (and whole family) was fascinating reading for me, but I don't know about Agata Christie. All my Un-ty friends were intoxicated by her novels, but me. She never gives any trace of who's done it, and at the end she collects all together and announces the killer. (Had she, really, written her novels, lying in the warm water in her bathtub?) Amis's Lucky Jim has been lying on my table for a year already, I can't finish such a thin book. He was never published in Sov. Russia, and now it's too late to read him, right? Thank you for the review.
I think it is still a good time to read Amis, but you may wonder what all the fuss was about... he was quite a surprise at the time, but on reflection it isn't one of the best books of that decade. I would like to see more straight to the point reviews! @BDM does capsule reviews also.
I am a Virginia Woolf scholar who has been working on her essays for years, and first, I want to thank you for your piece on The Common Reader. I love both her Common Readers, think she is an extraordinary essayist, and read and reread everything in The Essays of Virginia Woolf (6 volumes!) all the time for my work.
And second, I have read Rural Hours, agree with you that it is a beautiful work, and plan to use it in future projects. You will be glad to know that Harriet Baker HAS received some attention amongst Woolf scholars, and her work has also brought renewed attention to Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann. But yes, it deserves to be read by those outside Woolf world, too. It reminds us that Woolf is not just an urban writer and that her powers of observation worked in the country, too. (Barbara Lounsberry's three volumes on Woolf's diaries [and the diaries she read] is also incredible.)
And third, in case anyone is interested, a volume called The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf has just been published by Edinburgh University Press. It's fascinating, filling in lots of gaps in Woolf's correspondence, including bread-and-butter notes about tea and more letters about publishing matters, and is organized around correspondents. An expensive hardback right now (it's over 1000 pages long!), it is due to be out in paper in a year. Edited by Stephen Barkway and Stuart N. Clarke.
Thank you again for your piece on The Common Reader.
omg I had no idea about Woolf's letters... I have to read this book!!
Woolf was the best C20th critic and I want everyone to read her. I am very pleased to hear that about Baker. I hope to talk to her and write about her soon, in fact. Let me know if you have any questions I should ask her.
Hello, Henry! I am sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you, and I hope you're feeling better.
I dipped back into Harriet Baker's book when I got this note, and I see that I was puzzled by her statement that Woolf's Asheham Diary hadn't been published. But after rooting around in my papers for awhile, I found my print-out of it: Anne Olivier Bell published it in The Charleston Magazine (issue 9, Spring/Summer 1994, 27-35). But the Charleston Magazine: Charleston, Bloomsbury and the Arts is hardly an easily available source! Not like the five volumes of the Diaries are.
Anyway, I do not have any specific questions for her other than wondering what she thinks of "The Sun and the Fish," Woolf's wonderful essay about traveling to see the eclipse on 29 June 1927. I have always loved that essay and read it as I sat outside in our driveway waiting for the eclipse to occur in the summer of 2017. It somehow seems related to the Asheham Diary (and to all her early journals observing nature as Virginia Stephen), though other than the emphasis on the observant eye, I'm not sure how. I especially admire the contrast between nature as experienced in an open space and the natural world as observed through glass. Her ironic observations about what humans choose to focus on.
I did notice Baker's tendency to use the phrase "And yet" often when discussing Woolf. And that phrase, along with "But" and "Yet" standing alone, is a Woolfian habit as well. Even in Woolf's unlikeable moments, there is often an "and yet" hovering, either her own or the reader's, who also notes her incredible honesty and criticism of herself. I remember critics calling her thin-skinned about criticism, and my internal answer was "You only see her as thin-skinned because she admits more fear and anxiety about criticism than some others do. She is simply more honest about it!"
Anyway, I love the "and yet" usage because Woolf uses it to such great effect in her essays. I see her as a "both/and" thinker, not an "either/on" one. Which is too much of a simplification, I know. And yet (ha!), containing some truth as well?
Thanks for your note, Henry, and I apologize for going on so long!
Szalay still seems to be flying under the radar. We had him reading at Listowel Literary Festival a few years ago. I have his previous book and still have to read it. Flesh is getting very good reviews
I *love* Trollope and have read almost all of his novels, so am biased. But for anyone interested in politics, Trollope's Palliser series, especially Phineas Finn, is excellent.
When critics say stuff like that I always want to know what sort of taste they have. I have broad almost catholic taste, as I think you might, and so I like both. It’s true that TWWLN is more like Eliot/Dickens major novels. IMO you would enjoy Barsetshire.
Oh I love Trollope too and am also a big fan of Rural Hours and Laura Thompson's Agatha Christie biography. I enjoyed your recent podcast conversation with James Marriott and you actually made me want to read Le Morte d’Arthur - Derek Jacobi reading it sounds brilliant! Thanks for the recommendation.
lmk what you think, I am REALLY enjoying it
A green thought in a green shade with green socks
Haha very good!
Couldn't agree more about Laura Thompson's biography of Agatha. She really gets the author, being sensitive to the tone and the nuances, and something not everyone understands: the subtlety of Christie's apparent simplicity!
I have read it multiple times.
Isn’t it just an example of what biography should be?
Absolutely so!
Lucy Worsley’s biography of Christie is really good as well.
Excellent capsule review of Flesh. A modern, minimal revision of the kind of tale once told by Stendhal or Balzac (say, Sentimental Education or Lost Illusions). István, the main character neither likable nor dislikable, yet I hoped he’d fare well and doubted he would. I particularly liked the drama, which when it happened, just happened. Little notice given. One of my favorite books this year (and if this shows up as a duplicate comment it’s because I’m typing in a place with unreliable wifi).
Damn. Sold!
Yes yes yes indeed!
Interesting view about Orbital. I haven't heard anyone I know diss it, perhaps because we're all cartophiles here.
It gave me a headache
I can't understand why Orbital won the Booker. Primarily descriptive, with limited characterisation and plot. Preferred James.
Same
I go into this a little in another comment here. In more detail:
-- Political motivations. There's so much to argue about politically these days, and lots of people are burned out before the flames of anything truly apocalyptically awful have even personally licked at their own hides, if they ever will, so the safe Booker play is something about how we can all get along.
-- Life on ISS is good for that goal, but in absolutely the wrong way for fiction. Space-station astronauts are selected for various (figuratively) stellar qualities, but among the most important is natural comity. When a space agency has down-selected to half a dozen candidates but can only send one on the next mission, ability to get along with others can be make or break. So what are the chances of a conflict-driven plot based on ISS? Pretty much zero.
-- The author was asked about the structure of her novel and since it covers a Day in the Life of ISS, and there are 16 orbits in 24 hours, she said it was 16 orbits. So it's sort of the opposite of that stupid-but-strangely-also-brilliant TV series "24", in which the 24-hour aspect may offer a way to cluster scenes, but the overall story has real structure despite (tick-tick-tick) "events happen in real time."
-- The result in Orbital is what I might call a thinly fictionalized New Yorker non-fiction piece. And yet those can be done by some writers (John McPhee was a master at it) who somehow bring in a real feeling of movement and . . . story. As far as I could tell, all Orbital had was "beautiful writing." I suppose someone could look at all the space-related nonfiction I've written over the last 20+ years, and at the fact I'm writing fiction these days (though without having read what I write), and tell me, "Oh, I'm sure you'll love Orbital. It's exactly YOUR kind of novel." No. It's exactly not.
Your review of PERFECTION actually makes me want to read it 😂 I loved ORBITAL!
I loved PERFECTION but probably because I’m a grumpy boomer, part annoyed by and part jealous of the type of people it’s parodying.
haha well that's the joy of an honest review I guess!
Love Trollope! Also am enthused by this _Gulliver's Travels_ audiobook rec. I've never read it, and I'll give that version a try someday
oh I think you would love Gulliver!
On the strength of what you say about Flesh, and your drive-by marksmanship on Orbital, I think I'll order Flesh.
Orbital didn't even feel like novel, just a names-changed-for-no-real-reason New Yorker-style nonfiction. I think I browsed maybe five pages, and gave up. And this is me talking: I've been writing about space for years. I think the Booker was politically motivated. With all the geopolitical strife and the ideological bickering over it, they wanted something lulling about international cooperation, with some vaulting vision thrown in, and Orbital was "beautiful writing." It won't start any friendship-breaking arguments. As a conversation-piece book, it's like a way to talk about the weather, and, better still, from above it!
How you describe the style of Flesh works for me. I'm a late bloomer in fiction: pushing 70, started five years ago, except for some teen-years dabbling. In the time I have left in life, I may not be able to master that style in longer works.
So if our tastes align enough to see Orbital the same way, and you found Flesh praiseworthy despite a lack of "beautiful writing," I'll give it a try. And again, this is me talking--I read almost no contemporary literary fiction, and I'm in pandemic-penury I'm still digging out of, so I haven't ordered a book in years.
My own self-indulgent takeism on "contemporary literary":
https://ismailhatago.substack.com/p/why-i-dont-write-literary-fiction
Well based on everything you said I sure hope it works out well for you! There was another review in the Republic of Letters but with more spoilers…
Just read it. Didn't mind the spoilers at all. Delightful that Flesh robs Thackeray blind but with a clever twist. I was assigned Vanity Fair in college. It looked like a chore but I emerged somewhat awe-struck. Good steal.
I tend to avoid the perennial first-novel temptation to go autobiographical; my current first-novel project is close-third on a central character who I love, but who would probably regard me (if she was real) with a bit of amused contempt. The Republic of Letters review of Flesh makes me wonder whether I could actually write more of myself into fiction. At some point, anyway. Not now.
The spoiler details make Istvan more relatable, although my relationship quandary might be more an issue of exactly who is keeping whom. Like him, things keep happening to me, and although I can plan a go-bag for leaving my wretched life, I somehow never get it together to pack one. Flesh may afford me opportunities for theft, in a way that allows me to laugh at myself in some summing up. The older you get, the more you need those laughs. Some people may be depriving themselves of years of later life by not finding a way to them, suffering terminal sourness as a comorbid condition. We've all met the type.
I usually agree with most of your opinions when you review new novels. But I must say that I totally disagree with your positive opinion of Flesh. You comment that “Few novels can present a protagonist who is non-agentic without becoming dull.” But for me, that was exactly the problem with this novel. I also thought the plot was totally unbelievable. A wealthy, well educated woman is attracted to a poor Hungarian man working as a driver, who answers every question with “okay,” and doesn’t seem to have a thought in his head. I could accept the idea that she might have an affair with someone like that as an exotic adventure. But marry him? I don’t think so. And I know that Szalay’s writing style is minimal, or as you put it, “flat,” and “spare,” but he uses the word “okay” at least a thousand times. I got so tired of hearing “okay” as an answer to every question or comment. As Szalay would say it, you thought the novel was okay. And several others thought it was okay. But I didn’t think it was okay. I guess we will all have to be okay with different opinions, and accept the unbelievable characters as okay, and accept the plot as okay. And accept boring minimal writing styles as okay. So have an okay day and enjoy reading okay novels.
All the okays might be daijobu with me. I've spent half my adult life in Japan, having arrived with a career change in mind: from software engineer to translator of engineering documents, and thereafter free to live anywhere in the world, working over the wire. I did enough full-time Japanese language study to bootstrap myself into the bottom of the translation food chain, but not enough to get fully acculturated. Only to discover that translation of engineering documents wasn't any less miserable than software engineering. I also learned that, even if you're low on the translator food chain, taking overflow from other translators, the client wanted you IN Japan. So much for my dreams of travel freedom. By then, still in chronic culture shock, I'd come to slightly loathe Japan. And Japanese. (I've normalized it a lot more since.)
Then I became one of those pathetic long-stay gaijin, in a semi-slacker position of running a guest house for foreign visitors and I ended up speaking far more English than Japanese, thus doggishly dumb in many native-speaker Japanese conversations except for the most formulaic. I've probably answered "daijobu" as frequently as Istvan says "okay", for lack of the ability to say much more, even when I desperately wanted to.
Shame on me, of course, for not keeping up with Japanese study, but I think I get this about Istvan. Many readers won't. It's probably a more common condition than most people know. And it can be an isolating one. Dean Martin, a decent comic actor, and apparently fluent in English on screen, had to be fed a lot of his lines because he actually wasn't. He was also noted as dining alone a lot. It figures.
It does have its comic aspect, though, in a cross-cultural marriage. When I was growing up, my sisters and I used to laugh at how Desi Arnaz would explode into Spanish at Lucille Ball. We used to call him "Ricky Retardo." Well, now I AM a Ricky Retardo.
The plot, I think, is supposed to be more of a parable than a realistic plot, but I do think he blurs that line. The attraction didn’t seem unrealistic to me, as they were similar ages etc. People do have affairs. I can see that your patience for the dialogue might wear thin, but I felt that he kept good control of a character who really didn’t have a lot to say sometimes and was often caught between drifting from inertia and from real determinism. As Julianne was saying somewhere, the form was also interesting.
It never occurred to me to think of the plot as a parable. That’s an interesting idea, and I will give that due consideration. I did think that the affair was believable. I feel that the plot broke down when they married. I will just add that I’m growing tired of minimalist writing. For me, one of the joys of the novel as an art form is in its ability to use beautiful and elaborate language to convey an insight into the nature of our world. Bring back the writing style of Henry James and Proust!
I have a copy of the Alexandria Quartet at my bedside. It has a lot of beautiful and elaborate language. Insofar as the reading of literary novels involves the ownership of status-signaling conversation pieces, if nothing else, this allows me to climb up a bit in the eyes of others. I can say that Durrell conveys a lot of insight into the nature of our world, with beautiful and elaborate language.
But here's the thing: he doesn't convey it. You have to dig for it. And don't bring a flimsy shovel for the digging. James conveyed a lot about /a/ world. Proust, about /another/ world. But "our world"? Like, the planet?
Maybe I got through Justine only because I'd traveled in the Middle East, and other post-colonial contexts, cheaply, which brought more demimonde to light than most tourists see. Durrell could be called "Orientalist", but I think he was more the opposite, in exposing colonially-inflicted wounds and the sorts of wounded people who are attracted to the open, running sores. For all the exoticism in Justine, what got me through it was the occasional shocks of recognition.
I slogged through Justine, appreciating the beautiful writing but hating a lot of the opacity of it, exasperated by the incredibly stilted dialogue, and annoyed by the metafiction of leaving stray bits of the corpse of a previous attempt at a Justine novel as central features of long paragraphs.
Yay, I got through Justine! On to Balthazar! Where the writing gets more straightforward and conventional, recounting events more serially, with dialogue more natural, and yet . . . that's where I bogged down. Yes, right where it got easier. It began to seem more like a travelogue, or James Michener-esque inch-deep ethnography.
So what happened there? The publishing industry, I think.
We have a lot of fun here on Substack with Big Five bashing and schadenfreude over its current slump in literary fiction, but these industry problems are probably nothing new. Durrell wrote The Black Book, with its unmistakable signs of genius. But that book was about the rot of a corpulent Britain. It was Durrell's parting shot of disgust at his home country--/a/ world--before going to "live by one's wits in the Levant." Which sounds romantic and risky, but basically, it's being an English teacher abroad--safe, but dull.
When the publishers gave Durrell an advance, but got back a virtually uneditable Justine, they may have panicked. OK, lots of beautiful and elaborate sentences, but readers are gonna choke! Quick, get the reviewers to praise it to the skies! Put Durrell more under the editorial gun for a sequel and get something more readable out of him. Those who got through Justine may goose the midlist sales of it by telling the more frustrated readers among their friends that Balthazar is easier, but really, one /must/ read Justine first.
Beautiful and elaborate writing? I love it at its best, which is typically when it's about /a/ world, not "our world.". But as a goal in itself, in a books-as-conversation-pieces literary culture, it may do more harm than good.
Orwell's Burmese Days, not a great novel perhaps, but a good one, is more helpful than Durrell in understanding "our world." (Sorry, but it's not ours except as an inheritance of stolen goods.) Burmese Days got kicked to death by British critics, and got hated in British-colonial Malaya. Decades later, the translation into Bahasa Malaysia won a literary prize in Malaysia. Orwell had committed the sin of being honest and clear, of conveying real insights, about "our" world. Which means exposing ugliness. That world is no longer "ours", and if some of the better fiction is now coming out of post-colonial worlds, that's no mere coincidence.
I can easily imagine Durrell complaining to his editors that the glowing reviews for Justine were written by people who didn't really get what he was trying to say. If so, perhaps he was politely told to shut up, and by the way, you're late in sending us the next chapter of Balthazar. Or, hey, you can always go back to teaching English abroad. Your choice.
Oh yeah, agree on that, but as minimalism goes, this is the good stuff. Good minimalism is still good! For me, the step-son stuff was the weakest part.
Maybe the parable isn't felt so easily when there's a combination of spare style and contemporary detail--it primes people for more realism. Cautionary for me. I tend to write near-future dystopian stories, which may help readers past this misperception. The prophetic narrative stance can imply a parable mode, though there are also credibility costs that go with the territory.
In the photo — we can’t see what you are reading!
Framley Parsonage
Sorry I should have read more closely … you do explain that in the piece. Hard to concentrate these days as the world is melting down.
Trollope is the best antidote!
Niles Crane reads Gulliver's Travels. I have to listen to that!
It is really good
I love your minimalist review of books - straight to the point. A deck chair is ideal for reading old classics, such as Trollope. Laura Thompson's Nancy Mitford (and whole family) was fascinating reading for me, but I don't know about Agata Christie. All my Un-ty friends were intoxicated by her novels, but me. She never gives any trace of who's done it, and at the end she collects all together and announces the killer. (Had she, really, written her novels, lying in the warm water in her bathtub?) Amis's Lucky Jim has been lying on my table for a year already, I can't finish such a thin book. He was never published in Sov. Russia, and now it's too late to read him, right? Thank you for the review.
I think it is still a good time to read Amis, but you may wonder what all the fuss was about... he was quite a surprise at the time, but on reflection it isn't one of the best books of that decade. I would like to see more straight to the point reviews! @BDM does capsule reviews also.
I am a Virginia Woolf scholar who has been working on her essays for years, and first, I want to thank you for your piece on The Common Reader. I love both her Common Readers, think she is an extraordinary essayist, and read and reread everything in The Essays of Virginia Woolf (6 volumes!) all the time for my work.
And second, I have read Rural Hours, agree with you that it is a beautiful work, and plan to use it in future projects. You will be glad to know that Harriet Baker HAS received some attention amongst Woolf scholars, and her work has also brought renewed attention to Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann. But yes, it deserves to be read by those outside Woolf world, too. It reminds us that Woolf is not just an urban writer and that her powers of observation worked in the country, too. (Barbara Lounsberry's three volumes on Woolf's diaries [and the diaries she read] is also incredible.)
And third, in case anyone is interested, a volume called The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf has just been published by Edinburgh University Press. It's fascinating, filling in lots of gaps in Woolf's correspondence, including bread-and-butter notes about tea and more letters about publishing matters, and is organized around correspondents. An expensive hardback right now (it's over 1000 pages long!), it is due to be out in paper in a year. Edited by Stephen Barkway and Stuart N. Clarke.
Thank you again for your piece on The Common Reader.
omg I had no idea about Woolf's letters... I have to read this book!!
Woolf was the best C20th critic and I want everyone to read her. I am very pleased to hear that about Baker. I hope to talk to her and write about her soon, in fact. Let me know if you have any questions I should ask her.
Thank you for your kind words!
Hello, Henry! I am sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you, and I hope you're feeling better.
I dipped back into Harriet Baker's book when I got this note, and I see that I was puzzled by her statement that Woolf's Asheham Diary hadn't been published. But after rooting around in my papers for awhile, I found my print-out of it: Anne Olivier Bell published it in The Charleston Magazine (issue 9, Spring/Summer 1994, 27-35). But the Charleston Magazine: Charleston, Bloomsbury and the Arts is hardly an easily available source! Not like the five volumes of the Diaries are.
Anyway, I do not have any specific questions for her other than wondering what she thinks of "The Sun and the Fish," Woolf's wonderful essay about traveling to see the eclipse on 29 June 1927. I have always loved that essay and read it as I sat outside in our driveway waiting for the eclipse to occur in the summer of 2017. It somehow seems related to the Asheham Diary (and to all her early journals observing nature as Virginia Stephen), though other than the emphasis on the observant eye, I'm not sure how. I especially admire the contrast between nature as experienced in an open space and the natural world as observed through glass. Her ironic observations about what humans choose to focus on.
I did notice Baker's tendency to use the phrase "And yet" often when discussing Woolf. And that phrase, along with "But" and "Yet" standing alone, is a Woolfian habit as well. Even in Woolf's unlikeable moments, there is often an "and yet" hovering, either her own or the reader's, who also notes her incredible honesty and criticism of herself. I remember critics calling her thin-skinned about criticism, and my internal answer was "You only see her as thin-skinned because she admits more fear and anxiety about criticism than some others do. She is simply more honest about it!"
Anyway, I love the "and yet" usage because Woolf uses it to such great effect in her essays. I see her as a "both/and" thinker, not an "either/on" one. Which is too much of a simplification, I know. And yet (ha!), containing some truth as well?
Thanks for your note, Henry, and I apologize for going on so long!
This is great! I’ll ask her about that. So agree about the “and yet”, one of many fine things in her writing. Thank you!
Szalay still seems to be flying under the radar. We had him reading at Listowel Literary Festival a few years ago. I have his previous book and still have to read it. Flesh is getting very good reviews
Was he a good reader?
I *love* Trollope and have read almost all of his novels, so am biased. But for anyone interested in politics, Trollope's Palliser series, especially Phineas Finn, is excellent.
I really want to read these
You "sold" at least copy of Flesh as I've bought it. Thanks for the recommendation.
Only Trollope I've read is the Way We Live Now, which one literary critic wrote is the book that non fans of his other novels like.
Oh good! Do lmk what you think!
When critics say stuff like that I always want to know what sort of taste they have. I have broad almost catholic taste, as I think you might, and so I like both. It’s true that TWWLN is more like Eliot/Dickens major novels. IMO you would enjoy Barsetshire.
See also the Pallisers (per my other comment).