Tuesday 22 May 2018

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters is a novel by Julian Barnes published in 1989. It is a collection of short stories in different styles; however, at some points they echo each other and have subtle connection points. Most are fictional but some are historical. One of the many recurrent motifs in the book is the portrayal of ships. This alludes to Noah's Ark — the subject of the first chapter — which plays a dominant role in the Abrahamic religions as an example of God's judgment. The woodworm who narrates the first chapter questions the wisdom of appointing Noah as God's representative. The woodworm is left out of the ark, just like the other "impure" or "insignificant" species; but a colony of woodworms enters the ark as stowaways and they survive the Great Deluge. The woodworm becomes one of the many connecting figures, appearing in almost every chapter and implying processes of decay, especially of knowledge and historical understanding.

Being a fan of Julian Barnes' writing, this title was one that had escaped my attention until I saw a copy in a second-hand bookshop.  I bought it.  I was knocked out by the first chapter.  Barnes is such a clever, gifted writer and I loved the wonderful wit he exhibited in the writing of 'The Stowaway'.

As I wrote to my niece Kat " Oh yes, on the other hand I read A History of the World in 10 and a half Chapters by Julian Barnes which I found brilliant even if Barnes is a bit of a smarty pants writer who knows how good he is and sometimes his writing is so impeccable it feels like he is showing off, not just his technique but what he knows.  If you are at the top of the class you cannot expect everyone to love you for it!!"

I resorted to the internet to search for reviews of the book and find that Jonathan Coe, writing in The Guardian describes very eloquently something of my feeling on reading the book:

Reviewing A History of the World in 10½ Chapters for The Guardian, Jonathan Coe found that it, "while hardly a ground-breaking piece of experimentalism, succeeds to the extent that it is both intelligent and reasonably accessible. Where it falls down is in denying its reader any real focus of human attention or involvement". He added that, "To dismiss the book as being too clever (or merely clever, for that matter) would be ungenerous as well as facile. "Readers of this novel will feel awed, I'm sure, by the range of its concerns, the thoroughness of its research, and the agility with which it covers its ground. 

As I have already mentioned above, there is in Coe's words something a bit grudging about acknowledging Barnes' genius for this brand of writing.  In summary then, another highly enjoyable compilation of short stories from Julian Barnes with the very satisfying attribute of connection, and reiteration of themes, running through the 'Chapters'.

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate by Alexander McCall Smith


Isabel Dalhousie thinks often of friends, sometimes of lovers, and on occasion of chocolate. As an Edinburgh philosopher she is certain of where she stands. She can review a book called In Praise of Sin with panache and conviction, but real life is . . . well, perhaps a bit more challenging - particularly when it comes to her feelings for Jamie, a younger man who should have married her niece, Cat. Jamie's handsomeness leaves Isabel feeling distinctly uneasy, and ethically disturbed. 'I am a philosopher', she thinks, 'but I am also a woman'. And more disturbance is in store. When Cat takes a break in Italy, Isabel agrees to run her delicatessen. One of the customers, she discovers, has recently had a heart transplant and is now being plagued by memories that cannot be rationally explained and which he feels do not belong to him. Isabel is intrigued. So intrigued that she finds herself rushing headlong into a dangerous investigation. But she still has time to think about the things that possess her - things like love and friendship, and, of course, temptation. The last of these comes in many forms - chocolate, for example, or seductive Italians . . .



What I thought:  My reading friend and fellow Splinter, Jan Drew, passed this book to me a while ago.  It had somehow got buried in one of my baskets of books which are waiting in the wings.  Oh dear, I thought, I'd better read this and return it to her.  I have been a great fan of the 44 Scotland Street novels because I love Bertie and have followed his development and his escapades, the hapless put-upon son of an overbearing mother who insists that he should have a pink bedroom, and take yoga lessons.  The opening chapters of Friends etc etc, the second novel in The Sunday Philosophy Club series seemed pretty inconsequential and then the protagonist Isabel Dalhousie meets Ian, a recent heart transplantee and the plot gets interesting...…………

There is a good Wikipedia entry about the novel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends,_Lovers,_Chocolate


Solar Bones

Solar Bones by Mick McCormack

 "an extraordinary hymn to small-town Ireland "
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017
WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2016
BGE IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016

Marcus Conway has come a long way to stand in the kitchen of his home and remember the rhythms and routines of his life. Considering with his engineer's mind how things are constructed - bridges, banking systems, marriages - and how they may come apart.  Mike McCormack captures with tenderness and feeling, in continuous, flowing prose a whole life, suspended in a single hour.
I make no apologies for reproducing the review which was written for the Guardian by Ian Sansom:

Excellence is always rare and often unexpected: we don’t necessarily expect masterpieces even from the great. Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones is exceptional indeed: an extraordinary novel by a writer not yet famous but surely destined to be acclaimed by anyone who believes that the novel is not dead and that novelists are not merely lit-fest fodder for the metropolitan middle classes.

McCormack is not entirely unknown. In 1996, he won the Rooney prize for Irish literature with his first collection of short stories, Getting It in the Head. The prize is a sure predictor of future greatness, responsible for bringing to wider public attention the work of Anne Enright, Claire Kilroy, Claire Keegan and the two mighty Kevins, Barry and Power. McCormack’s second collection, Forensic Songs, was published in 2012, and he is also the author of two novels, Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes from a Coma (2005). But it would be safe to say that outside his native Ireland his work is less well known than that of many of his contemporaries. Solar Bones is published by Tramp, one of Ireland’s small independent publishing houses, which, like its UK counterparts, is enjoying an unprecedented period of growth and success. The book deserves attention and applause.

It stutters into life, like a desperate incantation or a prose poem, minus full-stops but chock-full of portent: “the bell / the bell as / hearing the bell as / hearing the bell as standing here / the bell being heard standing here / hearing it ring out through the grey light of this / morning, noon or night”. It is 2 November 2008, we are given to understand, All Souls’ Day, the Day of the Dead, the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed. The bell is the Angelus bell and we are in rural Ireland – in Louisburgh, near Westport, County Mayo, “a county with a unique history of people starving and mortifying themselves for higher causes and principles [...] blistered with shrines and grottoes and prayer-houses and hermitages [...] a bordered realm of penance and atonement”.

The speaker hearing the bell is one Marcus Conway, husband, father and a civil engineer in some small way responsible for the wild rush of buildings, roads and bridges that disrupted life in Ireland during the boom that in the book has just gone bust. Marcus is a man gripped by “a crying sense of loneliness for my family”. We don’t quite know why until the very end of the novel, which comes both as a surprise and a confirmation of all that’s gone before.

Among its many structural and technical virtues, everything in the book is recalled, but none of it is monotonous. Marcus remembers the life of his father and his mother, for example, a world of currachs and Massey Fergusons. He recalls a fateful trip to Prague for a conference. He recalls Skyping his son in Australia, scenes of intimacy with his wife, and a trip to his artist daughter’s first solo exhibition, which consists of the text of court reports from local newspapers written in her own blood, “the full gamut from theft and domestic violence to child abuse, public order offences, illegal grazing on protected lands, petty theft, false number plates, public affray, burglary, assault and drunk-driving offences”. Above all, he remembers at work being constantly under pressure from politicians and developers, “every cunt wanting something”, the usual “shite swilling through my head, as if there weren’t enough there already”. He recalls when his wife got sick from cryptosporidiosis, “a virus derived from human waste which lodged in the digestive tract, so that [...] it was now the case that the citizens were consuming their own shit, the source of their own illness”.

The book is a hymn to modern small-town life, then, with its “rites, rhythms and rituals / upholding the world like solar bones”, as well as an indictment of human greed and stupidity, and how places and cultures respond to the circumstances beyond their control and yet of their own making.

Asked in a rare interview some years ago if there is such a thing as “Irish” writing, McCormack suggested that indeed there is and that it consists of “a three-part harmony of experiment, comedy and metaphysics”. The magnificent song that is Solar Bones possesses such peculiar depth, such consonances and dissonances that it is a reminder that a writer of talent can seemingly take any place, any set of characters, any situation and create from them a total vision of the reality. This is a book about Mayo, Ireland, Europe, the world, the solar system, the universe.

Further thoughts:  I have pasted an image of two pages from the book.  At first sight the lack of punctuation, other than commas presents a density and continuity which leads one to expect a stream of consciousness which might leave the reader breathless.  But no so.The book was brought to life for me by a reading by Tim Gerard Reynolds, a trained actor and audiobook narrator, who brings a wonderfully authentic voice to this Irish narrative, modulated and paced.  A pleasure to listen to.


 



Ian Sansom (born 3 December 1966 in Essex, England) is the author of the Mobile Library Mystery Series. As of 2016, he has written four books in a series that will comprise a projected forty-four novels.[1][2][3]
He is a frequent contributor to, and critic for, The Guardian[4] and the London Review of Books.
He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge, where he was a fellow of Emmanuel College. He is a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and teaches in its Writing Program.[5]


Thursday 10 May 2018

Two Women: Eleanor Oliphant and Marvellous Ways

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

Here is a debut novel, discovered through a writing competition, by an author in her 40s, which has sold for huge sums worldwide.  This title was chosen by my Winterborne Kingston Book Group, known as 'Splinter'.

Amazon says:  Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive - but not how to live
Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend.
Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything.
One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted - while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she’s avoided all her life.
Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than… fine?
An astonishing story that powerfully depicts the loneliness of life and the simple power of a little kindness

What I thought:

From the outset I realised that Eleanor is something of an oddball.  I confess at first I thought she was, as we tend to say these days of someone who is a bit odd, obsessive, or antisocial, 'on the spectrum'. Being so precise about her food choices and meals, buying two tickets for a gig in case she lost one, and taking people literally, leading an orderly life, these all spoke of some kind of autism, I thought.   But as the narrative progressed I realised that rather, Eleanor was lonely and a damaged person, used to being let down in life.  During the course of the novel we gradually find out why she is isolated.  There was much humour in the portrayal of Eleanor in the context of her interactions  at work, her shopping habits, her regular consumption of two bottles of vodka  (somehow this did not sit as quite convincing to me).  I laughed out loud at her puzzlement after she had opted for a Hollywood wax.  Even odd titbits such as her buying a copy of Razzle for Sammy! And her shopping expedition to buy clothing was equally funny.  Then there are poignant things as when Eleanor goes to a hair salon and thanks Laura for “making her shiny”.   But where did her naïve belief that she was destined to connect with the second-rate self-obsessed pop star for a romantic relationship come from?  Did this fit with the character as she was being revealed by the writer.  Certainly it gave a mechanism for the emotional crash that was to come.  

When you see a section entitled Bad Days, you think you know it is going to go end badly. I did guess that the mother was no longer alive and the phone calls were taking place in Eleanor's head.  Something of the language the author used in that dialogue was not quite authentic to my ear and that is what started me thinking.  Raymond is a character of continuity throughout it all and I wondered if  he and Eleanor would end up together.  Gail Honeyman does not go that far for her reader, but in the end you do feel that Eleanor has been rescued from the loneliness that has dogged her all her life.  

A Year of Marvellous Ways by Sarah Winman

A Year of Marvellous Ways begins on the bank of a Cornish creek in
1947. The year absolutely helps me to ground this novel in historical
terms, I was born that year so it gives a good context. And Cornwall
was the destination for many family holidays between the years of
1976 and 1984. We did not do abroad when our children were young.
Where Winman talks of creeks off the Carrick Roads, the ebb and
flow of tides, the gathering of cockles to coddle and limpets to pickle,
this is so familiar to me. I thought her descriptive prose was beautiful
and vivid with a real feel for nature. I loved the descriptions of the
orange starfish, many of them getting washed onto the shore and the
idea that they are stars that have fallen to earth. There was lots of

imagery which was beautiful.

The arrival of Francis Drake, the young man only recently returned
from the battlefields of France on his errand to deliver a letter to a
bereaved father from his son, a fellow soldier who didn’t make it
home. On the face of it you might think that Francis has been the
lucky one to survive the war but there are traumas in his past and he
has only recently had the shocking experience of Missy drowning
herself before his very eyes. I found this passage very shocking. I
liked Missy, she introduces the idea of a mermaid, how life can
change. I connected with her character rather better than Marvellous.
Yes, this was a character that the author wrote many words about,
she is after all the raison d’etre of the novel. But I found her a bit
tiresome sometimes, whimsical, ambiguous, contradictory. I
sometimes found it difficult to separate the real from the ‘magic’ this is
the so-called genre magical realism and I find it a bit frustrating. You
can sometimes not know where you are. Also known as 'marvellous
realism' it essentially represents a view of the real world whilst also

adding or revealing magical elements.   It does not ring my bell 
(Is it a coincidence that the main protagonist is called 'Marvellous'?) 

A good definition for Magical Realism is 'It is what happens when a highly detailed realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe'.


In some ways the narrative almost reads like a fairytale, complete with 
a journey into the woods; characters with strange, winsome names
and enchanted pasts (Marvellous tells the story of her mermaid
mother, shot shortly after her daughter’s birth, mistaken for a seal
frolicking in the water); and a gentle kind of magic is available to those
in need: a young girl drops an egg white into a glass of water to see it

take the form of the face of her one true love.

                                         ………………… 0000000...……………...

Here is a Short review from the Guardian below, "gripping suspense", "pacey plot"
...…...do any of Splinter recognise this as the book we read?

Waiting is what 89-year old Marvellous spends the year 1947 doing, in
an isolated Cornish hamlet, although she isn’t sure what she is waiting for. This
might seem like a less-than-engaging narrative device, but Sarah Winman creates
gripping suspense while unfolding Marvellous’s memories, from lonely nights spent
“willing her life to change” to the time “Whatshisname” was lured in her direction by
a Louis Armstrong song playing on the wireless. Paths cross in unexpected ways in
this pacey plot. An unlikely friendship develops at the core of the compelling tale
when Marvellous meets a troubled young soldier, Drake. Storytelling rejuvenates
Drake: as Marvellous shares stories of her life resonating with the transcendent
power of love, Drake learns how to marvel at life again, seeing the extraordinary in
the ordinary. “Everyone had a limit,” writes Winman, engrossingly showing

characters pushed past their breaking point. The novel’s surprising denouement is
also well worth the wait. .


The First Three Titles: Martin Beck



Martin Beck is a fictional Swedish police detective who is the main character in a series of ten novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö collectively titled The Story of a Crime. The stories are frequently referred to as the Martin Beck stories. All of the novels have been adapted to films between 1967 and 1994, six of which featured Gösta Ekman as Martin Beck. Between 1997 and 2018 there have also been 38 films (some only broadcast on television) based on the characters, with Peter Haber as Martin Beck.

I've read the first three volumes as follows:

Roseanna Book 1

Roseanna is the first book in the hugely acclaimed Martin Beck series: the novels that shaped the future of Scandinavian crime fiction and influenced writers from Stieg Larrson to Jo Nesbo, Henning Mankell to Lars Kepplar.
On a July afternoon, the body of a young woman is dredged from a lake in southern Sweden. Raped and murdered, she is naked, unmarked and carries no sign of her identity. As Detective Inspector Martin Beck slowly begins to make the connections that will bring her identity to light, he uncovers a series of crimes further reaching than he ever would have imagined and a killer far more dangerous. How much will Beck be prepared to risk to catch him?

The Man Who Went Up In Smoke Book 2
The second book in the classic Martin Beck detective series from the 1960s - the novels that shaped the future of Scandinavian crime writing.
Hugely acclaimed, the Martin Beck series were the original Scandinavian crime novels and have inspired the writings of Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo. Written in the 1960s, 10 books completed in 10 years, they are the work of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo - a husband and wife team from Sweden. They follow the fortunes of the detective Martin Beck, whose enigmatic, taciturn character has inspired countless other policemen in crime fiction; without his creation Ian Rankin's John Rebus or Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander may never have been conceived. The novels can be read separately, but are best read in chronological order, so the reader can follow the characters' development and get drawn into the series as a whole. 'The Man Who Went Up in Smoke' starts as Martin Beck has just begun his holiday: an August spent with his family on a small island off the coast of Sweden. But when a neighbour gets a phone call, Beck finds himself packed off to Budapest, where a boorish journalist has vanished without a trace. Instead of passing leisurely sun-filled days with his children, Beck must troll about in the Eastern Europe underworld for a man nobody knows, with the aid of the coolly efficient local police, who do business while soaking at the public baths - and at the risk of vanishing along with his quarry.

The Man on the Balcony

Published in 1967 this third instalment sees a newly promoted Detective Superintendent Martin Beck setting a much darker tone than previous books.
The opening description of a nondescript, forty-year old man sitting on his apartment balcony and watching Stockholm waking up brings shivers to the spine as the traffic builds and children make their way to school feeling fairly ambivalent about the whole scene playing out under his watchful eye.

Tempers amongst the police force are frayed as a serious of vicious mugging on pensioners at the city parks is running riot, with the eighth occurrence in the last two weeks and no closer to finding the perpetrator. This man who is charged with tackling this one man crime wave is Detective Inspector Gunvald Larsson who comments that "if someone doesn't grab him soon" the perpetrator could end up taking a life. That "someone" being either the police or a civil patrol, and Larsson seems largely indifferent to just whom it is, one of many times that society seems to sympathise with vigilante action in this novel. On the night of the eighth mugging an altogether more sinister horror awaits, as the body of a young girl who has been the victim of sexual interference and assault is found dead. Jaded before even beginning the investigation, Kollberg is faced with breaking the news to the mother of the child, just as his own wife is due to give birth. When a second girl is discovered under similar circumstances it takes a tip off to bring the mugger into the police fold and establish that he has seen the murderer. Along with a three-year-old boy who is also believed to have witnessed the murderer, the details they provide bring a flash of inspiration from Martin Beck.

My thoughts:
These were 3 easy reads, not long or overly convoluted but straightforward crime detective narratives.  Written in the 60s the accessories of detection and sources available to the police which we take for granted today: the internet, databases of personal information, previous criminal history, mobiles phones and DNA techniques inevitably lead to plots which are less convoluted and the methods employed by the police are less sophisticated and immediate - for example mobile phone communication between detecting personnel which accelerates the action.  In some ways this lack of sophistication and technology adds to the tension and the reader is drawn to keep turning the pages, and delaying the moment when the book must be put aside in favour of a more pressing  task.  These are books to take on a 'plane, or on a beach.




Homo Deus

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

I read the forerunner to his volume, Sapiens, a couple of years ago.  This sequel examines what might happen to the world when old myths are coupled with new god-like technologies, such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering.

Humans conquered the world thanks to their unique ability to believe in collective myths about gods, money, equality and freedom – as described in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. In Homo Deus, Prof. Harari looks to the future and explores how global power might shift, as the principal force of evolution – natural selection – is replaced by intelligent design.
What will happen to democracy when Google and Facebook come to know our likes and our political preferences better than we know them ourselves? What will happen to the welfare state when computers push humans out of the job market and create a massive new “useless class”? How might Islam handle genetic engineering? Will Silicon Valley end up producing new religions, rather than just novel gadgets?
As Homo sapiens becomes 'Homo deus', what new destinies will we set for ourselves? As the self-made gods of planet earth, which projects should we undertake, and how will we protect this fragile planet and humankind itself from its own destructive powers? The book Homo Deus gives us a glimpse of the dreams and nightmares that will shape the 21st century.
Summary:  The book sets out to examine possibilities of the future of Homo sapiens. The premise outlines that during the 21st Century, humanity is likely to make a significant attempt to gain happiness, immortality and God-like powers. Throughout the book, Harari openly speculates various ways that this ambition might be realised in the future based on the past and present. 

Homo Sapiens conquers the world 

The first part of the book explores the relationship between humans and other animals, exploring what led to the former's dominance.

Homo Sapiens gives meaning to the world


  • Since the verbal/language revolution some 70,000 years ago, humans live within an "intersubjective reality", such as countries, borders, religion, money and companies, all created to enable large-scale, flexible cooperation between different individual human beings. Humanity is separated from animals by humans' ability to believe in these intersubjective constructs that exist only in the human mind and are given force through collective belief.
  • Humankind's immense ability to give meaning to its actions and thoughts is what has enabled its many achievements.
  • Harari argues that humanism is a form of religion that worships humankind instead of a god. It puts humankind and its desires as a top priority in the world, in which humans themselves are framed as the dominant beings. Humanists believe that ethics and values are derived internally within each individual, rather than from an external source. During the 21st century, Harari believes that humanism may push humans to search for immortality, happiness, and power.

Homo Sapiens loses control


  • Technological developments have threatened the continued ability of humans to give meaning to their lives; Harari suggests the possibility of the replacement of humankind with a super-man, or "homo deus" (human god) endowed with abilities such as eternal life.
  • The last chapter suggests a possibility that humans are algorithms, and as such homo sapiens may not be dominant in a universe where big data becomes a paradigm.
  • The book closes with the following question addressed to the reader:

"What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?

What did I think:
I read this as an audio book on Audible.  It was a good medium through which to try and absorb all the information that Prof. Harari sets out for us.  It will take some re-reading, selected chapters were packed with examples of what the future might hold in relation to the power of computer techonology and AI and how it could impact humans.  Quite scary stuff really.