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[Leeway]

THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER - Rebecca West - (1918).

Another Virago Modern Classic, another World War I novel, another "women's war novel" as they are usually (and somewhat incorrectly) called. This is the story of Chris Baldry, flower of English manhood and a fine specimen of the gentry, who has gone off to the war, leaving three women behind: Kitty, his brittle, superficial, materialistic and snobbish wife; Margaret, his first love, now a dowdy but generous matron, very "earth mother"; and, Jenny, his adoring cousin, who lives with Chris and Kitty, and narrates the story.

We learn very little about the war, except that war has been hell on Chris, and so he is sent home to Baldry Court--minus the last 15 years of his memory, that is, the period of time he has been married to Kitty. Chris sets about reliving his love affair with Margaret, much to the anger and despair of Kitty and Jenny, who attempt to bring him back to the present.

At the heart of this book is a ripping social critique of the gentry and upper classes, of puritanism, of class-consciousness, of materialism, although oddly, not of Chris himself. Jenny is probably one of the most unreliable narrators I've encountered recently, one minute ripping into Margaret, the next minute viciously attacking Kitty (even physically attacking her once). There is mordant humor here, although if West intended a comic effect, she plays it very subtly. The social polemic predominates. It has been suggested that West intended an attack on H.G Wells; and his menage, and although West denied it (what else could she do?) it makes sense to me. One does feel there is more than one agenda at play here. West has created her own "A Nest of the Gentry" or maybe, "A Nest of Vipers."

My wife's recommendation for Rebecca West is The Fountain Overflows. (Regret to say I've never read any.)

Thank you, I'll make a note of that. My reading of West, and indeed of H.G. Wells (her lover), has been sparse; it's a literary era I have not delved into much, so will try to do so.

[BillF]

THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER - Rebecca West - (1918).

Another Virago Modern Classic, another World War I novel, another "women's war novel" as they are usually (and somewhat incorrectly) called. This is the story of Chris Baldry, flower of English manhood and a fine specimen of the gentry, who has gone off to the war, leaving three women behind: Kitty, his brittle, superficial, materialistic and snobbish wife; Margaret, his first love, now a dowdy but generous matron, very "earth mother"; and, Jenny, his adoring cousin, who lives with Chris and Kitty, and narrates the story.

We learn very little about the war, except that war has been hell on Chris, and so he is sent home to Baldry Court--minus the last 15 years of his memory, that is, the period of time he has been married to Kitty. Chris sets about reliving his love affair with Margaret, much to the anger and despair of Kitty and Jenny, who attempt to bring him back to the present.

At the heart of this book is a ripping social critique of the gentry and upper classes, of puritanism, of class-consciousness, of materialism, although oddly, not of Chris himself. Jenny is probably one of the most unreliable narrators I've encountered recently, one minute ripping into Margaret, the next minute viciously attacking Kitty (even physically attacking her once). There is mordant humor here, although if West intended a comic effect, she plays it very subtly. The social polemic predominates. It has been suggested that West intended an attack on H.G Wells; and his menage, and although West denied it (what else could she do?) it makes sense to me. One does feel there is more than one agenda at play here. West has created her own "A Nest of the Gentry" or maybe, "A Nest of Vipers."

My wife's recommendation for Rebecca West is The Fountain Overflows. (Regret to say I've never read any.)

Thank you, I'll make a note of that. My reading of West, and indeed of H.G. Wells (her lover), has been sparse; it's a literary era I have not delved into much, so will try to do so.

Over the years I've read quite a few of Wells's books.. As a science fiction fan I love The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine and, to a lesser extent, The Invisible Man - as well as the short stories. Of the non-science fiction novels, I'd recommend The History of Mr Polly and Kipps.

[johnblitweiler]

I have no memory of the few non-sf novels by H.G. Wells that I read many decades ago. Except that his snobbery in "The Research Magnificent" was so repulsive that I never read another of his writings.

[BillF]

My second Middleton and I preferred it to the first, Holiday. Story of marital woes in a classical music and English Midlands setting. Beautifully written.

[A Lark Ascending]

Standard British crime novel set in nice town. Enjoyed it though rather sad to see the most attractive character felled just before the end.

In the early Soft Machine years at present - a little bit of inevitable overlap with the Soft Machine bio of some years back but intriguing. A more fragile character than I imagined.

[ejp626]

I'm maybe 20% into the second part of Herzen's My Past and Thoughts (Ends and Beginnings from Oxford Press). It's good but I think Isaiah Berlin blew it up just a bit much (putting it on the same level as War and Peace ). Herzen himself thought of his memoirs as comparable to David Copperfield. I would be enjoying it a bit more if my expectations hadn't been raised quite so high...

[johnblitweiler]

After sleeping on Philip Roth forever, I finally read The Plot Against America and I Married A Communist. His characters' dilemmas are moral and complex and subtle. They may have been his last 2 novels - especially his utter seriousness, his indignation are engrossing. After those 2 explosions I can see why he gave up writing.

[Leeway]

THE STARCHED BLUE SKY OF SPAIN - Josephine Herbst (1892-1961).

Herbst is an interesting literary figure. Born and raised in Iowa, she formed a passionate devotion to literature and writing, and became a ubiquitous figure on the Bohemian and radical left scene of the 1920s and 1930s. This book is a collection of four autobiographical pieces, describing her Iowa upbringing; her life in Manhattan, Connecticut and Maine with her husband John Herrmann, also an author (Herrman's first novel was banned by U.S. Customs; he later became involved in the Whittaker Chambers-Alger Hiss affair, and fled to Mexico with his new wife and the FBI at his heels, where he lived an "Under the Volcano" life); her time in Weimar Germany; her travels to Communist Russia in the '30s; and her experiences on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War (the title piece, and best of the group), where she hung out with Hemingway and DosPassos. Along the way, Herbst talks of her friendships (or at least relationships) with Katherine Ann Porter, Maxwell Anderson, H.L. Mencken, and Hemingway (who turns up everywhere). Later in life, Herbst was befriended by Alfred Kazin (whose prose has an interesting similarity) and Saul Bellow. I believe she ended up in an old stone house without plumbing buried in the Pennsylvania countryside. Anyway, an interesting figure, one admires her feeling and her intellect, her literary passion and her political commitment, and although she must be considered a minor writer, she was a writer nonetheless.

[jlhoots]

After sleeping on Philip Roth forever, I finally read The Plot Against America and I Married A Communist. His characters' dilemmas are moral and complex and subtle. They may have been his last 2 novels - especially his utter seriousness, his indignation are engrossing. After those 2 explosions I can see why he gave up writing.

Should win the Nobel, but they don't seem to want to give it to an American.

[niels]

I hear this more often, but fact is the US is second on the list of nobel laureates by country, so this is not a correct statement. I think the list of nobel prize winners can certainly be debated ( I mean writers like Tolstoy, Proust, Borges, Kafka and Nabokov never won), but on average I think it is a pretty strong and correct list. As for the writers who still have a chance at winning, I would go for Milan Kundera (now that's someone who should have won it allready in my book), Wieslaw Mysliwski, Alessandro Baricco ( little bit of an outsider, but a personal favorite) or Haruki Murakami (I personally think his books are a little to "light" to win, but I can't think of a serious writer who managed to receive such a rockstar like status).

[jlhoots]

I hear this more often, but fact is the US is second on the list of nobel laureates by country, so this is not a correct statement. I think the list of nobel prize winners can certainly be debated ( I mean writers like Tolstoy, Proust, Borges, Kafka and Nabokov never won), but on average I think it is a pretty strong and correct list. As for the writers who still have a chance at winning, I would go for Milan Kundera (now that's someone who should have won it allready in my book), Wieslaw Mysliwski, Alessandro Baricco ( little bit of an outsider, but a personal favorite) or Haruki Murakami (I personally think his books are a little to "light" to win, but I can't think of a serious writer who managed to receive such a rockstar like status).

I should have said the Nobel for literature - or are we 2nd there too.

[niels]

Yes, sorry could have been more precise myself. I have to say I didn't read anything from Philip Roth myself, so can't really comment on his work personally.

[jlhoots]

Last American Nobel laureate in literature that I can remember is Toni Morrison. That was 20+ years ago.

American or not I believe Roth is qualified.

[ejp626]

Well, Alice Munro just got it, so I suspect North America will be passed over for a couple more years, just like the World Cup...

[Leeway]

If you want the complete list of Nobel Prize winners in Literature, you can check out this link:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/

I too think that Roth should have been awarded the Nobel. His novels have such an incredible, personal, immediate voice to them, his approach is searingly honest, and his works are fearless in their subject matter. He also meets a standard of greatness an old literature professor of mine once mentioned to me: a substantial body of work, a uniformly high quality of work, and work composed over a sufficient period of time to allow judgment. Not only that, he "finished strong" in his literary career, with the later works rivaling, maybe surpassing, some of the earlier ones.

So why hasn't he received it? Leaving aside the various dark mutterings one hears (who knows, they might be true), one reason I think is that his best known work is "Portnoy's Complaint," and the Nobel folks are probably too stuffy to contemplate naughty things done to a piece of liver, or base an award on it. OTOH, Elfride Jelinek got her Nobel with some very kinky material.

What bothers me most is that some of the literature awards go to complete nonentities, people it seems no one has ever heard of, before or since; authors with slim vitaes; authors with little more than a local reputation. These surprises cause the obligatory fifteen-minute sensation, then return to obscurity.

[jlhoots]

Well, Alice Munro just got it, so I suspect North America will be passed over for a couple more years, just like the World Cup...

Canadian - I'm just saying, nevertheless deserved.

Reading Bone Clocks, so I'm not partial only to American authors.

[A Lark Ascending]

Nothing you didn't already know or suspect in the first 100 pages. But utterly depressing when every page is littered with examples of how everything is fixed.

[BillF]

Nothing you didn't already know or suspect in the first 100 pages. But utterly depressing when every page is littered with examples of how everything is fixed.

Mr Jones is writing some great stuff in the Guardian nowadays; e.g. yesterday on the duping of the working class by UKIP:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/2014/nov/21/rochester-byelection-beliefs-of-ukip-voters

[BillF]

Have just finished the Atwood and am now reading the Ford. They have little in common, other than havng been published in the past year and having considerable literary merit IMHO :-)

[A Lark Ascending]

Nothing you didn't already know or suspect in the first 100 pages. But utterly depressing when every page is littered with examples of how everything is fixed.

Mr Jones is writing some great stuff in the Guardian nowadays; e.g. yesterday on the duping of the working class by UKIP:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/2014/nov/21/rochester-byelection-beliefs-of-ukip-voters

Thanks, Bill. That is very much in tune with the book.

He's very good on the way the neo-liberal right has appropriated the language of protest - opponents of mass deregulation condemned as 'reactionary', enemies of 'progress' and 'reform'; above all, enemies of 'freedom'. Freedom seems to now mean the freedom for the wealthy to get even more wealthy, having thrown off the shackles of such restrictive practices as paying their taxes.

Had to smile (a rictus one!) - only a couple of weeks ago Eton Boy was declaring reducing taxation to be a moral imperative. Even morality has been turned topsy-turvy.

[Leeway]

Just finished Drabble's The Waterfall (1969), and my reaction falls neatly between johnblitweiler's and Bill F's, the former chucking the book aside, the latter praising its intense inner monologue. I finished the book but I didn't find it easy. The protagonist, and part-time narrator, Jane Grey, has to be among the most neurotic characters I've come across, a mash-up at times of Oblomov and the narrator of Notes from the Underground. An Oxford graduate (but with an inferior degree- a joke I suppose), she is defeated by everything from putting the bread away to taking the bus. She's incredibly inept for the most part, but there seems to be a deeper meaning to that ineptness that eluded me. Her husband has left her after a violent scene (not to be condoned (it doesn't seem to affect Jane too much), but after a few hundred pages of Jane perhaps understandable), and she takes as a lover, a day after giving birth to her second child, James, the husband of her cousin Lucy. Lucy is more than a cousin really, in all respects Lucy is Jane's sister and near look-alike. Jane obsesses her way through the adulterous relationship, defying all logic, morality, convention, anti-convention, or romance. I guess that is the point of the book: a love affair that exists outside of all definitions. Jane's habit of asking endless rhetorical questions and then acting in various improbable ways got tiresome for me. Having said that, there are powerful and even beautiful moments in the book, meditations on Elizabethan song, the card tricks that give the story its title, the car accident, but these are quickly deflated. In general, the story itself is deflationary. What looks to start out as a Jacobean tragedy, or even Elizabethan comedy, becomes a mundane suburban tale.

Everyone knows that Drabble and her sister A.S. Byatt have no love lost for each other, indeed, rather detest each other. It seems to me that this novel is a Drabble salvo in her war with Byatt, with Jane and Lucy, and James and Malcolm (Jane's husband), serving as proxies. The work seems heavily coded in this altercation. I think the novel is also a working out of Drabble's literary aesthetic. Jane is a poet, and as the novel moves to an end, a certain literary code is established. I suspect this code is also contra Byatt. One last thing, the alternation between first-person and third-person narrative seemed to have no purpose or effect. I respect that the novel got under my skin, I respect the craft, but I can't say I enjoyed it much.

Moving on from Spark to another mid-20th century British female writer. Excellent - I shall certainly read another Drabble.

Just finished another one, The Waterfall. Powerful interior monologue - a good read.

It's so sad that it is clear in the past I read too fast, particularly in the mid 90s. I look over lists of books that I read and can remember very little about them.

AFAIK, I read Drabble's trilogy (The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity and The Gates of Ivory) and that's it. There is one fairly powerful image I remember from The Gates of Ivory and that's about it. Maybe someday I will make a dedicated run through her novels (a second time in some cases), though it is not a particularly high priority.

Earlier this week I quit "the Waterfall" on about page 40. I lost all symnpathy with the childish heroine, she was too much like me.

[BillF]

Just finished Drabble's The Waterfall (1969), and my reaction falls neatly between johnblitweiler's and Bill F's, the former chucking the book aside, the latter praising its intense inner monologue. I finished the book but I didn't find it easy. The protagonist, and part-time narrator, Jane Grey, has to be among the most neurotic characters I've come across, a mash-up at times of Oblomov and the narrator of Notes from the Underground. An Oxford graduate (but with an inferior degree- a joke I suppose), she is defeated by everything from putting the bread away to taking the bus. She's incredibly inept for the most part, but there seems to be a deeper meaning to that ineptness that eluded me. Her husband has left her after a violent scene (not to be condoned (it doesn't seem to affect Jane too much), but after a few hundred pages of Jane perhaps understandable), and she takes as a lover, a day after giving birth to her second child, James, the husband of her cousin Lucy. Lucy is more than a cousin really, in all respects Lucy is Jane's sister and near look-alike. Jane obsesses her way through the adulterous relationship, defying all logic, morality, convention, anti-convention, or romance. I guess that is the point of the book: a love affair that exists outside of all definitions. Jane's habit of asking endless rhetorical questions and then acting in various improbable ways got tiresome for me. Having said that, there are powerful and even beautiful moments in the book, meditations on Elizabethan song, the card tricks that give the story its title, the car accident, but these are quickly deflated. In general, the story itself is deflationary. What looks to start out as a Jacobean tragedy, or even Elizabethan comedy, becomes a mundane suburban tale.

Everyone knows that Drabble and her sister A.S. Byatt have no love lost for each other, indeed, rather detest each other. It seems to me that this novel is a Drabble salvo in her war with Byatt, with Jane and Lucy, and James and Malcolm (Jane's husband), serving as proxies. The work seems heavily coded in this altercation. I think the novel is also a working out of Drabble's literary aesthetic. Jane is a poet, and as the novel moves to an end, a certain literary code is established. I suspect this code is also contra Byatt. One last thing, the alternation between first-person and third-person narrative seemed to have no purpose or effect. I respect that the novel got under my skin, I respect the craft, but I can't say I enjoyed it much.

Some very interesting speculation in your second paragraph, Leeway.

I'm not finished with Drabble yet. I see The Garrick Year sitting on my to-be-read pile :-)

[ejp626]

It is really hard for me to understand the whole Drabble vs. Byatt feud. What would be unbelievably droll is if they cooked it up to help stir up sales when things were slow. Maybe there will be some grand reconciliation towards the end (like Dostoevsky and Turgenev...).

Anyway, I am wrapping up Herzen's My Past and Thoughts tonight and will be immediately launching into Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album, which I've never read. Then Fathers and Sons for the first time in 20+ years. It's been a long fall with the Russians, but quite rewarding.

[BillF]

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/25/readers-prefer-authors-own-sex-goodreads-survey

With my liking for Murdoch, Drabble, Taylor, Bowen, Pym, etc I thought I was the exception to the rule here, but looking at my reading over the past six weeks or so, it seems I'm not.

[niels]

It is really hard for me to understand the whole Drabble vs. Byatt feud. What would be unbelievably droll is if they cooked it up to help stir up sales when things were slow. Maybe there will be some grand reconciliation towards the end (like Dostoevsky and Turgenev...).

Anyway, I am wrapping up Herzen's My Past and Thoughts tonight and will be immediately launching into Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album, which I've never read. Then Fathers and Sons for the first time in 20+ years. It's been a long fall with the Russians, but quite rewarding.

That's a coincidence, I just started Sketches from a Hunter's Album (Jagersverhalen as it is called in Dutch) a few weeks ago but decided to lay it back on the shelf for a moment to read Stone Upon Stone from Wieslaw Mysliwski (which is fantastic).