Update / Crossroads / Cannery Row / The Testaments

After more years than I would care to divulge of sticking steadfastly to the 1001 books list I made the seismic decision at the start of this month that enough was enough. The reasons were twofold: (i) it’s getting too expensive and tedious to track down list books anymore; and (ii) more often than not I don’t actually enjoy them.

Obviously, as soon as I made this decision I found myself really enjoying The Time of the Hero and Deep River, both of which are recent positive reinforcements as to why the list can be beneficial (not just for obscure quiz questions), but I have since read three books (free from the library) which were minimum 4/5s:

• Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen, author of the Corrections and Freedom, both of which I loved, was released in 2021, and what is really sad is I can remember reading all the reviews at the time it was released (which didn’t seem that long ago). As with his aforementioned other two novels, it revolves around an American midwestern family, this time the Hildebrandts. Each of the family members does of course have their own faults and issues, but the clear “villain” is father Russ Hildebrandt, a minister, who is pursuing an affair with an attractive widow who has just moved to town. Russ’s shameful downfall is only hinted at during the first part of the novel, but it transpires that a rivalry with his second in command, Rick, over the church’s youth group (Crossroads) culminated in Russ stepping away from the group after a number of the teenagers strongly objected to his presence – and his overt praying – and one insinuated that he had been creeping on her. Russ’s longsuffering wife has been secretly been going to a therapist who quite clearly sees Russ’s faults (it transpires that he is resentful that she was not a virgin when they married but he was, and that he feels like she tricked him into marrying her when there might have been other women who would have slept with him – I refer to the earlier comment on him being a villain); but Marion refuses to see them herself, wrapped up in her own mental issues which came to a head in her pre-Russ youth with a full mental breakdown. She is also consumed with worry that she might have passed this on to her second son: the family’s third child, Perry, who swears off smoking pot at the beginning of the novel in part of his new Crossroads identity, but then descends into a completely different spiral. Completing the family are eldest son Clem who is now away in college and witness to Russ’s downfall at Crossroads, daughter Becky, who reluctantly joins the church group only to find that it offers her more than moral salvation, and youngest child Jud, who we actually don’t learn much about, as he does receive dedicated chapters. This is a long novel and initially I thought it was taking me a little while to get into, and then I tore through the rest of it in a weekend – I have loved all three of Jonathan Franzen’s novels so far that I’ve read; they are so easy to read and I love the full character development and complex backstories, and the essential truth that every character is interesting no matter how banal they may at first appear. 4.5/5
• Cannery Row by John Steinbeck was, I’m sure, a feature of one of the list’s iterations at one point – or perhaps I’m thinking of East of Eden – but either way he is an author that I love and this book did not disappoint. Having been to Cannery Row I can vouch that it is no longer anywhere near as poverty stricken, but can’t vouch for the pervasiveness of its characters as all of my exploring was a pre 8am run on a Pacific Coast Highway road trip. Based on how tacky I found it, and a large amount of the state, I can bet I would have found it disappointing if I’d spent time there in the day rather than on an incredibly foggy, atmospheric, and empty morning. Steinbeck captures the feel of the place through its characters, notably Doc, a marine biologist and perhaps the only character to have a legitimate and sustainable source of income, Lee Chong who runs the grocery store, and Mack and his buddies, who live in Lee’s abandoned warehouse and are generally up to no good but in an (almost) well meaning way. It’s a short book and was perfect for reading on the train, with vignettes of these and more minor characters, centred around two key events: the first being a party that Mack and the boys try to throw for Doc which gets out of hand, the second being their next attempt. 4/5
• The Testaments by Margaret Atwood is another novel that I have been wanting to read since it was published – in 2019 – and Margaret Atwood in general is another novelist that I absolutely love. I wish I hadn’t had to wait so long between reading this and the Handmaiden’s Tale because I’m sure that there were additional details and references that I missed (actually, I could have reread Handmaiden’s Tale now that I’m free to do so !), but nonetheless I loved this. The narration is split between three women: Lydia, an “Aunt” who runs Ardua Hall as a senior figure in Gilead, or as senior as a woman can be. In a previous life she was a judge and Commander Judd assigns her and three other Aunts the task of oversight for Gilead’s women. Aunts are allowed to be educated and read and write, within limits, but Lydia’s narration takes the form of a secret diary that she secretes within other works, aware of how incriminating it would be if it were discovered. The other two narratives take the form of witness statements, of Witness 369A and Witness 369B, and any confusion about them both beginning 369 is quickly removed as these are two very different characters: 369A, Agnes, was raised in Gilead and attended a high class girls school, run by the Aunts, to prime her for her place in society (marriage, of course, to a high ranking man), whereas 369B, Daisy, was raised in Canada by parents actively involved in anti-Gilead activities. Apart from the obvious link of their narratives all being thrown together in the novel, and Agnes and Daisy presumably being part of the same case, it isn’t immediately clear how the three are intertwined. This novel was brilliant: again I raced through it in a weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. Margaret Atwood writes so well and the worlds and characters she creates as well as the accessibility of the text make it so easy to immerse yourself fully in her books. 4.5/5

#746 Deep River

Another audiobook, and the optimism I’d felt before starting Foundation was flipped here, because I did not enjoy Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence at all. However, as seems so often to be the way with books on the list, I was pleasantly surprised.

Deep River is a set of intertwining stories about a group of Japanese tourists on a trip to India in the 1980s. We being with Osamu Isobe, whose wife died of cancer not too long ago. Her death prompts Isobe to reflect on their marriage: by his own account taking her for granted in life, he is extremely upset when she’s gone and sets out to try and find whether she might have been reincarnated – one of her dying comments – which takes him to India. By chance, another member of the tour group was a volunteer nurse at Mrs Isobe’s bedside, Mitsuko Naruse. Mitsuko cannot rid herself of thoughts of Otsu, a source of ridicule during their time together at university but who she has found herself pursuing across the years, visiting him in Lyon, France on her honeymoon where he was training as a priest, and now supposedly living in India. The ageing Kiguchi has come to pay tribute to his fellow soldiers in a Buddhist ritual – both for his friends in the Japanese army and to the soldiers they were fighting against in Burma, and most of all the friend who kept him alive, while children’s author Numada has come to see first hand the birds and animals he writes about. The titular river is the River Ganges, with Varanasi being a stop on the tour’s itinerary, another (kind of) familiarly as I researched it for my university dissertation.

The key characters all have intriguing backstories with their own twists – the most haunting unsurprisingly being Kiguchi’s – but the story has overlaying common themes of religion, life, death, and the culture clash between Japan and India. It also drew in a lot of places that I could relate to – in particular the passages in Lyon, which I wasn’t expecting. While I found Silence to be stiflingly boring, I really enjoyed Deep River – the kind of audiobook that I’m happy to leave the house to go on a walk to listen to, and that I don’t pause the second I get in.

4/5

#745 Foundation

After the surprise success of Stranger from a Strange Land and Swarm last year as sci-fi audiobooks, and how much I enjoyed I Robot (also by Isaac Asimov), I was hoping Foundation would be another enjoyable listen – actually I thought it might be a waste to have this as an audiobook.

Sadly, this was not the case. Published in 1951, Foundation is the first in the trilogy of the same name (which was then extended to a full series). In the Galactic Era, mathematician and psychologist Hari Seldon has developed what he calls psychohistory, being a way to predict future galactic trends using sophisticated mathematics and statistical analysis, from which he has predicted the fall of the Empire. Obviously, the Empire’s rulers are not very happy at this prospect, and he is exile to Terminus, a fairly barren planet at the edge of the galaxy. This then becomes the home of the Encyclopaedia Foundation (the eponymous foundation), tasked with collating all of the galaxy’s knowledge, with the majority of Terminus City’s inhabitants working on the project. Terminus is then threatened by a few other planets and to be honest, the very little interest that I had managed to maintain up to this point was then fully lost and although this wasn’t a long audiobook it was a real slog to get through.

I think the thing that I struggle with in science fiction is where too much time is spent establishing a world or a galaxy without the character development to fully bring it alive, whereas in both Swarm and Stranger from a Strange Land the key focus was on the character stories rather than the science. I did finish listening to this but really I might as well have not bothered.

0.5/5

#744 The Time of the Hero

I was browsing for a holiday read (forgetting that I had Hadrian the Seventh from the library – and it would have infinitely improved the reading aspect of the holiday if that had remained forgotten) and picked this up with some hesitation. I read The Feast of the Goat a couple of years ago and wasn’t impressed – it seemed like it should have been a good read but dragged a lot. However, needs must and I’m really struggling to find books I haven’t read that sound good – even on amazon – and I do resent paying for them when I doubt I’ll enjoy them, but I picked up another of Mario Vargas Llosa’s books and it was described as a comedy, and although typically that book wasn’t on my list I thought I’d give him another go with this one which is.

Set in a military academy for boys in Peru, the narrative cycles around key pupils most of whom go by nicknames. “The Jaguar”, the harshest of the boys, orders Cava who’s from a poorer background to steal the answers to a test, but Cava accidentally breaks a window and the theft is discovered, but not the culprit. All of the boys are confined to the grounds until eventually “The Slave”, desperate to see a girl he is planning to ask out, tells one of the commanders.

The novel flicks between first and third person narrative and I’m not sure that I ever fully got my head around who was who in the former – it took me a while to match it up for characters who were less distinctive or less prominent in the third person chapters. When I eventually got to grips with the different personalities there was just one left who I wasn’t certain on, which I eventually deduced to be the Jaguar, but I think the confusion actually added to my reading because it mirrored the sense of the boys being duplicitous with each other. Whereas often this lack of clarity – which was likely on my side – would make me struggle to feel absorbed into the story, this somehow didn’t deter me: although it was slow to get going, I found myself enjoying it by the end.

4/5

#743 Tropic of Cancer

For some reason I’ve always equated Henry Miller with someone like D H Lawrence in my mind and thought he was stuffy and dull (and British), although I like D H Lawrence so that seems unfair. Henry Miller was in fact American, and was active between the 1930s and the 1980s, and Tropic of Cancer was his first novel, published in 1934 and swiftly banned.

Set in Paris, Tropic of Cancer is loosely autobiographical of the author’s life, often living in squalor as a struggling writer. He associates with an interesting cast of characters, most of them equally impoverished, unconventional and intellectual, but happily in pursuit of hedonism.

After struggling through the first chapter I thought this was going to be tedious – the largely nonsensical raving at characters we don’t know (I was going to put a quote here, but it’s all so needlessly profane) and abandoned the book for a while rather than suffer through another 250 pages, but when I did finally pick it back up I was pleasantly surprised. I think the link between Henry Miller and D H Lawrence is from both of their novels being banned for obscenity, but Tropic of Cancer is more akin to a William Burroughs than Lady Chatterly’s Lover, albeit it a much more coherent William Burroughs (after that first chapter). I enjoyed Miller’s frank and witty lyrism (“‘Life,’ said Emerson, ‘consists in what a man is thinking all day.’ If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine. I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night”).

This is another novel that I’m not sure I would recommend, but I am surprised how much I enjoyed reading it in the end.

3.5/5

#742 The Mandarins

I’ve always avoided Simone de Beauvoir based on the impression that her writing would be stuffy and tediously high brow, but after reading Sartre’s Nausea it was only right to disown that preconception and give her a go. Sadly, and also unfortunately given that her only novel on the list is over 700 pages long, this wasn’t in the same league as Nausea.

The Mandarins was published in 1954 and is set in post-WWII France, where a group of intellectuals are readjusting to their life and place in the world. It revolves around Henri Perron, the editor of leftist newspaper L’espoir, and Anne Dubreuilh, a psychoanalyst who is considered to be at least partly autobiographical. Anne is married to Henri’s friend Robert Dubreuilh, an author and member of the SRL, a liberal, non-Communist political group, and the place of politics in publishing is a consistent theme of contention for Henri, Robert, and a host of the novel’s other characters. There was much too much of the latter, and not enough of what could be considered more base-level drama, e.g. Henri holidaying with Anne and Robert’s teenage daughter Nadine much to the chagrin of his long term girlfriend Paula, who descends slowly into a breakdown as a result of his rejection. Largely for this reason, I vastly preferred the second half of the novel, which centres around Anne’s affair with American author Lewis Brogan.

In spite of a subplot in which one of Henri and Robert’s associates hunts down and kills Nazi collaborators, this novel really failed to grasp my attention in the way I’d been hoping. It is extremely well writing and the structure of the plot, as outlined above, should have been enjoyable, it was just far too drawn out.

3/5

#741 Hadrian the Seventh

My overwhelming impression is that this was a silly book which I had very little interest in reading, with its only saving grace being that it was at least quick to read; and I feel like I could stop writing there.

Partly autobiographical fantasy from its author, Frederick Rolfe (or Baron Corvo), an English author who trained as a priest including in Rome, but was ultimately expelled for his erratic behaviour. Rolfe styles himself as George Arthur Rose, who is one day visited by two Cardinals who summon him to Rome where, to his surprise, he is voted as the next pope at the conclave, upon which he assumes the name of Hadrian the Seventh.

Rose / Hadrian spends his days as pope smoking, redecorating, and reshuffling the current order, until (apologies, spoiler) he is unfortunately assassinated. Prior to that he is pursued by two people from his former life, a woman who professes to be in love with him and a man from (I think) a socialist organisation, both of whom claim demands on Rose and attempt to slander his name.

If this hadn’t been the only book I took on a weekend away, and if I hadn’t had a number of travel hours over the weekend I suspect this book would have taken me ages to get through this novel – sadly, another one which left me questioning its place on the list.

1/5

#740 Zeno’s Conscience

This seems like the kind of audiobook I could easily have hated, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why I didn’t (it doesn’t help that I listened to this in January). The book is prefaced with an introduction that it was written at the behest of Zeno’s psychologist, as an exercise in his patient’s psychoanalysis, although he excuses it for being “full of lies”.

Zeno begins his autobiography by insulting his psychologist – his one guaranteed reader – who he engaged to help him quit smoking, a habit he picked up in childhood stealing cigarettes from his father. He had his first “last cigarette” when he was 20, and since then he has had infinite last cigarettes (bringing to mind Trainspotting – “there are final hits and then there are final hits, what kind was this to be”). His repeat failings to give up form the theme of his first chapter, subsequent themes include his father’s death, his first marriage, and his business dealings. Although the topics aren’t necessarily funny, Zeno’s narrative style is amusing – a number of times I found myself thinking that this should have been tedious, but it wasn’t. As a young man Zeno acquaints himself with successful businessman Giovanni Malfenti and his family, Mrs Malfenti and their four daughters. Zeno speaks disparagingly of Augusta, who is plain and has a squint, but ends up marrying and loving her, and having a much happier union than his first choice. Ada instead marries Guido Speier, who begins as Zeno’s rival but becomes his business partner, but has a tumultuous marriage and similarly rocky financial situation.

I’m not sure if I would have enjoyed this as much if I’d read it rather than listened to it, but it was a pleasant surprise. It’s always hard when I conclude on an audiobook along these lines to decide whether or not I would recommend it.

3.5/5

#739 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

This was a strange audiobook listen, because I didn’t not enjoy it but I am struggling to summarise what I liked about it, or even what it was about. It is the soliloquies of our narrator, now living in Paris, now recounting childhood memories and other encounters, and his reflections on life and especially death. Often, this kind of pointless (to be reductionist) stream of consciousness would irritate me to no end, and I suspect this would have if I had read it myself, but in listening to it snatches of the tableaux that the narrator describes piqued my interest, even if I did find myself the next minute hearing a completely different scene described, often without a discernible link.

From research I’ve done after finishing it, I understand that Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet and that this is at least partly autobiographical, both of which make sense. Given all of the above I don’t think that I can justifiably rate it highly, but in the depressing context of the rest of the audiobooks I struggle through it was nice to have one that I didn’t completely dread, even if I can’t say I especially followed it.

1/5

#738 The Passion According to G.H.

What a tedious book. Whatever genius people see in Clarice Lispector I can now say I cannot see it – between this book and The Hour of the Star I am thoroughly unimpressed. At least both have been quick reads.

To summarise (and spoil the “plot”, because whatever the draw is about this book it clearly isn’t what actually happens in it): an affluent Brazilian sculpture is alone in her apartment, her maid having quit. She goes into the maid’s room, intending to clean the apartment beginning there; the room is spotlessly clean apart from a strange mural on the wall of three figures and – to GH’s horror – a cockroach. She crushes the cockroach and then an existential crisis ensues, climaxing in her eating the cockroach.

This isn’t even the best book I’ve read about a cockroach (that award going to Metamorphosis – the only other that springs to mind which features cockroaches so prominently, which is no bad things since it’s not the nicest subject). My favourite part was where the narrator says “my desire would be to interrupt all of this and insert in this difficult story, purely for the sake of fun and relaxation, a great anecdote I heard the other day about why a couple broke up” – if only.

0/5