7 books set in 6 different countries
England, Colombia, France, Germany, Spain, USA
Greetings!
The news a few months ago that Annie Ernaux was going to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature prompted me to think that a round-up of reviews of books by non-English authors, or set in foreign countries, would make quite an interesting newsletter. Your feedback on whether or not my assumption was correct would be most welcome.
Books reviewed here
The Go-Between
By J.P.Hartley
I’ve started this roundup with The Go-Between for four reasons. Firstly, it is set in England, and I’m nothing if not patriotic. Secondly, in 1971 there was a film of the book starring Julie Christie, who I fancied like mad at the time (and still do a bit: be still, my fluttering heart, etc). Thirdly, it begins with the famous line about the past being another country, so there is a tenuous connection there with the theme of this round-up. And finally, it is the first country in my alphabetically ordered list.
And now, with no more persiflage, here is my review….
Alright, I admit it: I was wrong. At the end of 2020, having read just around a quarter of The Go-Between, I wrote in a blog post somewhere:
Look, I know this is a classic, but I am finding it really hard going. I haven’t yet empathised with any of the characters, and so far am finding the whole thing a bit long-winded. Admittedly, I’ve only read 25% of it so maybe I’ll change my mind, but right now it feels like a bit of a penance. The famous first line: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” is great. I think the author’s big mistake was writing any more after that.
Well, I persevered, and at around the halfway mark it started to become interesting. The (somewhat subjective) evidence for this was to be found in my attitude. Rather than thinking, “How many pages to go?”, I began thinking, “OMG, what’s going to happen next?”.
I also started to ponder: why the obsession throughout the book with belladonna? I wonder whether this was a deliberate and subtle ploy by the author. The protagonist is in love, or infatuated, with a beautiful woman who, in many respects, is using him. I recalled that in The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce, belladonna is defined as something along the lines of “In English, a poisonous plant, in Italian, a beautiful woman, thereby demonstrating the similarity between the two languages.” Could Hartley have been referencing that?
As I continued to read, I began to discern the many layers in the prose, and so to appreciate it more. One of these days I shall read it again. Who knows, I might even enjoy the first half too next time!
Book of Clouds
By Chloe Aridjis
This fictional memoir of a girl from Mexico living in Berlin is completely engaging. I’ve never been to Berlin, but I feel like I’ve come to know it through this book. I’d probably have derived even more pleasure from it had I had a map of Berlin open while I read, but it stands on its own anyway.
The story itself is interesting, and the author brings the characters (and all of the cast really are characters) alive. The writing is beautiful, and more than once I found myself thinking: “Why has it never occurred to me to express my thoughts like this?”
Beautiful and thought-provoking is how I’d describe the prose. For instance, I really like this:
Spaces cling to their pasts, he said, and sometimes the present finds a way of accommodating this past, and sometimes it doesn’t.
That just seems to me to be very provocative, in a good way. It’s a very wistful way of portraying the city as a living entity, and although I’ve not been to this city, I can relate this sentiment to places I’ve known in London.
Definitely a book to curl up with.
Chronicle of a death foretold
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
My first attempt to read a book by Marquez was not entirely successful. That is to say, I gave up after about five pages. “Magic realism?”, I thought. “I don’t think so.”
Therefore it was with some foreboding that I opened this book. I need not have worried: I was gripped from the first sentence.
A little like Giovanni’s Room (reviewed below) in that we know from the outset what the outcome will be, this is a wonderful study in how the same event can be seen, or at least remembered, in many different ways by different people., and how everyone assumes someone else must know about something or be doing something about it.
A catalogue of errors and unforeseen consequences this reads like a farce.
The conceit or plotting device is that of someone trying to piece together exactly what happened twenty five years after the event. It therefore reads like a non-fiction account. Indeed, it reminded me in some ways of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
Threaded throughout is Marquez’s inimitable prose. Who can deny the sheer brilliance of:
She lied honestly.
A thoroughly enjoyable read.
Giovanni’s room
By James Baldwin
Giovanni’s Room, which is the only novel of James Baldwin’s that I’ve read so far (my Baldwin fare to date has comprised several articles, a few short stories and a biography), starts at the end. The result is a story that is intriguing and gripping within the first few minutes.
The writing is both beautiful and effective. You can feel the walls of Giovanni’s Room bearing in on you. You feel grubby from the sleaziness of some of the settings and scenes — the ones which involve hanging around bars looking for someone to pick up.
All the characters are portrayed with sympathy and are well-drawn. They all feel like real people. The interesting thing is that even when the narrating character behaves reprehensibly, such as by not helping his friend Giovanni, you cannot bring yourself to judge him.
This is a definitely a book worth reading if you value good writing, an interesting story involving a young man struggling with his sexuality, and a glimpse into the underbelly of French nightlife.
My only criticism, which is unfair given that it was first published in 1956, is that David’s girlfriend Hella seems quaintly old-fashioned. She feels it is necessary to be attached to a man. This is strange, considering that she has been independently-minded enough to travel around Spain by herself.
She also makes a comment that perhaps even these days is incisive and indisputable:
Americans should never come to Europe. It means they never can be happy again. What’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had.
A thoroughly enjoyable, if at times uncomfortable, read.
Things seen
By Annie Ernaux
Written in the form of a diary, Things Seen record the observations of the narrator as she travels around Paris on the RER rail network. I say “the narrator” because I’m not entirely sure whether the “I” in Things Seen refer to Ernaux herself, or a persona she’s adopted for the purpose. Certainly many of the observations seem a little too polished to have been mere jottings in a personal journal. Have they been spruced up afterwards? Or were they self-consciously written — somewhat over-written in places — with an eye to future publication?
I’m not sure it matters, except to purists who believe that every thought and conversation presented as being non-fiction has to contain no fictional elements at all, even if they help the narrative to flow better. Also, of course, the reader can not be absolutely certain that Ernaux herself shares the opinions voiced by the “I” in these entries.
I like the structure of the book. There is something to be said for short pieces that stand alone as impressions but yet together form a tapestry of a whole picture. One certainly gets a sense of the aspects of Paris which, as in any tourist-attracting city, are not to be discovered in the guidebooks.
The writer’s voice is evident in sentences such as:
In my head a sentence forms...with which surely I will do nothing. Simple habit of putting the world into words.
This is an incisive and accurate depiction of what writers do. We note down impressions, snippets of conversation, and from them craft sentences that we may be able to use one of these days, but almost certainly never will. (Not because we’re too lazy, but because, if we’re lucky, ideas come faster than we can keep up.)
There is much social commentary here, and a disdainful attitude towards politicians:
Politicians, and subsequently journalists, use terms like “colloquium”, “summit”, puffing up these empty words to give them importance.
This reminded me of something I wrote in January 2020, in an article about England’s Department for Education’s communication skills (or lack of them). I asked:
What’s the point of writing policy documents which are obscure, jargon-filled verbiage?
(Why I’ve never been offered a knighthood continues to baffle me, but I digress.)
At times beautiful, at times cynical, at times hard-hitting, Things Seen is an endearing and accurate portrayal of a modern city. The word “endearing” may seem out of place, given the extracts I’ve included in this review. But I think you have to love a place in order to write beautifully about it, faults included.
Leaving the Atocha Station
By Ben Lerner
This is a very clever book. Too clever, in fact, for any one person to fully appreciate I think. There are so many references, to books, philosophers cultural stereotypes and even a film, most of which are unreferenced, that I found myself becoming slightly exasperated with the author’s apparent showing off his erudition.
However, I think that is all part of the charm of this story. The protagonist doesn’t simply live and do things, he continually thinks about what he ”should” look like, or whether his pretence at being a poet is itself a pretence and that perhaps he really is a poet, or whether Teresa is going to reject him, which to prevent he decides to reject her first….
A classic example is when he is invited to appear on a discussion panel on the subject of “Literature Now”. As he knows nothing, or thinks he knows nothing, he memorises a few quotes which in themselves are pretty meaningless, but which are all-purpose quotes.
This reminded me of two texts. First, Knots, by R.D. Laing. In addition to including passages along the lines of “Jack thinks Jill is going to reject him he rejects her; because Jack has rejected Jill she rejects him”, there is also this:
There is something I don’t know that I am supposed to know. I don’t know what it is I don’t know, and yet am supposed to know, and I feel I look stupid if I seem both not to know it and not know what it is I don’t know. Therefore I pretend I know it.
The idea of the all-purpose phrase also reminded me of Stephen Potter’s one-up-manship books. One of the ploys he recommends to make yourself appear as though you have gone into the subject rather more deeply than the expert who is speaking about it is to interject with:
But surely not in the south?
The expert is bound to say “Eh?”, and this is enough to throw them off their stride and give the appearance that you know more than they do.
The one-up-manship books also take opportunities to be “one up” on the reader. Thus a footnote declaring the results of a survey is enough to break your reading flow and make you hesitate for a moment before realising that the statistics quoted are completely a propos nothing at all. You’ve been had. Similarly with a sentence like “ I was sitting on the beach at Eastbourne when this idea suddenly came to me.” There’s a footnote then, which reads: “See our booklet called ‘Places where it is OK for things to first come to you at’”.
John Webster, in his play The White Devil, also, it seems to me, treats the reader and his characters in the way they treat each other. In that case it involves bumping people off. A major character will have someone killed, and then in further Acts is never mentioned again. They, like their victims, are simply discarded.
Similarly, I think Lerner is treating the reader the same way that his narrator treats others. He, the narrator, will come out with quotes and even “steal” experiences in order to somehow burnish his credentials. The narrator would be quite happy to not acknowledge his sources if he thinks that will make him look more intelligent, so why would he not treat us, the readers, in the same way?
I wasn’t able to spot all the philosophical references, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t get all of the cultural and literary references either.
As for the story itself, it was very interesting, though I learnt very little about Spain, apart from that it seems to have a lot of cafes. This was in contrast to the other books set in foreign cities, such as Book of Clouds (Berlin) and Things Seen (Paris), where I learnt, or at least was able to infer, a great deal about the cities in which the stories were set.
This was the first Ben Lerner book I’ve read, and it certainly won’t be the last.
Who will run the frog hospital?
By Lorrie Moore
If you like stories about teenaged angst, and especially female teenaged angst, you will like this book. Well I don’t and I didn’t. The protagonist seems obsessed with her breasts, or rather the lack of them (at least at first). I found it all rather tedious, so much so that by the end I was virtually shouting, “Put them away!”
I will say a few positive things about it though. First, I thought some of the writing was quite beautiful. Like this bit:
My body fights travel, sends up the weapons of a homeless person, the boundaries thinly drawn, the body with its own knowledge, disorientations, defenses [sic]...
Second, it’s an interesting device, to switch between the teenaged narrator and the adult one.
Third, there were some sections which were actually exciting, and I don’t mean the bits about breasts. For example, whether the narrator will be caught with her fingers in the till.
So, not all bad. I’m pleased I’ve discovered Lorrie Moore, and perhaps I’ll try another of her novels once I’ve recovered from this one.
Concluding remarks
I hope you found these reviews interesting, and the thematic nature of this round-up interesting. Your feedback would be most welcome, as would your sharing this post with others.
Great post, Terry. I read 'The Go-Between' for A-level English. I remember the story of the weather - that heatwave that at first was great but which became so oppressive - running alongside the much deeper story. I might dig it out again - thank you.
I am intrigued enough to want to read some of these, thank you!