Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings

The books of indie publisher Michael Walmer have featured here on the Ramblings a number of times; he releases a wide range of interesting fiction, poetry and non-fiction, and since his relocation to the Shetland Islands (he was previously based in Australia), his focus has turned to writings from that area. Specifically, he launched an imprint called Northus Shetland Classics, and I’ve covered a pair of fascinating titles in that series on the blog. His latest Northus release is a poetry collection – “A Day Between Weathers” by William J. Tait – and it’s a fascinating, if occasionally challenging, read!

I have to confess straight away that Tait was a new name to me, which is to my detriment as he’s clearly a poet of some power. Born on the Shetland Island of Yell in 1918, he studied at Edinburgh University and taught across Scotland and England. Nationally recognised and published widely during his lifetime, “A Day Between Weathers” was originally issued in 1980 but has for some reason lapsed out of print – so kudos to Mike for the reissue.

“A Day…” is split into three sections, thematically gathered: the first is a miscellany, the second contains poems concerning love and the final one takes on the knotty subject of war. However, as well as those three divisions, the works also have another unique factor – they range over three dialects, those of English, Scots and Shetlandic. So this is something of a first for me! I know English and can manage a bit of Scots (having been born in Edinburgh) but Shetlandic is a new adventure. So I was really keen to see explore the book’s contents.

Held in the slaty hollow of the sky,
Based in the tarnished pewter of the sea,
The snow-pied hills deny
The anachronism, Spring.

I could tell straight away that Tait’s poetry was something I could relate to; his verse is beautiful and evocative. Whether capturing nature or landscape, mining human emotions or lamenting the horror of war, his writing is lyrical and often immediate. The poems move between the three tongues with ease, and Tait seems equally comfortable expressing himself in any of them. As with any poetry, the meaning is not always clear but the world are very beautiful.

The miscellany contained a lovely variety of poems, as did the love section. However, I think it was the war poems which hit me hardest; Tait really captures the world during conflict, with poignant memorials for the lost, and visions of Scotland at war. The variety of poetry in this collection is impressive, but I have to pick out one poem which particularly knocked me out. Christie Williamson highlights it in his introduction to the collection, and that’s for a good reason – it’s stunning. “Scorched Earth” from 1941 is one of Tait’s war poems and it was apparently inspired by a political rally attended by Tait where discussion of Russia’s ‘scorched earth’ policy was greeted with enthusiasm. In the poem, Tait envisages the East Coast of Scotland under invasion from the Germans, with the populace retreating and destroying the landscape he knew and loved. The poem contains stark and vivid impressions of Edinburgh being decimated, the Forth Bridge collapsing and the surviving Scots drawing back to hold a line against the invaders. It’s a dazzling tour de force of poetry, powerful and unforgettable, and one of the best poems I’ve ever read.

Poetry can sometimes be difficult to read, and it has to be said that Tait adds another level of complexity with his use of three dialects. However, even if you have to work a little at the Scots or Shetlandic poems, the results are worth it; and there is a guide and glossary at the back to help you. Intriguingly, some of the dialect poems are translations to that argot from French poets. Baudelaire makes an appearance, but Francois Villon is his favourite, and it’s fascinating seeing how Tait renders these into Shetlandic. I was reminded of the fact that there are lauded translations of Mayakovsky into Scots by Edwin Morgan, from 1972; it seems that maybe other languages than English are more welcoming to poetic translation

All in all this is a wonderful collection, full of beautiful poetry (in all three dialects) and much powerful verse which will stay with me. Tait is obviously a poet who deserves to be more widely known, and for “Scorched Earth” alone I would recommend this book – that vision of a destroyed Edinburgh will haunt me. A marvellous reissue in the Northus Shetland Classics series which I hope will be very widely read.

(Review copy kindly provided by Mike Walmer, for which many thanks! Rob Spence has done an excellent review of this title over at Shiny New Books.)

Back in 2024, I read the classic book “The Woman in the Dunes” by Kōbō Abe for Japanese Literature Month and was very taken with it, if a little unnerved by the claustrophobic atmosphere of the story. At the time, I thought I’d like to explore his writing but I’ve somehow never got to any of his other books. However, a comment on a recent post by Tony about Abe’s work mentioned “The Ruined Map” and when I did a bit of searching it appeared that a new and shiny Penguin Modern Classics version was available (albeit in an older translation by E. Dale Saunders). Needless to say, a copy arrived at the Ramblings hot on the heels of “Kafkaesque” and bypassed the TBR in much the same way!

At first glance, “Ruined…” appears to be a detective novel, pitched as noir. A Mr. Nemuro disappeared six months ago; a respected salesman, there’s no obvious reason why he should do a runner, but it *has* taken his wife a while to call in a private eye. This is our unnamed narrator, and from the start he’s unsettled. The wife lives in a newly built suburb, which in itself brings a sense of alienation. She’s attractive and alcoholic, and can provide no clues for the sleuth apart from a matchbox and a photo. These take our narrator to a local cafe, but no further; and the missing man’s brother is an unsettling presence who can offer no help.

It soon becomes clear that the detective is working in a haze, with the narrative reflecting the muddle he’s working through. No-one will give a straight answer; no-one has any information; and the detective finds himself drawn into a corrupt underworld where brutality can erupt at any moment (and indeed does). There are hints of industrial wrongdoings, protection rackets amongst the building works, and a subculture of sex and violence in the underbelly of the city and its environs. A colleague of Mr. Nemuro is as elusive as everyone else in the story and as the narrative becomes more oblique so does the mental state of the sleuth. It becomes doubtful, frankly, if any kind of solution will be reached…

Was this world so unbearable that one had to go on eternally escaping until one could put up with such a life?

If I’m honest, “Ruined…” is not always an easy book to follow. There is often little introduction to characters or settings, no real sense of where the plot is going, and as well as an underlying feeling of unease, it becomes hard at times not to want to shake the characters and get them to say what the mean. There is a lot of description of places and things, and yet getting a handle on the people is difficult. In many ways the city, its developing suburbs and its often surreal appearance seem to be the most important element of the story and I suspect that’s what Abe intended.

My take on the book, eventually, is that Abe meant it to be a commentary on then-current Japanese society, with its post-War building, westernised suburbs, and the alienation which goes with the modern world. It certainly shouldn’t be read as a detective story, as I feel that that element is just there for the author to hang his story on, and he’s more concerned with fragmentary experiences, dislocation and loss of sense of identity. Framing this in the trappings of a detective story is a clever idea, and ultimately, I think I understood what Abe was trying to do with the book, but it just ended up being too opaque for me and not really hanging together.

If you cling to trifles, you’re left behind. They all keep on walking like that without resting. Whatever would they do if they lost their goals and were put in the position of just watching others walk? Just thinking about it paralyzes my feet.

As for the ending, well things become very slippery here, with loss of identity and this reader, at least, a bit at sea about what was happening. Frankly, finishing this was a bit of a relief, and I can’t claim to be any the wiser as to who was who, and whether any of what had gone before was actually real! This is a very different book to “Dunes” and I have no idea if it’s typical of Abe (*is* there a typical Abe??); so I will check a little more carefully and not buy so impulsively if I consider reading any more of his books. An interesting and unusual read, but not entirely satisfying…

I have a new review up at Shiny New Books today and it’s of a fascinating and absorbing book – “The Village on the Edge of the World: Writing and Surviving Ceaușescu’s Romania” by Nobel prize-winner Herta Muller.

In “Village…” Muller explores her past, from her time as a child living in a remote village, with all the harshness that lifestyle brings, to her attempts to work and write within a totalitarian regime. Compiled from a series of interviews, it’s actually a beautifully written work which reads more like a crafted memoir. You can read my full review here!

There’s been a run of books recently which have arrived at the Ramblings and not even skimmed Mount TBR; and for once, I can remember where I heard about this recent arrival! The book is “Kafkaesque” by Maïa Hruska, translated by Sam Taylor, and it was featured in one of the regular newsletters I get from bookshops; it sounded right up my street so I had to send off for it straight away, and it arrived when I had just finished one book and was ready to start on another. Inevitably, this was the book!

The book has a really interesting premise: the subject is, of course, the great author Franz Kafka but instead of looking at his life and work directly, she instead examines him through the lens of the early translators of his work into other languages – and the names of these are perhaps unexpected. As Hruska reveals, luminaries such as Primo Levi, Bruno Schulz, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov all spent time working on translations and annotations of Kafka. There is also Milena Jesenská, one of Kafka’s passions, who as well as being a writer and a journalist was also an early translator.

Hruska, who is a French-Czech writer, brings fascinating perspective to Kafka’s afterlife. She explores the connections between the the author and many of the translators; considers the importance of Yiddish and Hebrew to Kafka; and of course, inevitably, there is a thread running through the book of the Holocaust. The 20th century was marked by this and many of these translators had experience in the death camps (Milena would die in one).

However, Hruska sees Kafka in a wider context, and one of her touchstones is the concept of “pokoj”, a Czech word which can be translated as ‘home’ and ‘peace or tranquility’. Kafka, and indeed all of his translators, seem to be searching for that, needing a safe space to live and work and that perhaps sums up the tragedy of the 20th century; homes became unsafe while conflicts raged and borders shifted, and no-one has the peace to be able to work or create, Inevitably, the search for a Jewish homeland comes into play, and the fate of Kafka’s papers after WW2 is a story in itself.

The pokoj constitutes a form of dissidence in itself. Tyrants hate rooms of one’s own, just as they hate private diaries. If Kafka was prescient when it came to totalitarianism, it was perhaps because he was able to observe, like Kundera after him, that when an organisation declared itself to be ‘like one big family’, all rights to secrecy, to integrity, to pokoj, were instantly abolished. Kafka had no more desire to reveal the layout of his room than that of his psyche.

In this series of linked essays, then, Hruska traces the effects of Kafka on the 20th century through the writers who took him on and carried his work forward. The ‘Pnins’, as she calls them (using Nabokov’s fictional exiled professor as an example) brought his work to American academia. Italo Calvino asked Primo Levi to translate Kafka into Italian – something of a trial for Levi as he was not a fan, it seems, and I doubt Kafka did much for his state of mind. And Bruno Schulz turns out to have unexpected synchronicities with Kafka; both have contested legacies which are fought over by those emphasising their European heritage and others insisting on their Jewish heritage. I’d been previously unaware that Schulz had translated “The Trial” in 1936, but somehow it makes sense; both authors incorporated much that was strange, unsettling and surreal into their work, so there is a kind of kinship.

As you might have gathered, this is a book which goes off at tangents all over the place, and is better because of it – although that does make in a little hard to pin down! As Hruska concludes, every translator brings something of themselves to Kafka and how they render him in another language, so that really each translation is a new work of art. Seeing the adventures of Kafka’s work throughout the tumultuous events of the last century really did make for fascinating reading, as well as sending me off exploring down a number of rabbit holes!

And yet… I *was* thoroughly absorbed in the book but I did pause in a couple of places. Hruska’s love of the French translations by Alexandre Viallate is clear, but I’ve seen commentary online about his work perhaps smoothing out the edges of Kafka when rendering the Czech in his own language. I suppose early translators often did this – the renaming of Tolstoy’s Andre as Andrew in an early version made me shudder – and when Hruska objects to modern French translators getting rid of Viallate’s presence in the translations as if they were ‘cleaning up a crime scene’ I did wonder a little.

Hruska is a little prone to sweeping statements, which is all well and good, but I was somewhat surprised to hear her comment that all Holocaust survivors were ashamed of using the German language after the war, as I’m sure that can’t be the case. As for the subtitle of the book, this is perhaps a little disingenuous as there aren’t actually ten specific names attached to each language; for example, the chapter on Kafka and the Hebrew is more an exploration of the debates concerning what language Jewish people should adopt in their homeland, and whether Hebrew, as such ancient language rooted in religion, would work for the everyday. It’s certainly fascinating but perhaps we are stretching the premise here a little.

But these are probably minor quibbles, and despite them, Hruska casts a fascinating light on the literature of the 20th century and the effect Kafka had on it. “Kafkaesque” was an engaging and sometimes provocative read which really set me thinking – as well as not only making me want to pick up Kafka again, but also sending me off in some very interesting directions! It was just the right book at the right time for me, and if you have any interesting in the culture of 20th century, I think you would find it captivating!

Memo to self: you really should start making a note about where you’ve heard about a particular book as it’s rare that the information remains in your head!! The book I want to share my thoughts about today is one I picked as long ago as 2015 and I have no idea where it or its author first appeared in my sight-line. The title is “Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings” by Nellie Bly, and my edition is a US Penguin Classic; but why I felt moved at that point to pick it up is anyone’s guess! However, I decided it should come off the TBR recently, and it did make interesting reading – although I do have some caveats!

Nellie Bly (1864-1922) was a pioneering American journalist who kick-started the ‘stunt girl’ reporting (a kind of early tabloid-style journalism) with her spectacular stories and headline grabbing exploits. Yet, although she’s regarded as something of a trailblazer, it seems (from the foreword by Maureen Corrigan), that she’s more read *about* than actually having her writing in print. This anthology seeks to redress that imbalance and gathers together a selection of her work ranging from her early appearances in print to her final writings.

Bly first made it into the papers when she responded by letter to an outrageous article in a local paper suggesting following China’s example of killing girl babies to avoid having too many women… This kick-started a journalistic career. However, she really sprang into the public eye when she managed to get herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island to report on the conditions there. The results, reproduced here, are frankly eye-opening. The tortuous route through which Bly went to get committed reflects the conditions for working women at the time; any slight sign of behaviour outside the norm led to suspicion, and as she found once inside the place, women could be institutionalised for the flimsiest of reasons.

I commenced to shake with more than the cold, and I looked around at the strange crowd about me, composed of poorly dressed men and women with stories printed on their faces of hard lives, abuse and poverty. Some were consulting eagerly with friends, while others sat still with a look of utter hopelessness. Everywhere was a sprinkling of well-dressed, well-fed officers watching the scene passively and almost indifferently. It was only an old story with them. One more unfortunate added to a long list which had long since ceased to be of any interest or concern to them.

And once inside, she encountered the most horrendous conditions. Brutal staff, indifferent doctors, disgusting and inedible food, plus bitter cold; lack of proper hygiene or exercise, and cruelty all around; well, if you weren’t mad when you went in, you soon would be, and one of the women institutionalised at the same time as Bly seemed to be well on this way. It’s harsh reading, and I believe contributed to a change in conditions. Fortunately, Bly was able to get out but I did worry about those others incarcerated and hoped something would improve their lot.

This piece of journalism was powerful, and made gripping reading; the central work of the book, however, was a little more problematic. “Around…” is a long-form piece of journalism which relates Bly’s adventures as she travelled round the world, attempting to beat the record of the fictional Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s “Around The World In 80 Days” and it was hugely popular at the time. Readers followed her escapades and her itinerary as she rushed round the planet on the most modern modes of transport available. There were competitions to guess her actual time, and even a rival from another paper racing against her. And yet… This one didn’t quite work for me.

Accepting that the asylum piece was still aimed at getting publicity, it had perhaps an intent behind it, to improve conditions for inmates. The journey, by contrast, was pure attention seeking, and pioneering as Bly’s journey might sound, in many ways it wasn’t. Although she was portrayed as a feisty woman, bravely travelling on her own, it’s clear she was actually accompanied everywhere. A variety of gentlemen met her off trains and ships, escorted her about and ensured she met her deadlines. While this is to be expected, it leaves the presentation perhaps a little bit disingenuous.

There’s an additional element which niggles, which is Bly’s attitudes to the various countries through which she travels and the peoples she meets. Her viewpoints are of her time, and she’s often judgemental – particular about China and its inhabitants for some reason. Allowing for the fact that she had little time to do more than barely register the country through which she was rushing, it’s difficult to read the sweeping statements she makes about places, and also her (very Western) attitudes to people like the struggling native pulling her rickshaw…

I’m aware that I perhaps shouldn’t be judging Bly’s writings and attitudes by 21st century standards; however, I couldn’t help but be aware of them, and as such a large chunk of the book was taken up with travelogue, it became perhaps disproportionate so it’s perhaps hard to judge how much the travel story represents the body of her work. I have to be honest and say that “Around…” did become a bit dull in places, as it just moved from train to boat to carriage or whatever. The narrative ended up being quite surface-level and if I’m honest I glazed over a bit.

In heavy fur-lined coat, sweater, flannel waist, cap, gloves, mitts, I am chilled to the last drop of blood. I think with fainting heart of the thousands of weary, sick, hungry men lying in mud trenches. Not here alone in bleak but lovely Galiscze, not only these kind childlike Austrians, but those of other nations. The Russians just back of these wonderful hills, the Germans and the French gentlemen and peasants lying in their terrible mud trenches. Not thousands but millions of them. I try to realize all it means—the untold, indescribable suffering of millions of the world’s best men, and when I say millions of men I must multiply those millions by ten to count the wives, children, parents and sweethearts and relatives who are suffering untold mental agony.

As for the later pieces of work featured here, the most powerful had to be Bly’s WW1 journalism. By sheer coincidence, she happened to be in Europe when the war broke out and managed to get herself to the Russian and Serbian fronts. The visceral, heartbreaking pieces she sent back for her paper made no bones about what she saw and revealed early on the horrors of war. Of course, at that point the USA had not yet entered the conflict, and I do wonder whether her reports were published in any of the countries involved in the fighting. They certainly could have been perceived as anti-war writings which would have gone against the propaganda being spewed out by the various European countries who were fighting. These were certainly sobering to read.

Bly’s range *was* wide; she could move from interviews with famous women to fiction (not included here) to tales of her attempts to house unwanted orphans. The interviews were fascinating; the one with Susan B. Anthony, an early feminist and abolitionist, stood out for me; and that with Belva Lockwood, who ran as a female presidential candidate (back in 1888!) was quite eye-opening. So there is much in this volume which makes for really interesting reading, also casting light on women’s situations at the time, and the attitudes they were up against.

The book comes with commentary and notes by its editor Jean Marie Lutes and strangely, I felt she was almost apologising for Bly at points, acknowledging the stunt journalism aspect of things and that she was of her time, which was quite odd. I also found myself querying the titling of the book; as the full travel story was not included, a more apt title would have been, perhaps, “A Nelly Bly Reader”, and I personally found the “Other Writings” to be the most interesting parts here. Certainly, it wasn’t always clear whether it was a full work which was being reproduced, and a little more notation on that aspect would have been helpful.

I hope this post doesn’t come over as completely negative, as parts of the book were fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable, and I was happy to have made the acquaintance of Nellie Bly. She *was* an adventurer and a pioneer, a self-made woman who had a heck of a life (her Wikipedia entry is definitely worth looking up). However, I feel that centring the book on “Around…” wasn’t the best move; this probably worked better in segments in newspapers, with readers waiting for the next instalment, than put together in a book like this. So this was an interesting and often informative book, which I’m glad I read – but at the moment I’m unsure if it will end up in my permanent collection!!

Having spent a good amount of time in an infinite, never-ending library inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, it was kind of inevitable that I would want to go on and read some of that author’s work. I have been gradually making my way through a beautiful volume of his “Collected Fictions“, translated by Andrew Hurley, and I realised when checking that I was nearly at the end. Only two collections still remained unread, and frankly this seemed like the ideal time to pick them up. The titles are “The Book of Sand” (1975) and “Shakespeare’s Memory” (1983) and although late Borges (he passed away in 1986), they are as powerful as his early works.

By this point in his life, Borges was blind and so dictating all of his works. The stories are often short (as are many of his earlier writings) but no less profound and affecting. I’ll look at the collections separately, starting with “Sand”; this contains thirteen stories, each of which is a gem:

The Other
Ulrikke
The Congress
There Are More Things
The Sect of the Thirty
The Night of the Gifts
The Mirror and the Mask
Undr
A Weary Man’s Utopia
The Bribe
Avelino Arredondo
The Disk
The Book of Sand

The stories range across Borges’ usual obsessions, from tales of gaucho past to works which look forward to strange futures and those which deal with the unnerving and unknown. “The Other” is a suitably unsettling opener dealing, as it does, with one of Borges’ obsessions, that of the double. In the story, Borges the narrator meets up with a version of himself from the past, and they compare their different times and beliefs. “Ulrikke” is an unusual story for the writer, dealing as it does with love and sex. “The Congress“, which was apparently one of Borges’ favourites of his own works, is a somewhat Utopian exploration of the concept of creating a congress of the world with everyone represented; and Utopias reappear in “A Weary Man’s Utopia” when the future is seen to be strange and unlike most predictions. As is so often the case, the Utopias go wrong…

“There Are More Things” was particularly interesting, as it’s dedicated “To the memory of H.P. Lovecraft” and it’s a wonderful tale which really channels the strangeness and tropes of the earlier writer; having read a bit of HPL recently, I recognised what a great tribute this was to him.

The last story in the book, the title one, is perhaps the most outstanding in the collection; it tells of a book which is infinite (perhaps drawing on Borges’ concept of The Library of Babel) and has no beginning or end. As the reader makes their way through it, more pages seem to grow out of the front and back, and even if he records or catalogues something he wants to go back to, it’s never there and the book has changed. The owner, initially obsessed by possession of the book, eventually realises he needs to get rid of it, but the decision as to what to do with it is not so easy. A wonderful and thought-provoking story.

“Shakespeare’s Memory” is a shorter collection, gathering just four stories:

August 25, 1983
Blue Tigers
The Rose of Paracelsus
Shakespeare’s Memory

The first story once again touches on the concept of doubles and it does seem as if Borges was haunted by this towards the end of his life. “Blue Tigers” has resonances with the concepts of things changing, expanding and contracting, focusing on some strange stones which do just that. And the final story in this collection is powerful and haunting, I believe being the last one that Borges wrote. In it, a Shakespeare scholar is given the chance to have the great playwright’s memory inhabiting his own head. At first all goes well, with the scholar discovering so much more about Shakespeare. However, playing host to someone’s else’s past has dangers and the scholar comes close to losing his own identity… This was such a clever and unsettling piece of writing which pondered on identity, memory and the creative process.

Reading these final stories by Borges was such a treat, and this was the perfect time to do so – I loved the whole experience! The thing about Borges’ work is that pretty much every story is a gem and would warrant a post on its own (and in fact, Andrew Blackman is doing just that on his blog, which you can check out here). I don’t have the space to do that on the Ramblings, but I can say that these final two collections from the great writer were as stunning as his earlier ones, and I’m happy and sad at the same time to have finished reading through his fictions. The wonderful thing is that I can always go back for a re-read…

My love of Russian writing is well-known, so when I saw that a newly-translated book from a 20th century author I’d never heard of was coming out, I confess to being very intrigued! The book is “Cynics” by Anatoly Marienhof, translated by Bryan Karetnyk, and it’s been issued by Penguin in their classics range.

“Cynics” is a satirical yet moving look at life during the early days of the Soviet Union, from the point of view of characters who are very unsuitable for survival under that regime. However, Marienhof adds to the tale by using modernist techniques to intersperse reportage from the changing post-Revolutionary landscape and creates a marvellous and inventive story. You can read my full thoughts here!

It’s funny how sometimes your reading seems to connect, with one book leading naturally onto the next, albeit with no previous planning. That’s been happening to me lately, with the Eliot/Pound adjacent books, and now appears to be starting again! After finishing the Barnes I wasn’t sure what to read next; however, a recent arrival was a book I’d stumbled across online and found the concept irresistible. I sent away for it straight away and it seemed like the perfect follow up to Barnes’s ruminations on mortality – “A Short Stay in Hell” by Steven L. Peck. I wish I could remember where I saw it mentioned, but whoever nudged me in its direction, thank you!

First published in 2012, “Hell…”, at 104 pages, is in novella territory but has a lot to say. Our narrator, Soren Johansson, is a faithful Mormon, and so on his death he expected to find an eternal hereafter where he would be reunited with his loved ones. However, the reality is somewhat different… Upon his demise, Soren discovers that the one true religion is Zoroastrianism and his fate is in the hands of a God he’s never even heard of before. As one who did not believe in this God, he’s therefore assigned to Hell; but this Hell is not the traditional one of fire and brimstone, despite initial impressions. Instead, it’s a personal Hell for everyone, and Soren’s is something a little darker and deeper – literally…

Soren finds himself in a building which is larger than he can comprehend; the place is the Library of Babel, a giant building bisected by a chasm which stretches so far that the human eye cannot see the end either up or down or to the sides. It is, of course, full of books and to escape from this Hell the residents simply have to find the book which tells their life story – which is easier said than done… Not only is this library infinitely huge, but each book seems to be full of gibberish; even finding one or two words which make sense can take forever. Food and resting places are provided; more darkly, any hurt which comes to any of the residents of Hell is fixed the next morning. Death is no escape, because if you take drastic action you’re back, alive, the next day. But in a library this size, what possibility is there of ever finding the book with your story?

“Hell…” is a short, sharp and deeply philosophical book which follows Soren at points of his journey through the library (and this takes eons… There are attempts to find the boundaries of the place; periods when the baser elements take over and dominate through violence and torture; and Soren’s experience with his one true love. The fellow residents of Hell he encounters are, intriguingly, all white and western, a fact which many of those Soren encounters comment upon; the longing for variety is strong but that need is unmet in this version of Hell.

Our attempts at music were nothing but a shadow of what we enjoyed on earth, but even more than music, we missed the natural sounds. The woosh of wind through the yellowing leaves of an oak on a cool day late in fall. The splashing of water over smooth stone in a tiny creek as it made its way down a steep mountain. Even the whistle of a train, or the screaming of a truck down the highway would have seemed like a symphony.

The blurb on the back of “Hell” describes it as an ‘existentialist novella’ and certainly it does get you pondering the bigger concepts. The idea of time being finite goes out of the window, for a start, as it appears that the inhabitants of this particular Hell are indestructible and can live forever. Again, the idea of physical space is completely unlike our own, with the library appearing infinite and beyond the capacity of a human to handle. And although the idea of being in an endless library, with food, drink and accommodation laid on might seem appealing, there is the lack of the natural world, the relentlessness of the search for your own story and, in fact, the boredom. Most of the books are unreadable, and perhaps this is meant as a comment on the reader’s constant search for the perfect book. The title is of course ironic as Soren (and everyone else) is going to be in the library for a longer period than we can even wrap our brains around, and although he does hope to eventually find his story, there’s no hint of what’s going to come after…

As is clear from the start (and also a short appendix to “Hell”) Peck is of course riffing on Jorge Luis Borges’ famous short story, “The Library of Babel“; looking back on that now, I can see resonances, but “Hell” certainly makes me want to go back and revisit the Borges. That author famously said “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” However, Peck would have the library as Hell, and I have to say that I would prefer Borges’ version to his!! A fascinating, if sometimes disturbing, read which has me looking at all of the books which surround me in a different light…

Back in March BBC4 showed a couple of interviews with Julian Barnes, an author whose work I love and who I’ve been reading since my twenties. One was a repeat of an older programme and one a new interview, and they reminded me that I still have some of his books on the TBR. I was in the mood for some non-fiction, and so I decided I would take a look at his “Nothing To Be Frightened Of” from 2008. The blurb on the back sounds as if it’s not quite sure what the book is actually about, and it’s given the category of ‘Biography/Literature’. Frankly, having read it, I don’t know that that either helps or does it justice!

“Nothing….” is centred around mortality, specifically in Barnes’s case his lifelong fear of it. He professes no religion, stating early on in the book “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him”, and therefore from an early age he was faced with the concept of an atheist’s death. Although denying that the book is a memoir, in much of it Barnes uses that form to explore his feeling about dying, his family life, and the loss of both parents. He also draws on his favourite authors to discuss concepts of death and the philosophies involved, including Jules Renard, Montaigne and his beloved Flaubert. The result is a thought-provoking work which goes in a number of directions, discussing the fors and againsts of belief in a deity, as well as memory (one of his favourite topics) and its accuracy (or not…)

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as “petite and unopinionated.” My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes “short and bossy.”

Despite Barnes’s denial, there is much about his family and his lineage in the book; stretching back to memories of his grandparents, Barnes also draws moving portraits of his parents. His quiet father is a man with whom Barnes obviously felt a strong connection; his mother is a more complex person, and it’s clear that their relationship was more fractious. During the course of the book, Barnes recounts the passing of both parents and notes that he’s become in effect the family’s archivist. With no children of his own, that role will presumably eventually pass to his nieces.

Basically, Barnes has something of an obsession with death; throughout much of his life he seems to have felt that to live properly you need to be aware every day of how transient things are. From the process itself, how we deal with it, whether we can truly be aware of what is happening to us, the best way to go (fully compos mentis or away with the fairies), one’s legacy – well, there’s a lot knitted into the narrative and it’s fascinating, if sobering, reading.

Alongside death, the other constant presence throughout the book is Barnes’s philosopher brother, Jonathan Barnes. Julian reports numerous dialogues between them, consults Jonathan to confirm or deny memories, and the contrast between the novelist and the philosopher is often fascinating. Yet, it could be argued that Julian is as much of a philosopher as his brother in many ways and certainly his meditations in this book are absorbing and very thoughtful.

As a philosopher, he believes that memories are often false, “so much so that, on the Cartesian principle of the rotten apple, none is to be trusted unless it has some external support.” I am more trusting, or self-deluding, so shall continue as if all my memories are true.

Inevitably, Barnes moves to a more global look at death and his own legacy, exploring the fact that eventually he will have a ‘last reader’ and even further along the line there will be no more readers left on our planet, and presumably one day no planet at all. When you think about these larger concepts, a human death seems just a matter of course, something that happens every day; but it’s important to those living through it and those left behind.

At some point between now and the six-billion-years-away death of the planet, every writer will have his or her last reader. Stendhal, who in his lifetime wrote for “the happy few” who understood him, will find his readership dwindling back to a different, mutated, perhaps less happy few, and then to a final happy—or bored—one. And for each of us there will come the breaking of the single remaining thread of this strange, unwitnessed, yet deeply intimate relationship between writer and reader. At some point, there will be a last reader for me too. And then that reader will die.

Surprisingly (or perhaps not so, given Barnes’s usual writing style) there is much humour here, often wry or ironic. The title, in fact, could be read two way: either we shouldn’t be afraid of dying, or it’s the nothingness we should be frightened of… I should state here that I’m an atheist myself, and the concept of not being and not thinking is the hardest thing to get my head round; and I’m not sure I’m any clearer on that after reading Barnes on the topic!

This being a Julian Barnes book, it is, of course, beautifully written, absorbing and memorable; and as the blurb suggests, it certainly gives you an insight into his life and his thinking. There is a rather sobering element to the book, though, which was written between 2005-2007 and published at the start of 2008. Later that year, Barnes’s wife, Pat Kavanagh suddenly passed away (a loss he wrote about achingly in “Levels of Life“). It’s hard, now, to read “Nothing…” without that knowledge of what was to come colouring it. Barnes is now 80 and living with an incurable cancer; but still working, although his most recent novel has been stated to be his last.

So “Nothing…” turned out to be a stimulating yet sobering read, and evidence, if I needed it, of what a brilliant writer Barnes is. I’ll leave you today, in true Madame Bibi Lophile fashion, with an appropriate song from a favourite band, Muse. They have a point or two…

April has whizzed by, partly I think because of the lovely fortnight break from work at the start of it! Coming back nearly halfway through a month does make it go by quickly… But it has been another great month of reading and although the stack is perhaps smaller than March’s one was, it’s still quite healthy – here it is!

In case the spines aren’t clear enough, here are the titles:

Cynics by Anatoly Marienhof
The Future of Fraud by Becky Holmes
Art-Quake, 1910 by David Boyd Haycock
The Worst Exhibition in the World by John-Paul Stonard
A Day Between Weathers by William J. Tait
The Ruined Map by Kobo Abe
Kafkaesque by Maia Hruska
Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings by Nellie Bly
The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges
Shakespeare’s Memory by Jorge Luis Borges
A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
Nothing To Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes
Jack on the Gallows Tree by Leo Bruce
Finders, Keepers by Nicholas Royle

And in the envelope at the bottom of the stack, two Nightjar chapbooks:

Halls of Residence by Dan Lockton
Murder by Paul Green

There were some really interesting books on the list, and a highlight for me was reading the final two story collections in Borges’ “Complete Fictions”. I’ve been working my way through them for some years now, and so getting to the end felt like a real achievement. They were, of course, marvellous, and my thoughts will follow.

Not all of the books I read this month were completely brilliant, if I’m honest, and I’ll have some reviews coming in the forthcoming weeks where I discuss these. No out-and-out stinkers – I did get something out of every book I read – but there were a couple of underwhelming ones…

Of course, April was also the month of the #1961Club and it was great fun to co-host this again with Simon! As you will have seen, we have plumped for 1949 for our next club in October, so we do hope you’ll join us then!

So what are my plans for May’s reading? Well, I don’t have any reading events lined up (though if you know of any good ones, do let me know!) I’ll be playing catch-up with reviews (as I’m very behind), and I have a couple of titles to write about for Shiny New Books – I’ll share those when they’re live. And having finished my Proust journey, I’m now circling another Major Book with a view to reading it soon – it will be another one off my bucket list of reading! So watch this space!

How was your April reading, and do you have any exciting reading plans for May??

It’s always a moment for great joy when a new book from British Library Publishing pops through the door, and a recent arrival was the latest title in their Crime Classics series. They’ve been reissuing some stellar books and this new one caught my eye straight away. The author is Leo Bruce and the name was familiar to me; and when I dug a little more I realised he was the author of “Case for Three Detectives“, a bit of a spoof title from 1936 which sends up three classic names in the sleuthing field we’d all be aware of! He was responsible for the creation of Sgt Beef (who also featured in “Case…”) and produced a good number of titles featuring that policeman. However, later in his career he switched to a new detective – one Carolus Deene, Senior History Master of Queen’s School, Newmaster – and “Jack on the Gallows Tree”, from 1960, sees Deene in action!

As the book opens, Deene is recovering from a bout of jaundice and is searching around for somewhere to convalesce. From the start, it’s clear that there is an extended cast in the Deene adventures, including his headmaster, Mr. Gorringer; the latter seems to live in terror of bad publicity for the school resulting from his history master’s previous investigations. As there have been a series of murders at seaside watering holes, he steers Deene to the quiet inland spa of Buddington. Alas, this was a mistake, because almost as soon as Deene arrives, there’s not one but two murders! These are a bit outré, as well – two completely unconnected women are found dead in different areas in and around Buddington, both carefully posed and holding a lily in their hands. Inevitably Deene is drawn into the affair, and fortunately the local police are represented by Detective Inspector John Moore who’s a friend of Deene’s. Assisted by Rupert Priggley, one of his pupils, and with Gorringer becoming involved despite his reservations, Deene sets out to solve the mystery – and a fiendish one it is too.

One of the victims, a spinster named Miss Carew, was found strangled, four miles out of town; the other, a wealthy widow called Mrs. Westmacott, was murdered in the same way in her home. Yet nothing ties them together apart from method and the way they were arranged after death. The obvious conclusion is that some kind of maniac is at work, but Deene thinks not and is determined to dig deeper. There are further complications in that one of the families has connections with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and in fact Mrs. Westmacott’s children are called Dante, Gabriel and Christina!! It will take much sifting through alibis (or lack of them), as well as dealing with recalcitrant family members, health obsessives and a remarkable pub landlady to find the truth.

“Jack…” was a treat from start to finish, and I’m delighted to report that I had no idea whodunnit! The mystery itself was thoroughly satisfying, the solution a clever one, and Deene was an interesting character to encounter for the first time – on the basis of this title, I’d definitely like to read more of his cases. The characterisation is lively and well done, with Deene and Gorringer sparring nicely at time, and Priggley adding a joyously irreverent element. There’s much humour, too, with Bruce building in some wonderfully witty exchanges, and even references to fellow crime writers; and the naming of Mrs. Westmacott (the pen name used by Agatha Christie for her non-mystery novels) was presumably a deliberate nod in the direction of the Queen of Crime. I have to mention the marvellous character of Gilling, a hypochondriac, whose constant interjections in the pub about his various ailments became funnier and funnier as the book went on.

Though published in 1960, “Jack…” is definitely in the traditional GA crime mould, and all the better for that. Locating the action in an old-fashioned spa town meant that the book didn’t necessarily have to reflect modern day trends; and despite there being hints of the era, the book doesn’t tackle these head on in the way that some GA crime authors were starting to do. Although there’s a light-hearted air to the book in places, it’s clear that Deene is someone who despises murder and is determined to track down the criminal in this case. The resolution is revealed in a somewhat traditional fashion, although with some nice twists, and the denouement was very satisfying.

So “Jack on the Gallows Tree” turned out to be another winner in the British Library Crime Classics series. It continues to astonish me how many good and satisfying Golden Age crime books are out there waiting to be reprinted and brought back to eager readers. I hadn’t realised before this that Bruce had had such a long career, too, having only come across him because of “Case…” and it’s clear he definitely warrants more investigation. Another highly recommended title from me, ideal if you want some GA crime escapism!

(Review copy kindly provided by the publisher, for which many thanks!)