May 2011 Reading: The Elephant Vanishes, Incendiary, Zeitoun, Speaking with the Angel, The Dog Who Came in from the Cold, The Finkler Question

Yes, more Murakami.  Stories this time – seventeen of them, all deliciously bizarre and rather uncryptically titled.  I don’t think I’m giving anything away if I tell you that ‘On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning’ is about seeing a perfect girl one morning in April, while ‘Sleep’ is about a woman who finds that she can survive perfectly well without, well, sleep, which may invoke jealousy in anyone who’s ever suffered from insomnia.

Wandering into more fantastic realms, ‘The Little Green Monster’ and ‘The Dancing Dwarf’ teeter between parable and parody; the Brothers Grimm have nothing on Murakami’s warped fairytales.  However, he is equally at home on more realistic ground, depicting family relationships and chance encounters with a deep understanding of how we interact – his surreal sense of humour compliments rather than substitutes for his human compassion.

As much as I enjoyed Murakami’s novel, Kafka on the Shore, I think I am even more taken with his short stories: his forays into the surreal seem to work better over the sprint of a shorter work, where they are less distracting from the main narrative arc, and the sheer variety of ideas laid out in these seventeen stories cannot fail to impress.  By making his world strange in the extreme, Murakami highlights the oddness of our own, and encourages us to find the extraordinary in the mundane.

The publicity campaign for Cleave’s novel showed images of London billowing with smoke, beneath huge ‘What If?’ slogans, daring us, as Incendiary does, to imagine the horror of a Twin Towers Mark Two, this time in London.  This would have been controversial enough, but the release date happened to be the 7^th July, 2005, when over fifty people were killed by four bombs throughout the city.  Unsurprisingly, this had a profoundly negative effect both on the book’s reception and on the author himself, and it was only months later that Incendiary began to receive anything like a fair analysis, and Cleave himself came out of what he describes as a period of deep depression.

In a less dramatic coincidence, I had no idea what this book was about when I picked it up and began reading the day after Obama announced Bin Laden’s death.  The book opens:

It does make you begin to wonder if there isn’t something a bit eerie about this novel.  Actually, there is: the story of a young mother whose husband and son have been killed in a terrorist attack, Incendiary pushes only slightly at the boundaries of believability, so that a post-attack London of barrage balloons and curfews seems terrifyingly possible.  A scene on an overcrowded bridge, with panicking Londoners falling into the water, even made me a little bit jumpy the last time I was crossing the Thames.  But then, I’m a sensitive soul.

The narrator, writing her plea to Osama, is a working class East Ender who becomes involved with a ‘posh’ couple who live nearby, and with her late husband’s boss at Scotland Yard.  Her voice is convincing and original – she is a sharp, witty woman, run ragged by her grief, but still clinging on to life as best she can.  Not every scene rings true – some of the climactic episodes push things too far – but the courage of both narrator and author is impressive.  I haven’t seen the film, but I’ve heard it is disappointing – so skip it and read the book instead.

Time for a long-overdue work of non-fiction (my first this year, not counting books on writing, about which I’ll be posting soon).  I read the wonderfully titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Eggers’ excellent memoir about bringing up his kid brother) a couple of years ago, and have since heard a lot about the great work Eggers has done to promote writing and storytelling around the world.  This book is not Eggers’ story, but that of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a New Orleans resident who refused to leave the city when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.  Zeitoun’s experiences came to Eggers’ attention when he was interviewed as part of Eggers’ Voice of Witness project, which uses oral history to highlight human plight around the world.

Indeed, the book does have a flavour both of oral storytelling tradition and, unsurprisingly given Eggers’ journalistic credentials, eyewitness reportage.  What begins as a tale of one man’s determination to protect his home and help his neighbours takes an ugly twist when Zeitoun, who is originally from Syria, is mistakenly arrested by the overzealous law enforcers patrolling the flooded city.  Eggers presents events from the alternate viewpoints of Zeitoun and his wife Kathy, building up the suspense and allowing us to sympathise with this family.  Although at times it may feel that the story is somewhat biased (the Zeitoun family is a little too perfect; Zeitoun’s faith in his adopted country a little too naïve) Eggers’ skill lies in his ability to lay out the facts as presented by the story, which he has diligently checked and rechecked, allowing it to tell itself, and thereby removing any sense of an ‘agenda’.

Anyone who has seen the fantastic TV series Treme will know that the tragedy of Katrina lies not so much in the destructive power of nature but in the authorities’ failure to rise to the challenges posed.  While Treme gives us an insight into the hardships suffered by the New Orleans community by focusing on various fictional individuals, Zeitoun provides a fascinating view of the impact the storm, and the spectacular mismanagement that occurred in its wake, on a real-life individual.

Technically a re-read, but I hadn’t looked at this collection of short stories for ten years, and thought it deserved another look.  I love anthologies of stories – you’re bound to find something you like, and it is a great way of discovering new writers.  Compiled by Hornby in order to raise money for a charity for autistic children, Speaking with the Angel is a tasty selection, with original stories by big names such as Zadie Smith, Helen Fielding, Roddy Doyle and Irvine Welsh, doing an honourable favour for their pal Nick.

There is also a story by Zeitoun author Dave Eggers (see above) – it’s a small literary world after all.  And it’s one of the best stories in here, dammit (it’s told from the point of view of a dog, but don’t let that put you off) – the man really is multi-talented.  Apart from Eggers’ ‘After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned’, I also enjoyed Giles Smith’s story about a woman who cooks on Death Row, ‘Last Requests’, and the novelty value of reading a story by Mr Darcy himself, Colin Firth’s ‘The Department of Nothing’.  (It’s not bad at all, actually).  Hornby’s own contribution, ‘NippleJesus’, about a controversial work of art, is the only story that hasn’t aged well – I feel as if we’ve moved beyond that kind of outrage and shockability – I doubt there is anything they could put in the Tate Modern now that would raise much of a fuss, but perhaps I am wrong.

The most unnerving thing about this book is how quickly all the stories came back to me – so either they’re brilliant, or a decade has passed in an eye-blink.  Let’s say they’re brilliant.

For more information about the charity that this book supports, visit www.ambitiousaboutautism.org.uk/

I am a big fan of Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series; to me his books are the equivalent of Galaxy chocolate – a total indulgence, but guaranteed to make the world seem just a little bit brighter, if only for a short while.  I have read a couple of his other books (the man loves a series – he currently has four on the go) and while the lack of Mma Ramotswe and the sunny African setting might make me downgrade the guilty pleasure factor to that of a Fruit and Nut, I’ve always found them enjoyable.

Perfect reading, then, for a little weekend break.  This novel is his second set in Corduroy Mansions, a seemingly time-warped building in Pimlico where the neighbours still communicate with each other, even slipping notes under each others’ doors to invite them to ‘soirees’.  The cast of characters is rich and varied, but the main plotline concerns William French, whose dog is recruited by MI6.  So far, so P.G.Wodehouse, and indeed, most of the novel concerns ridiculously named posh people getting into implausible scrapes, and probably calling them ‘scrapes’ as well.  It reads like a series of interlinked short stories, and I can’t help wondering if it might have been a more satisfying read if it wasn’t presented as a novel.  But it is a lot of fun, and there aren’t many books that can get away with characters called ‘Oedipus Snark’ or dogs called ‘Freddie de la Hay’ these days.  Still, I’d recommend the Botswana series first.

After a holiday both literal and literary, time to plunge into another Booker winner.  I haven’t read any of Jacobson’s other work, or his column in The Independent, so I was coming at this quite fresh.  (Although halfway through my Dad told me he didn’t agree with a lot of his opinions, which always makes me think twice.  Father knows best.)

The plot of this novel is actually pretty scanty: three men past their prime meet up from time to time, two of them, Libor and Finkler, are Jewish, one of them, Treslove isn’t but kind of wants to be, then he gets attacked and thinks that perhaps he is.  Of the three main characters, only the older man, Libor Sevcik, is in any way endearing, mostly by virtue of his devotion to his now deceased wife of fifty years.  Finkler and Treslove, old schoolmates, have an intensely uncomfortable friendship, based on strange jealousies and petty rivalries that make for tough reading at times.

However, Jacobson’s refusal to simplify is what makes this novel so impressive.  Much of the time, we follow Treslove’s tortured thoughts as he struggles to carve out an identity that can never belong to him.  His agonising is depicted in minute detail; he constantly questions himself, is wildly insecure and almost wilfully unhappy much of the time – it is a sad picture of a man approaching his fifties, but one which may in fact be more accurate than many would like to admit.  The struggle to be happy is almost as contentious as the struggle for success in our society, and failure to achieve it becomes a reflection on our own weak nature.

In terms of conclusions or resolutions, the book offers no easy answers either.  Contemporary Jewishness in all its forms sprawls across its pages, but we are still left with more questions than answers about what it means to be a Jew in Britain today.  The most startling thing about this novel for me, though, as a newcomer to Jacobson’s work, is how effectively he blends humour and tragedy.  The aching hearts of the protagonists thrum in time with the impeccable comic beats that skip across the page, pithy one-liners nestle alongside real human suffering.  Whether or not the intensity of his style is for you, there is no denying that this is a writer who knows what he is doing.  Hence the Booker, I suppose.