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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on G. Kirilenko and L. Korshunova's What is Personality? Also going through some Gramsci essays.
I was in a charity shop a few months ago and found two books I wanted to buy, one of which was a collection of Father Brown stories. They had a buy-two-get-the-third-free deal, so on a whim I bought Nell Zink's Doxology despite knowing nothing about it.
It's set in the early 90s in New York and charts three characters who are close friends, one of whom unexpectedly makes it big as an indie rock star while the other two get married and have a baby. It's extremely knowing, all of the characters are annoying and pretentious (none of them even slightly believable) - and yet for all that, entertaining enough that I'm more than a quarter-way through this large-format 400-pager after starting it on Friday.
On Thursday I finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, which I did enjoy a great deal, although not quite as much as Never Let Me Go. Normally when a novel employs an unreliable narrator, it's to set up an elaborate twist ending: I found it interesting here to be used for the comparatively modest goal of conveying the inner life of a character who is so used to repressing the emotions he experiences that he is effectively in denial about doing so. Arguably a deconstruction of the whole "English stiff upper lip" thing, though as I pointed out to herself, earlier this year I read Theodore Darlymple's book Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality, which (as its subtitle unsubtly implies) argues that the pendulum has swung much too far in the opposite direction and now British people are encouraged to engage in flamboyant displays of emotion far more than they should.
I found it an enjoyable book, but it also came across as incredibly fake--not necessarily in a bad way, as I don't care if an author is an authentic whatever-he's-writing-about because the whole point of fiction is telling interesting stories, but it was very apparent he was writing about being English as an outsider. I read Remains after reading a long list of English authors when I was trying to get a feel for what 1905-1914 and 1920-30 England was Really Like: Huxley's Crome Yellow, Forster's Room with a View and Howards End, two of Ford's Parade's End books, the 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time by Powell (over a million words and went by in a flash; I look forward to re-reading it), a number of Waugh's novels, and others I'm forgetting right now. Remains is a character study using some English trappings, but after reading so many authors who lived through English society of that era, it doesn't compare.
And coincidentally enough on the topic of English society, I'm about halfway done with the 4th Jeeves omnibus. In some ways, bits of Wodehouse's jokes and characters are wearing out their welcome, but in others, his writing has gotten so much better he went along that some of the sentences are breathtakingly brilliant and funny.
On that note, I'm currently reading Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, and it's very helpful to try and get into the mind of an Englishman from that period - the ways of thinking they brought into and then out of the War.
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