1001 Books Review - Austerlitz

It's very easy to get World War II Fatigue when it comes to literature. A lot of writers behave as though they believe that history began in 1939 and ended shortly afterwards in 1945, and this, as a reader, can be annoying. All the same, though, there's something very attractive about World War II from a writer's perspective. It's not just that it was very BIG, and that the good guys were Good and the bad guys were Bad (and in easily recognisable uniforms), but, because of generations of exclusively 39-to-45 history lessons, all of your potential readers know the period, in a deep-down, under-the-skin way. Those dates are in our brains; it makes up an almost unique shared historical shorthand. We've all got these mental countdown clocks, with September 1939 bright red and labelled YOU ARE ALL BUGGERED NOW. Read 1938 and you think one year left!, read 1943 and you start calculating how long it is to summer 1945, and read Jewish and Poland and 1942 and you think, oh shit.

That's what makes it so interesting that Austerlitz's main character, Jacques Austerlitz, who arrived in Wales in 1939 as a very young child as part of the Kindertransport scheme, doesn't know anything about what happened in Europe between 1939 and 1945. He spends the first half of his life trying - mainly unconsciously - to blank it all out, so effectively that when he does come to investigate his past he discovers that he has no idea of the larger background to what really happened to him. We hear the facts of his early life - Czech Jew, four years old in 1939 and we know what he's escaped from, and what must have happened to his lost parents, but he's got to discover it all for himself, as though it was completely new.

It's a weird concept, which is fitting, because Austerlitz itself is an extremely strange book. I've never read anything else quite like it. Really what it is is a work of art that happens to be made up of a lot of words. It's set out as an intense stream-of-conscious meditation on the everything (including moths, battlements, tree roots, railway station architecture, European history, underwater villages and hats), in vast rambling sentences with almost no paragraph breaks. It's to the enormous credit of Sebald's astonishingly beautiful writing style that reading it doesn't feel like being beaten in the face by language - that, and the pictures that appear in it every page or so.

I like pictures a lot, and am all in favour of them where books, especially long and serious ones, are concerned. I have the Artistic Version of The Interpretation of Dreams, which is great - every time the words are about to wear you out, you turn the page and see A GIANT PICTURE OF A FISH EATING A TIGER and you are refreshed. The pictures in Austerlitz are even cleverer, because they actually make up part of the story that's being told. Sebald'll be describing the window display of a shop in some tiny town in the Czech Republic, with a squirrel holding a banjo, and there the squirrel is in photo form, like a visual clue from a massive Europe-wide treasure hunt. Sebald must have actually travelled to every place he mentions in the book and taken pictures of them all, which makes him a nutter, but a very visionary and thorough one.

Austerlitz really is the work of a craftsman.There is so much skill, and so much knowledge in the book that you could read it five times over and see something totally new in it every time. It's like one of those paintings by Bruegel with five hundred tiny people all doing seven things at once in very bright colours, except without the bright colours. Everything in Austerlitz is misty and sombre, all the streets are deserted and all the buildings are crumbling and it is always late afternoon in autumn and everyone is sad. Or dead.

This is not, as you might have guessed, a cheerful book. It's a treasure hunt with no resolution (we never do find Austerlitz's parents) it's a personal tragedy and it's the story, of course, of an international tragedy on a mindboggling scale. Even though I loved it, actually reading it left me feeling sort of hollow and grey inside. I'd still highly, highly recommend it, though. It's stunningly lovely in so many weird and perspective-altering ways, and it manages to make World War II as a topic seem almost new. Just make sure you're feeling really optimistic before you pick it up.

4 stars. And 18.18% complete.

Review - Darkness Rising

So, the Booker Prize shortlist for this year has been announced. And there it is. It's a shortlist. Unmistakably a list, and a short one at that.

Goodness.

I'm really struggling to muster any emotion about this one. I feel... whelmed. Distinctly whelmed (because I am in Europe, and I can be). The Sisters Brothers has the best cover, and Sense of an Ending is, er, the thinnest (can you tell I haven't read any of these, or really been moved to?). If I had to pick a winner, though, I'd go for Pigeon English, since it's the only title that seemed to be generating any sort of low-level person-to-person buzz before it was nominated. I mean, I worked in a fairly literary, well-read bookshop for most of this year and I don't think I even sold a copy of any of the rest of them. I'm going to try to read some of them, and we shall see, but... hmm.

Anyway, review.

I spent most of last Wednesday sitting in a hospital waiting room. Which turned out very well for all concerned, so don't worry, but at the time was not exactly restful. We happened to be sitting next to a woman who kept calling people up and saying awful things like, "and then his lung collapsed, and then his OTHER lung collapsed, and then he lost sensation in his legs, and then his SPLEEN burst," while her child ran around in circles screaming "MUM I'm BORED I'm SICK THERE'S A STICKER MISSING FROM MY COLOURING BOOK!"

I had sort of guessed it might not be a place for my MA reading, and so I brought along a book that would be exceedingly restful. And then I read the whole thing. That day had a lot of time in it. I think they might have been slowing down the clocks. But Darkness Rising kept me calm, because there are two things that soothe me more than anything else in the world and those things are CAKES and MURDER. And that is all Frank Tallis's books are ever about.

There is an amazing amount of pastry in a Frank Tallis murder mystery. His excuse, I think, is that they are set in Vienna, where cake is a form of religion (I have been there. I know. French pastry wishes it was that delicious), but even so, his characters' relationship to pudding borders on the obsessional. You could make a very profitable Frank-Tallis-spot-the-foodstuff drinking game, and the last time my boyfriend read one I got a stream of delighted texts all along the lines of CAKE! CAKE SPOTTED IN CHAPTER FOURTEEN!

And this is not just any cake, either. These cakes all have mysterious and delicious names, like guglhupf and punschkrapfen, and whenever a character bites into one you are treated to an intricate and borderline erotic description of the taste sensations they are experiencing:

At once his mouth was suffused with a melee of flavours. The coolness of the shell contrasted with the warmth of the alcoholic sponge inside, and he was overwhelmed by an almost dizzying sweetness. After he had swallowed, his taste buds were still tingling with flavours: marzipan, nuts and jam.

I mean. Take off all your clothes, Frank Tallis is writing about food again.

Frank Tallis's background is nearly as bizarre as Anne Holt's. He's a practicing clinical psychologist who happens to write historical murder mysteries on the side - and, of course, because he's a clinical psychologist his chosen bit of history is Vienna at the turn of the last century, when Freud was getting everyone het up about children sucking their thumbs and people dreaming about wolves in a wardrobe. His main character, Dr Max Liebermann, is a disciple of Freud, and all the murders he investigates are conveniently to do with unconscious desires and sex mania. We also get treated to hilarious b-plot side cases as Dr Liebermann treats his patients - in Darkness Rising, for example, we get the case of a man who thinks he's pregnant. Which is totally brilliant.

What Frank Tallis is not, though, is a technically excellent writer. His policy seems to be that he knows a lot of words, and by god he is going to use all of them. People aren't unconscious, they're insensate, a carving of bears becomes eponymous ursine relief work, and image of someone's boobs in a low-cut dress is described as

She was wearing a tight silk dress, the intrepid neckline of which descended steeply, revealing a plenitude of bulging flesh.

You guys, she was stacked.

But all the same, it's not the sort of language-abusing writing that makes me want to tear out my hair in a rage. It's just gently silly, and the result is an awful lot of fun.

Darkness Rising's plot, such as it is, concerns a series of mysterious murders of notable anti-Semites, who all turn up beneath plague monuments with their heads ripped off. If you know your Jewish folklore you're going to get to the answer quite a bit before Liebermann and his policeman sidekick Inspector Rheinhardt do, but the point of this book is not cunning trickery. The point of this book is cakes and psychoanalysis. And the cakes are good.

I nearly forgot I was in a hospital waiting room.

3.5 stars.

Being Critical of Critics

This is the month that I begin my MA, and so this is the month that I am beginning to do reading for my MA and I have to tell you that things are not going entirely well.

Whenever I pick up critical texts it dawns on me that I may not be a very scholarly person. I tend to enjoy books in which words make sense, and mean things, whereas the main point of words in most criticism seems to be to make the average reader frightened and confused. Consider, for example, this delight of a sentence by Nancy Stepan:

By the 1850s, the shift from the earlier ethnographic, monogenist, historical and philosophical tradition to a more conservative, anthropological, and polygenist approach... had advanced quite far in Britain... Races were now seen as forming a natural but static chain of excellence.

SO MANY WORDS, and all of them carefully crafted to be as bamboozling as possible. It's nonsense! And that's just one sentence. Imagine this drivellous stuff going on for pages and pages, and you will understand why I after a while I begin to feel like every word of it is jumping gleefully up and down on my head until my brains run out from my ears.

I don't understand why critics think they have to make up so many technical words to get across what they mean - in practice, they're just isolating themselves from a vast majority of readers who might otherwise be interested in what they have to say. Shouldn't criticism be about, I don't know, explaining things to people?

There are exceptions, of course. Some critics do try to light up their reader's brains rather than smear the product of their own superior cerebral cortexes all over the page, and some essays have such wonderful (or hilarious) ideas behind them that I don't even care if they're expressed in a slightly confusing way.

As an example of this, please see pretty much anything written by Freud. He does have an unfortunate fondness for phrases like "libidinal object-cathexis", but he also (with an entirely straight face, which makes it even better) has entirely brilliant, totally insane thoughts that make his essays completely worthwhile.

Okay, so. Birth. Freud has thoughts about birth. According to Freud, we should see birth as a form of

castration in the mother, (based on the equation 'child=penis').

Isn't that AMAZING? The child is a penis! Of course it bloody is! If you read Freud's essays you will quickly come to discover that everything is a penis unless it is a vagina. Hats are penises. Buildings are penises. Trains are certainly penises. He's essentially one of those mad little old men who wander the streets with wheelie bags yelling at passers-by, except better educated.

The horse is a penis

But, in the main, I'm struggling with the critical mindset. I find that I don't like most of these people's writing styles, and then I feel bad for not liking them. It's very awkward. Everyone KNOWS Raymond Williams is a genius, so how can I be thinking that he is an idiot? (Bloody Raymond Williams, he is the worst of the lot. He does these twee subjective-pretending-to-be-objective value judgements that drive me nuts because of how totally random they are -  he'll just merrily state that some book is an author's "best" work, and then move on as though he's stated an obvious scientific fact. It makes my brain bleed. BEST, Raymond Williams? What do you mean by BEST? Did you TEST this theory, did you ASK PEOPLE or did you just MAKE SHIT UP OUT OF YOUR HEAD)

So this was how I was feeling when I came to nearly the last book in my pile, Walter Benjamin's Illuminations. And, oh my god, it was like I had stumbled upon an actual person writing an actual book for actual people.

I think (and this is rare for me, with critics) Walter Benjamin and I could definitely be friends. If he wasn't dead. He's not only poetically good with words, he loves using them, and (even more importantly) he loves books, in a greedy, geeky way that most critics refuse to admit to. The following passage is the best and most wonderful critical thing I've read so far:

one of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a thought, much less a wishful look, because he found it lonely and abandoned on the market place and bought it to give it its freedom - the way the prince bought a beautiful slave girl in Arabian Nights. To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

He's one of those rare people who can write about a text and (no matter what it is) make you desperate to read it - there's an essay in Illuminations about A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, which I can safely say I have never had the slightest inclination to pick up, and by the end I was absolutely desperate to rush out to the nearest bookshop and pick up the fifteen-volume set. Walter Benjamin made me want to read Proust! The man's a miracle-worker.

After all that Freud and Raymond Williams, I want to take a bath of happiness in Walter Benjamin's essays. I want to gambol through the fields with them like a person in a pastoral poem. Oh, clever and normal man, where have you been all week? Walter Benjamin proves to me that you don't have to be an ass just because you have complicated thoughts in your head. Raymond Williams I am looking at you.