Tuesday, April 17, 2007

4. A Thousand Acres

The novel by Jane Smiley. I read this recently and, subject to some reluctance to believe that a hard-working farmer would do such horrible things to his daughters, thought the novel very skilfully constructed. It turned me from a slow reader into a (temporarily) moderately quick one. The writing is often worth savouring.

An interesting review here:

I found the voice of the narrator intriguing and wondered just how much of King Lear Smiley was going to be able to transpose to 1970s Iowa. Turns out, quite a bit, in a wondrously deft way that I would have termed a 'tour de force' if I used that phrase anymore.

The narrator is the eldest of the three daughters, and instead of a king dividing up his kingdom, the family farm is to be divided among the daughters somewhat early by forming a corporation in which he gives control of the farm to the children, in a sudden move that delights the older daughters and their husbands and alarms the youngest, who no longer lives on the farm nor has much to do with it.

3. The Black Obelisk

Number 3, 11 April Quiz, read about here:

The Black Obelisk is a novel written in 1956 by the German author Erich Maria Remarque. This novel paints a portrait of Germany in the early 1920's, a period marked by hyper-inflation and rising nationalism.

Ludwig, the protagonist, is in his early 20's and he, just like most of his friends, is a World War I veteran. Although aspiring to be a poet, he works for a friend, Georg, managing the office of a small tombstone company. He tries to earn some extra money as a private tutor to a son of a bookstore owner, and by playing the organ at the chapel of a local insane asylum.

Monday, April 16, 2007

2. The Postman Always Rings Twice

Number 2, 11 April quiz: here is an extract from the Wikipedia page on the crime novel by James Cain:

The story is narrated in the first person by Frank, a young drifter who stops at a rural California diner for a meal, and ends up working there. The diner is operated by a young, beautiful woman, Cora, and her much older husband, Nick Papadakis, sometimes called "The Greek".

There is an immediate attraction between Frank and Cora, and they begin a passionate affair.

Cora, a femme fatale figure, is tired of her situation, married to a man she does not love, and working at a diner that she wishes to own and improve. She and Frank scheme to murder Nick in order to start a new life together without her losing the diner.

Friday, April 13, 2007

1. The Midnight Bell

Here is a description of number one in my 11 April, quiz:

The magnificent fourth novel, by Patrick Hamilton, The Midnight Bell (1929), opens with the worst literary device in the world - a dream sequence. Bob, barman of the eponymous pub, is asleep in the afternoon and dreaming that he's leaving the coast of Spain aboard a ship embarking on a momentous voyage.

Fortunately it's only a couple of paragraphs before he jolts awake to find that the swishing of the water is no more than his own breath, and the thundering wind is nothing but the rumble of traffic from the nearby Euston Road. He is fully clothed and feeling wretched, and it's here that the novel really begins: "Then he cursed himself, softly and vindictively. He faced facts. He had got drunk at lunch again." Poor Bob is to spend much of the next 200 pages charging around London in various states of alcohol-fuelled degradation, and from this point on Hamilton's fiction would rarely venture more than a few pages away from the pub.

This is a good article which can be read here.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Literary genius required. Apply below.

I promised to introduce some quizzes and here is one. Below are the first few sentence from six novels, all on my bookshelves. I supply dates of first publication and birth nationality of author. Answers will be provided by 25 April or by rapid e-mail to any who attempt answers via comments. Anyone who gets 4 correct would be worthy of an honorable mention, 5 or 6, without help, must make you very well read.

1. Sleeping, just before five, on a dark October's afternoon, he had a singularly vivid and audible dream. He dreamed that he was on a ship, which was bound upon some far, lovely, and momentous voyage, but which left the coast less than an hour ago (1929; English).

2. They threw me off the hay truck about noon. I had swung on the night before, down at the border, and as soon as I got up there under the canvas, I went to sleep. , I needed plenty of that, after three weeks in Tia Juana, and I was still getting it when they pulled off to one side to let the engine cool. Then they saw a foot sticking out and threw me off. (1934; American)

3. The sun is shining in the office of Heinrich Kroll and Funeral Monuments. It is April 1923, and business is good. (1956; German)

4. At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road. Cabot Street Road was really just another country blacktop, except that five miles west it ran into and out of the town of Cabot. (1991; American)

5. It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter. (1931; English)

6. In Poland's deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and – in the lapel of the dinner jacket – a large ornamental gold-on-black enamel swastika, emerged from a fashionable apartment block in Straszewskiego Street on the edge of the ancient centre of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine.

"Watch the pavement, Herr ________*," said the chauffeur, "It's icy like a widow's heart." (1982; Australian)


* Name suppressed.