Holiday Reading

I am very, very pernickety about what I read on holidays. The book has got to feel j-u-s-t right or I really do get quite grumpy. I've made some real mistakes in the past: St Augustine's 'City of God' on a Greek beach holiday when daughter no.3 was three months old (what was I thinking of?); Nikos Kazantzakis' 'The Fratricides' which just filled me with gloom as I finished it off on the last day of a holiday filled with rain; 'The Thirteenth Apostle' which I threw across the apartment in disgust....and so it goes. I feel a bit like Des Esseints in Huysmans' 'Against Nature' neurotically trying to match aesthetic experiences. But, for me, holiday reading is part of the whole holiday experience. Thus I am wondering what to take with me to Venice. I am stricken with regret that I have already read Sally Vickers' 'Miss Garnett's Angel' as that would have been little short of perfect - well-written, but easily digested and with the correct sort of atmosphere and sense of place. As would 'The Seven Sisters' by Margaret Drabble. Or 'The End of Mr Y' by Scarlett Thomas - but I've read them already too, and I rarely do re-reads. I want something with a decent plot that will distract me if there's any turbulence on the flight, but not too complex. It has to be well-written.....nothing Dan Brown-ish, not pure thriller, but definitely with some intrigue. The local library hasn't turned up anything for me as yet, although the husband is happily getting on with Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods' (which I am eyeing enviously). I guess I'm just going to have to head for Borders and grumpily poke at the shelves. I am emphatically not like one of my former colleagues who took with him to Crete Denniston's 'Greek Particles' and a few volumes of Livy (in the original)!!!

I'll Be Damned...

I rather like the wall of black Penguin Classics in my local Borders book shop. They look....well....pretty serious and intriguing. I think Borders has a Bit of a Problem knowing what to do with 'the classics', be it either of the Aristotelian or the Brontean sort. They started off a few years ago with a pretty good collection of Greek and Roman stuff (better than Waterstones, which doesn't even have a Classics section), including a few Loebs (drool, drool), general histories and Classical texts (but only major authors) in translation, all arranged in broadly alphabetical order. It seemed to work quite well. 'Classic' authors like Tolstoy and Hardy could be found slotted into the fiction section where alphabetically appropriate. That seemed to work quite well too. Over the past few years there has obviously been a rethink and subsequent revamp, and all the works by 'classic authors' (be they 4thcentury BC or 19th century AD) were lumped together, the Oxford Classics translations cheek by jowl with the Wordsworth Classics (very cheap and not to be underrated- my Aeneid was more faithful to the Latin than quite a few others I could name!), the stark black Penguin Classics and the lurid lime green bargain classics (which i can't bring myself to look at). This motley assembly obviously offended whoever is in charge of the shelf displays, and more recently the books have been divided by publishing houses. The Oxford Classics now present a wall of white, with red tips (a bit bland); the Wordsworths - a wall of blue, with cute little cameo pictures on the spine; the lime green monsters just look hideous, but the Penguin Classics look sombre and studious and rather lovely. I like riffling through them for unknown (to me) gems, and it was this approach that led me to find and buy Huysmans' 'Against Nature' which I absolutely loved, enjoying every rich and bejewelled sentence. Last Friday, my duties discharged for the week, I took a copy of 'The Damned' up to the in-house Starbucks with the intention of leafing through it over a cup of de-caf Americano. But, as luck would have it WHO was sitting across the room from me but a priest acquaintance, who waved at me cheerily. Thinking that 'The Damned' was probably on the Index of Banned Books, and not wishing to give offence, I turned it over and covered it surreptiously with my copy of the Independent. So I did not get a chance to skim through it as I had wished.

I returned a few days later, however, and bought it, as the half-term holidays were coming up and I have the rare chance to read first thing in the morning for a week. I hope it will be as intriguing as 'Against Nature' - I've read a few online reviews and many of the people who 'get' Huysmans' writing (and there are many who complain that 'Nothing Happens' - well, duh!), rate it just as highly, and some even more so. He was such an encyclopaedically knowledgable writer. His discourses on the various topics within his books are fascinating lectures in their own right: I loved the chapter on the decay of Latin literature and envy his breadth of learning. Only this morning I read a wonderful description of the Grunewald Crucifixion.

Incidentally, whilst walking out of the book shop, who should I see walking in but my priest-acquaintance, who again waved cheerily at me. Fortunately I had my purchase secreted deep in my bag.

Decadence and la nostalgie de la boue

Part way through 'The Liar' by Stephen Fry and am starting to lose interest slightly: the bits where he writes of his protagonist's youth are excellent, and thus I am assuming that it is mostly himself that he is writing about, but the episodes dealing with his later life are much less amusing or convincing. Time to start on something fresh: Huysmans' 'Against Nature', or 'A Rebours' as it is in the original. The prose is gorgeous, in the same sumptuous and slightly over-rich vein as Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' (which I never finished, having had a surfeit of gorgeousness and the same feeling as if I had gorged a box of Belgian chocolates in one sitting). I rather like the 'hero' and his neurasthaenic extreme aestheticism. I am reminded of my late teenage years when I immersed myself in Gauloises, Pernod, Baudelaire and a nostalgie de la boue which lead me to mistakenly marry a complete idiot thus bringing my young self back to earth with a nasty bump! Fortunately, that is all far in the past and having extracted myself from la boue I became a wiser and more cynical person. One lasting influence from that bout of teenage Francophilism was an abiding interest in the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. I ascribe a lot of my determination to her and her refusal to allow her sex to interfere with her intellectual pursuits. Unfortunately she harnessed herself to the toad-like Sartre and lived for much of her life in his shadow, despite the fact that she was the one whom Sartre trusted to critique his work, and whose ideas he often purloined and passed off as his own. Their relationship was lifelong, hardly exclusive and they often conspired to seduce and manipulate those who should have been able to trust them. I've not read the book detailing their correspondence: I fear that I would lose any faith that I had in 'Castor' (Sartre's nickname for de Beauvoir) left by Deirdre Bair's uncompromising biography. Suffice to say that two of my favourite comfort books are still de Beauvoir's 'Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter' and the follow-up volume of her autobiography 'The Prime of Life'. Obviously it is written from her point of view, and leaves out that which is inconvenient for her to remember or write about, but her spirit shines through - the spirit that motivated a younger self to Get The Hell Out.