Re-reads

Hotel Splendide – Ludwig Bemelmans

When Bemelmans immigrated to the United States he got a job at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel as a busboy, and, over the years, worked his way up to the position of assistant banquet manager. In these stories he doesn’t write about himself, but of the other employees, such as (to select a few) Mespoulets, the hopelessly incompetent waiter who is steadily demoted to lower and lower positions; Kalakobe, the only Negro employed at the hotel, one with grandiose ambitions; and, looming over everyone, Monsieur Victor, the tyrannical Maître d’. A few portrayals of the wealthy patrons of the restaurant are also included. Some stories are more entertaining than others, but overall this book has charm, and the capacity to make you feel good. It’s often amusing, and even when it addresses situations that could be seen as tragic, it’s done with a light touch. There’s one story in which a character quotes from a book describing the grotesque gustatory extravagances of decadent Rome, and this can be seen as a critique of the opulence of the Ritz-Carlton. But, really, Bemelmans has no ax to grind. In the attitude toward life displayed, I would think he was happy man (which is what he may have become), so I was surprised to find that his early years in Europe were very grim. He first found success as an illustrator (each chapter in Splendide begins with one of his line drawings); later fame and fortune came to him as the author of the Madeline series of children’s books. I was familiar with some stories because I used them when teaching reading in Junior High decades ago. The final one is “The Murderer of the Splendide.” I remembered exactly how it would end: with a surprise twist, and a mystery which we know the answer to. 4

Laughter in the Dark – Vladimir Nabokov (Russian)

Nabokov had a cruel streak (or, at least, cruelty is a factor in many of his novels, including Lolita). In Laughter he seems to enjoy presenting the exploitation and destruction of Albinus; there’s no trace of pity for the victim. This is mid-career Nabokov; he wrote it when he was in his early thirties. It seems conceived as a book that would bring in some cash. The prose is good, and at times inventive, but not finely honed as much of his other work. And the characters are one-dimensional. The rationale for Albinus’s obsession with sixteen -year-old Margot is not developed; we’re asked to accept that he finds her irresistibly attractive in a sexual way, and he gives up wife and child to have her. He’s merely a dupe. As for Margot, she’s a hard-boiled manipulator; though her feelings for Albinus are aversion and contempt, he’s rich and she wants to get as much as possible from him. She does love (or lust after) a man named Rex, who enters the picture at the halfway point. Rex ups the ante of heartlessness; he’s a full-fledged sadist who derives delight from Albinus’s suffering. What we have here is a lurid and even repellent tale: we watch as poor Albinus is completely destroyed (before his violent death he’s rendered blind). At the end Margot and Rex are the winners. As a potboiler, the book succeeds. It serves up a readable excursion into aberrant emotions. 3

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog – Dylan Thomas

The Welsh writer (primarily a poet) wrote these autobiographical sketches when he was in his twenties. Why he chose to use a title similar to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a mystery. Maybe his aim was to signal his lack of pretention. Or maybe it was an effort to attract readers (which he failed to do). At any rate, I call these sketches rather than stories because they have no plot. Just scenes. The prose is the big thing here – the poet comes out in clusters of impressions. I’m not the ideal audience for this sort of thing (at least, not now; I may have been in the past). That said, I did appreciate it. It’s constructed chronologically; that is, the first sketch – “The Peaches” (my favorite of the lot) – takes place when Dylan is a very young boy, and the last when he’s on the verge of adulthood. The setting is Swansea in South Wales, a place filled with colorful characters who engage in rollicking dialogue. A lot of this comes alive in a swarming way. The last two sketches are drenched in alcohol – which would be the author’s  lifelong nemesis – and they aren’t presented as positive experiences. Pervading them is a sense of loneliness, of an unfulfilled need of a woman’s love. Here’s part of the book’s closing sentence, which encapsulates what Thomas set out to give us in this portrait of the place which formed him: . . . “the small and hardly known and never-to-be-forgotten people of the dirty town had lived and loved and died and, always, lost.” 4

The Connoisseur – Evan S. Connell

Prior to starting this review, I looked up as much as I could find on the enigmatic Mr. Connell. One thing I already knew was that he was a collector of pre-Columbian art, which is what his character in this novel becomes. Muhlbach is on a business trip in New Mexico (his home is New York), and happens to come across a terra cotta statuette in a Taos shop. The opening sentence: “Unspeakable dignity isolates the diminutive nobleman.” Thus begins what amounts to an obsession. Though Muhlbach has two children (his wife is deceased) they are given almost no attention. They could easily not exist, and Muhlbach could be, like the author, a lifelong bachelor without children. I think Connell included them to show how insignificant he considered them to be. What matters to Muhlbach (and to Connell) are the objects he’s obsessed with. We get long scenes – at a university’s anthropology department, at a motel auction, at a high-scale Greenwich Village shop, at a knick-knack store called Charlotte’s Curiosity Corner. Though Muhlbach remains somewhat monochromatic, the characters he meets are lively creations. A lot of technical territory is covered as Muhlbach learns the intricacies of collecting authentic pieces – for much is fake, expertly done. Muhlbach finds it peculiar that when he discovers that a piece is not truly pre-Columbian, no matter how much he was first attracted to it, it immediately becomes of little worth in his eyes. Does all this sound boring to you? Odd? Yes, it’s an odd novel, but, for me, in Connell’s hands, fascinating. The scenes are done with expertise. The prose is lovely in its flowing simplicity. It’s an artfully rendered work. 5

Death with Interruptions – Jose Saramago (Portuguese)

In Blindness, which Saramago wrote when he was seventy-three, people begin, inexplicably, to go blind. In Death, written thirteen years later, people begin, inexplicitly, to cease dying. This vanquishing of man’s oldest fear may seem a blessing, but it’s not so in this case. Those on the brink of death remain on the brink; they may be comatose, they may be suffering, they may be horribly mangled from a car accident, and they simply live on in that state. In the beginning of the novel Saramago studies the repercussions on families burdened with the care of these living corpses, then he explores the effects on the economy, examining how insurance companies, nursing facilities and funeral homes respond. Next organized crime gets into the act, seizing a hold on the transfer of the should-be-dead across the border to a country where death still reigns. I found all this pretty interesting, and I maneuvered my way through Saramago’s convoluted prose (you have to read it to understand what I’m referring to). The tone he assumes – one of omniscient bemusement – is right. But then he switches gears by introducing death (she refuses to have her name capitalized, and she’s the standard issue skeleton of myth, complete with scythe). Though we’re now in her thoughts, no explanation is given for her ceasing to take her daily toll of lives, and when she resumes she begins to send letters (by magical transference) to all those who will die, informing that they have one week to live. Why she does this also goes without explanation. Then one letter keeps returning to her, and she’s perplexed. A man is defying death! She visits him (as an invisible presence); he’s a cellist with a dog. She revisits him in human form, they fall in love, and wind up in bed. The last sentence: “The following day, no one died.” I closed the book thinking, What a lot of foolishness. As a character, death is a dud, and for a novel in which logic had prevailed for the first third, nothing that occurs afterward is justified (including why the man was able to escape death). The love story was not just unconvincing, it was sappy. Probably age can account for these failings – at eighty-six Saramago (with a Nobel Prize in his resume) kept writing when his creative powers were on the wane. In Blindness he was at his peak; he was able to make the reader relate to characters who experience a harrowing disintegration of societal norms. Read that one, don’t bother with Death.

Stanley and the Women – Kingsley Amis

There are three major female characters in this novel and all, Stanley comes to conclude, are insane. There’s his former wife, who’s implacably oblivious to all but her own needs; there’s the wacky psychiatrist who treats his crazy son; there’s his present wife who, at the end, inflicts a knife wound on herself and blames it on the son. Just to get attention, you see. The son, who makes an appearance on the fourth page (in a section entitled “Onset”), is not really a character because he’s way off his rocker; he remains in that state throughout the book; in the last section, entitled “Prognosis,” the prognosis is not good. Martin Amis, Kingsley’s real life son, described Stanley as “a mean little novel in every sense, sour, spare, and viciously well-organized.” I agree with all but the “well-organized.” For almost the entire novel Stanley’s wife seems to be an ideal mate, so when her advanced degree of insanity is revealed it seemed imposed by the author to suit his agenda; some prior indications of instability should have been provided. The novel is both entertaining and distasteful; it’s as if Amis was trying to be offensive, and it’s his mental state I was left wondering about. Stanley, despite a major drinking problem (the book abounds in double scotches), seems sane, but his conclusion – that all women are mad – is irrational. And for an author to write a novel filled with misogyny, and then dedicate it to his first wife (“To Hilly”), seems to be a cruel jab. It’s interesting to note that Sir Kingsley Amis would end his messy life under her care, living in the house she shared with her third husband.

Transit – Anna Seghers (German)

This novel is set in Marseille just after Nazi forces had invaded France. A nameless narrator (an escapee from a concentration camp) is telling about his efforts to get on a ship leaving Europe. Many others are pursuing the same goal – Marseille offers the only port for exit. But you need a bewildering array of visas, all in proper order, and getting them is a bureaucratic nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions. I was unable to follow the complexities which Seghers describes in detail. Soon I stopped trying; I came to believe that the process was meant to be (as is true with Kafka) incomprehensible. This is a world in which desperate people want life to begin with a transit to another place, but almost all are fated to fail. There are many secondary characters, too many to keep track of, so I just let the scenes in which this or that person took part to exist for the moment. Besides the narrator, only two characters mattered – the woman he falls in love with and her doctor friend, and they stand out. As for that narrator, he’s a slippery fellow, with his many reversals in making decisions. He wants to get out, but without steadfast conviction; at one point, when success comes, he sabotages it. Often he slips into the apathy of doing nothing. Did I understand him? No. As to why I continued reading a book that presented so much that was baffling, I just took enjoyment when it cropped up, which was often enough. The writing flowed, and the atmosphere of a seedy Marseille was nicely evoked. But the novel’s main strength is the emotional mood Seghers creates: the sense of people waiting and wandering in a shadowy limbo.

Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940 –1977

Either Vladimir was super careful as to what he included in his correspondence or (more likely) his son Dmitri, one of the co-editors of this book, wasn’t about to include any letters that would sully his deceased father’s reputation (especially since his mother/Vladimir’s wife was still alive). These suppositions arise because of the one-dimensional portrait that emerges. We get the man as a writer, and little else. And, because he’s writing about his work to those who will (or had) published it, we get a lot of shoptalk. Nabokov emerges as firmly resistant to distortion of his work (he was, for example, very particular about cover illustrations). In his demands he’s often truculent and contentious. Though an artist, he cared a lot about the money end of the business. He got into prolonged feuds, notably with Maurice Girodias, whose Olympia Press first published Lolita. In his comments about some other writers, he could be brutally dismissive (Saul Bellow is a “miserable mediocrity,” no more than an “exhaust puff”). Not that Nabokov wasn’t, at times, generous and kind, but the negatives carry greater force. And, by citing them, I’m making the book seem more interesting than it is. We get far too much about V’s work on a mammoth Pushkin translation; also, his lepidopterist activities take up many pages (I skipped both these sections). He was pedantic, so some issues are nit-picked at length. Lastly, many letters were written by his wife; in his post-Lolita years he was inundated by matters that he delegated Vera to respond to. All in all, this book is a disappointing mishmash. But I was left with some personal observations. Without Lolita, Nabokov would have remained a professor all his life. He was initially wary of the harm the novel might do to his reputation (and his job); thus its first publication by a Paris-based press noted for dealing in salacious material. Of course, what he referred to as a “timebomb” turned out to be a gold mine, and changed his life. Nothing he wrote after it was near the level of that book; some, in my opinion, were flops, including two highly ambitious efforts. Early on Katherine White, editor at The New Yorker, gave him advice which he should have heeded more often than he did: “I think it’s fine to have your style a web, when your web is an ornament, or a beautiful housing, for the context of your text . . . but a web can also be a trap when it gets snarled or becomes too involved, and readers can die like flies in a writer’s style if it is unsuitable for its matter.” I died in the webs of Pale Fire and Ada. In this review I’ve been mainly critical of someone who has given me enormous pleasure; six of his novels are on my “most meaningful” list. So if I were to write a letter to Mr. Nabokov I’d give him my enduring admiration and thanks. And I wouldn’t ask for his autograph.

Memories of a Catholic Childhood – Mary McCarthy

I first read “Yonder Peasant, Who Is He?” in Cast a Cold Eye, McCarthy’s 1950 short story collection. It reappears as the lead-off story in these memories (which came out seven years later). In it she dissects the mentality that allowed her paternal grandparents to be blithely indifferent to the miserable existence she and her brothers endured after their parents’ death. “Dissects” is the correct word: emotions are presented in a detached, analytical way, and sometimes with a wry humor. This is true even in the next piece, in which she describes the nature of their misery at the hands of the brutish uncle they were sent to live with. Uncle Myers is the only person in the book who comes across as evil. McCarthy isn’t a condemner; she sees people as too complex to be categorized as good or bad. The stories follow her life chronologically; when her well-to-do maternal grandfather takes her to live in Seattle she begins to live in privileged circumstances. She attends school at a Sacred Heart convent; though Catholicism is an influence, early on she becomes a non-believer. My favorite piece in the collection is the final one, “Ask Me No Questions,” in which McCarthy finally tackles (after the woman’s death) her supremely vain maternal grandmother. The smooth and precise prose never flags, but when we move into McCarthy’s mid-teens I got the sense that she was at a loss for material. Actually, these memories are meager; without the supplement of italicized addendum (which I skimmed) the book would come to less than two hundred pages. I can’t say that I grew fond of Mary, but I don’t believe she was asking that of me. Respect for her intelligence would mean more to her, and that I can grant her.

The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard – Anatole France (French)

This novel takes the form of a diary of a man in his seventies (and moves into his eighties). Sylvestre Bonnard is a bachelor whose house is filled with books – he lives in a “City of Books.” He has an elderly housekeeper and a cat named Hamilcar, to whom he talks. He is, actually, talking to the reader throughout the novel – a sense of intimacy is established on the first page and never wanes. My acquaintanceship with this unique individual was a most enjoyable one. The novel has a sentimental strain that may be old-fashioned, but it’s appropriate to the character of Bonnard; there are soft-hearted people like him. The first part of the book is devoted to a search for a precious manuscript, but that subject is dropped entirely. The story then concerns itself with the young daughter of a deceased woman whom Bonnard loved in his youth (a love that was unrequited; she married another). Paris is a big city, and how likely would it be for him to cross paths with someone he didn’t even know existed? But I found these “faults” to be irrelevant; the voice dominating the novel kept me out of a fault-finding mood. Jeanne is in need of  help; she’s staying at a school where she’s a charity case and has been relegated to the status and duties of a servant. Bonnard – who has led a sheltered a life among his books – sees for the first time a manifestation of evil in the person of the headmistress. She informs Bonnard that Jeanne must be trained in the struggle of life, and is to learn that she can’t just amuse herself and do what she pleases. His response: “One comes into this world to enjoy what is beautiful and what is good, and to do what one pleases, when the things one wants to do are noble, intelligent and generous.” He rescues Jeanne, and to provide for her dowry he decides to sell his book collection; the books gave him pleasure, but they have no real value. (His “crime” is robbing Jeanne by secreting some volumes aside from the sale.) As for his age and his solitary existence, it’s not in his nature to complain or to harbor regrets about what he doesn’t have. He accepts, and does so with benevolence and humor. The simple act of acceptance is shown to have its rightful place as one of the keys to contentment. Bonnard has reached the age when he has observations to make about Life (such as the one quoted above), and I found wisdom from a man who professes to have no wisdom. That Anatole France was thirty-eight when he created his “old-book man” is remarkable, as is the fact that this was his first novel. Years ago I read his Penguin Island and thought it a wonder, yet I didn’t pursue other works by him. I succumbed to the fact that France (even though he won the Nobel Prize) is out of vogue. Who even talks of this contemporary of Flaubert? Sylvestre Bonnard might say, with a shrug and a smile, thus are the vagaries of fame.

Transparent Things – Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov’s novels can be divided into three categories. Two of the categories are similar in that both have believable characters involved in an intelligible plot; what separates them is that some succeed in telling a good story and some don’t. Generally speaking, the simpler the plot, the more successful the story. The third category consists of works that are unintelligible. Though Lolita has its difficulties, it’s certainly not impenetrable. After that novel, Nabokov was finally freed of money worries and he no longer seemed to care about the reader (and so we get Ada). Transparent Things belongs in the third category; it delves into arcane matters in a prose that often seems like a verbal labyrinth. The characters that occasionally emerge from these encumbrances are unreal and act with a perverse randomness. For all his vast intelligence, why couldn’t Nabokov perceive how boring and foolish this is? At any rate, my long association with him ends here, on this down note: I’ve now read (or attempted to read) all of his novels. I wish I had taken his final two in chronological order. Look at the Harlequins! (the last to be published in his lifetime) would have been a much more fitting goodbye to an author who gave me so much pleasure.

Found, Lost, Found – J. B. Priestley

Priestley was a hugely productive writer – I counted thirty novels in the list of his works, and there were equally long numbers of plays, essays, autobiographies and criticism. This novella was published when he was in his eighties, but it has the feel of something done by a young man. I have a hunch it was a discarded manuscript that the elderly writer discovered in a drawer and found pleasing. Premise: Tom drinks a lot of gin (why he chooses to float through life in a perpetual state of inebriation is not made clear); he and Kate meet and soon (too soon) fall in love. She leaves London for an undisclosed location, challenging Tom to find her; she wants to test his commitment to their relationship. The episodes involved in his search make up the bulk of the novel. They’re played as comic set pieces; trouble is, they’re not funny. I became awfully annoyed with Tom the inventive wit (he likes to make up names for himself such as J. Carlton Mistletoe and Theodore A. Buscastle). So I skipped to the end: he finds her. But the larger question for me is why I’m having such a hard time finding a good book to read. I only review those that I get halfway through, so you don’t know about all the ones (sometimes six in a row) I can’t tolerate for that long. Even having to write about this bit of fluff has put me in a bad mood.

The Finkler Question – Howard Jacobson
Jacobson’s main character is besieged by emotional woes; the second sentence of the novel is, “His life had been one mishap after another.” Unfortunately, Julian Treslove and his mishaps (particularly those involving women) were too doggedly offbeat to be credible. For example, Julian is employed by a theatrical agency as a double for famous people at parties, conferences, etc. “Treslove didn’t look like anybody famous in particular, but looked like many famous people in general, and so was in demand if not by virtue of verisimilitude, at least by virtue of versatility.” (Of course, we never see Treslove plying his trade.) The crucial event comes early, when Treslove is robbed on a London street. The person who mugs him is a woman, and she says something Treslove finds unintelligible. At first he thinks her words were “Your jewels,” but after interminable contemplation he becomes convinced that she said, “You Jew.” This is used as a jumping off point: Treslove (who isn’t Jewish) begins to think of himself as being a Jew. The Finkler Question is really the Jewish Question. When Finkler and his wife argue (which is all they do) it’s over his ASHamed Jews movement; Jacobson even manages to make Treslove’s affair with Finkler’s wife revolve around Jewishness. I’m not interested in that subject per se (and per se was all there was), and what was left? Only one of the characters was appealing (an old fellow named Libor Sevcik, who is relegated to the sidelines); I found nothing humorous in a book that was (I suppose) meant to be a comic romp; the bluntness of the sex scenes made me yearn for women who have a modicum of modesty in words and actions (something mighty hard to find in today’s fiction). After I quit this Booker Prize-winner I did a bit of research on Jacobson and found that through a long and successful career his bread and butter issue has been Jewishness (his latest novel is entitled J). As an experiment I glanced through the half of The Finkler Question that I hadn’t read, opening it twenty times at random, and not once did I come across a page without references to you-know-what. I’ll do it again, right now. Okay, page 220 of the hardback edition: “He doesn’t say, the Jews misleading the world again, but only an uncomplaining fool, happy to be unforeskinned, could miss the implication.” This excerpt conveniently brings up something else that I wasn’t interested in but that gets a lot of attention: the state of penises.

Look at the Harlequins! – Vladimir Nabokov
If you’re not a Nabokov afficionado, don’t bother with this book; I am, and I found it enjoyable. It’s framed as an autobiography of a emigre Russian writer named Vadim; his novels are listed, and all of them are Nabokov’s novels assigned new names (it was fun to figure out which was which). Nabokov is playing a game with the reader; he mixes similarities in his own life with differences. Vadim is married three times before he meets the right woman; Vladimir married the right woman when he was twenty-six. What do these other wives represent? Mistakes he managed to avoid? Vadim states that “madness has been lying in wait for me behind this or that alder or boulder since infancy.” One wonders if Vladimir suffered from the same “incipient insanity.” And then there’s the Lolita connection . . . Coming from an author who some accused of having pederastic tendencies, Nabokov’s assigning that abnormality to Vadim seems like either an admission or an act of defiance. When Vadim’s eleven-year-old daughter Bel comes to live with him after a separation of many years, we get scenes like this: “She could not stop shivering, though, and I had to thrust my hands under her skirt and rub her thin body, till it glowed, so as to ward off ‘pneumonia’ which she said, laughing jerkily, was a ‘new,’ was a ‘moon,’ a ‘new moon’ and a ‘moan,’ a ‘new moan,’ thank you.” Later he claims to see “Nothing wrong or dangerous, or absurd or downright cretinous in my relationship between my daughter and me. Save for a few insignificant lapses – a few hot drops of tenderness, a gasp masked by a cough and that sort of stuff – my relations with her remained essentially innocent.” Yet Bel takes to walking around the house naked; when she appears wearing only slippers and a necklace, the woman who would be Vadim’s third wife is “flabbergasted” and has her sent away to a boarding school. Vera appears late in Vadim’s life, and is referred to only as “you” (Vera was Nabokov’s first reader, and he dedicated all his books to her). For him she represented no-nonsense Reality; I believe that she kept him stable, able to avoid the nightmare world to which he exiled so many of his fictional creations. But I may have given the impression that this is a dark and depressing work when it’s actually rather a lark. I believe that the act of writing well about even deplorable things gave Nabokov pleasure. At any rate, after suffering through half of Ada, I was grateful that my long association with him would end on a bright note; his last sentence has, appropriately, no period: “I had been promised some rum with my tea – Ceylon and Jamaica, the sibling islands (mumbling comfortably, dropping off, mumble dying away) –” Before he died Nabokov asked that the book he was working on (or, rather, doodling around with) be destroyed. But thirty years later his son Dmitri had The Original of Laura published, something which I consider an act of betrayal. I’ll close with a quote from Harlequins that describes what his craft meant to Nabokov; Vadim remembers Paris “merely as the chance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the colored phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk lamp awaiting me in my humble home.”

Good Behaviour - Molly Keane
In the opening chapter Aroon serves a mousse made with rabbit to her mother (who can’t stand rabbit), and the old lady promptly dies. The servant, Rose, accuses Aroon of murder and a variety of other despicable acts that go back many years. Aroon, who claims that “All my life I have done everything for the best reasons and for the most unselfish motives,” decides to review her life; perhaps, she thinks, “I shall understand more about what became of us.” Her remembrances make up the entirety of the novel. The Aroon who emerges isn’t the person she believes herself to be. Unable to face dismal reality, she becomes adept at self-delusion (“I know how to build the truth”). Unloved and unvalued, she needs to be needed; she even wants people to suffer so they will rely on her for sympathy. Despite such warped self-centeredness, Aroon isn’t a hateful character. We see how emotional deprivation twists her into what she becomes. The most guilty party is the mother, with her elegant, poised cruelty. The other characters are also captured with wonderful accuracy, as is the setting (the horse-obsessed world of the Irish gentry in the 1920s). The section that deals with Aroon’s One Great Love is handled perfectly. Her brother Hubert’s friend, Richard, comes for an extended stay at the family estate. The young men include Aroon in most of their activities, and she comes to believe that Richard has romantic feelings for her. One night he creeps into her room (and then into her virginal bed); this is a painful scene, for Richard has no intention (or desire) to do anything sexual. He’s just trying to get the family off the scent of the truth: that he and Hubert are lovers. Aroon is being used, but she rejects that ugly fact; all her life she holds onto the belief that she and Richard shared a deep bond. Despite all the sadness and cruelty in this book, it has an abundance of color and verve. I sometimes wondered, “Can Keane keep it up?” She couldn’t. The disasters which ensue when Aroon attends a Hunt Ball are depicted in prose that goes way over the top. Extravagance works, but not a jumble of overwrought emotions. What also suffers is logic; in the closing pages improbable events and loose ends abound. It’s as if Keane let the reins fall slack in her hands and the horse went plunging along. But even with these missteps, the pleasures to be found in Good Behaviour are unique ones. And to think that Keane wrote it when she was in her late seventies, after a literary silence of over two decades. Maybe this dark, rich brew was percolating all that time.

Ada - Vladimir Nabokov
In trying to account for the flaws in this novel – flaws born of self-indulgence and excess – I concluded that the financial success of Lolita freed Nabokov from having to please anybody but himself. He subjects the reader to his dalliances and digressions, his overly-fecund imagination, his obsession with words and wordplay. His premise – that a fourteen-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl fall in passionate love (and have passionate sex, constantly) – is unconvincing; that the children are (he would have us believe) brilliant and sophisticated and precocious doesn’t justify giving them adult emotions. Despite the posh trappings (everybody is fabulously wealthy), the book has a grubby quality; the use of elegant prose to describe gross carnality turns out to be the literary equivalent of dressing a toad in lace. The plot is both extremely complicated and irrelevant. Language is what matters in Ada, and it’s with language that Vlad impales the poor reader. Not only are sentences long and circuitous, but pretty much every page has a sprinkling (sometimes a cascade) of French and Russian; many English words were unknown to me. So why did I get four hundred pages into this six hundred page book? Because I respect the author and thought I should read what he considered his magnus opus. Also, there are brilliant scenes and stretches when the fog lifts and we’re in the hands of Nabokov the Genius. But there was much too much of Nabokov the Bore. A gluttonous bore to boot; when he adds a sci-fi angle I knew that his appetite for complexities had no bounds. At one point Van asks Ada what her IQ is and she answers, “Two hundred and something. A sensational figure.” Maybe this book is meant for people with sensational IQs (or pretenders). Nabokov’s failure is such that, when I called it quits, I had absolutely no interest in his two protagonists, and the grande amour he tried so hard to evoke had fallen flat on its puss (face, American slang). I didn’t even bother to skim what remained, though I did check out the ending and was surprised at what I found. For a full page Nabokov – in plain English, finally – extols the virtues of Ada. One sample: “Nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy’s reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the ‘Ardis’ part of this book.” Seems His Arrogance had doubts and felt the need to defend his work. But, sad to say, this turgid and bloated novel is indefensible.

Glory - Vladimir Nabokov (Russian)
Nabokov wrote Forwards to the English translations of his Russian novels, and for Glory he expresses a special affection. He admires his prose, and rightly so. His use of description is not just beautiful and inventive, but it’s tied to the main character’s emotions. When Martin spots Sonia sneaking out of the house (to go dancing with a rival), he enters her room, where “there remained a cloudlet of powder, like the smoke following a shot; a stocking, killed outright, lay under a chair; and the motley innards of the wardrobe had been spilled onto the carpet.” Nabokov bestows on Martin – who he proclaims to be “the kindest, uprightest, and most touching of my young men” – a finely-tuned and expansive imagination; for him a boyhood train ride is a feast of sensations. Nabokov calls it a “wand stroke” not to make someone with such keen sensitivity an artist. “How cruel,” he writes, “to prevent him from finding in art – not an ‘escape’ (which is only a cleaner cell on a quieter floor), but relief from the itch of being!” Indeed, how cruel this denial is, because all Nabokov leaves Martin with is a fascination for Sonia. Nabokov calls her “a moody and ruthless flirt,” but I’d go much further; she’s another wand stroke of cruelty. Her sarcastic, derisive rebukes cut; she seems compelled to bat Martin’s feelings about like a cat with a crippled bird. Not having the refuge of art and being left only with Sonia, Martin is an isolated man; his existence is purposeless, and by his mid-twenties he seems depleted. Still, his capacity to find something thrilling in ordinary pleasures is never entirely snuffed out, and the book ends with him embarking on an exploit into an imaginary world of adventure. We never know the outcome of his dangerous crossing of the border into Russia. In an abrupt and seamless transition we switch to the mind of a friend who has no idea what becomes of Martin. This switch, though done with remarkable skill, points to a major flaw: for half the novel Nabokov was stuck without a storyline. Though he filled the void with the distractions of wonderful incidentals, the ending presented an insurmountable obstacle. It’s significant that in his Forward Nabokov describes a chess problem he once composed, one that was “diabolically difficult to construct.” In Glory he resorts to legerdemain to solve his novelistic problem. He has Martin disappear like a canary on the arm of a magician. With a flourish of a scarlet scarf – poof! – he’s gone. And Sonia, finally, weeps.

Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell
This was Orwell’s first book, and the edition I have categorizes it as a novel. Actually, it’s three parts reportage, one part fiction. In Paris the unnamed narrator works as a plonguer (a dishwasher with a variety of other tasks) in a large hotel and later in a Russian restaurant. The kitchens in both places are filthy and vermin-infested. His experiences “destroyed one of my illusions, namely, the idea that Frenchmen know good food when they see it.” The work is physically punishing and often frenetic; verbal abuse is so commonplace that “imbecile” is a mild form of address. The pay for sixteen hour days (with only Sundays off) is barely enough to cover the cost of a tiny room in a hotel (also filthy and vermin-infested). For Orwell the City of Lights shrank to his workplace, the Metro, a bistro (to get drunk in on Saturday nights) and his bed. The Paris section teems with colorful characters carrying on in a state of high drama. When Orwell moves to England things slow to a more sedate pace. But in London he never finds work – he’s a tramp, sleeping in “spikes.” These government-sponsored boarding houses limit an individual to one night’s stay, a rule which causes the poor to constantly be on the move (thus comes the word “tramp”). Meals at the spikes consist of tea and two slices of bread with margarine; men sleep (or try to) crammed into filthy dormitories; the “beds” are often the floor. Though Orwell doesn’t in any way ennoble the down-and-out, he believes that most of the men he encounters could be worthwhile citizens. They would prefer to work, but the inability to keep themselves clean, or to have decent clothes, limits their options. And as they idly wander, their hopes are extinguished and their bodies deteriorate. They’re even denied the comforts of sex; no woman would have anything to do with them, and they don’t have money for the cheapest prostitute. The book is grimy and vulgar, as befits its subject (the Paris section reminded me of the atmosphere of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer). Orwell is successful in relating conditions, but he understands that his insight is limited because he’s not stuck in that life. He closes by writing, “I should like to know what really goes on in the minds of plonguers and tramps and Embankment sleepers. At present I do not feel that I have seen but the fringe of poverty.” An issue that cannot be avoided in reviewing this book is the anti-Semitism that runs through it. Is Orwell merely relating the attitude of his friend Boris when the man goes into a long diatribe expressing his virulent hatred for Jews? Why, whenever a Jew appears (and Orwell can spot them), are they depicted in a very negative light? For a man whose compassion and intelligence I respected, I found this to be disturbing. And disappointing.

Mary - Vladimir Nabokov (Russian)
This short novel, Nabokov’s first, was written when he was twenty-six years old and newly-married. It displays more of his flaws than his virtues. Ganin had a brief love affair with Mary; Nabokov tries to evoke their love through Ganin’s memories, but the young man is unappealing and Mary (who exists entirely offstage) never comes to life. I cared more about the old poet and the lonely young woman who live in Ganin’s rooming house. At the end an improbable coincidence is to reunite the lovers after a five year separation. The plan is for Ganin to meet Mary at the railroad station and whisk her away from her repugnant husband. But, on the final page, he abruptly decides that she should remain as no more than a memory, and he heads for another railroad station to make his getaway. Recently I started The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (written fifteen years after Mary) but didn’t read enough to do a review. In both novels Nabokov tried to capture elusive emotional states and to describe the inanimate world in fresh ways. He believed that the magic of his prose and perceptions could carry the day. He was mistaken. He needed vital characters in compelling situations. He needed Humbert craving Lolita.

Saint Augustine’s Pigeon - Evan S. Connell
In reviewing Connell’s Double Honeymoon I called it “a terrible mistake from an author I greatly admire.” His books that I admire are Mrs. Bridge, Mr. Bridge, Son of the Morning Star, Diary of a Rapist and The Connoisseur. They need to be duly noted, because this collection of selected stories includes many terrible mistakes. There are only two full-fledged successes. In the four page long “The Marine” a pilot who had not yet left the United States asks an injured Captain what it was like on the front lines. In the ensuing monologue we get a harrowing look at how war allows a warped person to indulge his grisly urges. The other success is an essay on the subject of celebrity (with “numerous digressions”); it was a pleasure to accompany Connell as he lets his thoughts meander along labyrinthine paths. As for the rest of the book, there are many short pieces, some interesting, some a waste. What baffled me are the five long stories. Two are about a character named J.D., a man who roams the world; he occasionally returns to tell his stay-at-home school friends of the wondrous things he has seen and experienced (including love affairs with exotic women). J.D. came across as one of Walter Mitty’s more foolish incarnations. Then there are three very long stories featuring a character named Karl Muhlbach. In struggling through them my wandering attention was caught by a line describing a telephone conversation: “. . . it goes on and on, a long, dreary, stupid, inconclusive affair.” These words accurately described the story I was reading. All the characters – not only Muhlbach, though he’s the worst of the lot – could be aliens from the planet Boffo. How could Connell get Mr. and Mrs. Bridge so right and then show no understanding of human nature (nor any inkling of how to tell an engrossing story)? The answer must lie in the psyche of the author. With the Bridges Connell captured stages of their lives in precise images, but he did it from a distance, as an observer. Though the images are artfully created and arranged, his scrupulous intelligence was the main factor at work. Connell used Muhlbach as his main character in two novels (which in itself is perplexing). The Connoisseur was successful because it focused on Karl’s obsession with pre-Columbian art; Double Honeymoon failed because it was about a sexual relationship. Connell was at a loss when presenting intimate feelings from a firsthand perspective. He needed to work from a place of detachment, either in the subject matter or the way the story was framed. A look at the body of his work – much of which is nonfiction – suggests that he was aware of this limitation.

The Unspeakable Skipton - Pamela Hansford Johnson

In an opening note Johnson states that she had “always wanted to write a study about an artist’s paranoia.” Skipton is a writer. I didn’t see a paranoid individual, though he’s certainly deranged. He has delusions of grandeur (he believes he’s a genius of the highest order); he’s arrogant – abusively so – and his heart festers with an overabundance of hatred. Since his writing isn’t appreciated by a world of fools, most of the novel concerns his machinations to get money. He’s an artist starving in the garret – literally. People (for whom he has extreme distaste) interest him only as potential sources of income, and he resorts to pimping, blackmail and thievery so he can buy food and pay his rent. This sounds grim, but it’s not. Not as Johnson presents it; she even manages to sustain a comic tone. The writing is topnotch – lively, sometimes moving with headlong impetuosity. The characters Skipton interacts with are a colorful group and Bruges, Belgium is a wondrous setting. By the end – even though I was in the mind of a warped and unsavory person – I felt pity for Skipton. In order to convey pity I suppose Johnson also felt it. I hope she did; poor souls such as Skipton meet with enough derision in their lives. *

King Solomon’s Mines - H. Rider Haggard

A rip-roaring yarn. Close escapes from the jaws of death, monstrous villains, an epic battle that rages over several chapters, a fabulous treasure. Throughout the exotic and gory events Allan Quartermain, the narrator, remains down-to-earth and unheroic (he even admits that he’s a bit of a coward). His solid presence provides a needed balance to the high drama. Haggard knew Africa and its people well. I was interested in how a Victorian colonialist would depict the natives. He grants them a condescending respect, sometimes even admiration, but they’re not the equal of an Englishman. Good as it is, the book’s ideal audience is the young; if I had read it when I was twelve it would have knocked my socks off.

The Eye - Vladimir Nabokov (Russian)

This long short story was fated to fail; its premise is too unwieldy. Yet Nabokov uses smoke and mirrors to fashion a rickety plausibility. He plays with the idea of a person viewing himself from outside himself – being merely a disembodied eye. The eye constantly sees the contempt and indifference the world has for him. In this outing Nabokov’s cruelty is tempered; in his Foreword he refers to his character as “poor” Smurov, and I wonder if he could relate to him; the parade of indignities he subjects Smurov to have a masochistic quality (was young Nabokov rankled by the lack of recognition for his writing?). At the end Smurov retreats into the realm of the imagination. He insists that he has found happiness there; in dreams he can possess the woman he loves. His last (and pitiable) words: “What more can I do to prove it, to proclaim that I am happy? Oh, to shout it so that all of you believe me at last, you cruel, smug people . . .”

Some Buried Caesar - Rex Stout
Another excellent Nero Wolfe mystery. The breezy and amusing Archie is more interesting than the one-dimensional Wolfe, and it was wise of Stout to make him the first person narrator. Unlike many whodunits, no information is withheld from the reader and no improbable plot twists pop up at the end. Stout plays fair by providing us with the clues we need to solve the crime. The writing has a light, casual touch; Stout didn’t labor over these books, but Archie wouldn’t either. The rustic setting works nicely, the varied cast of characters come to life. Stout is especially good in his portrayals of women (Lily Rowan is a treat, sexy and fun). Though dealing with murder, Stout avoids gore and sleaziness. What we get in the Nero Wolfe series is sheer enjoyment. Of what worth is sheer enjoyment? I don’t believe a novel must aspire to greatness to have value. If it succeeds in what it sets out to do, it’s a success; if it fails, it’s a failure. Rex Stout – like Ian Fleming – succeeded to a high degree in what he attempted. Sometimes we simply need to be entertained.

Double Indemnity - James M. Cain
This was Cain’s second novel. Like The Postman Always Rings Twice, one of its virtues is sparseness (was Cain our first minimalist?). There are no long descriptions of people and places. And, really, do detailed descriptions matter to a reader? Don’t we simply forget them? Cain uses dialogue to move his plots along; emotions are conveyed with the fewest words possible. These two novels offer lessons in how to engage and hold a reader’s attention. Postman is better by far; it’s more visceral, the story line more efficient, the feelings of the two characters more convincing. In Indemnity I didn’t understand what motivated the narrator to embark on the murder scheme; I didn’t believe in his pure love for the daughter; the twists at the end were improbable. As for the last chapter – it goes beyond the unexpected into the truly weird; I wanted to reject it but found that the lunacy of the situation – in which Cain posits a fatal bond between the damned – had a perverse power.

The Defense - Vladimir Nabokov (Russian)
I previously wrote that “plot obfuscation and stylistic ornamentation are mostly just clutter.” When I used the qualifier “mostly” I was thinking of Nabokov. His plot twists are intriguing, his ornamentation is brilliant; they enrich his work. But he has to enrich a discernible plot and comprehensible characters. The Defense was a tricky undertaking, and that’s because the protagonist, who we first meet as a boy, is severely autistic (this was written in 1930, when autism was not widely recognized, yet Luzhin has all the symptoms). How far can you go in exploring the inner life of such a person? Luzhin is a chess genius; but chess, for him, leads to a destructive obsession. The novel shifts away from the black and white squares and delves into Luzhin’s relationship with a young woman. This woman is endowed (or burdened) with a hyper-compassionate nature. She initially displays a lighthearted interest in this very unusual man, but she inspires in him a blind devotion. It’s not blind in its completeness, but in its incomprehension; Luzhin cannot understand or even relate to another person. She, in turn, cannot leave someone so in need of her. The ending, in which madness prevails with a vengeance, flounders badly. This supports my belief that Nabokov didn’t know what to do with his peculiar character. Ornamentation and obfuscation are this novel’s main features, and they’re not enough.

Confessions of an Advertising Man - David Ogilvy
This is a book about business. It’s practical, thorough, well-organized, honest and intelligent. Ogilvy takes pride in producing work of superior quality, but his primary goal is the making of money, both for the clients he represents and for himself. He doesn’t shy away from depicting the ruthlessness of the world he operates in. He’s a taskmaster who expects much of his employees; if they don’t meet his standards, out they go. There’s a photograph of him on the front cover; his eyes are cold and hard. Young people considering a career in business should contemplate that gimlet gaze. His prose is clear, concise and lively, as would be expected of a good copywriter. He reveals, with surprising frankness, how advertisers go about persuading the public (or, put more bluntly, how they manipulate us); this is instructive – and cautionary. The book was written in 1963, and Ogilvy is prescient when he looks to the future. He finds the over-saturation of ads on TV to be objectionable and suggests government regulation. He sees danger in the unrestrained promotion of materialistic goods and values. He also believes that advertising should not be used in political campaigns. He would no doubt be appalled at the state of affairs today.

Invitation to a Beheading - Vladimir Nabokov (Russian)
I believe this novel – a masterpiece that ranks up there with Lolita – is about Life, and it presents a disturbing picture. Cincinnatus is in a cell, awaiting execution for an undisclosed crime (that of being alive). He wants to know, in the beginning, the date of his execution; the answers he receives confuse or mislead him. Later a definite date is set (“You have inoperable cancer, Mr. Jones.”). If we think of the scenario Nabokov presents us with in these stark terms (mostly we avoid thinking of it) Cincinnatus is man stripped of all but the essentials of existence. In this state he yearns for three things: compassion, love and understanding. The last is the most important. For how can another person be compassionate toward you, how can they love you, if they don’t understand who and what you are? The terrible (and terribly grotesque) cruelty of the book (Cincinnatus is not harmed physically at any point) is the utter lack of understanding everyone exhibits toward him; instead he’s treated with a callousness that can take the form of ridicule or indifference. He tries to express his true self in writing, but that’s futile. No one will read his words; besides, he can’t put into words what he wants to say. So he’s emotionally alone (and is that not the human condition?). The surreal ending is intelligible if we consider that the world exists for each of us through our senses; the world ceases when we do. When Cincinnatus’s head is severed a vestige of his consciousness continues on for a moment as everything around him crumbles to nothingness. *

The Stepdaughter - Caroline Blackwood
A psychological study that’s pared down to the bare bones. A woman (identified only as J) is writing letters to “Nobody”; in them she describes her situation and her emotional state. She’s very depressed and angry; the person consuming her thoughts is her ugly stepdaughter, a girl that J loathes. I found all this interesting, in a warped way, but fault lines began to form in a structure that was already flimsy. When the stepdaughter mysteriously disappears J becomes deeply concerned about her fate. Why this sudden switch in attitude? Also, J has a daughter of her own living in the apartment, but she’s given only one scene, on one page; her absence as a functioning character is inexplicable. As for the whereabouts of the missing stepdaughter – that’s never disclosed. Even when writing an off-kilter novel the author has to connect the dots.

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich - Danilo Kis (Yugoslavian)
An original work, but, for me, impenetrable and boring. I was so lost that I thought I was reading separate stories before I realized that they were chapters in a novel. Nothing held my attention – no character is developed in depth, there’s no coherent and consistent narrative. There’s a lot of Slavic history (with names that meant nothing to me), a lot of political goings-on (which confused me), a lot of brutality, a lot of diversions. The book has a dark, oppressive atmosphere, which I suppose accurately reflects the world that Kis was writing about. But it’s a world I know nothing about, and the author never enlightened me.

Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
I don’t read much non-fiction. I prefer to inhabit somebody’s imaginative world. But Orwell is Orwell; his personality infuses this book, and communion with that person was what I was seeking. In the introduction Lionel Trilling makes two statements that I agree with: Orwell was a virtuous man, and he told the truth. This book doesn’t untangle the labyrinth intricacies of the Spanish Civil War; Orwell limits himself to what he observed, and even that can be confusing (at one point he warns the reader that a chapter will be rough sledding, and it was). The most interesting aspects are the human ones. Orwell tells of the boredom of war, of the rats, the excrement, the lice. He tells of the comradery that builds up between men. He sees a cause worth fighting for and exposes the ways in which that cause was violated. At the end he returns to find England in a deep, deep sleep, and he fears that it will be jerked awake only by the roar of bombs. As is usually the case with Orwell, he was prophetic.

Heat and Dust - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

The author does her usual competent job. All the characters are interesting, though a bit fuzzy. It’s this fuzziness that makes the book no more than competent. Motivations don’t quite convince; relationships are a bit dubious; people’s actions are only partially accounted for. Not that they ring false; they just aren’t deep and grounded. The novel’s format is twofold: a journal in present time alternates with letters written by the journal writer in which she reconstruct a long-ago episode. But the author doesn’t provide insight into the emotional life of anyone, not even her journal writer. I can’t say that what Jhabvala does is a failure – this is an engrossing work. But the withholding that’s so prevalent kept me at arm’s length.

Stories by Frank O’Connor

A real stylist at work – working carefully, polishing until he has it just right. There’s even a distinct lilt and cadence to O’Connor’s writing. He explores the Irish sensibility (making it as exotic as a South Sea Islander’s, particularly in regard to the relationships between the sexes). The problem is that too many of these pieces are humorous glimpses of life; they’re brimming with local color but aren’t full-fledged stories. When there’s a solid plot and characters O’Connor can be wonderful. The best story is “Guests of the Nation,” in which he tells of a horrible act while making the inexorable proceedings seem friendly and light – until the end. Also outstanding are “The Majesty of the Law,” “The Luceys” and “My Oedipus Complex.” Some stories miss due to garrulity, a storyteller’s love of hearing himself go on to the point where he overdoes it. But this collection as a whole left me with a feeling of enjoyment, satisfaction and a fresh appreciation of the importance of style in writing.

Lolita: A Screenplay - Vladimir Nabokov

A dalliance. Strangely, I don’t recognize the Lolita in this one. Could I have missed the whole point of the novel? Kubrick never used this script, but I hope Nabokov got a nice paycheck.

Wisteria Cottage - Robert Coates
Coates enters the mind of a warped and dangerous individual. To do this convincingly is an achievement, but the real value of the novel lies in the empathy and pity I felt for Richard. He’s a victim of a harrowing mental affliction, and, being in his mind, I saw the logic in his thinking as he distorts reality; I awaited his shifts in mood; I felt his irresistibly rising anger and his despair. Because I understood Richard so intimately, his violent acts seemed all the more terrible. This powerful, strange and disturbing book is not just a study of a killer; it’s a work of compassion. *

Clayhanger - Arnold Bennett
This is a solid and well-constructed novel, but it’s an example of how those virtues can be stifling. Bennett does everything right, but there’s no spark compelling the characters and action forward. The pace is a plodding one. When events became predictable I lost all interest. In its finicky carefulness, this struck me as a self-conscious effort. I think that Bennett was at his best when he wrote from a female’s perspective – as in his wonderful The Old Wives’Tale.

After Such Pleasures - Dorothy Parker
Parker wrote in the heyday of the American short story, when authors were paid well because they produced a desired commodity. She displays the virtues of writers of this era – her stories are highly readable; they do not tax or disappoint. They offer fifteen minutes of entertainment. One of Parker’s strengths is her wit; she had the deft touch. Still, none of these stories rose to excellence. They’re lightweight. Was Parker capable of digging deeper? She could (and did), but in this collection her objectives were modest.

Bend Sinister - Vladimir Nabokov
What I liked: an interesting main character, Krug (I admired his mind and personality); a study of Krug’s love for his dead wife and his son; a meditation on mortality and the great scheme of life (with no answers provided); a comical look at a totalitarian state malignantly malfunctioning. In the last aspect this is strong stuff, displaying how horrific humor can be. As for drawbacks, one was the obscurity of much of the prose; the book is full of Nabokovian word games. Also, the author indulged his cruel streak too fully in the nightmarish ending. A child being tortured before his father’s eyes? Repellant in the extreme, and this ultimately turned me against the book.

The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
Most of these stories shouldn’t have been published; they weren’t meant to be. Nabokov was doodling self-indulgently (probably with failed ideas for novels). He displays his intelligence and his verbal acrobatics, but to no purpose. That said, in this huge collection there are about ten stories in which Nabokov is at his masterly best. But how does one find them in this haystack?

Entertaining Strangers - A. R. Gurney
Mildly pleasant humor that ran out of steam. The first person narrator was likable, but the situation (academic politics) couldn’t carry the action. A weak villain didn’t help. At the 150 page point the author was slogging along to get fifty more pages, so that he could call it a novel. I quit befor he did.

The Egoist - George Meredith
A novel of extreme intelligence – almost too much so. It’s difficult to follow Meredith’s convoluted prose and his ideas. However, it’s well worth the effort. Two great characters – Willoughby and Clara – in a struggle: he to retain his sense of superiority and she to break an engagement to a man who has become repugnant to her. Clara is also breaking from the confining mold of the Victorian female – she’s going against society’s edicts as to how a woman should act. Her desperate need, at any cost, to free herself is presented wonderfully; she’s an exhilarating character. The setting for their struggle is a country estate, the cast is limited to a half dozen people (including one of the most appealing and genuine little boys in literature). This framework allows concentration on some basic and important issues. The book is about values, about what really matters in life. The ending, in which the author tries to emphasize the comic confusion, is more confusing than comic and is the novel’s weakest stretch. Also, the man Clara loves is merely a composite of virtues. But Willoughby’s defeat (in which all he can salvage is his reputation in the eyes of the world) is depicted with force. I even felt a bit sorry for him. *

Life Is Elsewhere - Milan Kundera (Czech)
Other books don’t go where this one does. Kundera explores his characters at a deeper level. To read this is to experience something new – and honest and brave. Brave because Kundera brings up things – such as Jaromil’s relationship with his mother – that other writers (and readers) avoid out of “good taste.” Not that Kundera is vulgar. He’s concerned with a degree of intimacy that we mostly look away from, even in our thinking. That’s a problem in reading the book – it’s often ugly and hits uncomfortably close to home when it exposes cruelties and selfish motivations that are common in human interactions. Also, Kundera demands a rigorous attention – he can tire you out. It’s not a fun read, but I was left mostly with respect. *

Wickford Point - John P. Marquand
This novel’s main virtue is the elegance of the writing. Though the plot held little intrinsic interest for me, I was carried along pleasantly for over 400 pages. I was never vitally engaged; rather nicely lulled, fairly interested in the cast of characters – maybe, at times, doubting their authenticity, but never enough for me to lose faith. Yet, days after I finished the book, it turned out to be more than a diverting read; I found myself missing its people and wanting to be with them again.

A Month in the Country - J. L. Carr
A short book, well-written (simplicity, ability to catch the essence of a person or place with a few words) and a big theme: how life passes us, our regret at that loss. The plot interweaves the mysterious uncovering of a sacred wall painting with the mundane aspects of country life. An evocative novel, gentle, loving, melancholy. However, the feelings evoked are diffuse; it’s a mood piece, and as such it lacks force.

King, Queen, Knave - Vladimir Nabokov (Russian)
Nabokov reworked this book, which he wrote in his twenties. It’s brilliant – its colorfulness, verve, audacity. The characters and scenes are vivid, the language glitters and dances, maniacally at times. He takes the shopworn theme of a love triangle/murder plot and, about two-thirds way through, the reader finds himself in the middle of a nightmare. That’s where a ferocity sets in. Things turn horrendous, sickening – moral corruption emerges as the theme. But Nabokov is not a moralist; he’s a cold and cruel writer, examining people like he would chloroformed butterfly specimens. His only mistake in this tour de force is that he overdoes the fantastic element. (Did he need the human-like dummies and the crazy landlord?) *