Books of 2009

A little late, but I thought I would run down my favourite books of last year, actually my favourites that were new to me for 2009.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Wells Tower

A collection of short stories from Chapel Hill, South Carolina's Tower, full of flawed but human characters struggling with the modern world. Even the title story, which concerns a group of Vikings going on a rape and pillage expedition, is (and this is my reading) about that most modern of concerns: trying to achieve a work/life balance. There has been a lot of noise about how the short story is back—I'm not sure of that (this has only sold 2,000 copies in the UK)—but Tower is worth seeking out. The B Format paperback is due in April.


A Gate at the Stairs
Lorrie Moore

Speaking of short story writers...Lorrie Moore is probably the best short story writer working in English today. But this is her first novel in about 15 years, and she brings to it that same chiseled prose, same perceptive insight into her characters. The only drawback is that there are some places in the book that it feels like it has been written by a short story writer and not a novelist; the pace of the narrative drags a bit. But there is all that beautiful writing, so that it's worth slogging through the odd rough patches.



The Lazarus Project
Aleksander Hemon

As I said, new to me. This was published in 2008, but I only recently picked it up on a visit to the States. It's a dual narrative: in early 1900s Chicago, Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch is shot dead in the home of the Chicago police chief and 100 years later another immigrant to the Second City, a Bosnian writer named Brik, starts researching and retracing Lazarus' journey. It's original, funny, poignant and the whole alienated outsider, stranger in a strange land thing appeals to me greatly. Hemon is Bosnian, moved to the US in the early 90s, wrote his first story in English only in 1995, the clever clogs.


Hard Rain Falling
Don Carpenter

This novel was originally published way back in 1966, but has unaccountably been long out of print, and has been resurrected this year, part of the New York Review of Books' list of bringing back 'lost classics'. It is set in Portland, Oregon in the 1950s, in the milieu of petty crims and pool hustlers, but it's not really a crime novel. There are pulpy, potboiler elements, but it is more about living on society's margins, challenging conformity and the system, and there is much compassion in the tough and terse Hemingway-esque writing.


That's my top four. I was going to do a top 5, but number one is still far and away Wolf Hall, which I have praised to no end previously.

Awwww

My cat has taken to sleeping in the bookcase...

Noted

I'll begin with a oft-repeated refrain: boy it's been a long time. But, I've been busy, so lay off, will ya.

Anyway, your Expat is shaking off his autumnal blues and post-Christmas weight gain to re-enter the blogosphere. Even tweeting. All in preparation for some exciting projects in the new year - stay tuned.

I spent Christmas in the usual way (the whisky, the shotgun, the sense of futility and dread) and lately have been kicking back reading and writing and relaxing. Relaxing, that is, until I read "The Dead", which is of course the final piece in Joyce's Dubliners. I read this every year around this time; it's snowy and takes place on the feast of the Epiphany - the 12th day of Christmas.

I used to have a lovely orange Penguin paperback edition, yet it seemed not to have survived my latest house move. So off to Oxfam to pick up the Penguin modern classics edition (sorry for screwing you on royalties, Joyce estate!), edited by Terence Brown, Trinity College Dublin.


What grated was that, unlike the orange Penguin, old Terry seems to want to stick his oar in and comment on almost every part of the story. Twice a page on average: the Dead is 49 pages long, yet there are 98 footnotes. The problem is that each of the notes are numbered and each time you interrupt your reading turning to the back thinking, 'Well this must be important,' and you are invariably disappointed. True, some are essential: a bit of Irish translated, the fact that 'Adam and Eve's' was Dublin slang for its Church of the Immaculate Conception. But many are interpretive and break the flow of the story. Naming the maid Lily may indeed be significant because it is the flower associated with the archangel Gabriel (the name of one of the main characters), but that could be told in an afterword.

What truly irritated was that so many were unnecessary, it seemed like Prof Brown was struggling to hit a word count. 'Dumb-bells' are 'weights for callisthenic exercises'. Glasgow, apparently, is a 'Scottish industrial city.' Who knew?

The solution for this is for Penguin to footnote like OUP does for their classics: not numbering them, so that they break up the story, but just having notes at the back which readers can refer to if stuck. Yet I suspect footnoting will become ever more intrusive going forward as traditional classics publishers strive to 'add value' to their books to combat the glut of free classics that are available on the internet.

The second biggest street party in the world, don't you know

To the Notting Hill Carnival on Sunday for my first time, and it sort of encapsulated everything about London. Up from the Central Line at Holland Park station (not Notting Hill Gate; Whitehall, my friend and guide said, that's for Carnival virgins) and meandering through tony, posh Ladbroke Grove, with its whitewashed Victorian townhouses, Chelsea tractors parked imperiously just inside vine covered gated drives. Richard Curtis London.

Then: turning into the Carnival, and the speed changes, a needle scratching along a classical LP and replaced by booming hip hop. Rammed shoulder to shoulder with a mass of multi-coloured, multi-cultural, multi-this-and-that humanity, accompanied by the thump-thump-thump of drum n bass, Afro beats, steel drums, a new sound around each corner and dancing, drinking, dancing, drinking. Zadie Smith London.


Then: sampling dubious looking but delicious but overpriced jerk chicken, several anxious waits in a port-a-loo queue, idly wondering why there are no bins and who the hell is going to clean up this mess, and finally the inevitably delayed, sweaty fug of an overcrowded tube ride home.

Friday bits and bobs

A few things that have caught my eye over the past week or so.

A nice freebie here. A journalist, Max Millard, interviewed the great and the good in New York City during the 1970s whilst working for a variety of newspapers, and he is giving away a free ebook of the interviews here and here. It is fascinating mostly for the wide range of people from Stan Lee to Betty Friedan to George Plimpton to Isaac Asimov.

Sony is launching a new eReader in the UK. I only mention this in order to post a gratuitous photo of the lovely Sadie Jones, who was at the launch at the British Library.



And, my little spot on BBC Radio 4's "You and Yours", yukking it up with Peter White about Potter-less Bloomsbury and the state of the trade.

How the dead live

So a touristy London weekend. On Saturday, propelled by Wolf Hall besotted-ness, I went to Hampton Court. It is an impressive, if schizophrenic palace, half Tudor, half Baroque. I love the Tudor bit most. Built by Cardinal Wolsey who gifted it to Henry VIII in order to forestall the good Cardinal's downfall (that didn't work so well), it's all about solidity, power, cowing and wowing guests, and it is so easy to imagine Henry stamping down the halls. Most of the exhibitions are done well, but there are some rather irksome 'let's engage the kids' sort of touches, like the ghostly whispering "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, died" piped into one of the stairwells.

The clean lines and Versailles-lite of the later Baroque stuff I don't find as appealing. And something puts me off about the (admittedly impressive) wide expanse of formal gardens. They are two boxed in, regimented, controlled. It's all a-flower but it doesn't seem alive. Still, I did get to see the oldest and biggest grape vine in the world, which is something to tell the grandkids.




On Sunday, to Highgate Cemetary, which curiously felt so much more alive than the Hampton Court gardens. Sure, there is the box office draws of Karl Marx's and George Eliot's grave, but what I loved was the verdant, unchecked undergrowth creeping over tombstones, angel statues poking out through trees, vines above a group of graves with the ripe grapes dropping down so you squish them as you walk, the sweet smell of blackberries in the air, butterflies flitting amongst tombstones. It is not a place of death so much, but to celebrate the dead's lives.







The artist Patrick Caulfield's gravestone is quite frankly a work of genius...



...but this tiny aspirational inscription was my favourite of all.

The question is, will the Vamp be stiffer than Robert Pattison's acting?

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