Anne Enright: The Wig My Father Wore

      I’m really not sure what to make of this one…

Enright uses language beautifully, playfully, in a way that to me is particularly Irish, in the sense that it reminds me of James Joyce, and even more of Flann O’Brien; there’s a linguistic levity that conceals a seriousness unless you slow down and look closely, beneath the surface.

There are other aspects that make it Irish, to me: an awareness of and – not quite rejection, but distancing from – a sense of provincialism, primitiveness, smallworldliness of the place, that is also connected with religion. The effect of cloying Catholic pietism pervaded Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and it was the combination of all these factors that led him to permanent exile from his homeland a century ago. Enright also, for me, resembles Joyce in the way she conveys a particular attitude to sex and sexuality, which is also shaped by religion. It was interesting to come across a portrayal of this by a woman writer.

And then there’s the surrealism, both of the plot – Grace, the narrator, has an angel living with her, and she wants to get him into bed, and she works on an Irish TV dating show that struggles with how explicit or not to be in matters sexual – and of the general presentation of people and events; further shades of O’Brien here…

It’s incredibly funny in places, absolutely deranged in others, and yet, sixty pages in (my usual trigger for why am I bothering?) I found myself thinking, what is the point of all this? I was sort of enjoying the plot and the offbeatness of Enright’s style, but what was I getting from the book other than light entertainment, which isn’t my usual motive for persisting.

And I can’t really answer that question. I finished the book and thought okay, Irish person writing about their perceptions of the weirdness of the Irish, and their take on love and sex…well-written, but derivative and basically all done before; enjoyable enough, but nothing new to see here. Have I missed something?

John Kennedy Toole: A Confederacy of Dunces

   I first came across this novel (and its author’s tragic story – unable to find a publisher, he killed himself) over thirty years ago: it was the funniest thing I’d ever read way back then, every time since, and it still is. It has me laughing out loud helplessly…

How to describe it? Set in downtown New Orleans and featuring a cast of total misfit characters, it’s centred on Aloysius, an unemployable overweight ex-student with a troublesome stomach valve, crackpot fantasies of how life was better in mediaeval times, an equally crazed (and sex-crazed) long-distance girlfriend who’s into hopeless leftwing causes, his alcoholic mother who is determined to get Aloysius either gainfully employed or else into the local asylum, an utterly useless policeman and the owner of a clip joint and her employees. This collection of oddballs and crazies means it’s mayhem all the way. During the course of the novel, Aloysius has two jobs, first in a rundown pants factory which he helps to run further into the ground, and then as a hotdog vendor, who eats most of his own merchandise.

What makes the book so funny for me is Toole’s astonishing ear for dialogue and local accent which often drifts a stream of consciousness effect and creates much of the humour. Burma Jones, the black floor-sweeper in the night-club and token oppressed minority representative, is particularly good through his dry, laconic utterances. Then there are the utterly outrageous scenes Toole engineers using his cast of characters and having them run into each other in totally implausible coincidences.

It’s definitely a book of its time (it was written in the sixties) and I fear that some of his characters and situations may well be deemed objectionable by some of today’s more PC readers, and although I was aware of this possibility as I re-read the novel for the fourth time, I nevertheless noted that Toole’s humour was never malicious towards his poor, disabled, gay or black characters. On the contrary, he manages to engage his readers’ sympathy for all of them and their predicaments, while making us laugh at their antics at the same time.

It is a work of genius, I have always felt; it’s probably also something of a boy’s book…

Giacomo Sartori: I Am God

   I read about this recently, was intrigued and having put it on a wish list, received it for Christmas.

Attempting to visualise God and present him as the first person narrator of a novel is an engaging start. Here is a God who can (and does) boast about his powers and flaunt his capabilities before the reader, at the same time as realising he needs to scale himself down in order for humans to be able to comprehend him and understand (or be interested in) the story he wants to tell. He can also threaten at various points to use his superpowers to intervene in and affect the world and the humans he is interested in, and yet forbears to do so, for a whole range of almighty reasons… He’s consistently disparaging about a man who lived a couple of millennia ago and was allegedly his son.

He seems inordinately focused on the human race and our tiny corner of the universe and acknowledges his creation, but also realises that there’s not much else we are that interested in, so if he is to tell a story it will involve his interest in and interactions with us. He does reflect on other aspects of his creation, both in the universe generally, and also more specifically on his six days’ work designing this planet and its contents; and doesn’t seem particularly impressed by homo sapiens and our sense of self-importance. His tale is interspersed with sarcastic comments and derogatory footnotes on us, our insignificance and our stupidity.

However, in this tale God also seems unduly interested in a small group of misfits somewhere in Italy, and their workplace and sexual adventures – perhaps he’s entertaining himself with experiencing attraction or obsession. He’s a very male God – or that’s the way he presents himself to us in this story, and it’s evident pretty early on that the heroine will ultimately head down a lesbian path… at which point he allows his Old Testament side to show. But he’s a fair God and does not interfere.

It’s clever, and funny at times, an easy read with the occasional thought-provoking idea slipped in, almost as an aside.

Jerome K Jerome: Three Men on the Bummel

Late nineteenth-century humour seems very tame, and a good deal of it relies on gender and national stereotypes that feel very jaded or even unacceptable today. I remember laughing my head off as a child reading Three Men in a Boat, and when a work colleague introduced me to Three Men on the Bummel quite a few years ago, I remember enjoying it. This time round, having been prompted to re-read it by a newspaper article about forgotten books by well-known writers, I found it rather tiresome. Except that, reading and feeling it’s all rather jaded, one suddenly comes across a moment that does make one laugh out loud… and there were a decent few of those.

Three Victorian men, two married and one a confirmed bachelor, leave their wives behind and go for a walking and cycling holiday in Germany. It’s suitably, if mildly chaotic, and full of the usual mishaps and misunderstandings. A great deal of the humour derives from each other’s faults and failings as seen by the others, and from quick-fire conversations which seem to be the forebear of modern stand-up comedy.

There’s a lot of rambling and digressing from the main idea, which feels a bit like padding, covering a wide range of topics, gently mocking of both England and the English, and foreigners. Jerome easily finds the occasion for fun in the Germans’ perceived penchant for tidiness, neatness and order. There are long drawn-out anecdotes based on linguistic misunderstandings; overall the tone struck me as rather flat, too even, lacking variation.

When I tried to think about what had disappointed me, I think it was hindsight, in a way: in 1900 it was easy to make fun of Germans being sticklers for law and authority, with rules for everything and penalties and fines for infringements; after seeing the effect of this on a global scale twice in the twentieth century such national proclivities somehow seem rather uneasy or inappropriate sources of humour… Germans are bred to obey anything with buttons, he says at one point. Humour is a funny thing in more ways than one. And I feel minded to look up Mark Twain‘s accounts of travel in Germany to see if he makes me feel the same way.

Ionesco: Macbett

I’ve always liked the theatre of the absurd, ever since I had to study Ionesco for French A-level; my recent reflections on Macbeth sent me back to his version of the play, Macbett, which I hadn’t read for many years.

There are the moments where a pair of characters share and repeat identical or almost identical lines, pantomime-fashion, just as in some of his earliest plays like La Cantatrice Chauve, echoing each other; often the phrases repeated are platitudes or even nonsensical, contradictory. Elements of farce develop as an aftermath of the opening battle where in Shakespeare‘s version Macbeth and Banquo show great valour: war is portrayed here as insane, with lengthy catalogues of slaughters and millions of innocent deaths, and the two ‘heroes’ make identical speeches and claims, which further undermines them. Indeed the entire train of events is absurd, for Duncan is a coward to whom no perceptible respect is due, and he and his wife are caricatures, anyway. Everything is called into question when the women appear far braver than the men, and the king spouts rambling nonsense rather than making regal speeches…

In this play the witches appear with their prophecies in the middle of the play, and their encounter with Macbeth and Banquo is much lengthier and more serious: they spend considerable time persuading Macbett that he should move against Duncan. And Lady Duncan is actually one of the witches, physically seducing Macbett at the same time. Ionesco’s emphasis is clearly on the fact that wealth, sex and power are inseparably intertwined.

Although for me the play lacks the power of Le Roi Se Meurt, it does nevertheless work, particularly because it is a re-writing, a re-conception or re-imagining of an original we know well and are very familiar with. Thus, although there are most of the events and plots of Shakespeare’s play here, and the end results of them are very similar, the words are different, the focus is different, and the thought processes of the characters are different; it’s alienation in the true Brechtian sense that unsettles the audience. It’s very much a twentieth century play. And it ends, after the death of Macbett and Macol‘s coronation, with his rehearsing the speeches of Malcolm in that very tedious interlude in Act IV of Macbeth where he tests Macduff‘s loyalty – Ionesco has translated Shakespeare’s text word for word here – except that we have the eerie impression that here, Macol really means what he is saying…

So, definitely not a tragedy – a farce if anything – deliberately absurd, very entertaining although very tricky to stage, I think. And I came away from it with all sorts of comfortable Shakespearean preconceptions shaken and stirred.

George and Weedon Grossmith: Diary of a Nobody

This semi-humorous Victorian work conceals quite a hefty punch behind its deliberately understated exterior. I first came across it at school and enjoyed it then; I think it’s the first time I’ve been back to it, whilst on a recent touring holiday, courtesy of the excellent Librivox website.

For a couple of years Charles Pooter keeps a diary of his life beginning from the day he and his wife Carrie move into their new rented house in Holloway; they are soon joined by their (for Victorian times) raffish son Lupin who has been ‘let go’ from his job with a bank in Oldham. Charles has a job with a broking firm of some kind in the City, and is moderately successful. They both have a group of rather dull and sometimes boorish friends and relations.

If everything so far sounds almost deliberately dull and boring, that’s because surely it’s meant to. The adjective, ‘pooterish’, has passed into the language. The family is very petty bourgeois in its tastes, lacking in wit, liveliness, interests, not wanting to offend anyone, or to be offended. No-one has an interesting or original thought in their head… The most enterteining and subversive moment of the novel comes when the Pooters somehow end up at a social occasion where the guest of honour is an American writer who deliberately challenges his hosts’ attitudes, beliefs, and everything they do and stand for – no doubt in the stereotypically rude and outspoken American fashion that people used to condemn in Victorian times – and Charles Pooter, to his horror, finds himself acknowledging the truth of what the guest is saying and agreeing with him! Fortunately, this wobble is only brief, and our anti-hero shakes off his temporary rebellion and returns to normal.

What is really challenging about The Diary of a Nobody, what makes is so very different from that other gem from those times, Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, is that the Grossmiths inevitably get their reader reflecting on her or himself: we come to realise, as we mock the Pooters for their tedious ordinariness, that there is some, if not a lot, of that ordinariness in our own lives, no matter what story we may tell ourselves and others about how interesting and exciting our lives are. For do not we live in ordinary houses, often in suburbs, where we wrestle with the daily chores of shopping, tradesmen, making the house into a nice home, whilst dealing with our awkward children? And are not our values, beliefs and attitudes replicas of those with whom we spend our time? Are we really any different from the norm, or are we kidding ourselves?

If what we seek in our lives is contentment, and surely there is nothing wrong with that as a goal, then the ending of the book is comforting, as Mr Pooter gets a promotion which means he will be financially secure for the rest of his life, and his son lands a decent job. But it’s also very scary: where is the excitement, the adventure we feel we need?

The other wonderfully subversive thing about the book is its indirect challenge to the realist fallacy, that idea that fiction or cinema or television can ever portray our existence in a ‘true to life’ or realist fashion, rather than cut and edit for the sake of plot and excitement: The Diary of a Nobody really does consist of all that tedious stuff that has to be left out of so-called realist works to make them bearable: no-one in War and Peace argues with the butcher’s boy, moves a boot-scraper, paints the stairs, gets lost in a cab, or any of a host of other unbelievably dull and tedious things; here they do. God, it’s boring, and the scary thing is, it could be us…

Laughter and literature

My friends would tell you I can laugh loudly and heartily, and that I laugh easily and at lots of things. Something provoked me to start thinking about those books which have made me laugh the most…

I have to go back to my childhood, and Norman Hunter‘s amazing Professor Branestawm books (a couple of stories have recently been televised by the BBC quite successfully, I think) – silly stories about a mad professor and his crazy adventures: I remember friends at sleepovers when I was a kid, trying to read the stories aloud to each other, and it being impossible to keep a straight face much of the time.

Jerome K Jerome‘s masterpiece Three Men in A Boat had a similar effect on me as a teenager when I discovered him, and then, a little later on, I first came across Jaroslav Hasek‘s wonderful Good Soldier Svejk! The brilliance of his idea – sending a congenital idiot off to be a soldier in the Great War, and in the incredibly bureaucratic Austro-Hungarian army, too – allowed him to write by the yard (he never finished the novel, but there are a good 800 pages to keep you smiling) and have his hero in a great number of scrapes. My favourite pages are probably those where he is batman, first to a chaplain, and then to the amorous Captain Lukas. And the stories are always enhanced by Josef Lada’s great in-line illustrations.

Later on in life I came across John Kennedy Toole. His was a tragic story, in that he committed suicide thinking himself a failure, before The Confederacy of Dunces was published and was acclaimed a masterpiece. It will soon be time to read this minor classic again, and each time I’ve read it in the past, it has reduced me to helpless laughter. There is a second book, not as good – The Neon Bible – which I remember as being rather darker.

I’m conscious of the fact that all these are boys’ books, ie written by men and enjoyed – most probably – by male readers (although I know of one former female student who has enjoyed Svejk) and there’s a conundrum here. Firstly, I’ve racked my brain for any novels or stories by women writers who have had a similar effect on me and can’t think of any; this may, of course, be my own limited acquaintance with female humour, and I will be grateful for any suggestions any of my readers have to offer. And secondly, there’s the question of what makes us laugh. I can vaguely recall exploration of the nature of humour whilst at university and the mention of the name of Henri Bergson; the idea that we are laughing at a fellow human either being ridiculous or being made ridiculous; the idea that we are laughing at the misfortune of someone else. And I haven’t ever found these explanations completely convincing. For me, there’s something about the pure absurdity of situations involved, rather than the people. I’ve always been attracted to the Theatre of the Absurd, ever since I was introduced to it. And, as far as people are concerned, for me it seems to be something about them being allowed to act, react and interact in absurd ways, and the incongruous consequences of such actions. Whatever it is, I have always enjoyed laughing heartily.

Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing

When I wrote about The Taming of the Shrew last month, I mentioned that I’d come late to the enjoyment of Shakespeare’s comedies, and considered some of the reasons. I’m back here again, having revisited Much Ado About Nothing, which I realise has some similarities with the former, particularly in the central male/ female relationship.

The idea of a comedy being a story – a drama – that ends happily, rather than something that you spend a lot of time laughing at, is a difficult one for us to take on board, although if tragedy is a story with an unhappy ending, then the contrast is logical. And in a Shakespearean comedy there is usually a good deal to laugh at, even if it isn’t the primary focus. And then there is the tragi-comedy – a drama of tragedy averted – as it was so succinctly put by my English teacher at school. There are certainly tragi-comic elements in Much Ado.

I don’t find the sharpness and the displays of wit between Beatrice and Benedick anywhere near as funny or as enjoyable as those between Petruchio and Katherine, though I do like the idea of their being so ‘up themselves’ that they can be manipulated into admitting that they fancy each other, love each other, and will marry. I do find the plot which leads to the public shaming of the chaste Hero quite a shocking element in a play which will eventually turn out to have a happy ending, and Claudio’s behaviour seems quite unforgivable: thank heaven for suspension of disbelief, I suppose. And there is a reminder that the first Elizabethans prized different things from us, found different things humorous, and different behaviours acceptable.

And then there’s Dogberry and the watch: I’ve always warmed to this bumbling crew with their hearts in the right place, and the whole happy ending depends on them, of course. Somehow their blundering and their malapropisms mean the mounties get their men, as it were, and we realise how much of the success of this play depends on overheard conversations, and who overhears them and what they do with that eavesdropped knowledge…

Because it’s a comedy, the punishment of the evil Don John is deferred beyond the end of the play: there is no real assurance that he will get what he deserves, unlike what is promised Iago, for example; again an instance of the difference between tragedy and comedy.

I have yet to see a performance of this play; I suspect I will enjoy it much more when it’s brought to life. I have a DVD of the recent RSC production which I must get around to watching.

Umberto Eco: How to Travel with a Salmon (& other essays)

Umberto Eco contributed a regular column to an Italian news magazine, and this is a collection of pieces from it. He writes humorously, satirically, mockingly about a wide range of aspects of our world: the title piece is about his attempts to store a salmon in his hotel minibar fridge. He is wonderful on Italian bureaucracy, too, with the saga of trying to replace his stolen driving licence. It is like something out of Kafka, and while sometimes I did suspect him of exaggerating for effect, somehow this tale rang true.

Eco does write very entertainingly, putting many of today’s no doubt overpaid columnists who knit words to earn their weekly fee to shame. I’m astonished at his scope and versatility – a series of best-selling novels, humorous columns, serious art history and criticism, learned tomes on language, linguistics and translation – I wonder what else I haven’t discovered. His is a mind I can admire.

Some of the columns are doubly amusing because of the way that they have dated, as, for instance, when he writes of wrestling with modern technology like the mobile phone – he takes us back to the problems of the pre-smartphone days, the days of primitive computer programs and the limitations of dial-up internet…those dark ages of a couple of decades ago.

There are also some great intellectual games: how various historical characters might have responded to the question ‘how are you?’, and how his friends attempted to construct an anti-university and an anti-encyclopaedia. And he does also indulge his love of lists, this time in a true Rabelaisian fashion.

It’s not great literature, but it is a good time-filler; like everything I’ve read of his, there’s quality there…

My love of Czech literature

I first came across Svejk (or Schweik as he was known then in the bowdlerised translation then in print; Cecil Parrott‘s full and unexpurgated version came along rather later) in the sixth form at school and laughed myself silly over his antics, and Josef Lada‘s wonderful illustrations. Humorous writing, satire even, about the horrors of the Great War, was new to me and an eye-opener – it wasn’t long before I was to come across Joseph Heller‘s masterpiece Catch-22, the only novel I know that rivals Hasek’s.

My teenage years overlapped with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and its consequences, particularly for its literature, which I came gradually to know as a student, the bitter disillusionment and wholesale repression after the Prague Spring. Some writers emigrated, Milan Kundera to settle in Paris and write in French, and Josef Skvorecky to Canada. Others wrestled with censorship at home, or wrote for the ‘bottom drawer’.

I’ve enjoyed the fizzy lightness of Kundera, and Bohumil Hrabal – who can forget Closely Observed Trains, once you have seen the film? – I’ve tried Ivan Klima but didn’t really warm to him, but my all-time favourite has to be Josef Skvorecky.

Much of his fiction seems to be semi-autobiographical, covering his younger days as a teenager and jazz fan and would-be rebel in the Nazi protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, through the character of the hero of a number of novels, Danny Smiricky. Danny and his friends, parents and peers populate many adventures, tinged with a love of jazz – forbidden as degenerate music during the war, of course, the teenager’s urge to try and get into bed with as many females as possible (which may perhaps make him a bit of a boy’s writer, though certainly not in any misogynistic way). Life becomes more serious in the post-war years, especially the first three, before Stalinism completely fixes its iron grip on the country. There are risks, dangers, difficulties in playing the music, chasing the girls and trying to be free. The Cowards, and The Republic of Whores deal with the immediate postwar years but my favourite is certainly The Engineer of Human Souls (Stalin’s description of what a writer should be) which has the author in exile in Canada, lecturing to high school students on American literature whilst reflecting on their incredible immaturity and naivete compared with his peers, remembering his younger days under the Nazi occupation, and the trial and tribulations of running an emigre publishing enterprise.

Skvorecky earned my adulation when I discovered he also wrote detective fiction, irresistible to someone reared on Sherlock Holmes. Three collections of short stories feature a melancholic, sometimes depressive detective, Lieutenant Boruvka, who has to solve a range of crimes, but whose life is further complicated by the fact that he lives in a totalitarian regime where certain people enjoy particular privileges or are untouchable. He also has a beautiful teenage daughter whom he loves, and who he knows will leave him one day. If you’re going to create a detective in the days when they are almost two-a-penny then you need an original take and an unusual character, and Skvorecky manages masterfully.

There are plenty of reasons why Czech literature of those times has a sad, even gloomy, introspective feel to it, but even under the heaviness of Nazi occupation and subsequent Stalinist rule – a grim half century – the irrepressible Czech spirit seems to shine through, and is probably my favourite of all the national literatures that I have to read in translation.