Foundations of Crisis
By Doug Casey, Chairman, Casey Research, LLC.
Everybody wants predictions.
The following article does a little better than that, in that I wrote it back in November of 1997, outlining several theories of history, and pointing to a logical way of anticipating what will likely happen to the world at large over the next generation.
As you will read, the methodology I relied upon for anticipating the events that are now unfolding -- 11 years later -- were actually quite accurate, confirming, in my mind at least, that now is a time to be very cautious in your personal and financial affairs.
The article is unaltered in its text from the original, though I have added some current commentary in bold italics
Doug Casey
December 16, 2008
"Don't know much about the Middle Ages, look at the pictures an' I turn the pages. Don' know much about no rise and fall, don' know much 'bout nothin' at all" "Wonderful World," Sam Cooke.
The lyrics quoted above probably describe the average American's knowledge of history about as well as any academic study. Not only don't they know anything about it, and think it's irrelevant, but what they do know is inaccurate and slanted. And they must not think very much about the future either if the amount of consumer debt out there, mostly accumulating at 18% interest, is any indication.
One point of studying history is that it gives you an indication of what's likely to happen now, if you can find an appropriate analog in the past. This is a tricky business because as you look at factors contributing to a trend, it's not easy to determine which ones are really important. Making that determination is a judgment call, and everyone's judgment is colored by his worldview, or Weltanschauung as the Germans would have it.
Let me briefly spell out my Weltanschauung so you can more accurately determine how it compares with your own, and how it may be influencing my interpretation of the future.
I'm intensely optimistic about the long-term future. It seems to me a lock cinch that the advance of technology alone -- and nanotechnology in particular -- will result in a future of incredible abundance and prosperity, and that alone will solve most of the problems that plague us. Space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension will be commonplace realities. These things, plus the growth of both knowledge and its accessibility and the concomitant rise of the individual from the group, will constantly diminish politics as an element of life. The future will be much better than anything visualized on Star Trek, and will arrive much sooner. That's the good news.
The bad news is that within the longest trend in history, the ascent of man, there is plenty of room for setbacks, and much of history is a case of two steps forward and one back. My gloomy short-term outlook, and my reasons for maintaining it, is recounted here monthly. Whether it's right or wrong, from an investor's point of view, the short term is more relevant than the long term. Notwithstanding Warren Buffett's great success in going for the long term, Keynes was right when he said that in the long run we're all dead. History shows that goes for civilizations as well as people. The problem is that our civilization is probably just now on the cusp of the long term.
Hari Seldon: Where Are You When We Need You?
Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation trilogy centers around a scientist, Hari Seldon, who invents a science called psychohistory, which allows the fairly accurate prediction of broad trends in society going for centuries into the future. Seldon lives on Trantor, the planetary capital of a galactic empire; the entire planet is covered with a high-tech version of Washington, D.C., devoted to nothing but taxing and regulating the rest of the galaxy. Seldon forecasts that the empire will collapse and Trantor turn into a gigantic ghost town. And of course that's what happens, because it's a novel, and that makes for a good story. It's a good story because it's credible, and it's credible because people know nothing lasts forever, and there is a cyclicality to everything; birth, youth, maturity, senescence, and death. These stages are shared by everything in the material world, whether it's a person, a city, a civilization, or a galaxy. It's just a question of time and scale.
From that point of view everyone knows the future, i.e., we all know that everything eventually dies. But we'd like a bit more precision on the timing of their lifecycles. Some gurus believe, or appear to believe, they can actually predict the details of the future; I consider them knaves. People who actually do believe them should be considered fools. That said -- Nostradamus, astrology, channeling, tea leaf reading, and the like aside -- I do think the best indicator of what will likely happen in the future is what has happened in the past. That may seem like an obvious statement, but it's not. There have traditionally been three ways of looking at the problem; call them theories of history.
Oldest is what might be termed a chaotic view, which presumes mankind doesn't have any ultimate destination but is wafted on the wings of Fortune or hangs by the thread of Fate. Subject to the arbitrary will of the gods, whether it's the Old Testament's Yahweh, or Homer's Zeus, the future is unpredictable, and prophecy or an oracle gives you as good a read as anything else. I discount this theory heavily.
A second ancient view is that everything is cyclical, and therefore somewhat predictable. History may be viewed like a giant sine wave that's possibly headed somewhere, but the direction is unknown. Or history is really a circle, constantly repeating itself, much like the four seasons of the year. There's a lot of wisdom to the cyclical view.
The third view sees history as a linear sequence, one that's actually headed somewhere. That view holds a special appeal for followers of evangelically oriented religions, particularly Christians (many of whose beliefs have an apocalyptic tinge) and Marxists (who were, until lately, given heart by the "scientific" inevitability their views would prevail). The linear view ties in with the idea of Progress, that (more or less) every day and in every way, things are getting better and better -- although there's also a subculture populated mostly by deep ecology, animal rights, and anti-technology types who believe things are headed to hell in a hand-basket. But they all believe we're headed somewhere in a more-or-less straight line. There can be a lot of truth to the linear view, certainly if you look at the technological progress of mankind over the past 10,000 years, and this view prevails today.
My own view is a synthesis of the cyclical and linear theories. I see history evolving towards an incredibly bright future, but cyclically suffering setbacks, cyclically repeating the same patterns along the way. To me history looks like a spiral, heading off in a specific direction, but always covering the same ground in a different way with each revolution.
That's one reason The Fourth Turning, (Broadway Books, NY, 1997) by William Strauss and Neil Howe got my attention; we're all drawn to those who see at least part of reality the way we do. The book is an extrapolation of their last work, Generations, and notwithstanding its literary faults, is simply brilliant.
I've never met Howe, but did have lunch with Strauss once about five years ago. The way I see it, although they're both conservatives, neither of them has any particular economic, political, or social philosophy, and they're not trying to grind an ax. Their books are a value-free look at U.S. history, and their conclusions are more credible as a result.
Their basic hypothesis is one I suspect Hari Seldon would recognize, and my thoughts are built on the research Strauss and Howe have done over the years. I suggest you get a copy of The Fourth Turning while it's still in the stores. That's also true for my own Crisis Investing for the Rest of the '90s, which has several chapters on related subject matter, and Arthur Herman's just-released The Idea of Decline in the West, which also bears on the subject. With 50,000 new books published every year, very few stay available for more than a few months. If something has appeal, you should buy it now, because it may be hard to come by when you have the chance to get into it. (Of course, I was wrong on that point -- websites such as Amazon and Alibris.com now make it easy to pick up many older books.)
Generations
Generational conflict has been recognized since ancient times. The twist here is the discovery of several things that have previously eluded observers. One is that the well- known conflict between fathers and sons is only half the story; there aren't just two generational types that alternate (e.g., liberal and conservative), but four. The reason for looking at it this way is that a human life can be conveniently divided into four stages: Childhood, Young Adulthood, Midlife, and Elderhood. Throughout all of history, a long life might be considered to be 80 to 100 years, with each of the four stages equaling a quarter of it.
Just as each person's life holds four stages of about 20 years each, each generation comprehends a group of people born over about 20 years. Members of a particular generation tend to share values and ways of looking at the world not only because their parents also shared a set of views (which the kids are reacting to), but because every new generation experiences a new set of events in a way unique to them. They hear the same music, see the same events, are exposed to the same books. Members of a generation share a collective persona. There appear to be four distinct archetypal personae that recur throughout American history. And throughout world history as well, although that's a bit beyond what I hope to explore here.
It also seems, throughout history, that there are periodic crises. About once every century, or about when each of the four generational types has run its course, a cataclysmic event occurs. It generally takes the form of a major war, and it generally catalyzes a whole new epoch for society.
The four mature generations alive today each represent an archetype. Let's review them from the oldest now living, to the youngest.
Hero Archetype
The "GI" generation, born between 1901 and 1924, includes basically all living people in their mid-70s and older. They grew up and came of age in the midst of the most traumatic years in human history: the 1930s and '40s. This was a time of catastrophic financial and economic collapse, world war, political dictatorship, genocide, and virulent ideology, among other unpleasant things; a period of intense turmoil. The times required them to be civic minded, optimistic, regular guys who could be counted on to do the right thing, fit in, and see that everybody got a square deal. As a consequence of what they've been through, they tend to be indulgent parents. As kids they're "good"; as adults they're selfless, constructive, and communitarian. Hero archetypes encounter a Crisis environment in Young Adulthood; assuming they survive it, the odds are the rest of their lives will be lived in growing economic prosperity, leading to a leisurely retirement.
Artist Archetype
Meanwhile, another generation was being born at the height of the Crisis -- something that seems to occur roughly every 80-100 years -- from 1925-42. This generation, the "Silent," watched these titanic events happen but were too young to take part in them. They were relegated to being protected, while trying to be helpful in the limited ways available to them. They're overprotected as children, when they might be characterized as "placid"; they tend to underprotect their own children as a reaction. As adults they're sensitive, well-liked, sentimental, and caring.
Prophet Archetype
Next came the group we call the "Boomers," born from 1943 to 1960. This was the first generation born after the Crisis was over, and they grew up in an environment where their parents (mostly GIs and early cohort Silents) felt obligated to protect them from all the trauma of the preceding years and were desirous of giving them all the things they never had. As kids they're seen as "spirited." Later in life, they tend to be narcissistic, presumptuous, self-righteous, and ruthless. Born after a Crisis, their Childhood years coincide with a rebirth of society, and their Elderhood coincides with another Crisis. More on them below.
Nomad ArchetypeThe fourth generational type is represented by today's "Generation X," born 1961-81, during what might be called an Awakening period when the Boomers were in the limelight. As a consequence, they were overlooked and a bit abandoned. Their reputation as kids can be summed up as "bad." They're oriented toward survival, which is partially a result of their being underprotected as children. When they become parents, they react and become overprotective. They tend to be savvy, practical, tough, and amoral.
The kids born between 1982 and perhaps 2002 should be another Hero archetype. My own experience with them is that they're shaping up that way. Represented by clean-cut, straight-arrow Power Rangers. Quite a reaction to the sewer-dwelling Mutant Ninja Turtles that were analogs for the previous generation. They're "'can do" kids, programmed to do the right thing in a smoke-free, drug-free, eco-sensitive, politically correct world. Like all Hero types, they respect their elders, do what they're told without much questioning authority. That's just the type of person you want to have fighting a war for you, and that's probably just what they'll wind up doing. Just like the last Hero types, the GIs. (Iraq was first. Iran next? Or will it be Saudi Arabia?)
It's risky to characterize everyone born in a certain time frame as sharing a persona; after all, people are individuals, not ants or atoms, each like the other. But it's really no different than characterizing people by the country they're from. There's no question in my mind that people share characteristics by virtue of the milieu in which they live, and that's true of time as well as geography. Take a look at the people you know by age groups, and see if they don't roughly fit the brief descriptions.
The interesting thing is that through about 400 years of American history, it's possible to see these generational types repeating themselves. It's not an accident. The characteristics of each type shape the next generation, as well as current events. And events leave a further imprint on all of them.
Making an Example of the Boomers
Just as every generation has its own persona, the character of each generation evolves as it moves through life. The Boomers are perhaps the most relevant example of this. First they were Mouseketeers and Beaver Cleaver clones. Who could have guessed they would mutate into Hippies and even Yippies as they reached Young Adulthood, reacting against everything they'd grown up with, everything their parents worked so hard to give them.
They came of age during a period that might be called an Awakening, and it's recurred on schedule five times so far in American history. Awakenings are times of religious and moral ferment, when the youth tend to challenge prevailing cultural values pretty much across the board. Young adults were into New Age things this time around, in the 1960s and '70s. At the time it seemed utterly shocking and completely new, but that was only because nobody then alive had seen the previous Utopian Awakening in the 1830s and '40s, the Pietist Awakening of the 1740s and '50s, the Puritan Awakening of the 1630s and '40s, or the Protestant Reformation of the 1530s and '40s.
Like all the generations before them that grew up in similar times, they eventually put away the things of their youth. But who guessed that their next mutation would be into Yuppies, whose motto was not "Peace and Love" or "Revolution for the Hell of It," but "Shop Till You Drop" and "He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins" as they moved into midlife.
But even now the acquisitive mania that characterized the '80s is ebbing, now that the first cohorts of Boomers are crossing over 50. You can already see the signs of their next stage of evolution, in the judgmental behavior of people like William Bennett (George Bush) and Dan Quayle (Ann Coulter) on the "right," and Al Gore and Hillary Clinton on the "left." They did sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll in the '60s. They believe they've fought the war of good against evil in both Vietnam and the segregated lunch counters of the South. They know they were the first generation to have traveled widely thanks to the jet, to have been brought up by television, and had the telephone as a given. They've been there, done that, and now that they're getting older, they're going to make sure that everyone else benefits from their wisdom -- like it or not.
The Boomers are an archetypal Prophet generation, a type born after a secular crisis, just in time to create another one. Get the image of a grim elder, with a well-defined vision of what's right and wrong, calling down wrath, and laying down the law for a troubled nation in chaotic times. That's the type of person who tends to lead countries into wars, as well as through them. Interestingly, the Boomers in America have their counterparts abroad today, especially in China, where they grew up during the Cultural Revolution. Two ideologically driven, righteous groups running two such powerful and alien cultures is almost a guaranteed formula for a millennial-sized crisis. Which should appear, coincidentally, sometime shortly after the millennium. (We're right on schedule.)
So What's Next?
The real watersheds in history, crises that make or break a civilization, occur roughly every 100 years. The most recent ones in American history that will resonate without looking up the facts in a reference book are the Revolution, circa 1782; the Civil War, circa 1863; and WW II, circa 1943. We've had other wars, and they were traumatic enough; that's the nature of war. But the War of 1812, Mexican, Spanish, World War I, Korean, and Vietnam wars had nothing to do with the country's survival as an entity, as a civilization. They were optional wars, sport fighting, if you will, by comparison. Wars that occur at a secular Crisis, a "Fourth Turning" to Strauss and Howe, when a Prophet generation is acting as elder statesmen, with Nomads as operational commanders, and Heroes as front line soldiers tend to be total wars that have an ideological underpinning. They're life-and-death struggles not just for the individual participants, but for the civilization as a whole.
That major wars occur at such long remove from each other probably isn't an accident. Really catastrophic wars, from at least the days of Troy on down, have usually been the Great Events that resound through living memory. The Great Event of a century forms the thought and character of everyone alive when it happens, influencing them relative to the stage of life they're in at the time. Perhaps that's why a people will collectively do its best to avoid a repeat, at least while there's anyone still alive who saw the last crisis.
(It's been said that war is a force that gives life meaning. And I think that's true, although it's perverse that the most destructive and idiotic activity that it's possible to engage in would just have to be the most important. Maybe, after the orgy of self-indulgence and conspicuous consumption that has characterized the past couple decades, Americans collectively feel they need to prove something. There has to be some rationale for the current war hysteria other than pure stupidity...)
In any event, the way the current generations line up relative to historical analogs, an excellent case can be made the U.S. is approaching another time of secular crisis, a Fourth Turning, with an expected due date of 2005 -- seven years from now -- plus or minus a few years in either direction. The Stamp Acts catalyzed the American Revolution, the election of Lincoln catalyzed the Civil War, the Crash of '29 catalyzed the Depression/WW II era. What might precipitate the elements now floating in solution? The answer is, practically any random event that's sufficiently traumatic. Any of the theses of current disaster/action novels and movies will do nicely. Perhaps the accidental or intentional release of a super plague vector. The crashing of an airliner into the Capitol during a joint session. (Close, but not quite.) An all-out assault on the IRS computers by an armed group -- or perhaps the computers just melting down due to the Year 2000 Problem. Perhaps a financial disaster that cascades into the Greater Depression. In any of these, or a hundred other scenarios, the federal government would almost certainly act precipitously and with a heavy hand, which would bring on a whole other set of consequences.
(In the historical context, 9/11 will be viewed as the opening kick-off for the coming Crisis... and the messianic overreaction of Bush and his cronies as the catalyst for turning things from bad to worse. It may be that Hurricane Katrina, for instance, a completely accidental event, may be blamed for providing a pin to burst the financial bubble -- which would be a pity, since the neocons could then blame it, not themselves.)
There's no way of telling where the Crisis will lead, or how it will end. That's going to depend not only on exactly who's in control, but what they do, whom they're up against, and a hundred other variables we can't even anticipate. One thing that seems certain is that real crisis brings out strong (although not necessarily wise) leadership. Because of its age and size, it will come from the Boomer generation, and it will be in the mold of Roosevelt or Lincoln -- both very dangerous precedents. The Boomers in Elderhood will be dogmatic, harsh, puritanical, and quite willing to burn down the barn in order to destroy whatever rats they see. Admix that attitude to a time resembling the Revolution, the Civil War, or WW II, overlain with today's ethnic strife, urbanization, financial overextension, and powerful, compact new weaponry in the hands of foreign fanatics out to teach the Great Satan a lesson, and it's a real witch's brew.
If things evolve over the next decade as they did in past analogs, it will be a very un-mellow time indeed. That's assuming things end well, and there's no guarantee they will, as many foreign countries have discovered throughout history. We've been uniquely blessed.
What to Do Strauss and Howe aren't financial types, and their advice is nebulous along those lines. To sum it up, their suggestion is to learn to swim with the tide by not hoping the current good times last forever; the chances of the good times are coming to an end now. They'd also advise not sticking your head up above the crowd, something that is always very risky when times are in turmoil; remember what happened to Japanese-Americans during the last crisis. They suggest that there will likely be a resurgence of nationalism, much as was the case during past crises. It won't be a good time to be a maverick in the U.S., a thought that makes places like Argentina and New Zealand look even more appealing.
(I bought property in both places shortly after this was written, and have been rewarded with a quadruple in both instances -- considerably better than would have been the case in the U.S.).
Strauss and Howe suggest you look to diversify in all things, so everything won't go bad at once. Brace for the collapse of public support mechanisms. Set your roots with your family, because people you can rely on will be at a premium. Heed emerging community norms, bond with like-minded people, and return to basic, classic virtues. This is sound advice any time, but critical if you're rigging for heavy weather.
Assuming you wanted to stay in the U.S., you'd rather be on some land near a small town, and far away from a major city. You'd want to be self-sufficient in as many ways as possible -- freeze-dried food. etc. Perhaps Howard Ruff will make a comeback with advice like that, which seems quaint today. But then I'm nothing if not a contrarian.
(In hindsight, the original article could have been a bit more specific -- other than the suggestions about Argentina and New Zealand. Personally, I believe that unassailable wealth is the best protection against global crisis. For it to be unassailable, your wealth must be at once substantial, free from threat of confiscation, divorced from the whims of the masses, and located in a country or currency that has a good risk/reward profile. Unfortunately, the U.S. doesn't make the cut.
In the first instance, the single best way to build wealth now, while there is still time to do so, is in carefully selected gold and other resource stocks. In order for it to be free from the threat of confiscation, at least some part of your wealth needs to reside in a country where you don't. To state the obvious, I would be very cautious about traditional stocks and bonds until we see how things shake out. Rather, get positioned in gold and silver stocks now, ahead of the curve, then sell out for a big profit to the panicking masses and move an increasing percentage of your wealth into tangibles such as gold, silver, and maybe, as part of a diversified portfolio, real estate in especially attractive areas -- but only after the bubble has decisively burst.)
A Parting Parable
In case you have any doubts, I buy the theory outlined above and its many ramifications that there isn't room to explore here. It really is scary to think that we could again experience a real Crisis with a capital C; I'm not talking about just a bear market in stocks. If it happens, I promise you stocks and mutual funds will be about the farthest things from most people's minds.
At the same time, there's no point in feeling terrorized. This stuff has been going on since the dawn of history. So let me leave you with a parable. I could appropriately quote Ecclesiastes (To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted, etc., etc.). But everyone knows that reference. Let me rather give you John O'Hara. At the beginning of O'Hara's novel Appointment in Samara, he tells a brief parable, which I'll summarize:
There was a merchant in Baghdad who went to the market with his servant. There they saw Death, who stared at the servant in what seemed a threatening way. Later the servant said "Master, lend me a horse. I shall ride to Samara, and there Death will not find me." The merchant did so, then returned to the market, where he again saw Death, whom he approached and asked why he had stared at his servant in such a threatening way. Death responded, "I wasn't threatening him. I was just very surprised to see him here in Baghdad, since I have an appointment with him in Samara later this afternoon."
(Strange, the location for the proverb, in that this was well before the current war).
By John Mauldin
John Mauldin, Best-Selling author and recognized financial expert, is also editor of the free Thoughts From the Frontline that goes to over 1 million readers each week. For more information on John or his FREE weekly economic letter go to: http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/learnmore
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Book Reviews - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
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Book Reviews - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Book Reviews - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Book Review - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Time Pieces
Cloud AtlasbyDavid Mitchell
Published by Random House
Review by W. R. Greer
Cloud Atlas is a brilliant novel. It is put together with almost clockwork precision in its exploration of several themes, many of which boil down to the duality of good and evil that exists within man and mankind. You will not read another book like it, and you will be absorbed by its genius that suddenly makes an idea leap off the page with a clarity of purpose that catches you by surprise. Yet, I had a hard time finishing this book.
Cloud Atlas consists of six different stories that march forward, and then backward, through time. Each of the stories is recorded in some form. It begins in 1850 in the South Pacific with an American notary named Adam Ewing traveling by ship from Chatham Isle back to San Francisco. He's been to Australia to find the beneficiary of a will, and his return trip is on a ship called the Prophetess. It's not a ship that inspires nostalgia for a return to sea, but is captained and crewed by harsh and cruel men who barely tolerate his presence. His only friend and companion is Dr. Goose, an English gentleman who shares his profound faith and compassionate approach to all life. Dr. Goose is also treating Ewing for a tropical brain parasite, a progressively worsening condition which makes the sea passage even more miserable. Ewing is recording all of this in his journal and it abruptly ends in mid-sentence.
The second story concerns a young bisexual English man, Robert Frobisher, on the run from gambling debts in 1931 after he's been disinherited by his father. He comes to Belgium with a plan to worm his way into a famous composer's household, offering his musical skills as a way to put a roof over his head and some money in his pocket. Vyvyan Ayrs is a syphilitic and arrogant old man struggling to still write music, and he hires Frobisher as an amanuensis. Frobisher details his experiences in letters to his best friend back in England, Rufus Sixsmith. Everything goes even better than expected for Frobisher. He becomes an indispensable asset for Ayrs' musical composition, he beds the old man's wife, and pilfers different documents from the estate that he can sell for needed cash. One of the items he finds is a copy of Adam Ewing's journal. It's also a time that Frobisher's own musical genius begins to emerge and he begins writing his own composition, the Cloud Atlas Sextet.
The novel then jumps forward to 1970s California where journalist Luisa Rey is investigating potential dangerous implications of the new nuclear plant being built. She meets Rufus Sixsmith, now an elderly physicist, whose report would uncover the truth behind the conspiracy to hide the failings of the plant and its real purpose. Those who want the report to disappear will stop at nothing, including murder, to destroy every copy of it. Luisa is determined to bring the truth to light and to stop the plan to have similar plants built all across the United States. Corporate greed appears to have the upper hand as the third section of Cloud Atlas ends with Luisa's life in imminent peril.
Then we meet Timothy Cavendish in present-day England. He has a small publishing business which suddenly achieves huge success when one of the novels he publishes becomes a bestseller. As his success grows, the more Cavendish's life unravels. His frustration grows as he encounters a society that no longer functions as it should, hampered by bureaucracy and incompetence. In a combination of wrong assumptions and miscommunications, he finds himself held prisoner against his will, and goes about trying to plot an escape. He does have with him, though, one of the last manuscripts he received. It's titled Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery.
Cloud Atlas then jumps forward to the 22nd century where a corpocracy rules Korea. Much of the earth has been poisoned and the remaining citizens are crammed into large cities run by corporations. The populace is supposed to do their civic duty and spend the appropriate amount of money in their businesses every year. Bioengineering has created fabricants, human creatures bred as workers, controlled by drugs, and enslaved to a business for a singular purpose. One of these fabricants is Somni, who works in a fast food restaurant. Somehow, Somni has achieved consciousness, and she can have thoughts and ideas that surpass what's necessary to do her job. As she ascends to this higher consciousness, she is helped by rebels who want to free her and educate her so she can achieve full human potential. She develops a liking for old picaresques from the 20th century. Her favorite is The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.
The final story is set in a distant future iron-age Hawaii. "The fall" has occurred and most of the remainder of mankind has reverted to a primitive state, trying to eke out what existence they can from the earth. Zachry is a goatherd in one of these settlements where they worship the goddess Somni. His clan lives among a peaceful group, but they live in fear of others on their island who bring violence as they rape, pillage, and enslave other communities. There are a few advanced human groups left from before the fall, and they travel in ships trying to find a way to understand their plight and rebuild civilizations if they can. A woman from one of these ship comes to stay with Zachry and his family. Zachry discovers amongst her possessions an orison of Somni, a video interview with her after she was captured by the corpocracy. Even this technologically advanced visitor may not be enough to help Zachry and his village when the warrior tribe finally attacks.
Zachry's story, an oral history passed to his children, is told in one section. When it completes, the second half of each of the earlier stories is then told, moving backwards in time until it reaches Adam Ewing on the ship in the South Pacific. By the time the novel ends, the threads that tie all these stories are understood - mostly.
The six stories in Cloud Atlas all explore similar themes, but each is presented in a different way through vastly different perspectives. Each of the six protagonists lives in a dystopian world where brutality, enslavement, and violence threaten their well-being. If survival or redemption is to be found, it can only be achieved by reaching out to someone else. By telling each of their stories in some sort of recorded format, David Mitchell explores the idea that the written or recorded word is an essential part of human survival. It is this sharing of stories and personal experiences that bind mankind together across generations and time that provides hope that similar challenges against the evils of the world can be overcome.
Part of the brilliance of Cloud Atlas is how each story, each period in time, has its own language and rhythm. David Mitchell aptly creates the atmosphere and sense of each era and its associated peril with the language he uses to tell each story. This helps keep each one unique from the others, so that the novel doesn't read like a set of repeated stories. The reader is easily immersed in the squalor of the Prophetess, understands the musical genius of Robert Frobisher without understanding the details of how he writes music, can sense the evil behind the corporate greed that seeks to destroy Luisa Rey, instantly identifies with Timothy Cavendish's frustration with a nonfunctioning modern society, and can empathize with Somni and Zachry as they try to find their place in future dehumanized worlds.
Nothing is wasted in this novel. It explores so many themes and ideas that several readings may be necessary to ferret them all out and understand them all. This is literary novel with literary in capital letters. So why did I have such a hard time finishing such a brilliant novel with well-formed characters and deep thematic structure? I think it comes down to the basic structure of the novel. Telling six different stories with six different protagonists means that instead of investing my time, compassion, and worry in one character, it had to be spread out across all six of them. It's not that the individual stories lacked suspense or that I didn't care about the characters' eventual survival. Instead, it just wasn't that important to me to find out.
Should you read Cloud Atlas? If you appreciate literary fiction, then this is a novel you should read at least once. Maybe more. It will challenge you, intimidate you, frustrate you, and dare you to think about the important questions it raises. It may not, however, grab you and pull you along with its storylines. That doesn't necessarily detract from its importance or its brilliance. David Mitchell may be more intelligent than the rest of us, and he has some interesting and important ideas he wants to explore with his readers. Read Cloud Atlas.
Copyright © 2005 reviewsofbooks.com
Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
Paperback
Used copies of Cloud Atlas at amazon.com
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Message from Pat to all members....
Hello Everyone,
Here is your usual reminder about our next Book Club meeting which will be on Friday 19th December 10.30 a.m. at Le Cheval Blanc when we shall be discussing the book Great Apes by Wil Self.
It has been suggested that as it is near Christmas perhaps we should splash out and have our lunch in the main restaurant, this will also give the chance for those who are not keen on having a set menu to have a choice of food.
So you could please let me know if this is OK for you.
There is always the possibility, of course, of some of you having the set Plat de Jour, but you may need to be in the front part of the hotel for that.Can you, therefore, let me know how many of you will be there for just coffee (chocolate etc.) and/or lunch in the main restaurant by Tuesday evening 16th December.
There are a couple of things which I would like to discuss, they are - as we have so many members now do we have two groups or just have a waiting list?
Also regarding the lunches, in order to please as many of you as possible, do some of you want to have lunch in the restaurant one month and then the plat de jour another, or any other ideas?
As I mentioned last time, I would dearly like to have someone who can take over from me from time to time as, at the moment, it looks as though I may be away for both the April and June meetings.
So, please, please, would someone like to volunteer.See you all on Friday.Pat
Here is your usual reminder about our next Book Club meeting which will be on Friday 19th December 10.30 a.m. at Le Cheval Blanc when we shall be discussing the book Great Apes by Wil Self.
It has been suggested that as it is near Christmas perhaps we should splash out and have our lunch in the main restaurant, this will also give the chance for those who are not keen on having a set menu to have a choice of food.
So you could please let me know if this is OK for you.
There is always the possibility, of course, of some of you having the set Plat de Jour, but you may need to be in the front part of the hotel for that.Can you, therefore, let me know how many of you will be there for just coffee (chocolate etc.) and/or lunch in the main restaurant by Tuesday evening 16th December.
There are a couple of things which I would like to discuss, they are - as we have so many members now do we have two groups or just have a waiting list?
Also regarding the lunches, in order to please as many of you as possible, do some of you want to have lunch in the restaurant one month and then the plat de jour another, or any other ideas?
As I mentioned last time, I would dearly like to have someone who can take over from me from time to time as, at the moment, it looks as though I may be away for both the April and June meetings.
So, please, please, would someone like to volunteer.See you all on Friday.Pat
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Buying Books for the 2009 Season
I think all of us have used different ways of acquiring books for the Book club. Some buy in the UK whilst on holiday picking up bargains in Second-hand and Charity shops. For anyone who may wish to use the internet the following are good, reliable and cheap sites:
There’s a global network of second hand booksellers which supplies secondhand books. The UK website is:
http://www.abebooks.co.uk/
For new or second hand books and all sorts of other goodies contact:
http://www.play.com/Books/Books/6-/ComingSoon.html
Hope this hlps. I've ordered my books this weekend and expect delivery over the course of the next few days. The books cost me £35 including delivery to France. Most of the books were second hand.
There’s a global network of second hand booksellers which supplies secondhand books. The UK website is:
http://www.abebooks.co.uk/
For new or second hand books and all sorts of other goodies contact:
http://www.play.com/Books/Books/6-/ComingSoon.html
Hope this hlps. I've ordered my books this weekend and expect delivery over the course of the next few days. The books cost me £35 including delivery to France. Most of the books were second hand.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Book List for 2009.......
At this morning's Book Club meeting we discussed books for the 2009 Season. After placing all offers in the plastic bag the following were chosen at random.
Each person nominating a book will introduce it at the monthly meeting.
January
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and introduced by Patsy Odams
February
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson and introduced by Rosalinde Betts
March
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan and introduced by Annie Grainger
April
Mutant Messages Down Under by Maria Morgan and introduced by Pat Dixon
May
The Five People You meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom and introduced by Vernon Goddard
June
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and introduced by Kerstin
July
Tanamera by Noel Barber and introduced by Lucy
August
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse and introduced by Mary Rogers
September
The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West and introduced by Angie Brewer
October
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale and introduced by Mike Brewer
November
East of the Mountain by David Gutersen and introduced by John Binks
December
The Girls by Lori Lansens and introduced by Diane Foster
Each person nominating a book will introduce it at the monthly meeting.
January
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and introduced by Patsy Odams
February
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson and introduced by Rosalinde Betts
March
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan and introduced by Annie Grainger
April
Mutant Messages Down Under by Maria Morgan and introduced by Pat Dixon
May
The Five People You meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom and introduced by Vernon Goddard
June
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen and introduced by Kerstin
July
Tanamera by Noel Barber and introduced by Lucy
August
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse and introduced by Mary Rogers
September
The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West and introduced by Angie Brewer
October
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale and introduced by Mike Brewer
November
East of the Mountain by David Gutersen and introduced by John Binks
December
The Girls by Lori Lansens and introduced by Diane Foster
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Message from Pat for Book Club Members......
Here is your usual reminder that the Book Club will be meeting again on Friday 21st November at the usual time of 10.30a.m. at Le Cheval Blanc to discuss the book Piano in the Pyrenees by David Hawks. Please let me know if you wish to have coffee etc. and/or how many are staying for lunch by TUESDAY EVENING 18TH NOVEMBER. Thanks.
Also at this meeting we shall be deciding which books we would like to read for next year, so please bring along the titles and authors (if possible). If by any chance you cannot make this meeting then perhaps you could let someone else have the details with a short synopsis of what the book is about, alternately e-mail me the details.
Something else that has been noticed, some people have not been able to get the book in time for our meetings, would it be possible for someone that has read a particular book 2 months ahead to bring it to the meeting for another person to borrow - or perhaps to bring it to a Connect meeting? This is just an idea - any others would be gratefully received.
Another point, as there is a possibility of Vernon being in England during this next year, I would like someone else to be available to take over from me when I am not able to be here, then, hopefully, they would then take on the job permanently in 2010 (or before if they so wish!!!!).
Look forward to seeing you all again and having another lively discussion.
A Bientot
Pat
Also at this meeting we shall be deciding which books we would like to read for next year, so please bring along the titles and authors (if possible). If by any chance you cannot make this meeting then perhaps you could let someone else have the details with a short synopsis of what the book is about, alternately e-mail me the details.
Something else that has been noticed, some people have not been able to get the book in time for our meetings, would it be possible for someone that has read a particular book 2 months ahead to bring it to the meeting for another person to borrow - or perhaps to bring it to a Connect meeting? This is just an idea - any others would be gratefully received.
Another point, as there is a possibility of Vernon being in England during this next year, I would like someone else to be available to take over from me when I am not able to be here, then, hopefully, they would then take on the job permanently in 2010 (or before if they so wish!!!!).
Look forward to seeing you all again and having another lively discussion.
A Bientot
Pat
Monday, October 27, 2008
Book List for 2009......
Don't forget everyone ~ in the November Meeting, we are setting aside some time for each of us to suggest and promote a book of our choice for inclusion in the list for 2009.
PLEASE come prepared!
PLEASE come prepared!
Another review of Great Apes.......
Review by Charles Wyrick
Years ago a friend of mine described a peculiar sensation he had while reading a book that he didn't like. He felt that he was being watched, that the author was continually peeking around a corner in order to make himself known. This image he created of the overbearing writer stuck. It resurfaced in my mind after reading Will Self's new novel "Great Apes." Self's presence is insurmountable. He gnaws at the pages and cuts peepholes through the spine. Yet unlike my friend I relish this authorial presence. I enjoy being watched.
Ironically enough "Great Apes" revolves around different types of voyeurism. It begins with Simon Dykes staring out a window watching a rowing team. Dykes is a semi-controversial painter just weeks away from exhibiting his newest work. At a midpoint in both his career and his life Simon is beginning to feel restless. Bored with the now predictable nights on the town with his young girlfriend and her friends, Dykes does not know that soon he will be the subject of another's scrutiny. Soon Dykes will be under psychiatric observation. Just as we as readers meet him, Dykes undergoes a dramatic change. After a night of heavy drinking and drug use Simon wakes up as a chimpanzee.
Using Dykes as his Gulliver, Self takes a hilarious romp through modern society. In "Great Apes" the worlds of contemporary art, academics and psychiatry fall quickly as easy prey to Self's mock sociology of chimpanzee culture. Just imagine a popular art opening crowded with chimpanzees dressed in chic chimp evening wear and you can get a peek at the novel's vision. "Great Apes" is literature's Planet of the Apes as author Self plays the role of a funhouse anthropologist, a voyeur into a world of his own warping. On waking to a world modified to satisfy chimpanzee issues, the protagonist Simon Dykes is hysterical. As readers we can only be amused. When Simon Dykes first screeches at the sight of his girlfriend's hairy chest and arms, we know we are witnessing the birth of a strange world.
What I have liked in the past in Will Self's writing is that he is blunt. In this book there is nothing easy about his characters' transformations from humanity to chimpanity. The chimpanzee world thrives on a brutal code of male supremacy. Dykes is astonished by the physicality of this society. Chimps express irritation through violent physical attacks on one another and tenderness through prolonged grooming sessions. Dykes is completely horrified by these practices. With a shrewd wit Self draws a wonderful and acerbic satire out of his character's absurd dilemma. We see chimpanzee society through the eyes of its weakest member, the spiritually weakened Dykes whose case hinges on what his psychologist sees as the completely unnatural delusion that the world should be run by humans.
There is an overreaching sense of Self's presence in these pages. He forces on us his love of the banal and the absurd. His humor is as bawdy as it is bizarre. But these profanities are not without their compliment. Self litters his work with his sublimities -- his playful yet masterful language and his gorgeous literary control. In "Great Apes" he writes with both the assertiveness of a great satirist and the dexterity of a practiced, well-tuned prose strategist. When reading "Great Apes" do not be afraid to look over your shoulder if you feel you are being watched. Try to take comfort in the intrusion because your voyeur wants to see you laugh.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles Wyrick lives in Nashville and plays in the band Stella.
Years ago a friend of mine described a peculiar sensation he had while reading a book that he didn't like. He felt that he was being watched, that the author was continually peeking around a corner in order to make himself known. This image he created of the overbearing writer stuck. It resurfaced in my mind after reading Will Self's new novel "Great Apes." Self's presence is insurmountable. He gnaws at the pages and cuts peepholes through the spine. Yet unlike my friend I relish this authorial presence. I enjoy being watched.
Ironically enough "Great Apes" revolves around different types of voyeurism. It begins with Simon Dykes staring out a window watching a rowing team. Dykes is a semi-controversial painter just weeks away from exhibiting his newest work. At a midpoint in both his career and his life Simon is beginning to feel restless. Bored with the now predictable nights on the town with his young girlfriend and her friends, Dykes does not know that soon he will be the subject of another's scrutiny. Soon Dykes will be under psychiatric observation. Just as we as readers meet him, Dykes undergoes a dramatic change. After a night of heavy drinking and drug use Simon wakes up as a chimpanzee.
Using Dykes as his Gulliver, Self takes a hilarious romp through modern society. In "Great Apes" the worlds of contemporary art, academics and psychiatry fall quickly as easy prey to Self's mock sociology of chimpanzee culture. Just imagine a popular art opening crowded with chimpanzees dressed in chic chimp evening wear and you can get a peek at the novel's vision. "Great Apes" is literature's Planet of the Apes as author Self plays the role of a funhouse anthropologist, a voyeur into a world of his own warping. On waking to a world modified to satisfy chimpanzee issues, the protagonist Simon Dykes is hysterical. As readers we can only be amused. When Simon Dykes first screeches at the sight of his girlfriend's hairy chest and arms, we know we are witnessing the birth of a strange world.
What I have liked in the past in Will Self's writing is that he is blunt. In this book there is nothing easy about his characters' transformations from humanity to chimpanity. The chimpanzee world thrives on a brutal code of male supremacy. Dykes is astonished by the physicality of this society. Chimps express irritation through violent physical attacks on one another and tenderness through prolonged grooming sessions. Dykes is completely horrified by these practices. With a shrewd wit Self draws a wonderful and acerbic satire out of his character's absurd dilemma. We see chimpanzee society through the eyes of its weakest member, the spiritually weakened Dykes whose case hinges on what his psychologist sees as the completely unnatural delusion that the world should be run by humans.
There is an overreaching sense of Self's presence in these pages. He forces on us his love of the banal and the absurd. His humor is as bawdy as it is bizarre. But these profanities are not without their compliment. Self litters his work with his sublimities -- his playful yet masterful language and his gorgeous literary control. In "Great Apes" he writes with both the assertiveness of a great satirist and the dexterity of a practiced, well-tuned prose strategist. When reading "Great Apes" do not be afraid to look over your shoulder if you feel you are being watched. Try to take comfort in the intrusion because your voyeur wants to see you laugh.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles Wyrick lives in Nashville and plays in the band Stella.
"Great Apes" A review by M.Kakutani
'Great Apes:' Life Among Randy Apes Can Be Tough on a Guy
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Books of the Times
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GREAT APES
By Will Self
404 pages. Grove Press. $24.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Will Self is the Dennis Rodman of contemporary fiction.
Like Rodman, he has made a name for himself by specializing in willfully self-conscious outrage and by flirting with sexual transgression. And like Rodman, he possesses a genuine talent -- for writing in his case, not rebounding -- that is often overshadowed by his adolescent high jinks.
As his 1994 novel, "My Idea of Fun," demonstrated, Self is capable of creating genuinely engaging, innovative fiction, of turning his myriad influences -- Kafka, Burroughs and Lewis Carroll -- into something interesting and new. All too often, though, he has squandered his gifts for language and satire on silly, sophomoric stories: tales in which a man grows a vagina, a woman sprouts a penis or the phlegm of sick people coats the streets and contaminates the air. An obsession with bodily functions and the grosser aspects of sex infects all his work, as does a fascination with altered, often drug-induced states of mind.
Self's latest novel, "Great Apes," unfortunately, embodies most of his weaknesses as a writer, and few of his strengths. It is a slender idea for a satire, inflated into a fat, puffy novel, a "Twilight-Zone" episode blown into a full-length feature.
The novel's premise is borrowed, as was the first part of his novellas "Cock & Bull," from Kafka's "Metamorphosis." This time, an eminent artist named Simon Dykes wakes up to find himself turned into a chimpanzee and the world around him transformed into a planet of the apes. Simon is committed to the mental ward of a London hospital and diagnosed as suffering from a terrible delusion: he believes he is a human being.
As delineated by Self, the world Simon awakens to is very much like the human world he remembers: yuppies addicted to computers, would-be artists addicted to cocaine and careerists addicted to competition. The one difference: everyone -- from historical greats like Socrates, Plato and Freud through contemporary not-so-greats -- has become a chimpanzee. As for humans, they are regarded as a pathetic, inferior species; dying out in the wild, they can now be seen in zoos and experimental labs.
"Infants often had stuffed humans as toys," Self writes. "Birthday cards with humans dressed up as chimps on them were available in almost every news agent. There were also the notorious commercials for P.G. Tips tea, with their absurd use of humans mimicking chimp behavior; special effects used to convey the impression that they were signing intelligently and enjoying the beverage."
Although there are occasional moments of wacky comedy in "Great Apes," Self's usually inventive imagination is notably absent in this novel. His chimps tend to be lewd, pretentious sycophants: they are constantly saying things like "I admire your beautifully effulgent ischial scrag, your rump is like the morning star, and your maverick philosophy is a beacon of intrigue in a dull world." In fact, his planet of the apes turns out to be an even less surprising place than the one in the Charlton Heston-Roddy McDowall movie, a highly predictable place, mechanically constructed to allow the author to indulge in his sophomoric fascination (and disgust) with sex.
Self's chimps differ from humans in several respects: they greet one another with elaborate grooming rituals (involving fondling, petting and nit-picking); they do not wear clothes on the lower parts of their bodies (the better to display their genitals to others), and they routinely take part in public, and often incestuous, sex. This leads Self to go on, and on and on, at wearying length about an individual chimp's sexual endowments and about chimpanzee sex in all its varieties: sex between fathers and daughters, sex between doctors and patients, sex between dozens of strangers linked in a copulatory conga line in a public park.
All this chimp sex, of course, is supposed to make a satiric point: that humans, too, can be promiscuous and unfaithful to their spouses; they're just more hypocritical in pretending to be monogamous. This is a pretty banal point for a 400-plus page satire to make, and the book's other points are equally familiar: that human beings can act like beasts when competing for prestige, fame and money; that they can grovel and betray one another like chimps; that humans and animals actually have quite a lot in common.
The lumbering plot of "Great Apes" hardly makes up for the novel's flimsy satire: a long, meandering story line about Simon's efforts to come to terms with his "chimpunity," the efforts of a doctor to help him, and the suggestion that Simon's delusion may stem from his participation in an experimental trial of a drug called Inclusion (first mentioned in an earlier Self story, "Gray Area").
"Great Apes" may push Self's favorite theme of alienation (from family, friends, self) to a new extreme, but in doing so, it sorely tries the reader's patience. Like Rodman's recent antics, "Great Apes" is all juvenile calculation: meant to be provocative, it ends up being merely boring.
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Books of the Times
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GREAT APES
By Will Self
404 pages. Grove Press. $24.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Will Self is the Dennis Rodman of contemporary fiction.
Like Rodman, he has made a name for himself by specializing in willfully self-conscious outrage and by flirting with sexual transgression. And like Rodman, he possesses a genuine talent -- for writing in his case, not rebounding -- that is often overshadowed by his adolescent high jinks.
As his 1994 novel, "My Idea of Fun," demonstrated, Self is capable of creating genuinely engaging, innovative fiction, of turning his myriad influences -- Kafka, Burroughs and Lewis Carroll -- into something interesting and new. All too often, though, he has squandered his gifts for language and satire on silly, sophomoric stories: tales in which a man grows a vagina, a woman sprouts a penis or the phlegm of sick people coats the streets and contaminates the air. An obsession with bodily functions and the grosser aspects of sex infects all his work, as does a fascination with altered, often drug-induced states of mind.
Self's latest novel, "Great Apes," unfortunately, embodies most of his weaknesses as a writer, and few of his strengths. It is a slender idea for a satire, inflated into a fat, puffy novel, a "Twilight-Zone" episode blown into a full-length feature.
The novel's premise is borrowed, as was the first part of his novellas "Cock & Bull," from Kafka's "Metamorphosis." This time, an eminent artist named Simon Dykes wakes up to find himself turned into a chimpanzee and the world around him transformed into a planet of the apes. Simon is committed to the mental ward of a London hospital and diagnosed as suffering from a terrible delusion: he believes he is a human being.
As delineated by Self, the world Simon awakens to is very much like the human world he remembers: yuppies addicted to computers, would-be artists addicted to cocaine and careerists addicted to competition. The one difference: everyone -- from historical greats like Socrates, Plato and Freud through contemporary not-so-greats -- has become a chimpanzee. As for humans, they are regarded as a pathetic, inferior species; dying out in the wild, they can now be seen in zoos and experimental labs.
"Infants often had stuffed humans as toys," Self writes. "Birthday cards with humans dressed up as chimps on them were available in almost every news agent. There were also the notorious commercials for P.G. Tips tea, with their absurd use of humans mimicking chimp behavior; special effects used to convey the impression that they were signing intelligently and enjoying the beverage."
Although there are occasional moments of wacky comedy in "Great Apes," Self's usually inventive imagination is notably absent in this novel. His chimps tend to be lewd, pretentious sycophants: they are constantly saying things like "I admire your beautifully effulgent ischial scrag, your rump is like the morning star, and your maverick philosophy is a beacon of intrigue in a dull world." In fact, his planet of the apes turns out to be an even less surprising place than the one in the Charlton Heston-Roddy McDowall movie, a highly predictable place, mechanically constructed to allow the author to indulge in his sophomoric fascination (and disgust) with sex.
Self's chimps differ from humans in several respects: they greet one another with elaborate grooming rituals (involving fondling, petting and nit-picking); they do not wear clothes on the lower parts of their bodies (the better to display their genitals to others), and they routinely take part in public, and often incestuous, sex. This leads Self to go on, and on and on, at wearying length about an individual chimp's sexual endowments and about chimpanzee sex in all its varieties: sex between fathers and daughters, sex between doctors and patients, sex between dozens of strangers linked in a copulatory conga line in a public park.
All this chimp sex, of course, is supposed to make a satiric point: that humans, too, can be promiscuous and unfaithful to their spouses; they're just more hypocritical in pretending to be monogamous. This is a pretty banal point for a 400-plus page satire to make, and the book's other points are equally familiar: that human beings can act like beasts when competing for prestige, fame and money; that they can grovel and betray one another like chimps; that humans and animals actually have quite a lot in common.
The lumbering plot of "Great Apes" hardly makes up for the novel's flimsy satire: a long, meandering story line about Simon's efforts to come to terms with his "chimpunity," the efforts of a doctor to help him, and the suggestion that Simon's delusion may stem from his participation in an experimental trial of a drug called Inclusion (first mentioned in an earlier Self story, "Gray Area").
"Great Apes" may push Self's favorite theme of alienation (from family, friends, self) to a new extreme, but in doing so, it sorely tries the reader's patience. Like Rodman's recent antics, "Great Apes" is all juvenile calculation: meant to be provocative, it ends up being merely boring.
Great Apes by Will Self.....A Review......
The Ape Who Mistook Himself for a Man
By GARY KRIST
Read the First Chapter | Read Michiko Kakutani's review of "Great Apes" (September 12, 1997)
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More on Will Self from The New York Times Archives
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GREAT APES
By Will Self.
404 pp. New York:
Grove Press. $24.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
r. Zack Busner -- distinguished clinical psychologist, maverick neuropharmacologist, noted television commentator and tooth-clacking, lice-picking chimpanzee -- is a figure of commanding presence. In the world of Will Self's latest novel, ''Great Apes,'' a world in which chimps rather than humans are the species cursed by the gift of advanced civilization, Busner is one of the greatest apes of all. An ''elder stateschimp of the psychiatric fraternity,'' he has achieved an Oliver Sacks-ish eminence in his field, writing about his encounters with various neurological misfits in popular books like ''The Chimp Who Mated an Armchair'' and ''Nestings.'' As a result, he is met wherever he knuckle-walks with a flurry of obsequious groveling from subordinates, reinforcing his position as an alpha male at the very top of the professional hierarchy.
But now Busner is confronted with his most puzzling case: that of Simon Dykes, a celebrated artist suffering from the bizarre delusion that he is human. Indeed, Dykes's psychosis is so comprehensive that he even regards the true reality as one in which -- get this -- humans are the evolutionarily successful primates. Evidently thinking ahead to his next book (''The Ape Who Mistook His Fur for an Overcoat,'' perhaps?), Busner takes on the unfortunate Dykes as a patient. And that's where the trouble begins, for there are subordinate males afoot who, while paying homage to Busner in public, are secretly working to undermine him, and see his handling of the deluded artist's case as just the opportunity they seek.
Such, believe it or not, is the story line of ''Great Apes,'' and if it doesn't sound like your idea of literature, you're probably not alone. In earlier books, like ''My Idea of Fun'' and the story collection ''Grey Area'' (in which both Zack Busner and Simon Dykes previously appeared, though in human form), Self made a name for himself as a defiant satirist with a peculiar mastery of the vocabulary of modern neurosis. Cultivating controversy in his life as well as in his work (during his stint as a reporter in the recent British election campaign, he was thrown off John Major's plane, accused of shooting heroin in the bathroom), he has polarized the reading public both here and in England, earning the usual iconoclast's reward of rabid denunciations and hyperbolic praise.
In ''Great Apes,'' his seventh book, Self carries this outrageousness into new realms. Taking a device that most comic writers would have dared to employ only over the space of a four-page satirical piece, he instead develops it into a 400-page novel. And although that may sound like a recipe for disaster -- like deciding to make an animated all-Simpsons version of ''Long Day's Journey Into Night'' -- the real surprise here is not only that the device works but that it works so brilliantly. What should have been the literary equivalent of a parlor trick turns out to be an utterly absorbing and affecting work of fiction.
The success of Self's feat is due in large part to the completeness with which he has imagined his alternate universe of ascendant ''chimpunity.'' Though much of the civilization depicted in ''Great Apes'' will be recognizable to human readers (there are chimp versions of Freud, O. J. Simpson and even Jane Goodall -- who, of course, has spent her career studying the wild humans of Gombe), it is the differences that are most telling. For instance, since chimps lack the vocal range necessary for complex spoken language, Self's primates have instead developed an eloquent vocabulary of hand signs punctuated by generic vocalizations. Thus the cry ''HoooGraaa!'' is the all-purpose attention getter, while ''H'huuu?'' is the question signifier and ''chup-chupp'' the inevitable accompaniment to all palliative gestures. Similarly, the human idea of the family has been replaced here by the hierarchical grouping of chimpanzees, where promiscuous copulation (even among blood relatives) is warmly encouraged and the major antisocial act is to upset the group structure by failing to groom with sufficient deference or mate with appropriate frequency and abandon. Self's grip on his extended trope is so tight, in fact, that I found only a few transmogrification errors in the entire book -- instances, for example, in which a ''bed'' is referred to instead of the more proper ''nest.'' (But then, as Alexander Pope once wrote, ''To err is chimp,'' and so on.)
What's more, all of this literary skylarking is grounded in a lush, scrupulously exact prose that can vault from the poignant to the grotesque to the ridiculous with vertiginous ease. Here, in a typical passage, Self riffs on the emotional consequences of Simon's recently failed marriage and his relationship with his children:
''No matter how much he saw them now, how many times he picked them up from school, how many times he made them oven chips and fish fingers, how many times he petted them, kissed them, told them he loved them, nothing could assuage this sense of wrenching separation, their disjunction from his life. He may not have snacked on the placenta, but somehow the umbilici still trailed from his mouth, ectoplasmic cords, strung across summertime London, snagging on rooftops, car aerials, advertising hoardings, and tied him to their little bellies.''
A few pages later, Self reprises the snacking imagery in an entirely different tone, when Simon idly imagines the crowds in Oxford Circus being ravaged by a ''post-imperial Kong'': ''These people were finger food to the god, sushi for the divinity. He disentangled them from his fur, eyed their knotted faces, and then popped them between his teeth, each of which was the size of a dentist. Mmmm . . . ! Crunchy . . . and yet chewy.''
With such reckless bravado, Self manages to turn his novel into a high-powered satirical weapon capable of blasting a wide range of targets. The circus of celebrity psychiatry, the jungle of hospital politics, the Vanity Fair of the London art scene -- all are brutally sent up in their apish reincarnations. But Self is also after bigger game. In scope, his book's obvious predecessor is ''Gulliver's Travels,'' which made similar use of anthropomorphized beasts to point up the general corruption and foolhardiness of Homo sapiens. And like Swift's book, ''Great Apes'' can be unexpectedly moving in its more ambitious moments, as in this passage, where Simon's human mind/chimp body problem takes the form of a drug-induced fever dream:
''He identified the lost infant as himself -- or to be more precise his lost body. He saw his infant's body, standing, shivering, naked of its protective coat. Little Simon, as gracile as a young bonobo; head fur blond and cropped at the back, features refined and serious. . . . Simon turned towards the lost infant, wafted across the grassy floor to get him. But as he drew nearer the infant's blue eyes widened, and his red red lips parted, and the sapling body bent in an afflatus of anguish. Then Simon heard the awful, meaningful vocalizations; so guttural -- but so just. 'Get away! Get away, Beelzebub! Foul beast! Ape man!' ''
It's in moments like this that Simon's situation -- the radical alienation he feels from his environment, his family, his own nature -- becomes more than just a clever comic device. Simon, the human-minded ape, could at times be speaking for all divided souls of the modern urban savanna, where the demands of everyday life in society often seem at odds with the inclinations of our animal selves.
Obviously, ''Great Apes'' is not a book that will delight everyone. In places, its humor caroms toward the sophomoric (not to mention the scatological), and there are times when Self's readers may feel as if they're trapped in a windowless room with a monstrously intelligent, diabolically articulate adolescent. Moreover, like some of Self's earlier work, this book ends lamely, with a reductive conclusion that seems almost intentionally to trivialize what has come before. But the value of the novel shouldn't be obscured by the inevitable skirmishes it will inspire on the battlefield of taste. With ''Great Apes,'' his most satisfying book so far, Will Self establishes himself as an alpha male in the British literary hierarchy. He deserves every thunderous ''HoooGraaa!'' we can offer him.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Krist is the author of two story collections, ''The Garden State'' and ''Bone by Bone.'' His first novel, ''Bad Chemistry,'' will be published this winter.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More on Will Self
From the Archives of The New York Times
REVIEWS:
Cock & Bull (1993)
"[Will Self] possesses all those gifts a satiric writer might want....Unfortunately, in this volume, these copious gifts are all too frequently put in the service of a misogynistic and ridiculously sophomoric vision."
My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale (1994)
"Although he is British and this novel is set in England, it has family resemblances to the work not only of Nabokov, but also of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo....Will Self belongs in their company."
The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1995)
"Mr. Self was fired as a cartoonist for The New Statesman because he was "too depressing." And he does seem very fond of that word."
By GARY KRIST
Read the First Chapter | Read Michiko Kakutani's review of "Great Apes" (September 12, 1997)
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More on Will Self from The New York Times Archives
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GREAT APES
By Will Self.
404 pp. New York:
Grove Press. $24.
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r. Zack Busner -- distinguished clinical psychologist, maverick neuropharmacologist, noted television commentator and tooth-clacking, lice-picking chimpanzee -- is a figure of commanding presence. In the world of Will Self's latest novel, ''Great Apes,'' a world in which chimps rather than humans are the species cursed by the gift of advanced civilization, Busner is one of the greatest apes of all. An ''elder stateschimp of the psychiatric fraternity,'' he has achieved an Oliver Sacks-ish eminence in his field, writing about his encounters with various neurological misfits in popular books like ''The Chimp Who Mated an Armchair'' and ''Nestings.'' As a result, he is met wherever he knuckle-walks with a flurry of obsequious groveling from subordinates, reinforcing his position as an alpha male at the very top of the professional hierarchy.
But now Busner is confronted with his most puzzling case: that of Simon Dykes, a celebrated artist suffering from the bizarre delusion that he is human. Indeed, Dykes's psychosis is so comprehensive that he even regards the true reality as one in which -- get this -- humans are the evolutionarily successful primates. Evidently thinking ahead to his next book (''The Ape Who Mistook His Fur for an Overcoat,'' perhaps?), Busner takes on the unfortunate Dykes as a patient. And that's where the trouble begins, for there are subordinate males afoot who, while paying homage to Busner in public, are secretly working to undermine him, and see his handling of the deluded artist's case as just the opportunity they seek.
Such, believe it or not, is the story line of ''Great Apes,'' and if it doesn't sound like your idea of literature, you're probably not alone. In earlier books, like ''My Idea of Fun'' and the story collection ''Grey Area'' (in which both Zack Busner and Simon Dykes previously appeared, though in human form), Self made a name for himself as a defiant satirist with a peculiar mastery of the vocabulary of modern neurosis. Cultivating controversy in his life as well as in his work (during his stint as a reporter in the recent British election campaign, he was thrown off John Major's plane, accused of shooting heroin in the bathroom), he has polarized the reading public both here and in England, earning the usual iconoclast's reward of rabid denunciations and hyperbolic praise.
In ''Great Apes,'' his seventh book, Self carries this outrageousness into new realms. Taking a device that most comic writers would have dared to employ only over the space of a four-page satirical piece, he instead develops it into a 400-page novel. And although that may sound like a recipe for disaster -- like deciding to make an animated all-Simpsons version of ''Long Day's Journey Into Night'' -- the real surprise here is not only that the device works but that it works so brilliantly. What should have been the literary equivalent of a parlor trick turns out to be an utterly absorbing and affecting work of fiction.
The success of Self's feat is due in large part to the completeness with which he has imagined his alternate universe of ascendant ''chimpunity.'' Though much of the civilization depicted in ''Great Apes'' will be recognizable to human readers (there are chimp versions of Freud, O. J. Simpson and even Jane Goodall -- who, of course, has spent her career studying the wild humans of Gombe), it is the differences that are most telling. For instance, since chimps lack the vocal range necessary for complex spoken language, Self's primates have instead developed an eloquent vocabulary of hand signs punctuated by generic vocalizations. Thus the cry ''HoooGraaa!'' is the all-purpose attention getter, while ''H'huuu?'' is the question signifier and ''chup-chupp'' the inevitable accompaniment to all palliative gestures. Similarly, the human idea of the family has been replaced here by the hierarchical grouping of chimpanzees, where promiscuous copulation (even among blood relatives) is warmly encouraged and the major antisocial act is to upset the group structure by failing to groom with sufficient deference or mate with appropriate frequency and abandon. Self's grip on his extended trope is so tight, in fact, that I found only a few transmogrification errors in the entire book -- instances, for example, in which a ''bed'' is referred to instead of the more proper ''nest.'' (But then, as Alexander Pope once wrote, ''To err is chimp,'' and so on.)
What's more, all of this literary skylarking is grounded in a lush, scrupulously exact prose that can vault from the poignant to the grotesque to the ridiculous with vertiginous ease. Here, in a typical passage, Self riffs on the emotional consequences of Simon's recently failed marriage and his relationship with his children:
''No matter how much he saw them now, how many times he picked them up from school, how many times he made them oven chips and fish fingers, how many times he petted them, kissed them, told them he loved them, nothing could assuage this sense of wrenching separation, their disjunction from his life. He may not have snacked on the placenta, but somehow the umbilici still trailed from his mouth, ectoplasmic cords, strung across summertime London, snagging on rooftops, car aerials, advertising hoardings, and tied him to their little bellies.''
A few pages later, Self reprises the snacking imagery in an entirely different tone, when Simon idly imagines the crowds in Oxford Circus being ravaged by a ''post-imperial Kong'': ''These people were finger food to the god, sushi for the divinity. He disentangled them from his fur, eyed their knotted faces, and then popped them between his teeth, each of which was the size of a dentist. Mmmm . . . ! Crunchy . . . and yet chewy.''
With such reckless bravado, Self manages to turn his novel into a high-powered satirical weapon capable of blasting a wide range of targets. The circus of celebrity psychiatry, the jungle of hospital politics, the Vanity Fair of the London art scene -- all are brutally sent up in their apish reincarnations. But Self is also after bigger game. In scope, his book's obvious predecessor is ''Gulliver's Travels,'' which made similar use of anthropomorphized beasts to point up the general corruption and foolhardiness of Homo sapiens. And like Swift's book, ''Great Apes'' can be unexpectedly moving in its more ambitious moments, as in this passage, where Simon's human mind/chimp body problem takes the form of a drug-induced fever dream:
''He identified the lost infant as himself -- or to be more precise his lost body. He saw his infant's body, standing, shivering, naked of its protective coat. Little Simon, as gracile as a young bonobo; head fur blond and cropped at the back, features refined and serious. . . . Simon turned towards the lost infant, wafted across the grassy floor to get him. But as he drew nearer the infant's blue eyes widened, and his red red lips parted, and the sapling body bent in an afflatus of anguish. Then Simon heard the awful, meaningful vocalizations; so guttural -- but so just. 'Get away! Get away, Beelzebub! Foul beast! Ape man!' ''
It's in moments like this that Simon's situation -- the radical alienation he feels from his environment, his family, his own nature -- becomes more than just a clever comic device. Simon, the human-minded ape, could at times be speaking for all divided souls of the modern urban savanna, where the demands of everyday life in society often seem at odds with the inclinations of our animal selves.
Obviously, ''Great Apes'' is not a book that will delight everyone. In places, its humor caroms toward the sophomoric (not to mention the scatological), and there are times when Self's readers may feel as if they're trapped in a windowless room with a monstrously intelligent, diabolically articulate adolescent. Moreover, like some of Self's earlier work, this book ends lamely, with a reductive conclusion that seems almost intentionally to trivialize what has come before. But the value of the novel shouldn't be obscured by the inevitable skirmishes it will inspire on the battlefield of taste. With ''Great Apes,'' his most satisfying book so far, Will Self establishes himself as an alpha male in the British literary hierarchy. He deserves every thunderous ''HoooGraaa!'' we can offer him.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Krist is the author of two story collections, ''The Garden State'' and ''Bone by Bone.'' His first novel, ''Bad Chemistry,'' will be published this winter.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More on Will Self
From the Archives of The New York Times
REVIEWS:
Cock & Bull (1993)
"[Will Self] possesses all those gifts a satiric writer might want....Unfortunately, in this volume, these copious gifts are all too frequently put in the service of a misogynistic and ridiculously sophomoric vision."
My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale (1994)
"Although he is British and this novel is set in England, it has family resemblances to the work not only of Nabokov, but also of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo....Will Self belongs in their company."
The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1995)
"Mr. Self was fired as a cartoonist for The New Statesman because he was "too depressing." And he does seem very fond of that word."
Here's a review I saw on the internet of Great Apes
Will Self has always had an ambivalent relationship with the novel. He doesn't write about character and admits that he finds plot 'boring', as a result his novels usually work off a single comic device or absurd concept, stretched to the limit through a vast vocabularly, endless metaphors and a scatological humour. Self's is a style that can be very visceral, funny and incisive, however, over the course of an entire novel it can become nauseous, tedious and dull. Self is better suited to short stories and journalism, forums where his flamboyant, potent prose and wild premises still have the ability to be shocking rather than tired and worn.
'Great Apes', Self's 1997 work released shortly after the scandal over the author taking heroin on John Major's private jet, combines both these aspects of his work into a great, fierce piece of satire.
Taking the Kafkaesque premise of a London artist, Simon Dykes waking from a night of bad coke and worse sex to find himself in a world where chimps have reversed roles with humans, the novel works best when describing the social hierachy of the chimps and their bizarre behaviour, using it as a device to show how similar the two species are.
Dykes finds himself in a secure unit under the supervision of emenient primate psychiatrist Zack Busner, the titular 'great ape'. Self goes to great lengths to describe Dykes' anguish and how insane he seems in contrast to the rest of the world. As the book progresses Dykes' belief in his own humanity is shown to be nothing more than the workings of delusional mind- chimps do indeed have global supremacy.
Mental illness and the problems of medicine are common Self themes and the book does raise interesting questions about the nature of madness and drug abuse, but here they feel thinly developed, as if Self is writing for his own amusement. For every funny line or comic invention there are vast amounts of unecessary and flabby writing, either concerning psychiatry, sex or divorce, that just come across as dull. Self has an incredible mind, at his best recalling, all at once, Martin Amis, Celine, Kafka and Carroll, but here he comes across more as a man writing really just to waste time, as if the novel was a bit of filler between magazine assignments and taking drugs. The satirical comment Self hoped to make, on modern art, on coke, on humanity, on whatever, never fully translates or is fully concluded. Self started writing, kept going and then finished, whether what he wrote was of real substance wasn't obviously of much concern to him.
'Great Apes', Self's 1997 work released shortly after the scandal over the author taking heroin on John Major's private jet, combines both these aspects of his work into a great, fierce piece of satire.
Taking the Kafkaesque premise of a London artist, Simon Dykes waking from a night of bad coke and worse sex to find himself in a world where chimps have reversed roles with humans, the novel works best when describing the social hierachy of the chimps and their bizarre behaviour, using it as a device to show how similar the two species are.
Dykes finds himself in a secure unit under the supervision of emenient primate psychiatrist Zack Busner, the titular 'great ape'. Self goes to great lengths to describe Dykes' anguish and how insane he seems in contrast to the rest of the world. As the book progresses Dykes' belief in his own humanity is shown to be nothing more than the workings of delusional mind- chimps do indeed have global supremacy.
Mental illness and the problems of medicine are common Self themes and the book does raise interesting questions about the nature of madness and drug abuse, but here they feel thinly developed, as if Self is writing for his own amusement. For every funny line or comic invention there are vast amounts of unecessary and flabby writing, either concerning psychiatry, sex or divorce, that just come across as dull. Self has an incredible mind, at his best recalling, all at once, Martin Amis, Celine, Kafka and Carroll, but here he comes across more as a man writing really just to waste time, as if the novel was a bit of filler between magazine assignments and taking drugs. The satirical comment Self hoped to make, on modern art, on coke, on humanity, on whatever, never fully translates or is fully concluded. Self started writing, kept going and then finished, whether what he wrote was of real substance wasn't obviously of much concern to him.
Here's a review I saw on the internet of Great Apes
Will Self has always had an ambivalent relationship with the novel. He doesn't write about character and admits that he finds plot 'boring', as a result his novels usually work off a single comic device or absurd concept, stretched to the limit through a vast vocabularly, endless metaphors and a scatological humour. Self's is a style that can be very visceral, funny and incisive, however, over the course of an entire novel it can become nauseous, tedious and dull. Self is better suited to short stories and journalism, forums where his flamboyant, potent prose and wild premises still have the ability to be shocking rather than tired and worn.
'Great Apes', Self's 1997 work released shortly after the scandal over the author taking heroin on John Major's private jet, combines both these aspects of his work into a great, fierce piece of satire.
Taking the Kafkaesque premise of a London artist, Simon Dykes waking from a night of bad coke and worse sex to find himself in a world where chimps have reversed roles with humans, the novel works best when describing the social hierachy of the chimps and their bizarre behaviour, using it as a device to show how similar the two species are.
Dykes finds himself in a secure unit under the supervision of emenient primate psychiatrist Zack Busner, the titular 'great ape'. Self goes to great lengths to describe Dykes' anguish and how insane he seems in contrast to the rest of the world. As the book progresses Dykes' belief in his own humanity is shown to be nothing more than the workings of delusional mind- chimps do indeed have global supremacy.
Mental illness and the problems of medicine are common Self themes and the book does raise interesting questions about the nature of madness and drug abuse, but here they feel thinly developed, as if Self is writing for his own amusement. For every funny line or comic invention there are vast amounts of unecessary and flabby writing, either concerning psychiatry, sex or divorce, that just come across as dull. Self has an incredible mind, at his best recalling, all at once, Martin Amis, Celine, Kafka and Carroll, but here he comes across more as a man writing really just to waste time, as if the novel was a bit of filler between magazine assignments and taking drugs. The satirical comment Self hoped to make, on modern art, on coke, on humanity, on whatever, never fully translates or is fully concluded. Self started writing, kept going and then finished, whether what he wrote was of real substance wasn't obviously of much concern to him.
'Great Apes', Self's 1997 work released shortly after the scandal over the author taking heroin on John Major's private jet, combines both these aspects of his work into a great, fierce piece of satire.
Taking the Kafkaesque premise of a London artist, Simon Dykes waking from a night of bad coke and worse sex to find himself in a world where chimps have reversed roles with humans, the novel works best when describing the social hierachy of the chimps and their bizarre behaviour, using it as a device to show how similar the two species are.
Dykes finds himself in a secure unit under the supervision of emenient primate psychiatrist Zack Busner, the titular 'great ape'. Self goes to great lengths to describe Dykes' anguish and how insane he seems in contrast to the rest of the world. As the book progresses Dykes' belief in his own humanity is shown to be nothing more than the workings of delusional mind- chimps do indeed have global supremacy.
Mental illness and the problems of medicine are common Self themes and the book does raise interesting questions about the nature of madness and drug abuse, but here they feel thinly developed, as if Self is writing for his own amusement. For every funny line or comic invention there are vast amounts of unecessary and flabby writing, either concerning psychiatry, sex or divorce, that just come across as dull. Self has an incredible mind, at his best recalling, all at once, Martin Amis, Celine, Kafka and Carroll, but here he comes across more as a man writing really just to waste time, as if the novel was a bit of filler between magazine assignments and taking drugs. The satirical comment Self hoped to make, on modern art, on coke, on humanity, on whatever, never fully translates or is fully concluded. Self started writing, kept going and then finished, whether what he wrote was of real substance wasn't obviously of much concern to him.
Review of Piano in the .........
Sean McManus's Blog
Book review: A piano in the Pyrenees by Tony Hawks
21 June 2006
After lugging a fridge around Ireland, chasing Moldovan footballers to challenge them to play tennis, and increasingly desperate attempts to have a hit single, life's slowed down a bit for Tony Hawks. His latest book 'A Piano in the Pyrenees' tells the story of how he bought a nice holiday home in France, moved a piano over there and chilled out with his friends.
He still has a flair for character sketches and for humorous writing. It's just that the material's a bit weak. There is a 15 page section about a village event where everyone follows the cows up into the mountains. It's a gruelling journey and a long day, but it all falls a bit flat when Hawks ducks out early and ends up committing a minor faux pas in front of the mayor: not really the kind of punchline you'd expect after such a big build-up.
Most of the book's pretty hum-drum: Buying houses abroad, wrangling with foreign bureaucracy, moving house, and building a swimming pool are common enough experiences that you'd never get an autobiography commissioned on the back of them. Reading the book is a gentle and pleasant enough journey - it just doesn't feel structured or particularly special at the end. Put it this way: you or I could never get this book commissioned on its outline, and probably not on the strength of any of these chapters either.
If you've lived in the region he writes about, it might be a lot funnier for you. If you enjoyed his other books, you'll probably like reading his style again. For me, it was an enjoyable but lazy read. After all his previous madcap stunts, I was pleased to read a book in which he seems to be content, rather than just jolly. But I'd be surprised if the market will be as tolerant and it seems unlikely this book will recapture the commercial success of his debut.
Book review: A piano in the Pyrenees by Tony Hawks
21 June 2006
After lugging a fridge around Ireland, chasing Moldovan footballers to challenge them to play tennis, and increasingly desperate attempts to have a hit single, life's slowed down a bit for Tony Hawks. His latest book 'A Piano in the Pyrenees' tells the story of how he bought a nice holiday home in France, moved a piano over there and chilled out with his friends.
He still has a flair for character sketches and for humorous writing. It's just that the material's a bit weak. There is a 15 page section about a village event where everyone follows the cows up into the mountains. It's a gruelling journey and a long day, but it all falls a bit flat when Hawks ducks out early and ends up committing a minor faux pas in front of the mayor: not really the kind of punchline you'd expect after such a big build-up.
Most of the book's pretty hum-drum: Buying houses abroad, wrangling with foreign bureaucracy, moving house, and building a swimming pool are common enough experiences that you'd never get an autobiography commissioned on the back of them. Reading the book is a gentle and pleasant enough journey - it just doesn't feel structured or particularly special at the end. Put it this way: you or I could never get this book commissioned on its outline, and probably not on the strength of any of these chapters either.
If you've lived in the region he writes about, it might be a lot funnier for you. If you enjoyed his other books, you'll probably like reading his style again. For me, it was an enjoyable but lazy read. After all his previous madcap stunts, I was pleased to read a book in which he seems to be content, rather than just jolly. But I'd be surprised if the market will be as tolerant and it seems unlikely this book will recapture the commercial success of his debut.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Will Self
For anyone wanting to discover more about Will Self [Author of Great Apes] please click on the following link:
http://www.will-self.com/
http://www.will-self.com/
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
A few comments on Grasshopper........
Sunday, 11 March 2007
Review: Grasshopper, by Barbara Vine
Personal Rating: 4/5
Having said I'm going away (which I have done) unfotunately I haven't managed to stay away from the internet altogether, so here I am (but maybe for the last time this week - honest!
Anyway, I seem to have gone from one Barbara to another with my reading. This novel is the story of Clodagh Brown, who has a great love of heights and an equally great fear of underground and enclosed spaces. Her love of heights has resulted in two major events in her life, both of which end with tragic consequences, and this story primarily focusses on the second one.
Much of this story takes place skipping across the rooves of terraced houses in Maida Vale, an area of London, although this light airy spirit is not carried through into the writing. The plot cleverly reveals little bits at a time, and although this can be intriguing, it does also drag along in places.
What saves the day are the main characters, Clodagh and Silver, and their young simple naive spirits as they try to help underdogs. The characters and the intriguing plot kept me reading through to its fairly inevitable tragic end, and the way the story flipped between the present day, and earlier events, kept giving little clues about the outcome.
Although this book was hard work at times, I would still say it was worth it, and I'm glad I persevered. I read one of her other books, The Dark Adapted Eye, a few years ago, which I remember thinking was an amazing psychological novel and, although this wasn't on a par with that, it was still a thrilling read which I would highly recommend.
Posted by heidijane at 19:36
Labels: Barbara Vine, holiday, Recommended, reviews
4 comments:
jenclair said...
I haven't read this one, but have enjoyed all of the novels I've read by Barbara Vine (and all of those she writes under her own name, Ruth Rendell).
13 March 2007 12:24
nessie said...
I remember when I worked in a bookstore that she had a small but devoted following.
13 March 2007 21:48
Lesley said...
Hmm, this sounds interesting. I just finished a Barbara Vine book that I did not really like all that much (The Minotaur), and that was my first experience with her writing (either as BV or Ruth Rendell). Not sure whether I want to give her another try or not ...
14 March 2007 18:09
Anonymous said...
Yeah I read this one as well and I admit that it dragged along at times for me.
I must say though that I love all Barbara Vine and Ruth Rendell novels. I love the settings and the deep and sometimes very dark psychological intrigue.
http://twitter.com/RedPenAnni
Review: Grasshopper, by Barbara Vine
Personal Rating: 4/5
Having said I'm going away (which I have done) unfotunately I haven't managed to stay away from the internet altogether, so here I am (but maybe for the last time this week - honest!
Anyway, I seem to have gone from one Barbara to another with my reading. This novel is the story of Clodagh Brown, who has a great love of heights and an equally great fear of underground and enclosed spaces. Her love of heights has resulted in two major events in her life, both of which end with tragic consequences, and this story primarily focusses on the second one.
Much of this story takes place skipping across the rooves of terraced houses in Maida Vale, an area of London, although this light airy spirit is not carried through into the writing. The plot cleverly reveals little bits at a time, and although this can be intriguing, it does also drag along in places.
What saves the day are the main characters, Clodagh and Silver, and their young simple naive spirits as they try to help underdogs. The characters and the intriguing plot kept me reading through to its fairly inevitable tragic end, and the way the story flipped between the present day, and earlier events, kept giving little clues about the outcome.
Although this book was hard work at times, I would still say it was worth it, and I'm glad I persevered. I read one of her other books, The Dark Adapted Eye, a few years ago, which I remember thinking was an amazing psychological novel and, although this wasn't on a par with that, it was still a thrilling read which I would highly recommend.
Posted by heidijane at 19:36
Labels: Barbara Vine, holiday, Recommended, reviews
4 comments:
jenclair said...
I haven't read this one, but have enjoyed all of the novels I've read by Barbara Vine (and all of those she writes under her own name, Ruth Rendell).
13 March 2007 12:24
nessie said...
I remember when I worked in a bookstore that she had a small but devoted following.
13 March 2007 21:48
Lesley said...
Hmm, this sounds interesting. I just finished a Barbara Vine book that I did not really like all that much (The Minotaur), and that was my first experience with her writing (either as BV or Ruth Rendell). Not sure whether I want to give her another try or not ...
14 March 2007 18:09
Anonymous said...
Yeah I read this one as well and I admit that it dragged along at times for me.
I must say though that I love all Barbara Vine and Ruth Rendell novels. I love the settings and the deep and sometimes very dark psychological intrigue.
http://twitter.com/RedPenAnni
Something on the author...
Author Information: Barbara Vine
View all 1 Images
Comment!
Rating: Weighted - 7.36 / Average - 6.3 of 10 (3 votes)
Comments: 0 (show them)
Biography's Source:
Biography:
From the publisher
Barbara Vine is a pseudonym for Ruth Rendell. Barbara Vine's first novel, A Dark-Adapted Eye, won an Edgar Award, the highest honor of the Mystery Writers of America. A Fatal Inversion won the English equivalent, the Crime Writers' Gold Dagger Award. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature who holds honorary doctorates from the University of Essex and the University of Bowling, Green, Ohio, she has one grown son and lives with her husband and two cats in a sixteenth-century farmhouse in Suffolk, England.
Novels:
Dark-Adapted Eye, a (1986)
House Of Stairs, the (1988)
King Solomon's Carpet (1991)
Anna's Book (1993)
No Night Is Too Long (1994)
Brimstone Wedding, the (1995)
Grasshopper (2000)
Blood Doctor, the (2002)
Pseudonyms:
Ruth Rendell
View all 1 Images
Comment!
Rating: Weighted - 7.36 / Average - 6.3 of 10 (3 votes)
Comments: 0 (show them)
Biography's Source:
Biography:
From the publisher
Barbara Vine is a pseudonym for Ruth Rendell. Barbara Vine's first novel, A Dark-Adapted Eye, won an Edgar Award, the highest honor of the Mystery Writers of America. A Fatal Inversion won the English equivalent, the Crime Writers' Gold Dagger Award. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature who holds honorary doctorates from the University of Essex and the University of Bowling, Green, Ohio, she has one grown son and lives with her husband and two cats in a sixteenth-century farmhouse in Suffolk, England.
Novels:
Dark-Adapted Eye, a (1986)
House Of Stairs, the (1988)
King Solomon's Carpet (1991)
Anna's Book (1993)
No Night Is Too Long (1994)
Brimstone Wedding, the (1995)
Grasshopper (2000)
Blood Doctor, the (2002)
Pseudonyms:
Ruth Rendell
"Grasshopper" hops from one reader to another
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This book is currently in the wild!
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Journal entry 1 by boucli from Toulouse, Midi-Pyrénées France on Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Synopsis
Blamed by her parents for the tragic death of a friend, Clodagh has been banished from their home in the countryside to a dingy basement flat in the city. Her life is transformed when she meets the inhabitants on the top floor of 15 Russia Road. An exotic range of young people who explore a London of roofs, eaves and ledges, thrilling in the freedom and danger. Clodagh, haunted still by the accident, finds that running the roofs brings her back to life, but it seems that tragedy and misfortune may not be done with her yet. Barbara Vine's 10th novel, Grasshopper is an enthralling, chilling novel that mirrors Vine's acclaimed London Underground novel King Solomon's Carpet.
Offered in the "one word only" bookrelay, and accepted by MissBagpuss
sent june 22nd
book rating:
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Journal entry 2 by MissBagpuss from Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire United Kingdom on Saturday, July 10, 2004
a very enjoyable read. although the events portrayed were a little far fetched, they were written in a strangely believable way. i liked both of the main characters. i also thought the character of wim was well thought out and oddly convincing.
book rating:
back to top
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Journal entry 3 by MissBagpuss from Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire United Kingdom on Monday, September 19, 2005
Released about 3 yrs ago (9/19/2005 5:00:00 PM BX time) at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) in San Francisco, California USA
RELEASE NOTES:
left next to the payphones near the bathrooms in the departure check-in area
Thank you for picking up this book. Please make a journal entry to let me know that this book has found a good home with you. You may choose to remain anonymous or to join (its free). If you join, please consider indicating that you were referred by MissBagpuss. I hope you enjoy the book. You can make another journal entry with your comments when you’ve finished reading. Whenever you’re ready to send it on its way, make a journal entry if you are giving or sending this book to a known person, or release notes if you are leaving it “in the wild” again for anyone to catch. Then watch its journey. You’ll be alerted by e-mail each time someone makes another journal entry. It’s all confidential (you’re known only by your screen name and no one is ever given your e-mail address), free, and spam-free.
This book is currently in the wild!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Journal entry 1 by boucli from Toulouse, Midi-Pyrénées France on Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Synopsis
Blamed by her parents for the tragic death of a friend, Clodagh has been banished from their home in the countryside to a dingy basement flat in the city. Her life is transformed when she meets the inhabitants on the top floor of 15 Russia Road. An exotic range of young people who explore a London of roofs, eaves and ledges, thrilling in the freedom and danger. Clodagh, haunted still by the accident, finds that running the roofs brings her back to life, but it seems that tragedy and misfortune may not be done with her yet. Barbara Vine's 10th novel, Grasshopper is an enthralling, chilling novel that mirrors Vine's acclaimed London Underground novel King Solomon's Carpet.
Offered in the "one word only" bookrelay, and accepted by MissBagpuss
sent june 22nd
book rating:
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Journal entry 2 by MissBagpuss from Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire United Kingdom on Saturday, July 10, 2004
a very enjoyable read. although the events portrayed were a little far fetched, they were written in a strangely believable way. i liked both of the main characters. i also thought the character of wim was well thought out and oddly convincing.
book rating:
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Journal entry 3 by MissBagpuss from Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire United Kingdom on Monday, September 19, 2005
Released about 3 yrs ago (9/19/2005 5:00:00 PM BX time) at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) in San Francisco, California USA
RELEASE NOTES:
left next to the payphones near the bathrooms in the departure check-in area
Thank you for picking up this book. Please make a journal entry to let me know that this book has found a good home with you. You may choose to remain anonymous or to join (its free). If you join, please consider indicating that you were referred by MissBagpuss. I hope you enjoy the book. You can make another journal entry with your comments when you’ve finished reading. Whenever you’re ready to send it on its way, make a journal entry if you are giving or sending this book to a known person, or release notes if you are leaving it “in the wild” again for anyone to catch. Then watch its journey. You’ll be alerted by e-mail each time someone makes another journal entry. It’s all confidential (you’re known only by your screen name and no one is ever given your e-mail address), free, and spam-free.
Review of Grasshopper by K. Kimbrough
by Kay Kimbrough
GRASSHOPPER
Barbara Vine
Harmony Books, New York, 2000, $25.00.
Clodagh Brown is nineteen when she goes to London to attend a technical college and recover from a depression caused by a tragic accident for which she feels responsible. She lives in a basement flat provided by her mother's cousin and his wife. Unable to ride the London subway because of claustrophobia, she takes the bus to school on the days she does not skip classes altogether to investigate the architecture of London, which fascinates her. On one occasion she is directed to an underpass because of a blocked-off crime scene, and she collapses in terror while trying to reach the end of the tunnel.
Rescued by a young eccentric, Michael Silverman, known as Silver because of his almost white hair, Clodagh begins her adventure that leads to the complications of the plot. Silver is living an experiment in goodness, consciously accepting anyone into his life and into his flat on the top floor of his parents' house in spite of criminal records or character defects. With the confidence of youth, he expects to do good to anyone who needs him, although he does prevent evil when it is happening in his presence. Clodagh recognizes that she has been longing for "goodness" for a long time, so she is attracted to Silver immediately.
She does have some doubts about Silver's generosity at times, for he seems to have no regard for his money, inherited from his grandmother, that is enough to live on, but not a grand fortune. Unable to suppress her strong pragmatic bent, she quarrels with him about this carelessness.
While carrying out his experiment in goodness, Silver has learned to enjoy climbing on the roofs of London with his friend Wim for pleasure, excitement, challenge and escape from life on the ground level. Clodagh is already in love with climbing, a practice which had led to her friend's death and her exile to London. These young people are like children climbing trees, towers, mountains or castle walls. They are still immature, enjoying spying through windows, getting away with something they shouldn't do.
Although there are several mysteries presented to throw the reader off the tract, the central plot stems from this practice of going on the roofs. An adopted mixed-race child has been abducted by his parents because the social service has decided the adoption is bad for him. He should go to a mixed-race couple, no matter how happy he is. Spotting the family, who have frequently appeared in newspapers and are in hiding in a neighboring flat, Silver and Clodagh determine to help them. Their efforts lead to the conclusion, highly improbable but no stranger than real life, solving one of the novel's mysteries.
Along the way, the two young people fall in love and discover that their powers of doing good are limited by the very people they try to help, leading Clodagh to wonder about whether one should consider the kind of people in need of help before getting involved with them. They encounter true evil, dishonesty, greed and indifference in one character after another. They are innocent, inexperienced and trusting, learning about the disguises people create and the lies they tell themselves to get their way in painful steps toward wisdom.
Writing the Wexford mysteries as Ruth Rendell or psychological thrillers as Barbara Vine, the author always has a sermon to deliver without preaching or being obvious. The treatment of children by parents is one of her typical subjects; evil people have had some form of abuse as children in her books. Sometimes the abuse is neglect, sometimes physical battering and sometimes extreme indulgence, but there is always an explanation for human behavior.
A botched illegal abortion and a child who should have been taken from sick parents cause the tragedy in this novel. Other issues surface, such as the unfairness of the class system and the increasing materialism of culture. There is one bright spot: the cleaning woman Clodagh befriends lives a contented and meaningful life. On the other hand, the successful actress who loses her husband to another woman is miserable, regretting the amount of money she spent to provide her husband with a lovely home more than she regrets the loss of him.
GRASSHOPPER opens slowly; nothing much happens for the first one hundred pages. It takes patience to get into the story. Unlike some of Vine's other books, it ends almost too quickly, leaving one story, that of Liv, unfinished. It is well worth reading, however, for its understanding of the growing-up process, its array of characters and the varieties of human dramas they perform. The character of Clodagh is created with restraint. She grows up in the book, becoming good herself without leaving behind her practical self and her refreshing honesty.
GRASSHOPPER
Barbara Vine
Harmony Books, New York, 2000, $25.00.
Clodagh Brown is nineteen when she goes to London to attend a technical college and recover from a depression caused by a tragic accident for which she feels responsible. She lives in a basement flat provided by her mother's cousin and his wife. Unable to ride the London subway because of claustrophobia, she takes the bus to school on the days she does not skip classes altogether to investigate the architecture of London, which fascinates her. On one occasion she is directed to an underpass because of a blocked-off crime scene, and she collapses in terror while trying to reach the end of the tunnel.
Rescued by a young eccentric, Michael Silverman, known as Silver because of his almost white hair, Clodagh begins her adventure that leads to the complications of the plot. Silver is living an experiment in goodness, consciously accepting anyone into his life and into his flat on the top floor of his parents' house in spite of criminal records or character defects. With the confidence of youth, he expects to do good to anyone who needs him, although he does prevent evil when it is happening in his presence. Clodagh recognizes that she has been longing for "goodness" for a long time, so she is attracted to Silver immediately.
She does have some doubts about Silver's generosity at times, for he seems to have no regard for his money, inherited from his grandmother, that is enough to live on, but not a grand fortune. Unable to suppress her strong pragmatic bent, she quarrels with him about this carelessness.
While carrying out his experiment in goodness, Silver has learned to enjoy climbing on the roofs of London with his friend Wim for pleasure, excitement, challenge and escape from life on the ground level. Clodagh is already in love with climbing, a practice which had led to her friend's death and her exile to London. These young people are like children climbing trees, towers, mountains or castle walls. They are still immature, enjoying spying through windows, getting away with something they shouldn't do.
Although there are several mysteries presented to throw the reader off the tract, the central plot stems from this practice of going on the roofs. An adopted mixed-race child has been abducted by his parents because the social service has decided the adoption is bad for him. He should go to a mixed-race couple, no matter how happy he is. Spotting the family, who have frequently appeared in newspapers and are in hiding in a neighboring flat, Silver and Clodagh determine to help them. Their efforts lead to the conclusion, highly improbable but no stranger than real life, solving one of the novel's mysteries.
Along the way, the two young people fall in love and discover that their powers of doing good are limited by the very people they try to help, leading Clodagh to wonder about whether one should consider the kind of people in need of help before getting involved with them. They encounter true evil, dishonesty, greed and indifference in one character after another. They are innocent, inexperienced and trusting, learning about the disguises people create and the lies they tell themselves to get their way in painful steps toward wisdom.
Writing the Wexford mysteries as Ruth Rendell or psychological thrillers as Barbara Vine, the author always has a sermon to deliver without preaching or being obvious. The treatment of children by parents is one of her typical subjects; evil people have had some form of abuse as children in her books. Sometimes the abuse is neglect, sometimes physical battering and sometimes extreme indulgence, but there is always an explanation for human behavior.
A botched illegal abortion and a child who should have been taken from sick parents cause the tragedy in this novel. Other issues surface, such as the unfairness of the class system and the increasing materialism of culture. There is one bright spot: the cleaning woman Clodagh befriends lives a contented and meaningful life. On the other hand, the successful actress who loses her husband to another woman is miserable, regretting the amount of money she spent to provide her husband with a lovely home more than she regrets the loss of him.
GRASSHOPPER opens slowly; nothing much happens for the first one hundred pages. It takes patience to get into the story. Unlike some of Vine's other books, it ends almost too quickly, leaving one story, that of Liv, unfinished. It is well worth reading, however, for its understanding of the growing-up process, its array of characters and the varieties of human dramas they perform. The character of Clodagh is created with restraint. She grows up in the book, becoming good herself without leaving behind her practical self and her refreshing honesty.
Robert Crone on Grasshopper.........
'Grasshopper' by Barbara Vine
Open-and-shut cases of masterful mystery writing: ‘Grasshopper’
Sunday, December 17, 2000
By Robert Croan, Post-Gazette Senior
Grasshopper
By Barbara Vine
Harmony Books
$25.00
British mystery writer Ruth Rendell uses the pseudonym Barbara Vine when writing novels in which mystery is not the primary element. Her latest effort in this genre has several mysteries woven into the plot, but the new book is essentially a coming-of-age story about a young woman afflicted with severe claustrophobia.
Clodaugh Brown, or Clo, is so claustrophobic that she cannot go through any of England’s short underground passageways to cross a street. And she will never take the tube, or what we call a “subway.”
She will walk miles out of her way or take buses and trams that might add hours to a normally brief journey. Worst of all, her claustrophobia is offset by a love of heights. As a teen-ager, Clo and her first boyfriend, Daniel, would scale the pylons -- dangerous electrical towers -- but one day Daniel was zapped by the electrical current. Clo was helpless to save him.
Her parents, the whole town, in fact, blamed Clo for Daniel’s death. As an adult, Clo blames herself as well and writes her thoughts in a diary, which -- now, more than a decade later, she is updating for a particular reader. We know that Clo has survived it all, though not without mental and physical scars. She is married and has become a successful electrician, living in a luxury apartment.
The part of her life that she (and we) are most concerned with, however, is the time -- at the age of 18 -- that she went to London to take a business course at Grand Union Polytechnic. Soon Clo finds a lover, a neighbor called Silver because he’s an albino. He makes his apartment available to a variety of occupants, including a mysterious Dutchman named Wim who has discovered the secret of traveling through the neighborhood on rooftops.
Other residents include a Swedish girl named Liv who has a phobia just the opposite of Clo’s: She cannot bear to go outdoors. Liv takes up with Jonny, a very bad egg who uses the roofs in his trade as a burglar.
Things get even more tangled when Liv becomes infatuated with Wim and Jonny takes violent steps to keep Liv for himself.
Furthermore, Clo and Silver -- in a naive attempt at altruism -- help a childless couple trying to abduct a mixed-race child who has been refused for adoption.
All this comes together in a tale that shows Vine’s mastery of plot and character. We hardly know what the mystery is until it is solved, although Clo gives us hints that one thing will work out and another will end badly. Characters develop in ways that are unpredictable but ultimately believable. Vine’s prose is quite beautiful, not only in her furthering of the plot but also the atmosphere she creates of two Londons: one class-bound and wealthy, the other Bohemian and poor.
By the end, the reader can’t help wishing it were possible to join in just once for one of those wild romps on the roofs.
Open-and-shut cases of masterful mystery writing: ‘Grasshopper’
Sunday, December 17, 2000
By Robert Croan, Post-Gazette Senior
Grasshopper
By Barbara Vine
Harmony Books
$25.00
British mystery writer Ruth Rendell uses the pseudonym Barbara Vine when writing novels in which mystery is not the primary element. Her latest effort in this genre has several mysteries woven into the plot, but the new book is essentially a coming-of-age story about a young woman afflicted with severe claustrophobia.
Clodaugh Brown, or Clo, is so claustrophobic that she cannot go through any of England’s short underground passageways to cross a street. And she will never take the tube, or what we call a “subway.”
She will walk miles out of her way or take buses and trams that might add hours to a normally brief journey. Worst of all, her claustrophobia is offset by a love of heights. As a teen-ager, Clo and her first boyfriend, Daniel, would scale the pylons -- dangerous electrical towers -- but one day Daniel was zapped by the electrical current. Clo was helpless to save him.
Her parents, the whole town, in fact, blamed Clo for Daniel’s death. As an adult, Clo blames herself as well and writes her thoughts in a diary, which -- now, more than a decade later, she is updating for a particular reader. We know that Clo has survived it all, though not without mental and physical scars. She is married and has become a successful electrician, living in a luxury apartment.
The part of her life that she (and we) are most concerned with, however, is the time -- at the age of 18 -- that she went to London to take a business course at Grand Union Polytechnic. Soon Clo finds a lover, a neighbor called Silver because he’s an albino. He makes his apartment available to a variety of occupants, including a mysterious Dutchman named Wim who has discovered the secret of traveling through the neighborhood on rooftops.
Other residents include a Swedish girl named Liv who has a phobia just the opposite of Clo’s: She cannot bear to go outdoors. Liv takes up with Jonny, a very bad egg who uses the roofs in his trade as a burglar.
Things get even more tangled when Liv becomes infatuated with Wim and Jonny takes violent steps to keep Liv for himself.
Furthermore, Clo and Silver -- in a naive attempt at altruism -- help a childless couple trying to abduct a mixed-race child who has been refused for adoption.
All this comes together in a tale that shows Vine’s mastery of plot and character. We hardly know what the mystery is until it is solved, although Clo gives us hints that one thing will work out and another will end badly. Characters develop in ways that are unpredictable but ultimately believable. Vine’s prose is quite beautiful, not only in her furthering of the plot but also the atmosphere she creates of two Londons: one class-bound and wealthy, the other Bohemian and poor.
By the end, the reader can’t help wishing it were possible to join in just once for one of those wild romps on the roofs.
October Book Choice ~ Grasshopper by Barbara Vine
This month we're discussing Grasshopper.
We'll be meeting on Friday 17th October ~ usual time and place.
I've read about 100 pages so far and find the style ponderous, the characterisation unbelieveable and the storyline uninspiring.
Perhaps things can only get better!!!!!!
We'll be meeting on Friday 17th October ~ usual time and place.
I've read about 100 pages so far and find the style ponderous, the characterisation unbelieveable and the storyline uninspiring.
Perhaps things can only get better!!!!!!
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Never Let me Go Reviews
Book Summary and Media Reviews
Never Let Me Go: Summary and book reviews of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, plus an excerpt from Never Let Me Go and a biography of Kazuo Ishiguro.
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Hardcover: Apr 2005
Paperback: Mar 2006
Publication information Book Jacket & Reviews
Excerpt
Reader Reviews
Author Biography
Author Interview
Reading Guide
Read-Alikes
This Book's Themes
BookBrowse Says....
Critics' Opinion: Very Good
Readers' Rating:
(7 reader reviews)
Add to my Reading List Buy this book:
From the Jacket
A BookBrowse Favorite Book
From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly re-imagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.
As a child, Kathy–now thirty-one years old–lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.
And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed–even comforted–by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham's nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood–and about their lives now.
A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance–and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work.
Media Reviews
Booklist - Allison Block
In this luminous offering, he nimbly navigates the landscape of emotion--the inevitable link between present and past and the fine line between compassion and cruelty, pleasure and pain.
Library Journal - Henry L. Carrigan (starred review)
Ishiguro's elegant prose and masterly ways with characterization make for a lovely tale of memory, self-understanding, and love.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives-without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have "tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn't matter." ... A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
So exquisitely observed that even the most workaday objects and interactions are infused with a luminous, humming otherworldliness. The dystopian story it tells, meanwhile, gives it a different kind of electric charge. . . . An epic ethical horror story, told in devastatingly poignant miniature. . . . Ishiguro spins a stinging cautionary tale of science outpacing ethics.
The Guardian (UK) - M John Harrison
This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn't about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It's about why we don't explode, why we don't just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.
The Independent (UK) - Geoff Dyer
The problem for the reviewer, appropriately enough, is that by revealing more of what the book is about he risks going too far and unravelling its meticulously woven fabric of hints and guesses. So I'll leave it there. Suffice it to say that this very weird book is as intricate, subtly unsettling and moving as any Ishiguro has written.
The Sunday Times (UK) - Peter Kemp
Not since The Remains of the Day has Ishiguro written about wasted lives with such finely gauged forlornness. That he contrives to do so in a narrative crawling with creepy frissons is remarkable. Not the least out-of-the-ordinary feature of this novel, with its piercing questions about humanity and humaneness, is the way it affectingly moves past gothic shudders to a wrenchingly desolate ending.
The Telegraph (UK) - Caroline Moore
Never Let Me Go will probably disappoint readers for whom the solution of a mystery is all-in-all, or those who want the gratification of full-on horror. But in its evocation of a pervasive menace and despair almost but not quite lost in translation - made up of the shadows of things not said, glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye - the novel is masterly.
Never Let Me Go: Summary and book reviews of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, plus an excerpt from Never Let Me Go and a biography of Kazuo Ishiguro.
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Hardcover: Apr 2005
Paperback: Mar 2006
Publication information Book Jacket & Reviews
Excerpt
Reader Reviews
Author Biography
Author Interview
Reading Guide
Read-Alikes
This Book's Themes
BookBrowse Says....
Critics' Opinion: Very Good
Readers' Rating:
(7 reader reviews)
Add to my Reading List Buy this book:
From the Jacket
A BookBrowse Favorite Book
From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly re-imagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.
As a child, Kathy–now thirty-one years old–lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.
And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed–even comforted–by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham's nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood–and about their lives now.
A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance–and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work.
Media Reviews
Booklist - Allison Block
In this luminous offering, he nimbly navigates the landscape of emotion--the inevitable link between present and past and the fine line between compassion and cruelty, pleasure and pain.
Library Journal - Henry L. Carrigan (starred review)
Ishiguro's elegant prose and masterly ways with characterization make for a lovely tale of memory, self-understanding, and love.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives-without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have "tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn't matter." ... A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
So exquisitely observed that even the most workaday objects and interactions are infused with a luminous, humming otherworldliness. The dystopian story it tells, meanwhile, gives it a different kind of electric charge. . . . An epic ethical horror story, told in devastatingly poignant miniature. . . . Ishiguro spins a stinging cautionary tale of science outpacing ethics.
The Guardian (UK) - M John Harrison
This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn't about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It's about why we don't explode, why we don't just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.
The Independent (UK) - Geoff Dyer
The problem for the reviewer, appropriately enough, is that by revealing more of what the book is about he risks going too far and unravelling its meticulously woven fabric of hints and guesses. So I'll leave it there. Suffice it to say that this very weird book is as intricate, subtly unsettling and moving as any Ishiguro has written.
The Sunday Times (UK) - Peter Kemp
Not since The Remains of the Day has Ishiguro written about wasted lives with such finely gauged forlornness. That he contrives to do so in a narrative crawling with creepy frissons is remarkable. Not the least out-of-the-ordinary feature of this novel, with its piercing questions about humanity and humaneness, is the way it affectingly moves past gothic shudders to a wrenchingly desolate ending.
The Telegraph (UK) - Caroline Moore
Never Let Me Go will probably disappoint readers for whom the solution of a mystery is all-in-all, or those who want the gratification of full-on horror. But in its evocation of a pervasive menace and despair almost but not quite lost in translation - made up of the shadows of things not said, glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye - the novel is masterly.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
August, September, October & November Meetings
Hi Everyone in the Book Club & potential new members
The Book club will meet at the usual venue at the hotel.
Under discussion for the next few months will be:
August
Last King of Scotland
Giles Foden
September
Never Let Me go
Kazuo Ishiguro
October
Grasshopper
Barbara Vine
November
A Piano in the Pyrenees
Tony Hawkes
Reviews of the Book and information about the author are available on the St Yrieix Book club Blog. http://vernonboy.blogspot.com
Please let Pat Dixon know of your coffee/lunch requirements a few days before the meeting.
Pat Dixon ~ 0553552185
Vernon Goddard ~ 0555099490
All welcome ~ but if you are a new member, please contact us to let us know you’re joining. _________________
Gorseinonboy................
The Book club will meet at the usual venue at the hotel.
Under discussion for the next few months will be:
August
Last King of Scotland
Giles Foden
September
Never Let Me go
Kazuo Ishiguro
October
Grasshopper
Barbara Vine
November
A Piano in the Pyrenees
Tony Hawkes
Reviews of the Book and information about the author are available on the St Yrieix Book club Blog. http://vernonboy.blogspot.com
Please let Pat Dixon know of your coffee/lunch requirements a few days before the meeting.
Pat Dixon ~ 0553552185
Vernon Goddard ~ 0555099490
All welcome ~ but if you are a new member, please contact us to let us know you’re joining. _________________
Gorseinonboy................
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Solzhenitsyn the great survivor will live on as truly great writer
The man who exposed Stalin's horrors outlived his time, turning from a prophet into a zealot, writes EILEEN BATTERSBY
HAD HE died about 30 years ago, instead of living on until Sunday to die of heart failure at 89, the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have been remembered as a hero, a prophet and, above all, a great writer in a country of great writers.
But he made one mistake - he survived.
Not only did he survive the second World War, Stalin's death camps and stomach cancer, Solzhenitsyn, the author of more than 20 books, who went into exile, initially to Switzerland, and then on to the US where he remained for 17 years, survived communism.
His was not an exile of glamour. By the time Solzhenitsyn had settled in Vermont where his household lived in a high security compound of sorts, surrounded by a high wooden fence, the West had already discovered a far more attractive Russian dissident, Joseph Brodsky, who was possessed of a swagger, an anger he could use to theatrical effect and a willingness to play to the gallery. Aside from all of that Brodsky was only 55, he favoured highly Americanised English, whereas Solzhenitsyn's was formal. Above all, he repeatedly attacked liberalism. His years in the West saw the one-time prophet become a zealot.
Yes, Solzhenitsyn was very different from Brodsky; he was reclusive, taciturn, an ex-soldier and detached since childhood, his father having died before he was born. It was his fate. His soldier father, having survived the Great War, then died in a hunting accident - some suggested it was suicide.
Whatever the truth, the future writer was born in the shadow of a family tragedy and was left with relatives while his mother went to work in a nearby town. He was also born into revolution; his birth in Rostov on Don in 1918 coincided with a time of global upheaval. For Russia it was cataclysmic. Tsarist Russia died in a bloodbath and Communist Russia was born into another.
The young Sanya was clever and secured a first-class degree in maths and physics while also pursuing his interest in the arts, particularly literature, and he completed a correspondence course. Then he was called up. Already something of an intellectual, he proved an arrogant soldier, serving as a gunner and later an artillery officer. He was twice decorated and was the commander of his battalion. He was soon a captain. But he made a mistake; when writing a letter to a friend, he made "derogatory" comments about Stalin. The irony was cruel. Having served his country well, he was then arrested as an enemy of the people in early 1945. His sentence seemed mild enough - only eight years - but those eight years were spent in the hell of the labour camps, initially in general camps in the Arctic Circle where the political prisoners lived alongside criminals, and later in the harsher conditions of Beria's "special" camps for long-term prisoners.
His experiences in the camps inspired his masterful first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , first published in Novy Mir, a literary journal, in 1962. It was the book that would make his name, and for many, it remains his finest artistic achievement. It is written with a bleak lyricism that is both heartrending and also, at times, deeply witty. It is his most human book. For those who doubt him as an artist they need only read this book and experience life in the camp through the thoughts of Shukhov, who survives the biting cold and the hunger.
He had been released from the camp in 1951 but then had another battle to face, cancer. This experience would later inspire Cancer Ward (1967). With The First Circle , published in 1968, Solzhenitsyn proved that he was privy to the literary power that had dominated the 19th-century Russian novel.
Yet all the while Solzhenitsyn the artist was being pushed aside by Solzhenitsyn the campaigner. He set out to expose the horrors of the Soviet system. He began his monumental work, The Gulag Archipelago , a history of the political oppression and personal suffering that destroyed millions. It is a three-volume labour of courage. In 1967 he revised and retyped the entire text which runs to more than 1,500 pages. At that time he did have some support within Russia, also he could draw on the influence of Pasternak's legacy. The international success of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had made him famous. It was a useful shield - he did not disappear, he was merely quietly deported.
There is no disputing his contribution towards the collapse of communism - he exposed the system. He had also demolished the myth of Lenin with his boldly ironic Lenin in Zurich , which was first published in Paris in 1975. By then he had already been honoured with the Nobel Prize, although he had not been able to accept it in person in 1970. His books were being read all over the world and he was grimly devoting himself to the story of Russia. The witness, the writer, had become an historian. The Gulag Archipelago is the defining study of the horrors communism inflicted on Russia. Unfortunately, unfairly for Solzhenitsyn, a shift occurred. He outlived his usefulness. No longer a prophet, he would be dismissed as a polemicist and a crank.
In addition to survival, his love of Russia proved another mistake. After the fall of communism, he decided to return home. By then his country had changed beyond recognition. Most Russians when asked to name great Russian writers rarely included him in the roll of honour. His homecoming in 1994 had none of the expected triumph. Indifference, not affection, met him. His books were dismissed as boring and his Russian was considered ugly and graceless.
The British writer Michael Scammell wrote a detailed and near definitive biography in 1985. It is a good book, even including material on the writer's second marriage during which he first became a father at the late age of 52. Solzhenitsyn, who had never wanted children and effectively broke his first wife's heart because of this edict, eventually had three sons.
If his country lost interest in him as both a writer and a polemicist, the West has continued to take him seriously, although US opinion of him was damaged by his reclusiveness. In 1998, the maverick British writer DM Thomas, who has long held an interest in Russian history and literature and who has also translated many of the Russian poets, attempted an eccentric biography of Solzhenitsyn, focusing on his personal life, his ego and his vanity.
As a schoolgirl I remember reading the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago back to back and wondered at the cruelty of humankind and also the endurance. In an interview with me in 2006, the British novelist Martin Amis attributed Solzhenitsyn with opening his eyes and inspiring his novel, House of Meetings .
Yes, the strange, remote, determined Alexander Solzhenitsyn did outlive his time; the country he tried to save turned its back on him with all the indifference of an ungrateful child. Yet his achievement remains and, for all the truths contained in his non-fiction and autobiographical writing, his fiction, Cancer Ward and The First Circle are compelling, important novels, while One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich remains a masterpiece. The prophet may have been forgotten but the novelist will be remembered.
© 2008 The Irish Times
The man who exposed Stalin's horrors outlived his time, turning from a prophet into a zealot, writes EILEEN BATTERSBY
HAD HE died about 30 years ago, instead of living on until Sunday to die of heart failure at 89, the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have been remembered as a hero, a prophet and, above all, a great writer in a country of great writers.
But he made one mistake - he survived.
Not only did he survive the second World War, Stalin's death camps and stomach cancer, Solzhenitsyn, the author of more than 20 books, who went into exile, initially to Switzerland, and then on to the US where he remained for 17 years, survived communism.
His was not an exile of glamour. By the time Solzhenitsyn had settled in Vermont where his household lived in a high security compound of sorts, surrounded by a high wooden fence, the West had already discovered a far more attractive Russian dissident, Joseph Brodsky, who was possessed of a swagger, an anger he could use to theatrical effect and a willingness to play to the gallery. Aside from all of that Brodsky was only 55, he favoured highly Americanised English, whereas Solzhenitsyn's was formal. Above all, he repeatedly attacked liberalism. His years in the West saw the one-time prophet become a zealot.
Yes, Solzhenitsyn was very different from Brodsky; he was reclusive, taciturn, an ex-soldier and detached since childhood, his father having died before he was born. It was his fate. His soldier father, having survived the Great War, then died in a hunting accident - some suggested it was suicide.
Whatever the truth, the future writer was born in the shadow of a family tragedy and was left with relatives while his mother went to work in a nearby town. He was also born into revolution; his birth in Rostov on Don in 1918 coincided with a time of global upheaval. For Russia it was cataclysmic. Tsarist Russia died in a bloodbath and Communist Russia was born into another.
The young Sanya was clever and secured a first-class degree in maths and physics while also pursuing his interest in the arts, particularly literature, and he completed a correspondence course. Then he was called up. Already something of an intellectual, he proved an arrogant soldier, serving as a gunner and later an artillery officer. He was twice decorated and was the commander of his battalion. He was soon a captain. But he made a mistake; when writing a letter to a friend, he made "derogatory" comments about Stalin. The irony was cruel. Having served his country well, he was then arrested as an enemy of the people in early 1945. His sentence seemed mild enough - only eight years - but those eight years were spent in the hell of the labour camps, initially in general camps in the Arctic Circle where the political prisoners lived alongside criminals, and later in the harsher conditions of Beria's "special" camps for long-term prisoners.
His experiences in the camps inspired his masterful first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , first published in Novy Mir, a literary journal, in 1962. It was the book that would make his name, and for many, it remains his finest artistic achievement. It is written with a bleak lyricism that is both heartrending and also, at times, deeply witty. It is his most human book. For those who doubt him as an artist they need only read this book and experience life in the camp through the thoughts of Shukhov, who survives the biting cold and the hunger.
He had been released from the camp in 1951 but then had another battle to face, cancer. This experience would later inspire Cancer Ward (1967). With The First Circle , published in 1968, Solzhenitsyn proved that he was privy to the literary power that had dominated the 19th-century Russian novel.
Yet all the while Solzhenitsyn the artist was being pushed aside by Solzhenitsyn the campaigner. He set out to expose the horrors of the Soviet system. He began his monumental work, The Gulag Archipelago , a history of the political oppression and personal suffering that destroyed millions. It is a three-volume labour of courage. In 1967 he revised and retyped the entire text which runs to more than 1,500 pages. At that time he did have some support within Russia, also he could draw on the influence of Pasternak's legacy. The international success of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had made him famous. It was a useful shield - he did not disappear, he was merely quietly deported.
There is no disputing his contribution towards the collapse of communism - he exposed the system. He had also demolished the myth of Lenin with his boldly ironic Lenin in Zurich , which was first published in Paris in 1975. By then he had already been honoured with the Nobel Prize, although he had not been able to accept it in person in 1970. His books were being read all over the world and he was grimly devoting himself to the story of Russia. The witness, the writer, had become an historian. The Gulag Archipelago is the defining study of the horrors communism inflicted on Russia. Unfortunately, unfairly for Solzhenitsyn, a shift occurred. He outlived his usefulness. No longer a prophet, he would be dismissed as a polemicist and a crank.
In addition to survival, his love of Russia proved another mistake. After the fall of communism, he decided to return home. By then his country had changed beyond recognition. Most Russians when asked to name great Russian writers rarely included him in the roll of honour. His homecoming in 1994 had none of the expected triumph. Indifference, not affection, met him. His books were dismissed as boring and his Russian was considered ugly and graceless.
The British writer Michael Scammell wrote a detailed and near definitive biography in 1985. It is a good book, even including material on the writer's second marriage during which he first became a father at the late age of 52. Solzhenitsyn, who had never wanted children and effectively broke his first wife's heart because of this edict, eventually had three sons.
If his country lost interest in him as both a writer and a polemicist, the West has continued to take him seriously, although US opinion of him was damaged by his reclusiveness. In 1998, the maverick British writer DM Thomas, who has long held an interest in Russian history and literature and who has also translated many of the Russian poets, attempted an eccentric biography of Solzhenitsyn, focusing on his personal life, his ego and his vanity.
As a schoolgirl I remember reading the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago back to back and wondered at the cruelty of humankind and also the endurance. In an interview with me in 2006, the British novelist Martin Amis attributed Solzhenitsyn with opening his eyes and inspiring his novel, House of Meetings .
Yes, the strange, remote, determined Alexander Solzhenitsyn did outlive his time; the country he tried to save turned its back on him with all the indifference of an ungrateful child. Yet his achievement remains and, for all the truths contained in his non-fiction and autobiographical writing, his fiction, Cancer Ward and The First Circle are compelling, important novels, while One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich remains a masterpiece. The prophet may have been forgotten but the novelist will be remembered.
© 2008 The Irish Times
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