The Violins of Saint-Jacques: A tale of the Antilles – Patrick Leigh Fermor

This brief and ornate novel is another one I picked up after reading this.

The framing device uses a stately Frenchwoman who reminded me of Agnes Varda, who relates her experiences on an exotic Caribbean island at the start of the twentieth century. The tropical, aristocratic setting is evoked vividly and the climactic volcanic eruption is memorably described.

The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

A re-read, obviously. In fact I once wrote an undergraduate linguistics essay on the very first page, so I knew I wasn’t going to get “all that David Copperfield kind of crap”, but instead one of the greatest character portraits ever created.

Holden Caulfield perfectly captures the adolescent mindset in which trivialities are a matter of urgency and important things are almost, but not quite, suppressed. His voice constantly churns out phrases like “if you really want to know” and “to tell you the truth”, whilst the real cause of his angst reveals itself only in asides.
In terms of language and character it’s a goddam masterpiece, if you really want to know.

The end of the book made me cry, but it’s also extremely funny. I particularly enjoyed a long riff about girls marrying boring guys, which segues into a description of a boring room-mate who Holden tolerates because of his exceptional ability in whistling jazz tunes. It concludes:

Naturally, I never told him I thought he was a terrific whistler. I mean you don’t just go up to somebody and say, “You’re a terrific whistler.” But I roomed with him for about two whole months, even though he bored me till I was half crazy, just because he was such a terrific whistler, the best I ever heard. So I don’t know about bores. Maybe you shouldn’t feel too sorry if you see some swell girl getting married to them. They don’t hurt anybody, most of them, and maybe they’re secretly all terrific whistlers or something. Who the hell knows? Not me.

Appointment in Samarra – John O’Hara

The title is a reference to Maugham’s retelling of a folk tale, so there’s no surprise that the story ends in the death of the protagonist. Interest is held along the journey by the forensic description of a decadent American elite, and the superb description a loving but irrevocably fractured marriage.

Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi

I always get irritated when reviewers use the term “deceptively simple”, it seems like a real cop-out. What’s wrong with just simple? The term certainly applies to this affecting graphic novel, both in terms of its monographic visuals and its storytelling.

The reason it works so well is the interweaving of autobiography and Iranian history. I learned a lot, and the import of the story is reinforced by the sad stories of Satrapi’s family and friends.

The Siege of Krishnapur - J.G. Farrell

A Booker winner back in the 70s, this splendid novel uses a historical event in 1850s India to look at a microcosm of English society at its imperial zenith. Issues of gender, class, science and art are all played out against a backdrop of an absorbing plot peopled by amusing characters.

The tone reminded me of Waugh's earlier satires. The dramatis personae are shown to be petty and self-deluding, but the reader cannot help but sympathise and when brutal events happen we are shocked and moved.

The Age of Revolution; Europe 1789-1848 - E.J. Hobsbawm

I read the first half of this hefty history in a bit of a haze, thanks to my flaky knowledge of the period between the French Revolution and the 1848 failed European revolutions, taking in the British Industrial Revolution. The fog of class war, if you will.

I was much more at home in the second half which takes a thematic line. Each chapter, on such topics as religious ideology, the arts and science, felt like a listening to an episode of In Our Time, of which I am a devotee.

Here’s a taste of Hobsbawm’s lovely and opinionated writing style, on Rousseau:

The views of this disagreeable, neurotic, but, alas, great man need not concern us in detail

The Ginger Man – JP Donleavy

I’ve never read a novel quite like this stylistically, with its constant shifting between first and person, and between present and past tense. It requires concentration not to lose one’s thread, a level of effort that is not really rewarded by a tawdry tale of deeply unappealing characters. Our narrator Dangerfield is in some senses reminiscent of Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces, but instead of a bumptious buffoon we are required to engage with a violent misogynist.

The Heather Blazing – Colm Toibin

Wonderful, this.

The troubled life of a gruff Dublin judge is interweaved with his childhood memories in effectless, affecting prose with superb results. Toibin is now in my personal list of top-rank contemporary novelists.