Typhoon - Joseph Conrad

 I got interested in Conrad a few years ago.   Heart of Darkness and Nostromo are both reviewed somewhere on this blog.   Then I kind of ran out; I didn't come across any of his work in the library or the pre-loved bookshops I frequent locally or in London.   I remembered Typhoon in connection with a novella/short story I'm currently working on and bought the Penguin Classics edition online and also pre-loved.

I'm glad I did.   It gave me the background information I was looking for but Typhoon itself is a fantastic read.   Of the three other stories in the collection (which, it should be noted, is the collection Conrad personally put together, insisting that the stories complimented one another), two are sea-based, two about seafarers ashore.   The other sea-based story, 'Falk', is a 'reminiscence' in the same form as Heart of Darkness - a bunch of retired seamen chatting in a Thames-side pub.   The twist, when it is revealed, is truly jaw-dropping.   The other stories, 'Amy Foster' and 'To-Morrow', are traditional short stories, character studies rather than twisted tales.   In both cases the main characters have mental shortcomings.   Amy has what we would today call learning difficulties and cannot fully understand the good-looking immigrant the sea has deposited in her village.   She remains enigmatic for us because Conrad uses the distancing device of the local doctor telling her story to his friend.   This works extremely well.  In 'To-Morrow' a retired seaman is convinced the son he drove out of his house and who has been seeking for years will turn up 'to-morrow'.   It has become a mania with Captain Hagberd, so much so that when son Harry does turn up he refuses to believe it is him.   This edition also includes Conrad's dramatisation of 'To-Morrow' (which he had to call One Day More because there was a play called Tomorrow already on tour).   This is interesting as an example of turn-of-the-century art theatre of the sort that attracted Yeats and Shaw, Masefield and Somerset Maugham, but adds little to the story.

The introduction by Paul Kirschner did not capture my attention.   I'm not sure anyone needs the notes, the glossary could, I daresay, be more useful.

The Moon and the Bonfires - Cesare Pavese

 The Moon and the Bonfires was Pavese's last novel.  It was published in 1950; he committed suicide in August that year.   He was forty-one.   Some say he was the most influential Italian novelist of his time, which makes it odd that this translation by Tim Parks didn't join the Penguin Classics until 2021.  I bought The Penguin Classics Book this time last year and Pavese isn't even mentioned in the index.

Anyway, this slim volume - a very short novel, I would suggest, rather than a novella - is about 'Eel', a bastard boy given as cheap labour to a fatrmer up in the Piedmont hills.  He works the farm, is given basic skills and an element of freedom.  He observes the farmer's three daughters, he makes friends with other farm workers and with Nuto, a part-time amateur band leader and son of the local carpenter.

After his spell of military service Eel travels to America where he makes enough money to return to his roots after the war, twenty years since leaving.   While it is probably not technically his home, the village outside Canelli is the only home he has ever known, the place he has dreamed about during his time in America.

But he returns to find that everything in the village has changed.  The farms have all changed ownership and almost all the people he knew as a boy have either left or died.   Only Nuto remains, married with children, but still the same philosophical mentor for Eel.   Twenty years ago Nuto taught Eel about life and the possibilities of change.  Twenty years on, Nuto, who hasn't changed at all, guides forty year-old Eel around their old haunts and explains, piecemeal, what happened in his absence.   Mainly what happened was the war.  Was Nuto a partisan?  It is never fully explained.  He certainly had links with the partisans hiding in the hills.  Eel himself becomes a mentor to a lame farm boy called Cinto.  It all ends with two bonfires, one in 1949, one towards the end of the war when the partisans were avenging old scores.

The style is discursive, skipping from Eel's memories to Nuto's updates.  For all his links to this rich soil Eel remains the outsider, the observer - except perhaps when it comes to Cinto.  His recollections of the women on the farm where he was raised remain detached, oddly impersonal; such women were never for him.  He has known women but it is doubtful he has ever known love.  Pavese wrote the book in less than three months yet it is incredibly deep and immersive.   I loved it.   I'm pleased to see that Penguin have also published Tim Park's translation of Pavese's semi-autobiographical novella The House on the Hill.  I'll  be having that.

Tales of Hoffmann - E T A Hoffmann

 

We've all heard of Tales of Hoffman, obviously.  But how many have read the tales?  Well I now have - and my breath has been taken away.  Unfortunately this Penguin Classics version isn't all the tales, so I'm guessing you have to hunt down other editions to complete the set.  Still, the eight tales here make for a marvellous read.

First off, these are not short stories, as the 'tales' element might have inferred.  Seven of these are novellas, the other - 'The Mines at Falun' - either a long short story or a short novella.  Hoffman (1776-1822) seems to have written his entire literary output in the last six or seven years of his short life.  Before that he tried painting and succeeded to an extent as a composer.  And all the time he was a middle-ranking local bureaucrat.

R J Hollingdale, in his introduction, makes much of Hoffman's 'double life'.  It is Hollingdale's thesis that many of his characters have double lives.  That's certainly true, but many of them are also mad, as are the worlds in which they find themselves.  A better argument - which Hollingdale also makes - is that Hoffmann is the direct precursor of Poe.  This is especially true of the first novella here Mademoiselle de Scudery, an aged aristocrat at the court of Louis XIV, turns amateur sleuth in order to unmask a serial killer.  But then we have the very creepy 'The Sandman', in which the story itself has two lives.  And my favourite, 'The Choosing of the Bride', in which a sad local bureaucrat in his forties gets embroiled with what may be a two hundred year old goldsmith and his associate, the Wandering Jew.  This, by the way, is a knockabout comedy.

The truth is, I can think of no one remotely similar to Hoffmann.  The closest I can think of is Neil Gaiman. (Is 'The Sandman' some sort of arcane clue?)  I am a Gaiman enthusiast and now I absolutely crave more Hoffmann.  Unique, brilliant - otherwise indescribable.

The Emperor - Ryszaed Kapuscinski

This Penguin Classic is a classic of reportage rather than fiction or indeed non-fiction. Kapuscinski was a Polish reporter who had spent time in Ethiopia but who was not a witness to the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. He knew, however, that the abolition of the Ethiopian Empire was probably the last there would ever be. Slipshod commentators often talk about 21st century empires in connection with Russia but there is a fundamental difference: Vladimir Putin might have absolute autocratic authority but not even the most servile Kremlin bureaucrat thinks that authority will pass to his son and heir, if he even has one. In Imperial Ethiopia all authority was vested in the emperor, whose main claim to power was that he had managed to beat all the other princely and ducal contenders. In his youth Ras Tafari had probably been the best of a bad lot. During his exile during the Italian invasion he had even managed to establish himself on the world stage, perhaps the first black ruler of the modern era to do so. But after forty-four years on the throne, four-and-a-half decades of sitting cocooned in his palatial nest of sycophants, what had he become? One of his retainers, referred to as F, provides the answer as early as page 5:

It was a small dog, a Japanese breed. His name was Lulu. He was allowed to sleep in the Emperor's great bed. During various ceremonies, he would run away from the Emperor's lap and pee on dignitaries' shoes. The august gentlemen were not allowed to flinch or make the slightest gesture when they felt their feet getting wet. I had to walk among the dignitaries and wipe the urine from their shoes with a satin cloth. This was my job for ten years.

Yes, the institution of monarchy had become so debased that significant people had to put up with being peed on, and a man was employed to wipe their shoes. This, however, was not the most ludicrous example of royal protocol. There was the Hour of Assignments during which the emperor doled out rewards to his courtiers; there was no penalty for those who had failed for some reason, they were simply not rewarded and that was the kiss of death for their career. Haile Selassie, it was maintained, had risen above the hurly-burly of actually conferring with his courtiers face to face. His face was immobile, his voice inaudible. Thus all power was invested in the Minister of Pen who alone stood close enough to hear the imperial whispers. But he too was dispensable. If His Venerable Highness should let it be known that the Minister of the Pen had misinterpreted his wishes...


The court has officers such as Keeper of the Third Door and Imperial Pillow Bearer, but no elected politicians and no serious ministers. Yet the palace was a hive of activity from early morning to late at night. Hundreds of people busied themselves with absolute nonsense and useless flummery whilst outside the compound the people starved to death in their thousands. This is the regime that Kapuscinski recreates through interviews with the former officials whose world fell apart when Haile Selassie turned out to be mortal after all.


A lesser hand might leave us feeling sorry for the senile old man in his palace. Certainly Kapuscinski has sympathy for the redundant servants who, in the post-imperial Ethiopia cannot walk safely in public and who have to hide behind their initials in his book. But he has no sympathy at all for Hailie Selassie and his corrupt ministers, the former under house arrest, most of the latter executed. At the end of the book he writes:

With state money the dignitaries built themselves palaces, bought estates, travelled abroad. The Emperor himself amassed the greatest riches. The older he grew, the greater became his greed, his pitiable cupidity. One could talk about it with sadness and indulgence, were it not for the fact that HS - he and his people - took millions from the state treasury amid cemeteries full of people who had died of hunger, cemeteries visible from the windows of the royal Palace.

 I wish I could think of a journalist that insightful writing today.

Our Game - John le Carre

First the Wall came down, then the Soviet Union fell apart. The Nineties were a decade in which old enemies lost their edge, former certainties simply evaporated. Eastern Europe suddenly comprised new counties and potential states we had never heard of and knew absolutely nothing about. Chechnya, South Ossetia and, most relevant to le Carre's 1995 novel, Ingushetia - which I have still never heard of.

Many spy writers went out of business overnight, or turned to period espionage fiction. Le Carre, the great master of the form, used his genre to explore the uncertainties. Tim Cranmer is an old-style spy - Winchester, the Treasury - put out to grass. Fortunately he is stinking rich, his inheritance including a Somerset manor and vineyard. His schoolfriend Larry Pettifer, the enfant terrible of Soviet Studies in his day, was Cranmer's agent and later double agent. Old Wykehamists look after one another, and Cranmer has found flighty Larry a sinecure at Bath University. Larry has repaid the favour by absconding with Timbo's trophy girfriend Emma. Then Larry is reported missing. The police call on Cranmer. This comes as surprise to Cranmer, who thought he might have killed his friend some weeks before he went missing.

Has Larry gone back to the Game? Has he involved Emma? Cranmer sets out to find them, his quest taking him from Paris to the wild homeland of the Ingush. I'm not sure that the enigma is ever fully resolved  but what we do get is a vivid picture of one of the world's largest landmasses, a political empire, at the moment of implosion, and the black hole lurking beneath.

Our Game is not le Carre's finest novel. It is not an easy read - it is by no means an easy subject - yet it contains some of the master's finest writing.  He has to stretch his vocabulary in order to pin down the themes that emerge as the exercise progresses.  It is therefore a key work, not only within le Carre's oeuvre, but within the spy genre itself.

And this cover, on the Penguin Classic ebook, has to be the best of any le Carre ever...

Kim - Rudyard Kipling

I encountered Kipling as a child, which was clearly a great mistake.  I didn't get it.  I hated it.  Thick end of half a century later this amazing cover image stared at me out of the library window.  I considered overnight whether I should risk associating myself with a work of Kipling. Thought what the hey, borrowed it, and had my eyes well and truly opened.

There is a view that for Kim, and for Kim alone, Kipling won the 1907 Nobel Prize, this of course being before Baden Powell fetishized the Jungle Books.  I can well believe it.  Kim is an astonishing tour de force, literature which transcends mere narrative.  There's something of the Pilgrim's Progress at work here, but with a total immersion in the multi-coloured world of Raj India.  Kim is only a child but he has two distinct identities, Sahib and native guttersnipe, which he switches between at will.  For this reason he is subsumed into the Great Game (British Intelligence) whilst at the same time being the devoted chela of the Tishoo Lama.  How any novelist can make an interesting character out of a lama with no personal identity, engaged on a hopeless quest, beats me.  That Kipling can make him so attractive and compelling defies belief.  The other characters likewise: the Afghan horse dealer Mahbub Ali, the healer of pearls Lurgan Sahib, the garrulous widow, the all-powerful Woman of Srinagar, and the Babu doctor - a magnificent gallery, all richly realised, several without even a name to distinguish them.

Apart from the cover, this Penguin classic is a horrible edition.  There are far too many endnotes, sometimes three or four a line, which interferes with reading pleasure.  It would have been much better to include an appendix dealing with Kipling's use of local colour.  To my mind, he uses Indian names like a conjurer uses abracadabra - it really doesn't matter what they mean, they are there to add zing to the experience.  The introduction by Edward W Said is unforgiveable.  Why commission a critic who doesn't like Kipling?

For one thing, it is far too long.  Introduce it, for Pete's sake, don't append a scholarly paper.  As a piece of criticism it is very old fashioned, the sort of stuff that was de rigeur in the seventies and eighties but has long since passed its sell-by date.  Said seems to have convinced himself that Kipling is a racist.  Nonsense, as all those wonderful characters I have just listed demonstrate.  Kipling is not patronising his Indians, he clearly adores them.  Kipling evidently considered the Raj to be a good thing, but that doesn't make him racist, it makes him imperialist - a man of his era.

Said is a Conrad specialist, so he compares Conrad and Kipling.  There is no connection or parallel.  Conrad was a Pole who turned himself into an Englishman.  Kipling was an Englishman born and raised in India.  Conrad was pretty much a nobody when he arrived in England; Kipling couldn't have been more Establishment - he was Stanley Baldwin's cousin for one thing.  If the Conrad comparison is not sufficiently spurious, Said goes on to compare Kipling's Kim with Thomas Hardy's Jude.  Why?  Again, no sensible comparison is either possible or conceivable.  Kim is a happy-go-lucky youth devoid of all ties, Jude a depressive stonemason weighed down by family. Ridiculous.

Back to the main issue, though.  This is a staggeringly brilliant novel.  Read it - re-read it if need be.  But skip the intro and don't waste time on the notes.