The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

 Hemingway's classic roman a clef - also known as Fiesta - was published in 1926 to instant acclaim.  A group of expats meet up in Paris and move on to Pamplona for the Fiesta of Saint Fermin and the bullfighting.  The relationships of the expats is mirrored by the rivalry between bullfighters and their deathly dance with the bull.

Jake Barnes is the Hemingway figure but he is no bull because he has been neutered by a war wound.  He loves the beautiful Lady Brett Ashley and she loves him as much as she loves anyone else.  But she also loves other members of the group, Robert Cohn, whom she has recently spent a holiday with, and Mike Campbell, the British bankrupt she is engaged to.  Unable to have a sexual relationship with Jake, she prostitutes herself with other men, including the young matador Romero, who is only half her age.  Meanwhile the drunken Campbell baits Cohn in the same way Romero taunts his bull in the ring, and Cohn - a college boxing champion - ultimately strikes back.

In one sense Brett is the ultimate New Woman of the Twenties - sexually promiscuous, hard-drinking, frankly doomed.  But Barnes is a Catholic and, as narrator, takes a high moral tone, contrasting Brett with the working girl (Georgette) he picks up in Paris.

The Sun Also Rises is short, complex, multi-layered, experimental and, in summary, a modern masterpiece.  Is it Hemingway's masterpiece?  I haven't read enough to take a view.  But I was enthralled from the first page and became completely immersed.

Stoner - John Williams

Stoner is the Great American Novel that had to bide its time. Published in 1965, it had to wait more or less fifty years for its classic status to be recognised.


It explores familiar territory - the campus, secluded scholarship, the lost grandeur of the South - and it takes the two World Wars as its chronological frame.


William Stoner exceeds expectations when he gains admittance as a student to the University of Missouri in 1910. He comes from dirt-poor farming stock and initially studies agriculture. Then his eyes are opened to the wonders of English Literature - in his case the late Latin lyricists. Thereafter, he never leaves the university and never really revisits his youth, save to bury his parents and sell the farm. The University is his life, teaching his passion.


Classmates leave to serve in France in 1917. Stoner thinks long and hard and decides to stay. Twenty-four years later, of course, he is too old to serve, a married man with a daughter. And here we really comes to the central issue of the novel. Stoner is a good man, but he is not a good husband and lets himself get sidelined as a father. His life is study but he is a poor student of life. Williams' great gift is the creation of character. Stoner's wife Edith is a fragile Southern beauty and slightly deranged. Stoner loves her and she wants to love him, but they can't manage it, so they eke out an uneasy compromise and over the years they make it work. The daughter, Grace, on whom Stoner dotes, finds teenage pregnancy her only way out. The father of her child, a student at the University, does the right thing by Grace only to be killed in the war. Thereafter Grace takes to drink.


Stoner's great love turns out to be another student, Katherine Driscoll, a free spirit and thoroughly grounded young woman. The only way to keep her is for him to leave Edith and leave the University. As a good man and a dedicated teacher, Stoner can do neither. He becomes embroiled in a feud with his head of department that lasts to the end of his career. And, ultimately, Stoner does what the protagonist in every Great American Novel has to do: he makes his peace and dies. And what a death! Gradually fading away with his long-forgotten text book in his hand. Magnificent. Profoundly moving.


How much of this is autobiographical we do not know. We know that Williams, too, was an academic and, like Stoner, he wrote far too little. Other than that, he is a mystery. His name is about as plain as it gets, and so is his prose style. But what his achieves with simple words is far more than the likes of Henry James achieved with all his frills and flamboyant vocabulary. Williams achieves deep truths and phenomenal beauty.


I'm having luck, recently, finding masterpieces. Stoner is definitely another.

Silent House - Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in 2006, so we can take it for granted that he writes like a dream.  Silent House was his second novel, published in 1983 but only translated into English in 2012, which seems frankly bizarre. The book is written in the first person but the twist is, each chapter is in a different voice to the one before as the main characters give their perspective on the events of one long weekend in a holiday town in easy reach of Istanbul.

The main characters are the ninety year old Fatma, long widowed, who lives in the titular house with only the dwarf Recep to attend her.  Recep also happens to be the illegitimate son of Fatma's late husband, conceived - as was his younger brother Ismael - in the housekeeper's hut in the grounds of the mansion. Fatma's son Dogan died - a drunkard and non-achiever like his father - a decade and a half ago.  His wife, Gul, predeceased him.  Their children have come to visit their grandmother as they reluctantly do every summer: Faruk, a third generation drunken failure, the glamorous sister Nilgun, who inclines to the politics of the Left, and younger brother Metin, who plans on making an 80s-style fortune in America but who first hopes to seduce the local beauty Ceylan.

Nilgun and Ismael are not given first-person narratives.  Instead of Ismael, who lives away from the Silent House and only visits right at the end of the book, we hear from his son Hassan, who is between Nilgun and Metin in age and who was allowed to play with them at the mansion as a child.  Like Metin he dreams of great achievements, but whereas Metin is a star student in the big city Hassan is a drop-out in an unimportant little seaside town.  In 1980, as today, Turkey was torn between the rightwing Nationalists and the Leftist intelligentsia who saw Turkey was either the last bastion of Western Europe or the western frontier of the Soviet bloc.  Hassan hangs out with the local Nationalists, who spray slogans on walls and not much else.  Whilst Metin hankers after the lovely Ceylan, Hassan is besotted with Nilgun.  Unfortunately for him, she gives the impression of not knowing who he is.  This leads to the unforeseen climax of the story and is the reason why Nilgun has no chapters of her own but is only seen and appraised by others.

The young folk are immersed in their own problems.  Recep, in many ways the most appealing character, struggles to find positives in his situation, pandering to every whim of the embittered old woman who lamed his brother and may well have stunted Receps growth.  And marooned in her bedroom Fatma goes over and over her long life - a life she has no intention of giving up any time soon.  She came to hate her husband, despised her son and is largely indifferent to her grandchildren.  Her relationship with Recep, the living proof of her late husband's depravity, is the fulcrum on which the novel depends.  She cannot survive without him yet she cannot forgive him his paternity and cannot resist tormenting him.

Silent House is a brilliant book by a master of modern fiction.  Essential reading.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea -Yukio Mishima

Perhaps Mishima's best known novel in the West, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea is set in the era of the post-defeat reconstruction.  It is a novel of the early Sixties.  The characters, even the children too young to remember, are touched by the aftermath of the war and the subjugation of their nation.  The peephole in Noboru's bedroom and the 'dry dock' where the gruesome denouement takes place, are both relics of US occupation.

The focus is kept tight on Noboru, his widowed mother Fusako, and the new man in Fusako's life Ryuji, the titular sailor.  Aside from the actress Yoriko and the assistant manager Shibuya, who represent the two sides of Fusako's character, passion and punctiliousness, other key characters are not named.  Noboru's schoolmates - his gang - are simply the chief and number one, number two, and so on.  Noboru is number three.  They are all good students from good families, but we soon discover there is very little good about them.  They consider themselves superior.  They disdain their inferiors.  They set their own rules.  The chief has a book of Japanese law.  He knows time is running out for them.  Consequences will be different when they turn fourteen.

Mishima is such a genius in his structure.  We get drawn in to the nob of the story via the gang.  Noboru finds the peephole and watches his mother naked and masturbating.  Soon after he watches Fusako and Ryuji having sex.  As romance blossoms, sex turns to love, and their lovemaking becomes more private.  Noboru starts listing Ryuji's offences, perceived slights to the boy's elite status.  All of this he shares with his gang, the first intimation we have that these children are not normal.  In the middle of the book Mishima shows us just how abnormal they are, setting us up for the ending which he brilliantly doesn't show because what we imagine is so horrible.

In many ways this is Japanese noir.  The tension, the torrid atmosphere - literally, the fall from grace.  A modern masterpiece without any doubt.  My only criticism is that translator John Nathan (admittedly doing the work in 1965) is too quick with American colloquialisms.