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 Girl with the Golden Eyes - Honore de Balzac

 The Girl with the Golden Eyes is the third of three novellas which Balzac grouped together as History of the Thirteen (1835).   Being part of the 'Scenes of Parisian Life' series, rather than the Comedie Humaine, there is a lot more descriptive material, part-opinionated, part-ironical.   I suspect a lot of modern readers skip that and plunge straight into the narrative.   I certainly did on first reading; on a more leisurely second reading, though, I rather enjoyed the discussion of the strata of Parisian life, in itself an ironical take on Dante's Inferno.

On to the story...   Henri de Marsay is a rich young philanderer, one of many illegitimate offspring of the English Lord Dudley.   Like all his fellows he is much taken with the mysterious and beautiful Paquita Valdes, the girl with the titular eyes.   Like his father, Henri is incredibly good-looking and completely devoid of moral scruples.   So he absolutely must add Paquita to his tally of conquests.   There is no question of love or marriage; this, after all, is the aristocratic upper teir of Parisian life.

The Thirteen is a secret society of self-serving adventurers, a cracking idea which Balzac utterly fails to deliver.   It runs through all three of the History novellas but is only central to the first.   Henri is obviously a member and his colleagues help him breach the defenses of the Maison Valdes.   He seduces Paquita, he deflowers her.   Then comes the breathtaking twist.   It's a corker.   Here, Balzac absolutely delivers.

I bought this New York Review of Books single novella version before I knew about The Thirteen.   Having read the very useful introduction by Robert Alter, I had to get the History.   Carol Cosman's translation seems fresher than Herbert J Hunt's for Penguin Classics.   So it should, it's twenty-five years younger.

The Silence - Don DeLillo

 I've reviewed two DeLillo novels previously on this blog, Running Dog in 2015 and Libra in May this year.   The Silence is nothing like either of them and yet it is quintessentially DeLillo.

DeLillo specifically calls it a novel but it is really a novella, only 116 pages in huge and beautiful American typewriter font.   There are only five characters: Jim Kripps and Tessa Berens, who we find onboard their flight from Paris to New Jersey; and an older couple in their New York apartment, Max Stenner and Diane Lucas, and their guest Martin, who is a physics teacher and Diane's former student.   Martin has an obsession with Einstein's 1912 manuscript of The Special Theory of Relativity, which he can and does quote from.

It is Super Bowl Sunday 2022 (but DeLillo wrote the book in 2020) and the game is about to start.   Jim and Tessa are due to join the party later.   But something happens.   The TV blacks out.  The same system failure hits the plane.   Fortunately the pilot is able to glide in.   Motor vehicles still work but all digital systems are down.

There is no resolution - and, of course, in real life we would be able to do nothing in this situation, no matter if our domestic group included a retired physics professor and a savant on the theory of Relativity.  The lack of resolution is another trait suggesting this is really a novella or longish short story.   Whatever it is, it's damn fine writing.

Antwerp - Roberto Bolano

 I remember reading The Savage Detectives when it first came out in English translation, sometime around the Millennium.   I loved it.   I remember eagerly awaiting the appearance of 2666.   By then Bolano had died.   I got hold of 2666 but couldn't come to terms with it.   The other day I spotted this in the British Library bookshop.   A novella - perhaps even a series of vignettes - by Bolano?   No brainer.

And I have really enjoyed it.   Antwerp might even have been his first attempt at sustained fiction, back in 1980, tinkered with over the years (as Bolano himself tells us in a sort of preface) and finally published in Spain in 2002, the year before he died.   It wasn't even called Antwerp back then.   I prefer Antwerp and Antwerp is probably my favourite anecdote in the book.

It's experimental, naturally, with few if any clear links between the fragments - a hunchback, probably Mexican, the struggling writer who can't write anything other than bursts of words, detectives on a mystery trajectory, thin young women.   It's a world of ideas whipped into a swirling mass with us, the reader, standing in the middle with Bolano, trying to snatch the odd one as it whirls by.

It's only seventy large-print pages but it took me three sittings to read.   It is so densely packed, so stuffed full of ideas and wit and suggestions of things to come.   Maybe it's time for another go at 2666.

NOTE:

Well, what do you know?   I'd completely forgotten I'd read Bolano's The Third Reich back in 2017.   I only found it when 'Roberto Bolano' turned out to be already saved in my labels.   Try it yourself - it's also in the labels for this post.   Or use the search box.   Spoiler - I moaned about 2666 but absolutely adored The Third Reich.

Queen Macbeth - Val McDermid

 Queen Macbeth is McDermid's contribution to Darkland Tales, the Polygon series of novellas that includes Denise Mina's Rizzio (also reviewed on this blog), in which leading Scottish writers of today offer a fresh take on Scottish history.

And Macbeth is history, though many people seem to think Shakespeare made him up.   And his wife was a significant person, so significant that her name survives a thousand years later.   Her name was Gruoch.   She was of royal Pictish blood and thus forced into an advantageous marriage to the Mormaer of Moray.   Macbeth freed her from that marriage - by burning her husband and his warband in their hall.   He then took over, uniting the various sub-kingdoms and formed a version of what is now Scotlnnd.   He was a benign ruler, it is said, and even went on pilgrimage to Rome.

McDermid starts with the facts and does a cracking job of bringing us into Gruoch's world.   Again wisely and well, she uses the framing device long advocated for novellas.   The present is after Macbeth's death in battle; Gruoch and her women have found sanctuary in a remote abbey, but Malcolm Canmore has defeated and killed the new king, Gruoch's son Lulach, and is said to be coming for her; so the women flee for the islands where Macbeth was always strong.   The past is how she and Macbeth first met and fell in love; how they plotted together to kill the Mormaer and how they then ruled Scotland together.

All this is first rate stuff, but then comes the twist - and it didn't work at all for me.   Goethe, who largely created the novella in its modern form, described it as "one authentic unheard-of event" - but there are limits.

Three Fires - Denise Mina

 In many ways Three Fires (2023) is the companion piece to Mina's brilliant Rizzio (2021).   Both, obviously, are novellas published by Polygon.   Both take historical incidents and view them through a contemporary lens.   Three Fires is less immediately engaging.   Its hero, the 15th century Florentine mystic dictator Girolamo Savonarola is clearly less appealing than the (probably) innocent French secretary.   Political murder, in the latter case, is more exciting than a renegade preacher ultimately brought down by hubris.  That said, both are compelling reads - Mina couldn't write boring sentence if she tried.   And she manages to drag out every shred of humanity in Savonarola.   He starts off indifferent to God, then personal setbacks lead him to find God.   He genuinely believes God speaks to him, then he begins to doubt, and the doubts quickly lead to his gruesome death.

The novella is the perfect form for Mina's purpose.   Many have tried and failed to spin the Rizzio story into full-length novels.   Such attempts fail because poor old Rizzio was collateral damage in a political powerplay which happened behind closed doors in Tudor times but today are everyday public fare.   In that sense Savonarola plays better because he is definitely responsible for his own rise and fall.   The canvas is bigger, the protagonist centrestage.  

I for one am really enjoying Mina's mid-career experiments.

Baron Bagge - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 Lernet-Holenia is a key figure in Twentieth Century Austrian literature, badly underpublished in English translation.   I looked on the British Library catalogue and only came up with four of his works in English.   I cannot understand this.   I jumped at the chance when I saw Count Luna was newly added to Penguin Modern Classics and that Baron Blagge had been republished to keep it company.   Waterstones only had Blagge but I was fine with that.

Blagge is a short novella or long short story.   The similarities with the stories of Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen are everywhere.   Upper class characters who find themselves overwhelmed by a vaguely supernatural situation.   Blagge is a junior officer in Count Gondola Dragoons.   In 1915 they find themselves in pursuit of the Russians in the Carpathian mountains.   There is a battle on a bridge.   The dragoons found themselves in the village of Nagy-Mihaly where Bagge is greeted by the beautiful Charlotte Szent-Kiraly, daughter of the best friend of Bagge's mother.   The mothers have long conspired to marry their children, but they have never met.   Yet Charlotte somehow knew that Bagge was coming today.   It's very odd.

And the oddness is the beauty of the book.   It is beautifully written and exactly the right length to do the story justice.  The characters are wonderfully realised, especially the supporting cast - Bagge's touchy superior Semler, and Charlotte's father with his damp handlebar moustache.  I absolutely adored it.   Exactly the sort of book I am constantly on the lookout for.   I must have more.

The Drop and The List - Mick Herron

 This is fun - two novellas associated with the Slow Horses of Slough House and Spook Street.  John Bachelor is not a Slow Horse - he's not that important.  He was always a low grade employee of the Secret Service and now he's a part-timer, working off-site, for peanuts.  Bachelor's role is called the milk round.  He looks after retired assets, former moles and agents now long retired, on Civil Service pensions, in safe, out-of-the-way accommodation.

Inevitably, old spooks die.  And Bachelor finds Dieter Hess dead in his chair, with a book on his lap and music on the CD player.  Not a bad way to go, and by no means unexpected.  Bachelor arranges the wake.  To his total horror, Diana Taverner, second desk at the Park, shows up, wanting a word.  Did Hess mention a second source of income?  How come Bachelor didn't know about the coded list under the carpet?

Bachelor needs to fix this - fast.  It doesn't take him long to figure out the code.  It's a list of people with German names.  Was Dieter a double?  Jackson Lamb soon identifies that problem.  But one of the names is more interesting than others.  A young woman, Hannah Weiss, living in England.  

That's The List.  The Drop opens with another of Bachelor's charges, Solomon Dortmund, witnessing an Old School 'drop' take place right in front of him in his favourite cafe.  He reports this to Bachelor, who shies away from reporting it to Lady Di.  Frankly, he'd rather she'd forgotten his existence, especially in his somewhat reduced circumstances.  But Solomon managed to get the name of the man making the drop out of a waiter and Bachelor asks a casual acquaintance of his at the Park to run the name.  All manner of chaos ensues as the snow starts to blanket London.

Herron really is on top of his form.  The clever thing here is the linkage of the two novellas.  Neither is sufficient for a novel, together they very nearly are.  And the linkage allows us the time to know more about the characters.  I hope we meet some of them again.

The Order of the Day - Eric Vuillard

 An odd little book, this.  It's a novella, only 128 pages in larger than usual typeface with blank pages between sections.  It certainly isn't non-fiction, yet there's no plot and barely any character development.  It has lofty literary aspirations - it won the 2017 Prix Goncourt - but for me at least the occasional literary flourishes were more off-putting than stimulating.

So what is The Order of the Day?  I suppose it's a pen-portrait of strategic moves made by various of the great powers in the build-up to World War II.  It is a collection of snapshots of those who one way or other appeased the clearly deranged Fuhrer of Germany.  The Munich appeasement by British PM Chamberlain is not one of those featured.  Instead we get a slightly earlier meeting with Lord Halifax, Chamberlain's Foreign Secretary.  Mainly it's about the Anschluss of Austria.  The sections dealing with this shameful episode are the best parts of the book, and I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the stage-managed 'welcome' - the Austrian girls all waiting expectantly while Hitler struggles to get past his own tanks, which have got stuck in mud.  There is a passage discussing how Joseph Goebbels altered the film record to make it look triumphant and how we have come to accept this version as truth even when the facts are readily available.  Framing this episode are before and after scenes showing how the great German industrialists agreed to bankroll Hitler, and how after the war they all got away with their use of slave labour.

What makes the book important is, firstly, the emotional impact Vuillard manages to get into passages like those dealing with the experience of slave labour - no more than a couple of paragraphs, yet they take your breath away.  Secondly, and I suspect this is what prompted Vuillard to write the book, the realisation that our world today is not very different.  Populist sociopaths in power around the world, tearing up consensus, human rights, human dignity, to enrich first themselves and then their capitalist backers, themselves too rich to ever be prosecuted.

In some senses The Order of the Day is an unsatisfactory read.  Overall, though, it's an essential one.

McGlue - Ottessa Moshfegh

 

McGlue (2014) is the only novella so far from multi-award-winning US author Moshfegh.  It's a cracker.  I read it in a sitting because I couldn't put it down.  McGlue is a total reprobate, more or less seduced into running away to sea by an acquaintance called Johnson.  The year is 1851; both McGlue and Johnson come from the township of Salem.  McGlue's only interest in life, from an early age, has been rum.  Johnson keeps him well-liquored and relatively safe, because Johnson ultimately wants McGlue to do him a favour.  One morning in Zanzibar McGlue comes more or less to his senses.  He is taken aboard ship, kept confined, and returned to Salem to stand trial for the murder of his friend Johnson.

The book consists of McGlue trying to untangle the tatters of rum-soaked memory.  He is often unable to tell fact from delusion - Johnson, for example, regularly visits him in prison as he awaits trial.  It is wonderfully done.  Moshfegh inhabits every pore of her unappealing yet oddly innocent protagonist.  She's won a lot of prizes and no wonder.

1922 - Stephen King

Originally collected in Full Dark, No Stars (2010), this is now published as a single novella by Hodder and Stoughton in the UK.  It's the first straight horror fiction by King I have read in probably twenty years, but as with Joyland (reviewed last year) I fell immediately back into the sheer visceral pleasure I experienced back in 1977, reading Carrie on the train home from Middlesbrough.

From the beginning of his career King has been a master storyteller, particularly fine in first person narration which, on reflection, I guess most of his shorter works are.  Here, the narrator is Wilf James of Nebraska, a farmer who has lost his farm, lost his family, lost his left hand, and who is now confessing all his sins in a lonely lodging house room.  Only he is not quite alone - and more visitors are making their way down the passage.

The story itself is fairly standard.  It's what King does with it that makes it special.  The stoicism of Wilf is standout.  I also loved the conception of the Conniving Man within us all.  The evocation of period is, it goes without saying, perfect, the characterisation superb.  I loved every second of this book.  A gem. 

The Kreutzer Sonata - Leo Tolstoy

 

The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) is a novella, and thus much less daunting than Tolstoy's vast novels.  To be honest, I only chased down the ebook because I had read in Max Nordau's Degeneracy (1892) that it was a degenerate work, which I thought somewhat unlikely.  Now, having read it, I can see where he was coming from.

On one of those interminable Russian railway journeys, our narrator finds himself buttonholed by a second rate count who insists on telling him why he murdered his wife.  The count is called Pozdnyshev; the wife doesn't merit a name.  He explains that like all young men of his class he used prostitutes and other men's wives before marriage.  Because of that he conflated married love with sex and thus became hugely disappointed as early as the honeymoon.  His wife was beautiful and great in bed.  Other than that they had nothing in common.  Nevertheless they had five children.  He liked the bits where she was pregnant and nursing because at those times there was no sex.  After her fifth pregnancy, however, the expensive doctors told her about contraception, thus forcing them back into one another's company.  Under this regime the countess lost weight and recovered her looks.  She regained her prowess at the piano and gave a soiree with a professional violist.  At this, they played Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata.  The count describes how this tune inspired his conviction that his wife and the musician were lovers, hence---

It is very clever how, to all intents and purposes, Tolstoy creates his own soundtrack for the count's descent into murderous madness.  The murder itself is recounted in elaborate, almost excruciating detail.  It is very unlike our expectations of Tolstoy, himself of course a count who was debauched in youth and then married...  We are left wondering how the Countess Tolstoy felt about this work, especially since I'm sure I read somewhere that she untangled his drafts and prepared decent copies for the publisher.

In essence then, it is a longish disquisition on the thesis that men who use prostitutes shouldn't get married, whereas married men should abstain as far as possible from sex, at least until age reduces the urge and obviates the consequences.  This is argument which got Nordau's dander up and, according to him, made Tolstoy's name in Western Europe.  It certainly kept my interest.

The Model - Robert Aickman

 

The Model is a novella, left by Aickman when he died in 1981 and published in 1988.  It is now a Faber Find and I got the ebook.  Aickman told a friend he thought it was his best work.  I wouldn't go that far but it is different and it is always great to see a dying man branching out into a new field.

What we have is a grim fairy tale, set in Tsarist Russia sometime in the second half of the Nineteenth Century.  Elena is a young girl who lives a very sheltered life in a remote town.  Her mother is an invalid, her father the local lawyer.  A visiting couple leave her a book about ballet which inspires Elena to build a model theatre.  A very strange man then pays a flying visit and gives her toy dancers.

Elena is on the verge of puberty and her parents start pressing her to look to the future.  Her mother wants her to become a nun which, she has been told by God Himself, will keep the mother alive a little longer.  Her father, however, wants Elena to become the 'companion' to the local nobleman's mysterious son and, all being well, to marry him.  But Elena is set on becoming a ballerina and takes herself off to the nearest town with an opera house.  She travels alone through the bleak Russian winter.  Along the way she meets a talking bear and a prince who wants to be a revolutionary.  She makes her debut her first night in town, but is taken in by a strange brown lady with simian servants, only to be rescued by a distant cousin of one of her friends back home - a young woman posing, for reasons vaguely connected to her university studies, as an officer in the hussars,

The Model is, in short, a triumph, very different to Aickman's other work (much of it reviewed elsewhere on this blog).  It is beautifully written, full of colour and imagination, and strongly recommended.

The Vampire of Ropraz - Jacques Chessex

This short novella is a late work by the prize-winning Swiss author who died in 2009. It gives the impression of being the straightforward telling of a true-life crime from 1903 but that is a scrupulously maintained illusion. One trick I especially enjoyed was the involvement of Blaise Cendrars, the pioneer of European modernism. I doubt very much he was actually involved with the titular vampire. On the other hand, he definitely wrote the novel Moravagine, which is the novel Chessex says is about the vampire. Cendrars published Moravagine in 1926 but apparently spent much of the rest of his life adjusting and rewriting it. These are the levels of smoke and mirrors which Chessex has whittled down to 106 pages of text.

Returning the plot, Ropraz is a deprived community in 1903 when the graves of young woman are torn open and their bodies violated. It doesn't take very long to identify the person responsible - a twenty-one year old orphan called Charles-Augustin Favez, caught (red-handed as it were) having sex with animals. He is psychologically appraised and the appraiser uncovers the huge level of deprivation and abuse which has led to Favez's brutalisation. No modern Swiss court can do anything other than commit Favez to the asylum.

That isn't the end of the story but to say more would be to give too much away. I want everyone who reads this post to seek out Chessex. Before this I had never heard of him. He doesn't appear to be translated into English much, and I have to note that the translation of Vampire by W Donald Wilson is not exactly beyond reproach. There are a couple of novels available. Meanwhile, Moravagine was translated back in 1968 and I am determined to track down a copy.

The Last Days of New Paris - China Mieville

The Last Days of New Paris is a novella, and better for it. The other Mieville novel I have read (Kraken, which I reviewed here last year) went on just that bit too long. Here, the ideas are fizzing throughout but the tighter narrative seems to help Mieville maintain the high standard of his prose.


The idea itself is a corker. Surrealist concepts are brought to life in Nazi-occupied Paris. As a result Paris is still occupied - indeed, cordoned off from the rest of the world, with the rest of the world's blessing - in 1950. These manifestations ('manifs') are predominantly on the side of the resistance (specifically the Surrealist resistance, the Main a plume) of which our hero Thibaut is a member. Thibaut wears one manif, the armour of Surrealist women's pyjamas, and joins forces with another, the Exquisite Corpse (featured on the cover) dreamt up by Breton, Lamba and Tanguy. The Nazis created the manifs with the S (for Surrealist) bomb, the creation of which in 1941 is the secondary storyline here, but the manifs naturally hate them for it. The Nazis have therefore done a deal with Hell and signed up hellish demonic monsters. Also involved is Sam, an American woman photographer, who may or may not be with the OSS, forerunner of the CIA. She is collecting photographs for a book called - typically Mieville - The Last Days of New Paris.


I enjoyed this hugely. It is precisely my cup of tea, right down to the account of how Mieville came by the story and the learned notes at the end. Just reading it inspired me. Hopefully it will do the same for you - because you have to read it.

The Secret Sharer - Joseph Conrad

"The Secret Sharer" (1910) is by modern standards a short novella. In its day it was a long short story originally published in Harper's Magazine.


Needless to say, we find ourselves aboard ship in exotic waters, in this case the Gulf of Siam. Our 'hero' is the new captain, two weeks into his first command and struggling to exert his authority over the junior officers. He finds relief by spending the night on deck - until he looks down and sees what seems to be a naked, headless body floating in the water. In fact it's a living man who, once aboard and seen in the ship's night lights, is extremely like the captain himself.


The newcomer, Leggatt, was first mate of a ship becalmed nearby. He too was an outsider, who had to demonstrate his authority. Unfortunately this led to the death of a seaman. Leggatt was locked in his cabin until he could be delivered to civilian authority. Her escaped and swam through the islands until he found the ship he is now aboard.


The captain has a decision to make. Should he return the fugitive? Should he hold him prisoner until the next decent-sized town? Or should he aid and abet? Can he bring himself to condemn someone so like himself in face and situation? That's the moral dilemma and Conrad doesn't shirk the challenge. Of course the captain makes the wrong choice - Conrad's protagonists almost always do, hence the drama - and we are soon heading into shore in the teeth of a furious typhoon that has the blood pounding in our imaginative veins.

You Were Never Really Here - Jonathan Ames

Pushkin Vertigo is a new imprint focusing mainly on classic crime fiction (including Vertigo itself) but also including some contemporary work such as this, from 2013 (Pushkin Vertigo Originals).

Ames is an American journalist, author and screenwriter, creator of the TV series Bored to Death. "You Were Never Really Here" is actually halfway between a short story and a novella. It took me just over an hour to read. I like that - tell your story without padding, leave it at precisely the length it needs to be. Within the eighty-odd pages of this big-print/small-format paperback he has polished his prose to a stiletto edge. For example:

He had come to believe that he was the recurring element - the deciding element - in all the tragedies experienced by the people he encountered. So if he could minimize his impact and his responsibility, then there was the chance, the slight chance, that there would be no more suffering for others. It was a negative grandiose delusion - narcissism inverted into self-hatred, a kind of autoimmune disorder of his psyche...

Joe, the hero, is off the books - off every imaginable book - ex-FBI, ex-Marine, ex-human being save for his role as carer for his octogenarian mother. He earns his crust by fighting a very specialized niche crime, rescuing young girls kidnapped for sexual purposes. He operates through a whole series of cut-outs. His handler contacts a bodega owner who puts a misspelled notice in his window to notify Joe that he needs to call in.



This case is a big case. The daughter of a state senator has been abducted. The senator has received a text telling him where she is. All Joe has to do is get into the brothel and rescue her. Which he does, with considerable malice aforethought. The brothel, however, is run by powerful people. There are consequences for Joe. His cut-offs are cut out - with extreme animus. Joe uncovers the secret. And resolves to seek revenge.


We don't see the revenge. That is another story. Maybe Ames will tell it, maybe he won't. But we have been given all the pointers we need to imagine what Joe's revenge will be, and that is better than reading about it. That freedom to imagine the very worst is the genius of this little book, why the short format is perfect for the author's purpose. It's the best of its kind that I have read since Point Blank.

Death in Venice - Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann is one of those literary greats I have often wondered about but never actually read, I bought this novella when it came out, as a film tie-in, in 1971. It has waited, unread, on my shelves ever since. I've never even bothered to see to the Visconti movie, or the Britten opera.

Well, now I've read it. It dates from 1912, more or less the middle of Mann's life. He was too young to be the hero Gustave von Aschenbach, and all bar one of his major works were yet to be written, Buddenbrooks (1902) being the single exception. Nevertheless, in terms of sexuality, Aschenbach is an extreme version of the author. Mann's bisexuality only became known when his diaries were published long after his death. He married and had several children. Aschenbach is alone, having sacrificed all semblance of a private life for his highbrow literary art.

One evening in Munich, he is overwhelmed by the need to break his rigid routine and take a holiday. He begins in Trieste, which doesn't suit, and ends up in Venice. Staying in the same hotel is a Polish family - a mother, presumably widowed, several straitlaced daughters and young Tadzio, a pubescent boy of extraordinary beauty. Aschenbach is entranced. He observes the boy from a distance, interest becomes an obsession, obsession becomes infatuation.

And at that moment of self-recognition, cholera breaks out in Venice. Aschenbach knows he should leave but cannot tear himself away from the daily sight of Tadzio in his sailor suit. He wonders if Tadzio is a sickly child who will not live to be an adult. He allows the hotel barber to dye his hair and pluck his eyebrows and rouge his cheeks to try and mask the vast difference in age - but Aschenbach, of course, is the one who is sick, who cannot accept that the boy's beauty will one day coarsen and fade.

Reading the novella today, you have to wonder to what extent this is paedophilia. In 1971 we would never would have. Hard as it is to believe today, in the age of free love we never countenanced such transgression. How then did Mann view his protagonist in 1912? He is well aware of the corruption, of course. That is why he chooses Venice, all facade for the tourists, literally plastering over the corruption and decay that hides behind. That is the meaning of the cholera outbreak, which the hoteliers, of course, pretend isn't happening - only a British man working in a German bank tells Aschenbach the truth.

Is it also, I wonder, the reason for the overly-elaborate writing, the various passages of high-minded pontification on the subject of Eros and love. Is he really saying to us that in the ends it's all about sex, and that literature that considers itself above or better than humanity is pointless?

Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad

Before this, the only Conrad I'd read was The Secret Agent, interesting enough but not dazzling. I knew Heart of Darkness's reputation but, despite being the basis for Apocalypse Now, I had not been attracted. Big mistake, it turns out.

First off, it's a novella, only three chapters long, which enables Conrad to create and sustain an oppressively dark atmosphere.  Even though the key action all takes place on the River Congo, everything is dark, primeval, threatening.  Marlow becomes obsessed by Kurtz because everyone he comes across speaks of him like a god.  Long before they find Kurtz's station they hear he is ill, that he may even have died.  Then they find him, defeated and dying, kept going only by his fascination with this antediluvian wilderness.

It's amazing to think that English wasn't even Conrad's second language.  Even when he first decided to become a novelist he wanted to be a French one.  Certainly the shorter French form has paid off brilliantly in Heart of Darkness - so much of the descriptive prose teeters on the edge of Symbolism, the key movement in French literature of the Belle Epoch.  French dialogue is differently punctuated and might have been easier for Conrad than the English, given we have Marlow telling his cronies in the Port of London his first-person account of the quest for Kurtz, including the tales told by the ex-pats he encounters along the way and, of course, Kurtz himself.  Everything is allusive in this tightly contained world.  Nothing is certain.  Kurtz is a character like no other I can think of - seedy, broken, twisted, perhaps even deranged, but still charismatic, above and beyond pity or compassion, utterly compulsive. Harking back to Apocalypse Now, no wonder they had to fly in Marlon Brando to play him.

God, it's a staggering achievement. Conrad, of course, writes from the heart. He had been to the Congo as a young sailor.  It affected him so profoundly that he tried to shoot himself through the heart.  It is why he gave up the sea and took to writing.  From such suffering comes art of the highest order.

The Lemur - Benjamin Black

Now, I have always approved of Banville's secondary career as Benjamin Black.  I have reviewed most if not all of his oeuvre on this blog.  OK, I didn't like Christine Falls as much the other Quirke novels, but I loved the faux Chandler of The Black-Eyed Blonde.  It is scarcely a secret that I am drawn to novellas, largely because they are all I can write myself in my current condition, so when I saw this slim volume by Black sitting on the shelf I had to have it,

Woe is us, for we are undone.  This - and I have to be blunt because Banville-Black is a major writer with a reputation of which he is prickly proud - is execrable scrapings from the barrel base.  What is the bloody point?  It's short but it is not a novella because a novella is as long as it needs to be whereas this is as long as Black can stretch the tissue-thin plot.  The characters are all horrible without a single redeeming virtue, and that's only the main characters, the other participants have no character.  The character who might just have sparked some empathy, the titular Lemur, is the victim in the so-called mystery.  The obvious solution is someone we have never encountered and therefore don't give two hoots about.

It's set in some ghastly super-rich New York milieu in which multimilliionaire Big Bill Mulholland is ex-CIA (yawn) but still wants his forty-something son-in-law, the Irish super-journalist John Glass (don't give me that, Banville, I've read Irish newspapers) to write his biography, which - surprise, surprise - quickly uncovers uncomfortable truths.  Glass is too lazy to do any writing, his wife is a sexless rich bitch, his mistress is a Boho artist who splashes paint about to no effect, and stepson David is Tony Curtis sending up Cary Grant in Some Like It Hot without being in any way amusing.

It's awful.  It's like the American  TV super-soaps of the 1980s and just about as insightful.  It will be a while before I go near a Banville-Black again.