Shucks, nearly a month has gone past since my last entry. Whoopsy! I think I can be forgiven though - essays call, plus I moved out of my SE1 loveshack, and at one point I was juggling three jobs. I've been busy. I also have a few draft entries which, if I am a very good girl, should go up over the next few days. Nonetheless, I have found some reading time at least. In no particular order:
1. Graham Swift's Shuttlecock. A good friend gave me a copy of Waterland last summer, with only 'Simply Brilliant' written on the inside cover. Possibly the most concise review ever. It really is wonderful. Since then, I've read Out of this World too, which I thought was excellent too - lots of the same issues (war, personal pain, intergenerational conflict) cropping up in both. Unfortunately, despite the 'Excellent. Profound. Odd.' review from the LRB on the front cover, I wasn't so enamoured with Shuttlecock. I must point out here that I'm working within a frame of reference. Swift is, of course, excellent. When I say I was disappointed, I mean it was 'less excellent' than the previous two I've read. The same general terrain is covered, always in that hyper self-conscious way of his, and I finished the whole book (to be fair, it comes in at just over 200 pages; not a huge amount for me these days) in a day and a half (another qualifier: Sunday train services are perhaps a blessing after all). I’d recommend it to a friend, but only after gushing at length about Waterland. I’ve got Last Orders waiting for me on the shelf at home; having lived nearby, I’m hoping that might have some personal resonance for me. I think that – the personal element – is what was missing from this one. Sure, he is, critically speaking, a fine novelist. But there was nothing - and no one - in this one that took me and shook me like in some of his other works (I’m thinking of Harry from Out of this World, mainly). Read it, but I’ll understand if you prioritise something else over this. (I realise that I haven’t included much – anything – about what actually happens in the novel. I know. I find reviews that bang on about plot rather tedious. Can’t you just be told it’s good, and be done with it?) (Something else of note: the amazon I've just linked you to has a picture of a shuttlecock on the front:
This is significant, given that the book within the book is called 'Shuttlecock' too, and has a picture of a man parachuting - with the intention for it to look like a shuttlecock too. Geddit? Alas my copy is old and a bit naff, so just has some weird blue print pattern.)
2. Jonathon Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. Argh – publishing houses – why do you insist on sensationalist quotations on the front of books? Is it so that suckers like me buy them......too cruel. This excellent book has a snippet from HFW (love love love) on the front (in fact, you could read my little summary about the book from a couple of months ago – yes, it really has taken me this long). I’ve finally finished it. Yes, it made me think about meat production and I think that having read this is the final thing that has made me want to turn vegetarian (note: not that I have already. Gross as many parts of this book are, I ate meat throughout reading it. Does that say more about me or the book?). Unfortunately, most of what JSF has to say is about the American meat industry, but I’m sure some of his points might be salient in a discussion about the meat industry here (to come back – again, I know – to the issue of the cover. How popular are HFW and Joanna Lumley in America? I imagine there must have been different covers for different sides of the Atlantic.). I don’t think, though, that he spends enough time anticipating and covering counter arguments: at once point, for example, he bemoans that most chicken is covered in salmonella. But is this a problem if you cook your chicken? I don’t think so; he didn’t cover the topic. Though a huge amount of research clearly went into this, his best writing is at the very start, when he lovingly recalls his grandmother, and when he brings the issue back to his son, and concerns for his diet. Overall, this was a disappointing book: not enough depth of argument, and I’m left unconvinced.
3. Sons and Lovers. (I haven't bothered to link this one, because I'm sure you're all capable of going to Oxfam. Better yet, a proper bookseller!) Yes, this was excellent. I was told to read this as I’m currently writing an essay on maternality/sexuality in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (no, I know there are no *real* mothers, but Connie sort of is one, and there’s a ‘mothering as erotic activity’ thing going on, which is what I’m discussing in the essay I’m currently writing) and was told it was the work through which to consider motherhood in Lawrence. It’s excellent. I don’t really understand the feminist issues with DHL. His best writing in this novel, as in Lady Chatterley's Lover, tend to be when he’s discussing something other than sex. Please can we not cloud our judgement of his entire oeuvre just because he got into a bit of trouble in 1928? Thanks. Great. You must read this. I even managed to look over the fact that it’s partly autobiographical; this works as a novel in its own right.
4. I started C by Tom McCarthy yesterday. Thus far it is creepy and eerie and different to anything I have ever read before, and for these reasons I shall keep on going with it, even though it is rather a struggle (a busy train perhaps wasn’t the best place to start it).
Erm, ho hum. What else? Well, I saw Frankenstein at the National a couple of weeks ago, and would love to re-read that; as usual I just haven’t got round to it. For my courses, which have now finished, I read a bunch of obscure things – though to make up for it, we had a class in which we watched Mildred Pierce:
. What a wonderful woman, and a marvellous film!
5. I’ve just remembered – Vile Bodies. Really wonderful, even if the superficiality of the tone starts to get a bit grating after a while. But what a pleasure it is to read a genuinely funny book once in a while. (Nina on sex: ‘For physical pleasure I’d sooner got to my dentist’.) A friend gave a great presentation on infantile sexuality in the novel, which is an interesting way to read it, but even if you read it for the candelabras and costumes and canapés alone, you’ll have picked a good one.
