GatesyRead

I have had ' Disgrace' on my shelf for a while now, and at last, I felt ready to engage with it. Coetzee is a much-revered writer, so the fault is all mine – the only other Coetzee novel I have read is the experimental ' Diary of a Bad Year' (2007). ' Bad Year'  involves a 72-year-old South African writer who falls for a younger woman. ' Disgrace' begins with a similar premise – 52-year-old Professor David Lurie moves from a falling for a woman whose love he pays for (Soraya) to an even less appropriate target for his affections: a student in his Romantic literature class. Melanie is at first rather passive in the affair, but a menacing boyfriend and a protective, prayerful father put an end to things and Professor Lurie is in trouble with the university authorities. Were he willing to make a public apology, the matter might be put behind him; but he is not and his days of teaching are over. At this point the novel moves from the diary of a bad man to

Under the Jaguar Sun was published posthumously in 1986 in Italian and 1988 in English, with Calvino passing in 1985, aged 62. Ether Calvino’s note relays that Calvino began the book in 1972, with only three of the stories finished (published here). A few days before he fell ill, Calvino had written about the idea of the framing device (here the five senses) – ‘We consider poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a kind of glint of that unlimited vastness’ (p.86). How I would like to hear more! The title story ‘Under the Jaguar Sun’ is set in Oaxaca, Mexico (a city I once visited and loved). The narrator and his wife Olivia are visiting Mexico and while their love life is muted, their sense of taste is a sensual delight. The narrator speaks of his desire for oneness: ‘Our subjective, individual selves … find their amplification and completion only in the unity of the couple’. Yet in t

 I was reading Martin Amis’s latest book Inside Story (see April’s post) when I realised the degree of interest Amis has for the darkest days of the Nazi regime. The dedication to Zone of Interest includes Primo Levi, Paul Celan, his mother-in-law, daughters and his wife – mentioned after the phrase ‘to the countless significant Jews and quarter-Jews and half-Jews in my past and present’. This close affiliation must be what gave Amis the confidence, and permission, to write about the Holocaust, and to do so from a number of perspectives.  While it is seemingly obvious in the subheadings, I read some pages of the first chapter before I realised that the novel was changing viewpoints. The main protagonist is ‘Golo’ Thomsen, an intellectual and privileged SS Officer, a skirt-chaser and ultimately a Romantic who turns against the regime. He survives the war largely due to an uncle who is an out-an-out supporter of Hitler and high up in the ranks. Thomsen nevertheless informs on a colleagu

  The novel is like a two-act play, opening in the year 2000, on ‘a day in April’. It anticipates the Global Financial Crisis more than responding directly to 9/11 (the novel was published in 2003) in that the critique is of western capitalism, rather than American foreign policy. This said, the simplified world-view of Eric Packer is part of the wider geopolitical and economic problem. In Part One, we meet Packer – a man of twenty-eight who appears to be at the height of his powers as an uber-rich investor with a forty-eight room apartment and an heiress wife he hardly seems to know. Packer’s power is pharaoh-like – outside of his house, he is enthroned in a stretch limousine, where employees and doctors are summoned. Packer asks childlike questions that could be profound were he interested in the answers; rather he is a man of rat-like intelligence that so far has allowed him to crush and win. Now doubt, for some reason, has entered his world and in the course of a day, he unravels

  Ian McEwan’s micro novel On Chesil Beach deserves at least a micro review. It is July 1962, and Edward and Florence are on their honeymoon. More precisely, it is their wedding night, and the clock is ticking. Edward has been holding out for this moment throughout the year of their engagement. With typical irony, McEwan writes that ‘Edward’s single most important contribution to the wedding arrangement was to refrain, for over a week’. During this time, he has been ‘chaste with himself,’ since he wishes to be ‘in top form for his bride’ (p.20). That is one side of the matter. Whether it is the expected restraint of the times, ignorance, fear or asexuality, Florence is rather the opposite, dreading Edward’s touch as a wifely duty she would rather not perform at all. There are five chapters in this short novel, and it isn’t until the end of Chapter Three that the near consummation sees Florence fleeing the room and sprinting out into the darkness, down to Chesil Beach where she hides u

The title ‘Sorry for Your Troubles’ suggests something Irish, and indeed it seems as though Richard Ford wishes the reader to follow him over the seas and back (though I, for one, feel he is strongest when the work is grounded among ordinary men and women of the United States). While I'd rather avoid sounding like a critic who likes the old stuff, the rough-and-ready nature of various strugglers in Rock Springs is hard to beat. Here there are lawyers and successful retirees (though, of course, troubles don’t stop with a solid safety-net, and lonely hearts are everywhere).  The first of the stories takes place in New Orleans. A middle-aged, married man Sandy McGuiness is out with business associates when he spies a slender woman in a brown dress, who returns his gaze with something like recognition. Ford switches to the past – thirty-five years earlier, when Sandy and Barbara (the slender woman in a brown dress) traveled together to Iceland. They’d bunked down in a rustic fishing h

  Seize the Day is Bellow is a bite-sized chunk; not much more than a novella; a story set in a single day you could read in a single sitting. When I first read it, many years ago, 42-year-old unemployed salesman Tommy Wilhelm must have seemed like an ancient mariner. Now I see him as man who should be in his prime, tragically moored by circumstances largely of his own making. His father is a doctor and a success, but also a man lacking any compassion for his two children (and one imagines, formerly for his deceased wife). Maybe Wilhelm thought hard work was for suckers, because he fell for flattery, dropped out of college and moved to Hollywood, thinking show business could be his career. His handsomeness was one thing; an unusual speech impediment is another. At some point he falls into line, marries and becomes a salesman, until he feels an injustice has been done to him by the company and takes his bat and ball home. An obvious comparisons is to Miller's Death of a Salesman ,

For a time I couldn't decide whether Martin Amis's  Inside Story was a chore to read, or a pleasure (it was both) -- but I persevered. Ultimately I would say it was a pleasure. Or perhaps, in keeping with the style of the novel, I should say something like this: “Geoff Gates, a reader who prided himself on some discernment, had decided that Inside Story was a novel worth bothering with. ”  The Wrap: You can read the way that the novel is equivocally praised in The Guardian by Tim Adams here:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/13/inside-story-by-martin-amis-review-too-clever-by-half.  Or roasted indulgently in the New York Times by Parul Sehgal here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/books/review-martin-amis-inside-story.html Here's some of my own thoughts on the book.  Observation One: ‘The Preludial’ (adjective for ‘Prelude?’) has the cute direct address of playful postmodernism (‘Welcome! Do step on in – this is a pleasure and a privilege’ [opening line]; ‘Now

I’m not Scared was a great success for Niccolò Ammaniti, published in 2001 when the author was aged thirty-five. The story is narrated by Michele Amitrano, a curious child living in a dull, hot hamlet where nothing much happens. Exactly where and when Michele is when he recalls the events of that summer is unclear, but some time has passed (‘The wheat was high that year …’[p.1]; ‘ That morning we went off on our bikes’ [p.5]). The narrative opens with the children riding out beyond the boundaries set by their parents. As a storm approaches, they find an abandoned farmhouse, and Michele is dared to enter (an act of selflessness to save the dignity of a girl in the gang). As Michele finds a hidden underground recess, he thinks he has found a corpse. He doesn’t tell the others and returns home with the first terrible secret. Ammaniti’s portrait of boyhood is from a bygone era, when fathers wielded an authority stemming from an accepted level of violence. Beyond the household, worldly i

\ If you are old enough you will remember the 1985 film -- a huge success, with eight Academy Awards nominations, and so on, and Helen Bonham Carter in her breakthrough role. I'd like to see it again, especially now that I've finally got around to reading the book. There may be little point in writing about a novel published in 1908 with all the critical studies over the decades. However, reading the novel at the start of 2022 has left me with a few thoughts to share.  The first is the simple pleasure of reading this novel after some time among the serious (necessarily so) books of contemporary literary writers. I refer in particular to my last two entries: Don Delillo’s Zero K (2016) and Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020). E. M. Forster's  A Room with a View operates very much like a two act romantic drama, with Act 1 set in Florence, and Act 2 set in Surrey (the setting is a house known as ‘Windy Corner’). A limited set of characters is introduced

Serious writers have a way of getting under your skin, and like Don Delillo’s Zero K,   this novel takes a hard look at the way things are and doesn’t let the reader off the hook for a moment. If the satirical fable of Zero K centres on sleep as the answer to the woes of the world, Flanagan makes disappearance – of species, of body, of meaning – the heart of his message.   The Living Sea of Waking Dreams has a simple plot, one immediately relatable: three adult siblings gather around their dying mother and struggle to let her go. The protagonist, Anna, should hold the sensible middle ground once treatments to prolong Francie’s life become inhumane, but she is under the spell of the Terzo, a wealth manager who believes that money and influence can buy life. Anna’s other brother, Tommy, is a sympathetically drawn character -- a struggling artist, stuttering and sentimental. A dead fourth sibling casts a dark shadow: Ronnie, a teenage suicide, likely the result of his interactions wit

Some of my students bought me this book, knowing that I am a fan of Don Delillo, having heard me talk about End Zone and White Noise (see earlier reviews). Like these earlier novels, Zero K is set in end-times for the human race (while the race continues on as ever). Not nuclear catastrophe, however, but an overreliance on technology, growing autocracy, and climate change as background. The immediate story is how to escape via a fairly extreme version of the underground bunker. By choosing the time of their suspension via cryogenics, the ultra-rich hope to weather the storm of the coming apocalypse and wake to a better world. This all seems  like madness to the storyteller, Jeffrey, whose step-mother Artis and billionaire father Ross Lockhart seek to take this bizarre leap of faith (involving, as it does, the preservation of the body and brain as separate commodities). The first line of the novel sets the theme in motion: “Everybody wants to own the end of the world” (p.3).