Reading Round-up

Like most purveyors of used books I can safely say 2011 has not been one of the best. In order to generate enough sales I have to upload new stock like crazy as most sales come from the last couple of hundred books one catalogues. Doing this is keeping things ticking over for my business but it does mean that I have been rubbish at blogging this year. I also have not had so much time for reading or for commenting on your blogs for which I am sorry. Anyway, here is a little look at what I have been reading recently.

The Ascent of Isaac Steward by Mike French is the most peculiar, luxuriously grotesque and enchanting of books. Isaac Steward has lost his wife and sons, he can't remember how or why and if he does what will the knowledge do to him and how will he ever find a way out of the inevitable abyss? What this densely compact novel does is take us through the psychology of grief and denial in the most weird and inventive ways. Nothing is quite as it seems and the parameters of the story serve to disorientate the reader. Wth a situation so extreme only an extreme handling of language will do. Words are very much Mike French's tools and what he constructs is not quite like anything else I've ever read.

To be honest the dense richness of this Michelin starred linguistic meal is such that I struggled to deal with it over the first chapters. Once I stopped trying to consume it greedily and treated it as a tasting menu, small courses, one at a time, then I enjoyed it immensely. There is no denying that this book is hard, and hard in a way that so few books, even those of great literary merit, are now. But why should we always expect that easy-greedy read? I am pleased that a book so evidently defying all marketing genres found a publisher. I read a chapter a day and it was like being a student again. The pleasure in deciphering a chapter each morning was the same I once got from tackling a difficult poem. Neither this style of prose, nor poetry, are my reading mediums of first choice but I thank Mike French for reminding me why hard is good, and I should try it more often. The Ascent of Isaac Steward is a real neo-modernist triumph and in a nihilistic world is definitely worth your time and patience. There is a quote on the back of my copy by R. N. Morris that describes it as 'reminiscent of the surrealist literary experiments of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake but blessedly readable' and I would agree with that. This work is a literary mountain but it is a perfectly climbable one, and boy, what a view.

Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky by Patrick Hamilton has been on my bedside heap for ages and I've had twitter conversations with several people about it. It has taken me absolutely ages to read, because of my time constraints, but has been a total pleasure from start to finish. Hamilton is best known for his plays Gaslight and Rope, the second of which may or may not have been murdered by Hitchcock for the film, depending on your point of view. In Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky you get three novels for the price of one as it was originally published as three separate works: 'The Midnight Bell', 'The Siege of Pleasure' and 'The Plains of Cement'. The overlapping narratives deal with the lives of pub waiter Bob, prostitute Jenny, and plain but good-hearted bar maid Ella. Bob is an aspiring writer with the goodly sum of £80 saved in the bank, he falls for Jenny and the narrative leads us on a will-they/won't-they pathos laden jaunt through those twenty thousand streets, and ordinary workaday London. Hamilton's ability to build a scene and people it with characters that could step off the page is very filmic in quality, and explains his best known successes. On the page not every manoeuvre is totally successful but Bob, Ella and Jenny are beautifully drawn and many of the pub scenes are hilarious. It would make a wonderful screen play and there is a BBC adaptation. I have dropped heavy hints to Santa on that one. All in all it's made me want to read Hamilton's complete works. What a joy if they're anything like this.

My last little treasure for this post is set quite close in time and place to Hamilton's work: Crewe Train by Rose Macaulay. I read and loved The Towers of Trebizond by Macaulay when I had it in stock and kept meaning to extricate it from the business for myself but never got round to it and last week I sold it! The horror! I shall have to buy it now, alongside the delightful Crewe Train. The world it depicts couldn't be more different to that of Twenty Thousand Streets. The heroine Denham is very much in the noble savage mode. Having had a free range childhood under the care of an indolent and careless father in the middle of nowhere (specifically Andorra) she finds herself living in her aunt's home in the heart of literary London. The story of her attempts to adjust and deal with the word-driven people around her is a timely one for those of us who live in a fiction-fuelled frenzy. Denholm shows just how we irritate the unconverted. I love Macaulay's writing and the sense that she keeps the reader at the end of a yoyo string, pulling us in and allowing us to see just as much of her creation as she chooses before she drops us below the line of vision again. One always gets the feeling that her books are like icebergs with so much more we can't see: omitted and deleted scenes that she won't be making available for the DVD. A bizarre and delightful book, the sort to read and re-read.

Comments

[Carola Huttmann]

Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky sounds like a great read. Thanks for the recommendation, Catherine. I'm making myself a note to seek out a copy when I've cleared my current TBR pile.

All good wishes to you and your family for a Happy Christmas and New Year. Here's hoping that 2012 will see your business prosper.

[Harriet]

Nice to have you back! These are three great-sounding books, none of which I have read though now I long to read them all. But I have read what I think is Hamilton's masterpiece, The Slaves of Solitude, so do give that one a go. And best wishes to you for a happy christmas and a successful 2012!

[Kit Courteney]

I like the sound of each of these but I really want to read the Rose Macaulay one. I was going to buy it for a friend but changed my mind. I shall buy it for myself instead!

Merry Christmas, Catherine. I hope you and your family have a delightful festive period :)

[Juxtabook]

Thank you Carola, Harriet and Kit! And Merry Christmas to you all.

The Slaves of Solitude is on my wish list since I Simon (Stuck in a Book) mentioned it but thank you very much for the endorsement Harriet.