Cornflower Books

Cornflower Book Group 2010: Volume 4

   

    If variety is the spice of the reading life, I hope you're finding the book group choices sufficiently piquant and zesty! So far this year alone we've gone from a fourteenth century English college to a road trip around the United States in the early '60s, and next week (March 20th.) we'll be in a small town in 1970s India.

    For our April read I've chosen a novel described as "part cookbook, part thriller, part eccentric philosophical treatise", The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester. This highly acclaimed 1996 book won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Hawthornden Prize and the Julia Child Award for literary food writing, and I could quote review after glowing review, but here's a taste of them: "dazzling and delicious", "gorgeously seductive", "deliriously entertaining". [I'm excited already - I hope you are, too!]

     Here's the blurb: "Tarquin Winot, voluptuary and supercivilized ironist (and snob), sets out on a journey of the senses from the Hotel Splendide, Portsmouth, to his cottage in Provence, his spiritual home. With his head newly shaved and his well-thumbed copy of the Mossad Manual of Surveillance Techniques safely stowed, Tarquin elegantly introduces his life, itself a work of art, through the medium of seasonal menus".

    I hope you can get hold of a copy of this book no matter where you are; I've checked various libraries, and all have it, booksellers should be able to supply it, US Amazon stocks it, as does the UK site, and The Book Depository offers it with free worldwide delivery. Let's read it in time to begin our discussion on Saturday, 24th. April, and if you haven't read along with the group before but would like to do so now, you'd be most welcome.

A bit of a boost

    I've been on BBC Radio Scotland's Book Café again today, this time talking with my fellow guests about books to give you a bit of a boost. The three of us had a very varied and interesting collection of titles at the ready (not all of which there was time to discuss), but although I managed to throw in a snatch of Stella Gibbons' classic Cold Comfort Farm, my main recommendation was Paul Gallico's delightful Flowers for Mrs. Harris (which, happily, is to be reprinted - under its other title - quite soon).

   If you can recommend any books guaranteed to lift the spirits, please tell us!

Later: I haven't responded to all the comments below, but there are many great suggestions there and other books which I don't know but have noted.

Cornflower Book Group 2010: Volume 3

    

     In line with our aim of reading slightly off the beaten track and having books from a variety of periods, genres and countries, the Cornflower Book Group book for March will take us to India and the fictitious town of Malgudi. This is the creation of R.K. Narayan, one of India's greatest English language novelists and a major influence on the work of our own Alexander McCall Smith (as you'll see here).

    The more I read about Narayan, the more I want to read him, and there are quite a number of novels and short story collections to choose from, but I've picked his 1976 book The Painter of Signs, "a comic, bittersweet story of love getting in the way of progress" about Raman, the eponymous sign-painter, and the high-minded, "thrillingly independent" Daisy.

    I'll quote the reviewers to whet your appetite: "one of the most charming masters of twentieth century fiction", "manages simultaneously to be funny and desperate, topical and timeless, sardonic and fresh and as seemingly natural and uncomplicated as milking a goat ... the rope trick of irony, fun and feeling is beautifully adroit", "subtle, vivid ... extremely funny". Tempted? I hope so!

    A week on Saturday (the 20th. of February) we'll be talking about John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, so let's put The Painter of Signs in the diary for four weeks after that, Saturday, 20th. March. The book should be easily available through libraries, shops and online (both Amazon US and UK have it), and if you can't get it locally The Book Depository can send it to you wherever you are with free worldwide delivery.

Dr. Hullah's casebook

    

     Reading Robertson Davies' The Cunning Man is like listening to the scintillating conversation of an eloquent, intelligent raconteur; it's stimulating, engrossing, wide-ranging and it never flags.

    As with Davies' Fifth Business, which I so enjoyed last year and whose hero, Dunstan Ramsay, makes a cameo appearance here, it's a first person narrative and in effect a life story. This time the narrator is Dr. Jonathan Hullah, a Toronto diagnostician of some renown but one whose methods raise an eyebrow or two among more conventional practitioners. Dr. Hullah understands that "... the close stitching of mind to body meant that each communicated its fortunes to the other", and while he has an unimpeachable grasp of medical science, that is coupled with a highly developed instinct and intuition for what really ails his patients and why. He's a very sympathetic character, cerebral, self-contained, companionable but independent of spirit, and around him are collected all manner of types who enrich the book and augment the plot, but whose roles as periferals are to reflect light back onto Hullah himself.

    He's the fascinating one, the cunning man of the title, and as the book allows him discourses on subjects from Freud to high Anglicanism, the illnesses and afflictions of characters in literature, philosophy, art and music, it is rich apparel in which he is clothed. That apart, the essence of the man - what he believes and his holistic approach to his calling - is described and recounted with great skill and was of especial interest to me.

   We often talk about books' opening lines (and this book has a good one), but its closing passage - which must be just as hard to do well - is perfect. No use my quoting it here as it would make no sense, so you must just go and read the book for yourself; it's not to be missed!  

Good lines: mothers

     

    "There is a whole large class of society - called children - to whom mothers are not women, but inescapable appendages, sometimes dear, sometimes not, and never full human beings but supporting players in their own intense drama."

From The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies.

Gelid

    

    "Unn looked down into an enchanted world of small pinnacles, gables, frosted domes, soft curves and confused tracery. All of it was ice, and the water spurted between, building it up continually. Branches of the waterfall had been diverted and rushed into new channels, creating new forms. Everything shone. The sun had not yet come, but it shone ice-blue and green of itself, and deathly cold."

     Cold and clear runs this story, too, every short chapter spare, rimed and held by a frozen intensity. Tarjei Vesaas' The Ice Palace is about two young girls, Unn and Siss, and what happens when, embarrassed by a misunderstanding, Unn decides not to face her friend at school next day but instead to go alone to the ice palace. The palace is the extraordinary natural structure caused by the freezing of a waterfall after a long spell of intensely cold weather. No-one remembers seeing this phenomenon before, and it will not remain for long, but Unn is drawn to venture inside its chambers and to explore its glassy depths, and what happens then will have far-reaching consequences.

    Inward-looking and set starkly in a landscape virtually featureless but for the ice-bound lake and the glacial force, the book is subtle and sombre, memorable for its simplicity and its strangely unsettling atmosphere; in one sense of the word, utterly chilling.  

Hooked

 

Mr C writes:

     Among my very welcome pile of Christmas books was John le Carré's The Spy who came in from the cold. I'd never actually read any of his books before, but for anyone who saw twenty years ago the excellent BBC dramatisation the author's name prompts a wide range of Pavlovian associations: sound (Geoffrey Burgon's Nunc Dimittis), images (Oxford spires) and, above all, atmospheres (seedy evasions and moral equivocations). Le Carré wrote the book while serving, unhappily, in one of the more shadowy parts of the Foreign Office, in the immediate aftermath of the building of the Berlin Wall, and in a neat bookending the edition I have has a new introduction which he wrote in late 1989, just as that monstrous edifice and the system it defended had collapsed.

     I surrender gladly to the seductive appeal of the series, the prospect of being wrapped up in a sustained and plausible narrative world. From Barchester and the Pallisers via Sherlock Holmes to Anthony Powell and Jack Aubrey, once I'm hooked there is no escape. One down, seven to go....

Cornflower Blues 2009 - part 2 (book group books)

    The second category in my books of the year list is for best book group books. If you've taken part in the Cornflower Book Group at all - and look, we're famous now! - please join in here and let us know which titles made the biggest impression on you. I'm giving my top four, though others are close contenders, but these books stood out in my fiction reading overall this year, not just in what the group has read.

   J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country was a beautiful, finely-balanced study of a brief period in a man's life, both for what it was and for what it might have led to. (Our thoughts on it are here).

  Robertson Davies was another author I'd never read before he came up on the list of suggestions for the group, but his Fifth Business was a most interesting, thought-provoking read, with a narrative of "page-turning force".

Elizabeth Jenkins' The Tortoise and the Hare, a study of an uneasy marriage undermined by an unlikely affair, certainly got us all talking! 

Wallace Stegner was another great find for those of us who read his Crossing to Safety; much to admire and much to ponder.

Country life

   

   If I'd had any doubts about how well Bruce Chatwin's On the Black Hill would measure up to being revisited years after it made a big first impression on me, I can say they'd have been unfounded: the book is as good now as it was then.

    The story of twin brothers on a Welsh border hill farm, their lives spanning most of the twentieth century, it tells of a particular, narrow existence, but one which draws together all the strands which make any life complicated rather than simple. From the extended family - grandmother Hannah for whom hard times had "...left her mouth as sharp and twisted as a holly leaf", father Amos whose harsh treatment of his sons was an attack on their mother's middle class origins and better education, and then later generations, grabbing, disrespectful of their heritage - to their neighbours of all social strata, and then to the events of the outside world and their impact on the few square miles of the hill.

    The twins have almost never left home, they still sleep in the same bed, even, and their outlook is at once binocular and monocular, their small differences of temperament making tense and taut the ties which bind them mostly so comfortably. You could read it as a study of repression, enclosure, a contracted life, but I'm not sure that that says enough. Lewis and Benjamin are happy with what they know, wary of change, slow to keep up with the outside when they see no point to what 'keeping up' involves; that is just the way they are. It's a pastoral story (the brothers' connection to the land and what it means is a source of strength), though it's by no means an idyll, but nor is it fanciful or sentimental, and there's a lot of humour to temper the sorrows.

    I find it a very rich book, every detail lovingly given, not a dull line or a careless one. It's moving and refreshing, and a beautifully crafted account of a specific place and time, and a way of life which has almost vanished.

ETA: Anyone who hasn't already come across Bruce Chatwin, or who wants to know more about him and his work might like to visit this website.

Cornflower Book Group - Crossing to Safety

    

    "He used congenial forms of literature to explore the world, and his sensitivity to the details of the world informed and illuminated the literature he produced. His voice is sane, and in some sense quiet, but his vision is none the less profound for that."

     That passage is from Jane Smiley's introduction to Wallace Stegner's 1987 novel Crossing to Safety, and it is Stegner's clear, well-modulated voice which drives the narrative throughout this beautiful and moving novel about the lives of four friends.

     The writing is straightforward, elegant and urbane, and in creating a character study and a portrait of lives lived, choices made and hopes overtaken by events, it's perfectly pitched, intelligent, fluent and highly readable.

     The Langs and the Morgans meet during the Depression when Sid and Larry are both members of the English department at the University of Wisconsin and Charity and Sally are expecting babies. The Langs - slightly senior, a little older, much richer and better connected - take the Morgans under their wing, and despite the calamities which befall Larry and Sally as a result of their friends' influence, the four establish a bond which endures for decades.

     The book looks at ambition, both thwarted and realised, at dependence, expectation, willful influence, at marriage and ageing, and at how pairings and groupings of people can function like a finely-tuned machine, or sometimes stall, get out of kilter and over-compensate. It's a wise book and a fine one, and as you can see I loved it. How about you?   

Re-reading

    We're talking about recycling of a kind over on Cornflower today, so why not re-reading - surely a form of recycling - here.

    It so happens that I am currently reading my hundredth book of the year. Never before have I reached that plumply round figure, though I know some of you get to that milepost months before mid-November! But which book would be my hundredth? Something completely new (but that could be hit or miss), an old favourite, guaranteed to delight, or a book I haven't read for years but which I remember finding very fine indeed. It's the last of these I've chosen, specifically Bruce Chatwin's On the Black Hill.

    It is set in the hill country of the Welsh/English border, and is about the lives of twin brothers who have never left the family farm, but while its physical scope is narrow, it's Chatwin's gift for treating his material with respect - or love, even - which broadens it and makes it special. I hope this will be as satisfying a read for me now as I remember it was ages ago.

Casualties of war

     I came to Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient with no prior knowledge; I hadn't read any of his books, nor had I seen the film version of this one, so by way of preconception I had only his reputation for fine writing.   

     What I found is that that renown is justified and due. Here is a wordsmith, here is a richly-furnished mind whose work is similarly well plenished, and in a narrative put together like a window of stained glass, every small scene or short passage is intensely coloured and deep with meaning. The lead that provides the episodic link is the crumbling Villa San Girolamo and the four people who inhabit it in the last days of the war. There is Hana, a nurse, who stayed behind when the hospital she was part of moved on, her sole charge now the English patient. This anonymous man was burned beyond recognition when his plane crashed in the desert. Who is he and what is the love affair of which he wrote in the palimpsest-like volume of Herodotus' Histories he keeps with him? Then enter Caravaggio, a thief, a spy, a family friend of Hana's. To complete the quartet, there is Kip a young Indian sapper or engineer, a bomb disposal expert, and in many ways the most complex and intriguing of the four.

    The story spans the characters' wartime experiences and pre-war histories as well their communion in the Villa, but it is the English patient's past in desert exploration and his affair in Cairo which is at the heart of the book, along with the questions of identity and the turns of fate to which that gives rise.

    Ondaatje's prose speaks of a muscular effort and a poet's sensitivity, so choose any passage and you'll find that tension producing writing of beauty and intelligence. Here is the English patient on economy of language:

"The words of her husband in praise of her meant nothing. But I am a man whose life in many ways, even as an explorer, has been governed by words. By rumours and legends. Charted things. Shards written down. The tact of words. In the desert to repeat something would be to fling water into the earth. Here nuance took you a hundred miles."

In the spirit of that line, I'll close here as I've said quite enough!

Cornflower Book Group 2009: Volumes 11 & 12

    Looking at the calendar to plan ahead for our Book Group weekends, it occurred to me that in order not to get too close to Christmas we ought to have our December discussion slightly earlier in the month than usual, so to allow enough time to fit everything in I thought I'd choose two titles in one go today and give us all a bit of a head start.

 

   For November I've chosen Wallace Stegner, an American writer new to me, and his novel Crossing to Safety, which was first published in 1987 and which is so warmly recommended by Norm.

     It follows the increasingly complex and close friendship of two married couples from the 1930s to the 70s, and is, according to the Washington Post, "a magnificently crafted story ...brimming with wisdom". Sid Lang and Larry Morgan are both members of the English department of the University of Wisconsin when their wives meet and find they have much in common. The story is told from the perspective of the now ageing Larry, and is "an exploration of the struggle of four people to come to terms with the trials and tragedies of everyday life."

 

     For December, let's have a complete change of continent, period and mood with George and Weedon Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody, first published in serial form in Punch in the late 1880s. It "created a cultural icon, an English archetype. Anxious, accident-prone, occasionally waspish, Charles Pooter has come to epitomize English suburban life [which] is hilariously and painfully familiar in its small-mindedness and its essential decency. Both celebration and critique, The Diary of a Nobody has often been imitated, but never bettered."

I've done my usual spot checks and found that both books appear on library catalogues, while of course they are available through retailers. As to dates for your diary, let's talk about Crossing to Safety from Saturday, 21st. November, and The Diary of a Nobody from Saturday, 12th. December. If you haven't taken part before but you like the sound of these books, please join us!

Some recent acquisitions

     All sorts of books fetch up on my desk, from brand new releases to what we might call vintage finds. Today's pair reflects this variety being a recently released first novel, and (for want of a better description) a bit of a curiosity.

   The Search by Glasgow writer Maureen Myant is set in Czechoslovakia in 1942 when the destruction by the Nazis of the village of Lidice devastated its families. Jan's father has been summarily executed, his mother and sisters have disappeared or been taken. The young boy embarks on a journey to reunite his family.

This examination of  fear and loss and of the bond between parents and children is described as "riveting, moving, at times disturbing", but it is this kind of war story which ought to be told, reflecting as it does the awful realities of the time.

     And now for something completely different: R. M. Dashwood's Provincial Daughter (a Virago Modern Classic, I might add, for those who collect them!). I bought this at Simon's urging when we were visiting a secondhand books shop just down the road the other day; he says it is very good, and as he is a big fan of the Provincial Lady, I trust his judgement.

    Rosamund Dashwood was the daughter of E. M. Delafield and her book, first published in 1961, is "a light-hearted continuation of her mother's work", stylistically similar and semi-autobiographical. Here's the beginning:

"September - Monday, 10th. Am disconcerted, at breakfast, to receive letter from old school friend saying What am I doing with My Brain these days, and isn't it a Pity to Let It All Go? Know what she means but am very angry nonetheless, and lose myself thinking out some really telling replies."

   

Tightly plotted - 2

      Following on from yesterday, as I begin The Plot, I have three novels lined up to follow it.

      First will come Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver (which Simon wrote about the other day). Ruth Rendell says of it, "I loved this book. It's cool in both senses of the word, understated yet exciting," and Ali Smith's opinion was that it "glitters with the kind of sharpness that might just cut you." I know the author through The Summer Book and The Winter Book, but this is described as a psychological thriller, a novel of suspense, so new territory.

    Next, we go to London in 1963 for Roberta Taylor's The Reinvention of Ivy Brown, "a gripping page-turner" about secrets and lies in an evocative 'period' setting.

    Last (because it's the shortest and I always do the longer books first when a deadline looms) is an intriguing-sounding Dutch novel, Dimitri Verhulst's Madame Verona comes down the hill. This is "tender, precise and pitch-perfect ... a wonderfully warm and funny novel, both an anatomy of a perfect marriage and a dissection of life in a remote village in rural Flanders". It sounds good to me.

Cornflower Book Group - The Tortoise and the Hare

 

     I found this an exquisite book - in all senses of the word.

     Glossing over the cover of the current edition of Elizabeth Jenkins' The Tortoise and the Hare, which despite its charms does not reflect or represent the contents, the novel is elegant, precise, beautifully paced and stiletto-sharp. The story is simple enough: the poised and beautiful -  but uncertain - Imogen is married to barrister Evelyn Gresham; he is some years her senior, highly successful, influential, used to getting his way. While Evelyn is capable and commanding, Imogen is content to be his weaker subordinate and her whole raison d'être is as his wife and mother to their young but emotionally distant son, Gavin, though she permanently fears their joint and several displeasure.

   Imogen gives little thought to their neighbour Blanche Silcox, closer in age to Evelyn, stoutish, awkward, but wealthy, determined and a force to be reckoned with. When Evelyn appears to be developing a closeness to Blanche, Imogen is ready to explain it away on the grounds of shared interests and practicalities, but there is more to it than that and as the unlikely relationship develops, so Imogen's spirit becomes oppressed, buried under the weight of her husband's personality and this new, sustaining, liaison from which he appears to derive so much.

  Watching Evelyn's subtle cruelty drive events is almost painful, and then when Imogen seems to find some sort of haven in the love of her doctor friend Paul ... Of the lesser characters there is the perceptive Cecil, and the boy Tim, friend of Gavin's but happy to spend most of his time out of his own chaotic home, but with or without the leavening, reading this is - as an early line has it - as "a voluptuous pressure on a bruise."

    What did you think?

(Later: here, at last, is this book's 'books and cakes' post.

Cornflower Book Group - The Nice and the Good

     Am I alone in thinking the dog was the nicest and best character in this book? Thank heavens for poor old Mingo!

   I remember enjoying my previous two Murdochs considerably more than I did The Nice and the Good, but while this book wasn't all 'the nasty and the bad', I'm hard put to it to express much enthusiasm.

   I started off with high hopes: a mysterious death in a Whitehall ministry, the involvement of a senior civil servant who lives an apparently idyllic, hedonistic life in his home on the Dorset coast, but then you look at the strange group of characters Murdoch has assembled, their tangled webs of blackmail and the bizarre, their Shakespearean pairings, separations, swappings and pairings again, and it all becomes too much and seems to stretch credulity too far. Perhaps it's a book of its time (1968) in that it describes an almost urgent loosening of the bonds tying people to societal conventions, and a kind of psychedic pattern of behaviour, and it feels dated now; perhaps it didn't even work perfectly in those heady days?

    Ducane was by far the most interesting character, I thought, while some of the others (e.g. the detestable Pierce) tried my patience. There were scenes and passages which were sticky and stuffy and tedious, while there were others in which the honeyed prose just dripped off the page, so the writing was of mixed quality and read as though the author was not on form. On the positive side, Iris Murdoch can insert a jagger of glass into what appears to be a smoothly comfortable, predictable scene: you cannot coast along relying on the expected to unfold, as she's wont to prick her characters and her readers, too. And still on the subject of glass - though literally rather than metaphorically - what was the significance of the giving of pieces of glass and stone and shells which occurs frequently throughout the story?

  I'm wondering how many people will have read the book, how many will have looked at it and thought better of it, how many will have a higher opinion of it than I have! Let's see.

Cornflower Book Group 2009: Volume 9

   

     "A subtle and beautiful book .... Very few authors combine her acute psychological insight with her grace and style. There is plenty of life in the modern novel, plenty of authors who will shock, amuse, amaze you - but who will put on the page a beautiful sentence, a sentence you will want to read twice?"

So writes Hilary Mantel of Elizabeth Jenkins' 1954 novel The Tortoise and the Hare and it was that comment together with Amanda Craig's review (scroll down to almost the bottom of that linked page to see it) which made me feel I must read this book and that the Book Group might welcome it, too.

     It is the portrait of a marriage and of a particular period and social milieu, but done with "descriptive grace and narrative pulse, dry humour and moral discrimination, tempered elegance and emotional force" - Hilary Mantel again. The poised and beautiful Imogen is married to Evelyn Gresham, a successful barrister, but her place in his affections is under threat due to their neighbour Blanche Silcox, middle-aged, ungainly, competent countrywoman - the very opposite of the soignée wife. What will be the outcome?

    For those unfamiliar with Elizabeth Jenkins, this article makes interesting reading. The book is currently available in a recent Virago edition, and my checks suggest that libraries may have that or an older version. Both Amazon US and UK stock it, as does The Book Depository (with free delivery worldwide).

     Next Saturday (the 29th. ) we shall be talking about The Nice and the Good, but let's come back to discuss The Tortoise and the Hare on Saturday, 26th. September. I hope we'll have a large turnout!

Good lines: summer in London

 

     "It was the sort of moment when, on a hot evening, London gives an indolent sigh of despair. There is a pointlessness of summer London more awful than anything which fogs or early afternoon twilights are able to evoke, a summer mood of yawning and glazing eyes and little nightmare-ridden sleeps in bored and desperate rooms. With this ennui, evil comes creeping through the city, the evil of indifference and sleepiness and lack of care. At such a time the long-fought temptation is wearily yielded to, and the long-dreamt-of crime is with shoulder-shrugging casualness committed at last."
From The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch.

I hope London readers will tell us if that is an accurate description - Edinburgh's climate is, of course, far too brisk for such degeneracy!

Great oaks from little acorns grow

          Jean Giono's The Man who Planted Trees is an unusual story, contemporary in its message, and one which reads as true but is - sad to say - 'only' a work of fiction. Originally published in Vogue under the title The Man who planted Hope and grew Happiness, it describes a journey on foot taken by the narrator in 1913 through a remote area of France. He meets few people in this largely inhospitable region of ruined villages, dry springs, and almost barren upland until he encounters a solitary shepherd who shares his simple meal with the traveller and gives him shelter overnight.

    The visitor then discovers that while leading his flock to pasture, the shepherd plants acorns - a metal rod thrust into the ground at intervals makes the planting holes, the acorns are dropped in, the soil put back. In three years he has done this 100,000 times, and though his success rate is 10%, that is still a remarkable 10,000 oak trees growing where none were before.

The man returns after the 1914-18 war and finds the shepherd still there and his planting rate undiminished. The area is now home to beech and birch, brooks which had been dry are flowing again and there are "...willows, rushes, meadows, gardens, flowers, and a certain purpose in being alive."
 
The tale moves on to 1935, the forest burgeoning, the shepherd still in rude health, the countryside now supporting small communities - life has returned.

The story embodies its author's confidence in the future. Giono favoured the feminine form of the word hope, espérance, meaning "the permanent state or condition of living one's life in hopeful tranquility". What the shepherd does is simple and sustained, the positive difference he makes is unquantifiably huge. I commend this beautiful little book.