Cornflower Books

Book shopping

Every month when I announce the next Book Group read I specifically mention The Book Depository as a source for the book because they offer free worldwide delivery. I know that while a title may be available in any shop or library here in the UK, our international readership might not find it as easily, and while you may prefer not to buy the book at all, borrowing it where possible instead, if you do want your own copy then TBD is a good place to get hold of it.

    As of last week The Book Depository have an affiliates scheme, and as you may have read over on Dovegreyreader Scribbles, if you go to the site through a link such as the one above, the person providing that link benefits from a purchase to the tune of about tuppence ha'penny per book - not enough to keep me in the style to which I wish to become accustomed, but it's for the love of it that I blether away here!

   Being a canny Scot, I always compare prices and try to find the best deal before I buy a book, and I wouldn't dream of trying to influence where anyone else gets their reading matter from, so the links to TBD and to Amazon are there should you wish to use them, and if you don't, then that's fine too.

The land of books

    Have a look at this map of the Land of Books. I'm glad it includes "a realm for reviewers", complete with "Kritische Walder" ! (Scroll down to the comments on the map for more explanation).

A cunning little vixen

    Until now, my only exposure to Icelandic literature was through the wonderful Njal's Saga and Egil's Saga which I remember as being great stories, but my heavily annotated copies bear witness to the fact that as a student it was for their legal content rather than their literary value that I was reading them.
     No need nowadays to examine procedure in the Althing or analyse concepts of honour, reparation and the like, but the subject of vengeance  - common in the sagas - is relevant to The Blue Fox by Sjon as that is an important theme.
    This is a curious little book, a fable that is short and spare and yet one whose brevity seems to be the key to opening the reader's imagination and to entering a world that is part real and part magical. Set in January 1883, it follows the Reverend Baldur as he sets out to hunt the blue fox who would "write the tale of her travels" on the virgin snow, and be "his letter of commission, setting him a task to perform in the material world". That line is crucial in the light of what is to come, but suffice to say that the reverend's fate is bound up with that of the herbalist Fridrik and Abba, his charge.
      This is not an easy book to summarise, its narrative interrupted at intervals with tiny set-piece scenes (I loved the tea-drinking one) all of which relate at one level or another to the fox and her hunter. If you're familiar with the Norse sagas and legends you'll recognise its debt to them; if not, read it as a story whose apparent simplicity hides its depths.

Thanks

    Thankyou, everyone, for your very kind comments on my broadcasting debut. Ignoring the biased 'home team' for now, Serenknitity, you mentioned the Queen song, and as that's a favourite of mine, we must have a link to it!! Carole, you said I sounded calm - you should have seen my hand shaking as I tried to drink some water prior to being 'on'. Lindsay, as a shy and retiring soul (that's me, not you!) I was a bag of nerves, and as to Dovegrey's hilarious comment, I can advise that no literary editor was harmed in the making of that programme.

Books revisited

     After all yesterday's excitement, it's time to calm down a bit with some book news. You may have read this short post in which I mentioned that Bloomsbury were to be reprinting some favourite titles. I'm delighted to say that I played a small part in the first lot of books to appear on the new Bloomsbury Group list, and I'll be talking about 'my' book, Henrietta's War: News from the Home Front 1939-1942 by Joyce Dennys, when it comes out.
     Meanwhile, you can have a chance to win all six books in the new collection; just go to The Bloomsbury Group webpage and take part in the brief bookish survey.
    The survey question on how often you re-read a favourite book is an interesting one: for me, it's perhaps as seldom as once or twice a year, but Mr. C. is never far from an old book and a P.G. Wodehouse in particular, usually one which is quietly disintegrating through age and much use. He is an avid - and fast - reader, but for almost every 'new' book he picks up, he has revisited (and chortled through) a favourite PGW; they never fail to delight him, despite - or is it because of? - how familiar they are.

Radio gaga

     Until today, my only experience of the broadcast media was being interviewed by John Humphrys when he was a young reporter and I was eight years old (and when done my little bit wasn't shown)! But Cornflower has moved on from the cutting room floor because your blogger has just been a guest on BBC Radio Scotland's Book Cafe.
    I joined the professionals to discuss the place of book blogs vis-a-vis the newspapers' review pages, and my conversation with Stuart Kelly, literary editor of Scotland on Sunday, and writer Richard Havers, creator of The Great Bookshops Blog, was ably chaired by Clare English and was a very enjoyable and stimulating one.
   I did tell my children that I would try to pull out the plug at the BBC so that their mother would not be heard, but I'm told that it all went fine (it was live but will be broadcast again) and thankfully my nerves didn't let me down.
    My thanks to my hosts and fellow guests for making the whole procedure painless and very pleasant!

Prime number

     This is a book about memory: specifically, what cannot be remembered, and what can never be forgotten.
Imagine if, as a result of an accident many years ago, you had a short-term memory of only eighty minutes. Anything occurring more than that brief time ago has gone and you have no recollection of it at all - people, places, conversations, facts. On the other hand, your memory store from your life before the accident is completely intact, and your recall perfect.
      That is the starting point of Yoko Ogawa's unusual and beautiful novel, The Housekeeper and the Professor. The housekeeper, comparatively uneducated, yet astute, sensitive and kind, comes to work for the professor of mathematics whose mind is full of elegant equations and the purity of number theory but whose life is small and shuttered. As they become reacquainted daily and the housekeeper begins to understand her employer's eccentricities, so mutual trust builds, strengthened when the housekeeper's young son joins them and the old man shows his solicitous good nature.
      The story of the unique relationship is very simply but touchingly told, and the book's mathematical content - the professor fashions complex puzzles from random numbers such as birth dates and shoe sizes - quite fascinating. My other recent 'maths book', David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk, is very different in scale and subject, but it would be Ogawa's book which I'd read again, as, though short its premise is intriguing, and its execution subtle, gentle, original and charming.

You heard it here first

 
    It's always gratifying to find that one's opinion of a book is shared by others, and though I know this is a business where the subjective/objective scale is a shifting one and we can't talk in absolute terms, I'm still pleased when my views are echoed by other people, whether they are fellow readers commenting here and elsewhere or reviewers writing in the press. (I hasten to say that that's not because I have some inflated idea of my appraising skills, but because seeing that I'm not "wrong"or alone does bolster the confidence!).
    Anyway, two reviews giving five stars apiece to books I've read and raved about appear in the paper this morning. "Enormously impressive" and "extraordinarily fine" said I about Philippe Claudel's Brodeck's Report (my post on it is here), while this review hails it as "a modern masterpiece".
"Marvellous and memorable" was my summing up just yesterday of Tim Gautreaux's The Missing, which the newspaper ( I can't find a link for you) calls "impressively thrilling, and pleasingly complete".
    If I were to operate a rating system here I'd be giving both books the highest marks, too; though very different in subject-matter, feel and pace, they are wonderful examples of fine fiction.

Deep south

   

     Over the past week my reading has taken me from 1930s England (Nightingale Wood) to 1990s Japan (The Housekeeper and the Professor), but it is America's deep south in the early 1920s which has become my most vivid mental landscape thanks to Tim Gautreaux's marvellous and memorable novel The Missing.
    The book's hero - and he is surely that - is Sam Simoneaux, a floorwalker in a New Orleans department store. When a little girl is snatched from the shop while he is on duty, the parents blame Sam for not acting quickly enough to prevent her disappearance. But the kidnapping becomes the hinge in Sam's personal story, the thing which turns him back - eventually - to try to right wrongs done to his own family as well as to the child's.
   The action shifts to a Mississippi paddle steamer where Sam gets a job on pleasure cruises while he hunts for the missing girl, determined to find her and bring her home. Here the richness of the writing, the detail, and the free rhythm of the story holds the reader, as does Sam's character: conscientious, decent and kind. Life on the boat is so dynamically portrayed - the rambunctious, liquor-soaked crowds, the jazz, even the piloting of the huge craft on the waterway, all is rendered vibrantly and with great skill, but the story's inherent morality is fascinating, too, and all the drama apart, I found that perhaps its most powerful aspect as Sam ponders vengeance, guilt and responsibility and comes to understand that "what you do will say who you are".

More special editions

     A very quick post to say that starting tonight The Book Depository are auctioning the original signed artwork for their special edition bookmarks in aid of charity. Full details here (I like Matt's!).

Special editions

     I do enjoy the occasional posts that come under the 'Reading habits' category, as our varying attitudes to all things bookish are fascinating. Today I'm wondering about editions of books, special or multiple:
     Do you have more than one copy of any book, and if so, for what reason? Keen cooks often have a 'reading' copy of a particularly prized cookery book, kept safely away from spills and spatters, and a 'using' one in the kitchen, but are there other instances of this?
     Do you keep different editions of a book for sentimental reasons, or because of a preferred cover design, clearer print, etc.? Many people dislike film tie-in versions of books, say, so may acquire a second copy of a title with a more attractive cover but keep the first one because .....

 
     Or do you have a special edition of a book, and one you wouldn't part with, just because there's something unique about it? The book pictured here is an example of that. I've never read it, though I have often looked through it; it is an 1850 edition of Lockhart's Life of Scott which belonged to my grandfather, but it bears an inscription which shows that long before he came to own it it was given to a young man (whose name I can't quite decipher) "on the occasion of his leaving Eton" at Easter 1852, and the giver of this fine present whose youthful hand is on the flyleaf was Jane Austen's great-nephew Herbert Knatchbull-Hugessen.
    Most of our books are nothing like as grand as this one, but even the humblest, most battered copy can have meaning beyond its text and therefore keep its place on the shelf. And on the subject of shelves, that's the reason we may not keep our 'second' copies - regardless of their importance to us - just because we haven't the space!

Burnt orange

                                                                                                                                                                  

     Still sitting on my TBR pile (I wrote a bit about it here) but more importantly now on the Orange Prize shortlist is Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows. For twenty four hours (that is until noon tomorrow, 23rd. April) and only in the UK, the book is available for free download - just visit the Bloomsbury website and follow the instructions at the bottom of the page.

Sharp and sweet

     "She had kept her brain exercised by reading heavyish books, which might not always be truly wise but at least were not those meringues of the intellect ...- novels."
     You could do worse than indulge in some literary iles flottantes by reading Stella Gibbons' 1938 novel Nightingale Wood. Young, penniless widow Viola comes to live with her dour in-laws in their dull house and despairs of having a life, but then she meets Victor Spring, rich, handsome, fast and engaged. Will our Cinderella ever get her Prince Charming? Well, her sister-in-law Tina (she of the 'heavyish books') falls for the wonderfully named Saxon, the family chauffeur, which stirs things up no end at home, and after dramatic events featuring characters who range from the 'slumocky' to the smart - class is an important theme and one played out with the right degree of emphasis - Viola's fate is finally settled.
     Without quite the eccentric perfection of Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons' first novel, and one that would be very hard to better) it is warm, funny, and full of delightfully knowing authorial comment on the action. With the modernity of its time, and marked by a degree of realism about its central characters' faults which shifts it out of the pure fairy tale category, it's bright and stylish and a lot of fun.

Tinker, tailor

    The Spy Game is a quiet book, and one of studied calm, but the writing's clarity has a depth to it which develops on reflection. I was struck by Georgina Harding's economy and restraint in controlling her story so expertly - both its elements and its method of unfolding - and in writing about children and childhood with a well-pitched detachment and an affecting lack of sentimentality.
     Beginning in the winter of 1961 - the Cold War, a time of spies, traitors and apparently ordinary people (the famous Kroger case) leading double lives - it features Peter and Anna, whose mother goes out one day and does not return. Unable to accept the awful reality that she has been killed in an accident, the children imagine that she was a spy and has gone underground, and they set about finding evidence to support their theory. Their quest to discover the truth about the woman who was "rubbed out" of their lives continues even into adulthood, long after "the spy game" had become just such a childish pursuit.
     Anna is a convincing narrator, and her episodic account of events before and after her mother's disappearance is a dispassionately edited one. She takes piano lessons but prefers practising scales because "they didn't trick you into feelings", and (heartrendingly) she plays them to cover the silence: "piano practice filled the house with order, with a picture of family life". Looking back, a scene is "... one of those full moments that make a memory, when everything else falls away. People later classify childhoods as happy or unhappy. Best would be to tot up those moments when nothing else mattered. That was what childhood was for." 

Well-judged detail (behavioural as well as physical) catches the 1960s period, and the study of memory, imagination and identity implicit in the story makes for a book which leaves the reader with questions and something of the unease of its characters. It invites an inward look or two, and that makes it no less powerful as a fine piece of fiction.

    

Janeites

     My only previous foray into all things Austen - as opposed to the novels themselves - was Claire Tomalin's biography of a few years ago, so I was interested to read Claire Harman's analysis of Jane's place in culture, popular and otherwise, in Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World.
     Beginning with her family's early attempts to protect and preserve her memory, and moving on through periods when she was out of mind and her books out of favour, to her wider reception in the world (cf the extreme liberties taken by her early French translator) and her present day immense popularity, the book is full of interest and very readable.
      Not everyone is a fan of "the Divine Jane's", however, and while Sir Walter Scott emphatically was, Mark Twain was not: "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice", he wrote, "I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone"! Charlotte Bronte was another who wasn't keen, but Kipling certainly was and made much of her appeal in his story The Janeites. That leads neatly on to how widely she was read at the front during the first world war, and the therapeutic use of her books in convalescence, and then to Churchill's turning to her while engaged in the planning for D-Day.
      From the ultimate in comfort reading to a satirical take on Austen scholarship, as Claire Harman reminds us that in David Lodge's Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses Professor Zapp's great project was to "work through the Austen canon, 'saying absolutely everything that could possibly be said' with a view to closing the subject down".
     And with that thought, perhaps I'd better shut up!

Three more

Three more books to add to the new arrivals pile, three more books with very striking, attractive covers.

    The Blue Fox by Sjon has the distinction of comments by both Bjork and A.S. Byatt on its cover! "A magical novel", states the former, while the latter says it is "comic and lyrical", but I was taken by ReadySteadyBook's remark: "the literary equivalent of a snowflake".
    Set against the Icelandic winter landscape in 1883, this book follows a priest on his hunt for the blue fox, a naturalist, Fridrik, and his charge, Abba, who has Down's Syndrome. "The fates of all these characters are intrinsically bound, and gradually, surprisingly unravelled in this spellbinding fable that is part mystery, part fairy tale".

    

     Click on the picture there to enlarge it so that you can read the names on the colour chart - a witty touch before we even get to the first page of the cleverly-titled Designs for a Happy Home, a novel "in ten interiors" by Matthew Reynolds.
This is "the sparkling story of a sometimes impossible, often infuriating but ultimately loveable heroine whose pilgrim's progress through modern marriage is at once funny, poignant and unforgettable".
    It looks as though it is going to be very original and fresh and fun, and probably extremely sharp too. More on it soon.

     Another novel in translation, this one by the Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa, and with a very interesting premise: "He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury... he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is a sensitive but astute young housekeeper ...who is entrusted to take care of him".
 The Housekeeper and the Professor is "an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family where one did not exist before".
Intrigued? I am.

Alice's adventures

     This post may lack subtlety but its message is simple: read this book!
     I was utterly gripped by Ask Alice from first page to last, and at no point did I or the book flag. I am sorry that I have finished it and that this excellent entertainment is at an end, but I shall read more by D.J. Taylor and have no hestitation in labelling his latest novel "not to be missed".
     The story begins in Kansas in 1904 and spans thirty or so years, moving to Edwardian London, a crumbling country house, the provincial theatre and the drawing rooms of the highest society. There are echoes of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and even E.F. Benson, but D. J. Taylor's remarkable achievement is how gloriously detailed and richly imagined is the world he has realised here. Almost like looking at a Frith painting, the reader becomes absorbed in the multi-stranded narrative, and follows the eponymous Alice from her humble American origins to her position of wealth and influence in the 20s and 30s. Alongside her rise is that of the young Ralph Bentley and his eccentric 'Uncle' Alfred who discovers a new colour and invents a dye which makes his name and his fortune, and achieves for them both an entree to a previously closed social milieu.
     Mixing fictitious characters with real ones - for instance, the scenes of courtroom drama towards the end of the book are recounted beautifully in his 'diary' by the delicately waspish Beverley Nichols - makes for powerful verisimilitude, and the whole thing is so compelling that it cannot be put down. If I have a quibble at all it's that the ending is rather more abrupt and convenient than one might like, but my notes on the book as a whole include the words "captivating" and "quite delicious", and so I forgive that, and there's really nothing more to be said than "read it"!

Cornflower Book Group - Fifth Business

     This book has been my introduction to Robertson Davies, and a very fine one it is. If you haven't already discovered it, ignore the cover and read what's inside because it's a narrative of deceptive ease and fluency but of page-turning force.

      The memoir of Dunstan Ramsay, teacher and scholar, as written by him in a letter to the headmaster of the school at which he taught, is in effect an essay on being 'Fifth Business': that is, in theatre, neither hero nor heroine, confidante or villain, but yet the person who is essential to bring about the denouement or resolution of the drama.
"This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries".

     The appealingly self-aware Dunstan, a man of conscience, late-flowering, self-sufficient, dispassionate observer of those around him, is nonetheless the star of the story, one which takes him from small town Canada to the battlefields of the first world war, then on to a not undistinguished career in teaching. But it is his life beyond the mere stops and staging posts that is so interesting, and the tale of which Davies spins so beautifully. 

     Beginning when, as a boy, he ducks the snowball thrown by his friend so that it hits the pregnant Mary Dempster and brings on premature labour, and moving through the years of his complicated relationships with Mrs. Dempster and her son Paul, it's a portrait of an unusual man and an analysis of responsibility, guilt, loyalty and resolve. Contrasting magic with the marvellous, the bizarre with the logical and consequential, it is a book with depths and intricacies, some wonderful lines, and all hugely enjoyable and thought-provoking.  

I can't wait to read my next Robertson Davies, but what did you think of this one?

The magnificent seven

    Here are the most recent arrivals, seven very different books which promise much in the way of interest and entertainment.
From the left, Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World by Claire Harman (and not without controversy) is part biography and part cultural history, exploring "the changing status of [Jane Austen's] work", its reception and its draw for the modern reader - and indeed viewer.
Next, D.J. Taylor's Ask Alice: "A wonderful novel of concealment and subterfuge, sweeping from Kansas to London, from 1904 to 1936...about a woman's rise and fall, the chances she takes and the secret which will undo her".
It's not unusual for books to be collaborative efforts, but quite uncommon, I should think, for the team to comprise mother and son.The authors of the third book there are just that, and in Bozo Sapiens: Why to Err Is Human Michael and Ellen Kaplan explore why the human species gets things wrong, in big ways and small. A quick dip into this marvellously comprehensive book suggests its lively and erudite analysis is done with a great deal of wit and charm, and I can attest to the fact that opening it at random leaves you quite unable to put it down!
From human error to an erring human, as next in line is Lilian Pizzichini's The Blue Hour: A Portrait of Jean Rhys. Rhys led a troubled life and this is "a stunning portrait of a complex, tortured woman, a loving ode to one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, and a biography of the first order".
Another novel, and Georgina Harding's The Spy Game is set in 1961 London when eight-year-old Anna's mother disappears into the fog. Obsessed by stories of the Cold War, Anna's brother Peter begins to believe their mother is a spy, and what follows is "a beautifully wrought novel about loss, history, memory and imagination, and the way in which we shape these to construct our own identities".
I've already mentioned The Adventures of Margery Allingham by Julia Jones as it sounded like a "must read", and here it is, just waiting to draw me in to Margery's world and that of her books.
And lastly, as a huge fan of Cold Comfort Farm, I am looking forward to reading Stella Gibbons' Nightingale Wood. Sophie Dahl says in her introduction to it, " There is romance galore: a transformative dress and a ball; much dizzy kissing in hedgerows and beyond; ... poetry and heartbreak...and a fairy-tale ending with a twist"!
All quite magnificent, don't you think?

Also on my desk

  
     From the pretty to the pretty interesting: four parcels of books have just arrived (and I know there are more on the way!), so I've got lots of treats in store which I'll talk about soon, but top of the pile there is my current reading, An Expert in Murder by Nicola Upson.
    Having read two novels by Josephine Tey last year (The Franchise Affair and The Daughter of Time) I was keen to read this book which is the first in a series featuring Miss Tey as protagonist. Building a work of fiction around a real person is tricky stuff (though here are two books whose writers pulled it off beautifully), and in this case the author has the challenge of fashioning a tightly plotted detective story against an actual background - the world of London theatre in the 1930s - and of creating a convincing and well-rounded main character from someone about whom there seems to be a comparative lack of literature.
     I'm around half way through the book and despite one or two minor quibbles, am enjoying it very much, particularly its period detail and all the theatrical content - which includes Harriet D's parents!! Interesting also (and understandable in the context of substantive material to be utilised), that in the layering and blending of fact and fiction which is a feature of this type of thing, we see Jospehine Tey musing on the fact that she has used her friend Detective Inspector Archie Penrose as the basis for her own detective, Alan Grant. Are you still with me? If not, you'll have to read the book!