The Evenings & the Reading Group

Bookshop Preamble

Props to the English Bookshop in Stockholm and their long-running reading groups. It means a lot to have a literary lifeline when you’re second-languaging your way through the day-to-day.

The reading group selections are often pretty tempting, which risks being a distraction from the demands of the existing To Be Read pile. Due to typical life reasons, it’s not often that I can make it along to a session, though I’m on all the mailing lists… so I’m always 100% up-to-date about exactly what I’m missing out on.

As luck would have it, the classics reading group’s recent selection, The Evenings, Gerard Reve’s Dutch post-war classic, was already in my To-Be Read pile, thanks to that other TBR-multiplying hazard, the Backlisted podcast. I’d planned to get round to reading The Evenings over the Christmas–New Year period, when the story is set, but: didn’t happen. Enter the English Bookshop…

The Evenings

What a strange book, a bleak, uneventful, comic, perverse, devout, and surprisingly moving story. A book that can only have been written in the postwar Netherlands. But there’s a universality of experience here too.

Detailing the ten days and nights leading up to New Year, and including Christmas, The Evenings charts the daily frustrations of family life and the awkwardnesses of socialising, on the surface of it a mordant and morbidly comic novel.

Who amongst us hasn’t been irritated by the poor table manners of family members? Or babbled inanely to their friends in an attempt to stave off awkward silences? Or even, in idle experimentation, urinated into the kitchen stove?

Okay, maybe not so much the stove thing.

The whine of violin music was faintly audible. He spat into the stove and watched as each blob formed a brown blister on the coals for several seconds before evaporating. When puckering his cheeks produced no more saliva, he stood on his toes and passed water into the stove, but was startled by the loud plop and the cloud of fine ash that came rushing out of the hopper. He sat down on the divan and looked at his shoes. For ten minutes, he remained sitting like that. “That vapour in the room gives off a mean enough stench,” he thought.

“The Evenings: A Winter’s Tale” by Gerard Reve; translated by Sam Garrett; Pushkin Press 2017 edition; p87–88.

Novels about boredom, done right, viscerally capture the excruciating tedium of the experience while also transmuting it into something elevated. The Evenings does this with plentiful dark humour, subtle hints of Frits’ emotional turmoil, and a redemptive shot of filial love that comes as something of a surprise.

Frits van Egters – “our hero”, as the opening of the book dubs him with lashings of irony – is often hard to stomach. Lovers of likable characters (ugh) need not bother with this one. To call him a protagonist feels like a stretch, since he does so little, so little happens in the book. He’s bored, and boring; brusque beyond the point of rudeness; always ready with a brutal story of accidental farmer mutilations or worse – tales that are played for laughs, and that never fail to amuse Frits and his peers.

Frits is a misanthrope, and worse, a misogynist. He appears to have one close friendship with Bep Spanjaard, sister of his old friend Louis, though no romance is implied, and he’s frequently dismissive of many of the women in his circle.

Arriving home, he found his mother dozing in the armchair. He looked at her and said to himself, moving his lips silently: “I feel miserable today. But let us pause and look around. Some people are punished severely from the very start: they are born as women.[…]”

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There is also, despite Frits’ acute self-consciousness, a partial lack of self-awareness on his part. The critiques he directs at people like his father and his shady friend Maurits could perhaps equally be levelled at himself:

“You know very well,” Frits said, “that I hold you in high regard. Your acuity is amazing, incisive, but unfortunately you have chosen the road that leads to destruction. Prompted largely by feelings of humiliation and a lack of self-esteem, which is what produces the hatred. A textbook example.”

p114

Humour, Bodies, Tears

At the start of breakfast, no one spoke a word. “Things are off to a roaring start,” Frits thought.

p107

The Evenings is a truly funny book; so long as you dig cringe. Most short summaries of the book focus on Frits’ relationship with his parents, and his having to endure their various quirks and tics, and of course his father’s appalling table manners. It’s true that this situation provides a lot of the comedy in the book, as well as – naturally – being at the heart of Frits’ emotional state.

His father mixed the lettuce with the potatoes, mashing it with the back of his fork, and stirring everything together with the onions. “God, all-powerful, look upon our deeds and tribulations,” Frits said to himself, watching the hand that moved the fork steadily up and down. He felt his face grow warm. “The mashing of a meal prepared with care is considered an affront to the one who made it, Father,” he said, looking at his mother. She lowered her eyes. “What?” his father asked slowly, with a smile. “I didn’t hear you.”

Frits fixates on the incipient baldness he perceives in his brother and friends, plus the science behind purported remedies for baldness. This is part of a broader obsession with the body and its functions that is reminiscent of Leopold Bloom, and he frequently assumes an obnoxious air of superiority that prefigures Ignatius J Reilly. But his bodily fixations go to less universal, more perverse places than those explored in Ulysses. And while he exhibits plenty of disdain – unlike in A Confederacy of Dunces – we also get the incredible depth of suffering that Frits goes through, merely by virtue of existing.

Because for all our hero’s more distasteful qualities, he is clearly in a lot of pain. As early as the second chapter there are passing references to unexplained crying: “He felt a pang in his chest and tears came to his eyes.” Throughout, he is tormented by strange dreams and is often afraid to return to sleep. Elsewhere, the myriad irritations of home life drive him to distraction, and bizarre behaviours that feel like cries for help.

As Frits watched how his father slowly distributed the peeled egg over his bread and then, not knowing what to do with g the shells still in the palm of his hand, made clumsy, helpless gestures, he thought: ”I have to do something.” “What are you waiting for?” his mother asked.
He stuffed his own, unpeeled egg into his mouth, closed his lips around it and began to make clucking noises through his nose, louder and faster all the time. Wide-eyed, he looked back and forth from his father to his mother, then let the egg fall to his plate. His mother smiled, but his father looked startled, wrinkling his face like someone squinting into bright sunlight.

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It’s a curiosity of the Dutch language that so much of its cursing revolves around disease. It’s thoroughly offensive to call someone tyfus, or even more brutal, kanker. So there are perhaps cultural roots to some of the curiosity with illnesses and deformities shown by Frits and his pals, though they go further, morbidly revelling in other’s misfortune.

“Still, it is precisely these things that enrich our lives,” Jaap said. “The ill and the poor in spirit. When I see a wooden leg or an old woman with a dance with a rubber tip on it, or a hunchback, it makes my day.”
They both laughed. “Or those wonderful lumps,” Frits said slowly, in a pensive tone, “those huge pink potatoes that grow on someone’s head, completely free of charge, or behind their ear, in lieu of a pencil.” He shook in his chair, so hard that the floor rattled. For a moment, both of them were out of breath. “You should try caressing a hunchback’s hump sometime,” Jaap said, coughing, “it drives them crazy.”

p77

War & Trauma

Sally Rooney, in her recent piece in the Paris Review, Misreading Ulysses, notes that “it is from the unavailability of language that the tensions of the novel arise. We might propose the novel as a kind of book in which the most important subject cannot be spoken about.” (My emphasis.)

There’s plenty in The Evenings that Frits can’t bring himself even to think aloud, but perhaps the most significant unspoken presence in the novel is the Second World War. There are asides about food or coal shortages, oblique tales of military service, a tasteless joke that Frits almost makes about being the German police, when he calls on a friend on New Year’s Eve – one of the rare times he thinks better of causing offence. But nowhere in this 1946 book is there any direct comment about the fact(s) of the war, its conclusion, or the transition to peacetime.

It feels very much as though the unnumbered traumas of war and occupation – with the murky mix of subjugation, struggle, and collaboration that is necessarily implied – lurk behind much of the tasteless and neurotic behaviours, not just of our damaged hero Frits, but of his family and circle of friends as well. He’s such a singular narrator that one can lose sight of the fact that the book is teeming with damaged and suffering characters. Frits’ mother and father are working through some unclear problem that none of the family can confront. All of Frits’ male friends find his urban myths of violent deaths, and particularly child deaths, nothing short of hilarious. And there’s a disturbing sequence where an acquaintance, Walter, sadistically mistreats a pet dog, an action which is witnessed without comment by Frits and his peers.

Another Dutch writer, the pseudonymous Nescio, produced a handful of excellent pre–WWI and between-war stories that also deal with groups of young male friends dealing with ennui and lack of purpose, but there are marked differences. In Nescio’s stories, the worst fate that can await one is a career in business, at the expense of a life following one’s artistic inclinations. In The Evenings, the highest aspiration is endurance. Nescio has one character driven mad by his art – and the inevitability of sunsets! – but Frits and much of his circle seem to be struggling with what from a modern perspective comes across as PTSD.

Frits, for example, recounts how he was traumatised by his parents feeding acquaintances:

“You see,” Frits said, “had it been up to me, they would not have eaten with us. I was always telling my mother: you’re insane. Before you know it we won’t have anything left. You shouldn’t do it. That’s the way I was. That is the way I am. Isn’t that despicable?” Viktor pursed his lips and shook his head slowly. Jaap had risen to his feet and was standing a few steps from the table, conversing with a tall, skinny man.”When it was over,” Frits went on, “we still had dozens of sounds of wheat, kilos of beans and peas. But it is the fear. That is the worst of it.”

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There are scattered references to sinister incidents, involving Frits, his quasi-criminal friend Maurits, or someone else, that are wholly unexplained, and which are all the more powerful for it. What actually happened is perhaps less important than the psychological burden the characters now bear because of it.

Jaap had his arm around Joosje. They were talking quietly. “Exaggeration or no,” said Frits, “the truth will out. You know, Viktor, are you able to forget things? Do you remember that weird business of mine, that very weird business back then? You do still remember that, or don’t you?” “Yes,” said Viktor, “I still remember.” “Good,” Frits said, “but still, you’ve forgotten it completely. You have forgotten, haven’t you? You don’t remember any more. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t remember it any more.” “Absolutely,” said Viktor.

p170

Love & Redemption *SPOILER ALERT*

When Backlisted dealt with the novel, there was some discussion of the redemptive note struck at the close of the novel, when, after a couple of hundred pages of excruciating if quotidian family frictions, Frits expresses his profound and unequivocal love for his parents. It’s a supremely moving passage, and if it is not spelled out in the text, it’s possible to connect this access of gratitude with the suffering and distress Frits is undergoing – the unexplained tears, the behavioural cries for help.

In truth, there are flashes of this throughout the novel. After a run of increasingly bitter chapters, there is a section in the middle of the novel where Frits softens towards his parents and expresses a more forgiving sentiment, in language echoed at the close of the novel. At another point, he returns home drunk, and his parents get him to bed with patience and tenderness, his inebriated state and obliviousness facilitating both his vocal appreciation for their care and their giving of this care in such a genuine and direct way, unlike the compromised, awkward maternal displays he endures when sober. In this helpless moment, incapable of undressing himself, Frits is infantilised, as he also is in his preoccupation with toy and model rabbits.

The next day, they express concern at Frits behaviour, but the moment of connection has passed, and he dismisses their comments. Instead it is in the closing chapter that Frits’ love for his parents reaches its apogee of expression, a sequence that pulls off the delicate balancing act of being both deeply moving and amusing.

“Eternal, only, almighty, our God,” he said quietly, “fix your gaze upon my parents. See them in their need. Do not turn your eyes from them.” “Listen,” he said, “my father is deaf as a tradesman’s dummy. He hears little, what he does hear is not worth mentioning. Fire a cannon beside his ear for a joke, he’ll ask if there’s someone at the door. He slurps when he drinks. He dishes up sugar with his dessert spoon. He takes the meat between his fingers. He breaks wind, without anyone having asked him to do so. He has the remains of food between his molars. He does not know where the guilder is supposed to go. When he peels his eggs, he does not know what to do with the shells. He asks in English whether there is anything new and interesting to report. He mashes together all the food on his plate. Everlasting Lord, I know that it has not gone unseen.”

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Author Backstory

Lastly, briefly, if you know anything about Gerard Reve’s complex character and controversial history, it’s possible to infer allusions throughout The Evenings. The biblical language is a very clear indication of his later conversion to Roman Catholicism (and that in the Protestant Netherlands), and his suggestively sadomasochistic treatment of a stuffed toy bunny is a precursor to more explicit themes in his later work. There is also a slightly strange, strained and fervent tone to his male friendships that might also be taken as a hint of closeted homosexuality.

But the power of the text lies in its subtlety and allusiveness, all the dangling inexplicable threads, and to map the book too directly to the facts of Reve’s life-to-come and themes of his later work is of questionable value, far too pat a solution for this fundamentally obtuse work.

Thanks for reading

If it hadn’t been for the English Bookshop’s reading group, I doubt I would have read The Evenings quite so closely, and if so I’d likely have missed a lot of the subtlety and artfulness of the novel. It’s well worth a close reading and/or group discussion, and the book’s now on its way to my TBRR (to-be re-read) pile…

Six-String and the Submissions Horse

Am back on the submissions horse after a looong hiatus/ slash/ period of little-to-zero actual writing.

While I get some material down on the page, figure it’s good to keep submitting flash and fragments too, part practice and part motivator.

Carol tucks her ponytail into the back of her dungarees, fingers stained with varnish, nails short. She smokes while working but keeps her goggles on, saving her eyes from wrinkles while scoring lines into her forehead. People think she makes such fine guitars because their shape is womanly, some affinity with the form. Bullshit. Guitars are like the men she’s known: hollow, set in their fretting, stretched by the tension between saddle and head.

Last week, ParagraphPlanet was good enough to post the short short story above, an existing (blogged but unpublished) flash of mine that I reworked and edited down from 96 words to PP’s regulation 75. So there’s that.

Other submission targets are lined up, but the question as always is whether I’ll get any of the current pieces ovefinished to submittable standard.

One line at a time, that’s all you can do.

NaNoWhyMo?

Somehow, I seem to have convinced myself to take another punt at NaNoWriMo.

November is 12 hours away. I have an unstable character list (the list is unstable, not the characters), some scrappy research, and the whisper of a plot. Also small children to parent and a job.

Twice before I’ve forced myself through the blunt force creative trauma of 50,000 words in a month, in 2010 and 2013. So the attempt rate is dropping, but that’s a pretty limited data set. I’ve “won” NaNoWriMo in those years, and languishing somewhere in a subfolder are the PDF winner’s certificates to prove it.

But both those times, I’ve failed.

2010’s Fantastic Damage (El-P was on repeat) was a desperate smushing together of several long-dormant short story germs. Reader, I did not go back and read it. Or maybe I did and have blanked it out.

2013’s Untitled Longer Project (oh, the mystery!) was a split-hair-over-the-50-thou of preamble and backstory to the novel I wanted to write. But I was deflated by the insipid inconsequentiality of the effort, and after a few weeks of attempting to right the thing, I let it sink to the bottom of my bottomless draw of false writing starts.

You see where I fucked up, right? The first time, it was in dismissing the attempt without even re-reading the thing. The second time, in feeling like the work done was a waste, rather than necessary groundwork to excavate whatever it was that should have been written.

So that’s two valuable lessons learned, albeit at a tortoisal pace. This year will have the immeasurably tougher constraint of working around that parenting business, but on the plus side this year’s idea-nugget feels more viable.

Providing the re-read is done clinically, with a reader’s eye.

Providing the NaNo word dump is sifted carefully, with an honest appreciation for what works and can be built upon.

The point is not so much whether or not I reach 50k. It’s getting teeth stuck into the idea.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Every few years I’ll think that I don’t read enough science fiction, and that I should dive into some hard SF opus or other, have my mind expanded by all the intergalactic worldgalaxy-building, quantum-powered futurology, and whatnot. My effort for 2016 was 2012’s 2312. And boy was it an effort.

This well-reviewed, Nebula-award winning novel from Kim Stanley Robinson is stuffed with plausible science and technofantasy. It’s packed with interesting ideas: asteroids terraformed from the inside out; the balkanisation of the settled solar system that forms the plot’s political backdrop; the mercurial gender fluidity that propels (kinda) the love story between the two protagonists.

Top marks for the Science. For the Fiction end of things, ehh, not so much.

The best prose is reserved for phenomena. Sunrise on Mercury is “a perpetual blue snarl of hot and hotter”, the sun’s corona dancing fantastically, “all the magnetized arcs and short circuits, the masses of burning hydrogen pitched out at the night”. These passages are enjoyably poetic, but in the main they merely describe, and seldom advance the plot or reveal character.

Human-scale interactions are clumsy, and at times clichéd.Coffee cups are waved around excitedly. The “heroine”, Swan Er Hong (admittedly a great name), beats her tiny fists in frustration against the oversized chest of the “hero”, Wahram.

Props to Robinson for his prescience in populating his novel with gender-fluid characters, in advance of the gender debate going mainstream. At one point he lists 30-odd different genders, and there is a sex scene wherein each party is both – erm – docker and docked. (An inventive, if completely unsexy scene.)

But this gender fluidity has negligible effect on the plot, and less on the characters. Swan is currently more female than male, Wahram more male than female, and as per the fist-beating scene above, there’s nothing aside from the bare facts of birthing history and gentials to give any sense of what that all might mean for their identity, their personality, their character.

Similarly, by now humans have begun speciation, with “talls” and “smalls” hailing from different areas in the solar system. But does this have much bearing on the narrative? Only once, during a gravity failure on an evacuating spaceship:

Genette stumped about them, cheerfully giving orders, and they dragged Wahram to a wall with a railing. Once there Wahram was able to pull himself along on his knees, red-faced and gasping. He fixed Genette with a bulbous eye.

“Thank you, I can proceed now. Please go help someone who can’t. I’m happy to see how the laws of proportion help you here, my friend.”

The inspector paused briefly to mime a stalwart boxer’s stance. “Every small takes up the call! None never yet died by natural cause!”

The boxer’s stance, the clunky dialogue… yeesh! In fact that whole episode is a nadir, with conversations about whether the ship’s insurance will compensate everyone EVACUATED INTO SPACE, and regular reassurances that everyone is going to/has escaped the vessel unharmed, and merely has to wait around to be collected. OK, so Wahram and Swan float around a while, but on a ship with hundreds (thousands?) of people, there are no casualties?

And here’s the worst fault. THERE ARE NO STAKES. There is a world-remaking event on Earth, which is planned sketchily, executed undramatically, and has absolutely no consequences. There is a flimsy mystery, with distant actors. Swan meets no resistance in her attempts to clear it all up, which she does a good hundred pages (if not more) after the mystery has been clear for even the most oblivious reader. There is danger at the start of the book, which arrives without foreshadowing or warning, and which is followed by MULTIPLE chapters of WALKING, interspersed only with whistling and episodes of diahrrea.

It was vexing at the time, now I spell it out like that, it’s downright baffling. And that’s one of the stronger sections of the book. As it goes on, the writing becomes more uneven. There are sentences so downright baffling that they only make sense as placeholders of a work in progress:

Everything on the water moved at a watery pace, including the water itself.

And it’s a real shame, because – digressions on space economics aside (shades of The Phantom Menace) – the interesting ideas never stop flowing. Interstitial chapters function as brain dumps for a lot of this background, written in snippets as if excavated from found documents, though it left me wondering if it wouldn’t have been better to have incorporated all that world-building in the narrative, saving leftover concepts for another work.

I want to remember this book for this kind of thing:

if you program a purpose into a computer program, does that constitute its will? Does it have free will, if a programmer programmed its purpose? Is that programming any different from the way we are programmed by our genes and brains? Is a programmed will a servile will? Is human will a servile will? And is not the servile will the home and source of all feelings of defilement, infection, transgression, and rage?

But it’s too much to have to wade through all that clunkiness, the cliché and unintentional comedy. I rarely leave a book unfinished, so persisted with this, but redemption never came, and it’ll be another few years before I dare scratch the hard sci-fi itch again.

Priorities: Reading v Writing v Due Date

No GoodReads Reading Challenge for me this year. I reached last year’s target, again thanks to a few choice graphic novels/comic hardbacks to counterbalance doorstep’s like The Luminaries. But TB-brutally-H it felt as if I was reading to bump up the book count, with the target always to finish fast. Is that conducive to good reading? Wide reading, intensive reading, yes. Clinical, technical, checkbox reading, yes. Not so much with the luxuriating in a text, wallowing there, inhabiting it body and soul.

There’s also the twinge of cynicism I can’t help but feel about GoodReads now that it’s Amazon-owned. In that light, the Reading Challenge just feels like a prompt to buy, buy, buy more inventory.

Reading is no problem. But it’s writing I need to be doing more of. Isn’t that always the complaint? Write, write more, write about anything. To blah or not to blah. Here it comes, another blogpost about blogposts. *SHUDDERS*

It’s never a thoughtful blogpost for me. Is that a mistake? Instead, it’s the first draft brain dump. Unedited stunt writing, unexpurgated, a la Knausgård – who BTW in Book 2 of My Struggle (“A Man In Love“) is coming across as a total dick, which okay is a bravery all of its own, an honesty less glamorous than petty criminality or heroin hijinks, because let’s be honest who comes off best, the helpless addict or the father whinging about his childcare duties? So Knausgård struggles against the selflessness required to be a parent in order to pursue the erasure of self he finds in writing. Transcendence, flow, engagement… it’s all pushing up towards the point of Maslow’s pyramid. Right?

So yes, we have a baby on the way, and that was probably the impetus for this post. We’re moving, and I’m freelancing, and I still need to learn Swedish (not nearly fluent yet). And even now it’s hard enough to maintain the writing necessary to keep contributing to the Amsterdam writing group that I’m still Skyping in to. How’s having a baby going to impact that? Or will it bring regularity and order to our lives, minute-to-minute scheduling that magically *does* give me the space to write?

Naming Conventions in Dune

It was one of the customs the two sons of Jamis had explained to him by indirection telling him they wore no green because they accepted him as guardian-father. ‘Are you the Lisan al-Gaib?’ they had asked. And Paul had sensed the jihad in their words shrugged off the question with one of his own – learning then that Kaleff the elder of the two was ten and the natural son of Geoff. Orlop the younger was eight the natural son of Jamis.

– Frank Herbert, Dune

Sorry, “Geoff”? Worst – sci-fi name – ever. Sticks out like a sore thumb in that little vignette of desert blood debt adoption. “Paul” you can get on board with, especially given the name’s roots and Dune‘s Abrahamically religious themes. But GEOFF?!

Contrast A Song of Ice and Fire, where many recognisable names are given a slight twist. Geoffrey becomes Joffrey, Peter is Petyr, and Edward Eddard. That’s fine, that works. I buy that.

So, Dune, hey? Yes, world building, and yes, that’s a daring Middle East analogy for a book written in 1965. All the same: tedious/turgid, much? Oh boy.

One can write having slept badly

One of those problems – though of course one of the least important – was those very writers from the provinces, who typically visited the literary workshops of other writer from the provinces who’d arrived in the capital some time ago and who were no longer writers from the provinces, or they pretended not to be, or the writers wrote in squalid pensions or in houses they shared with friends, usually from the same provinces, and later they worked in shops or drugstores or – if they were lucky – in bookstores, almost always with ridiculous schedules that ended up impairing their ability to dedicate themselves seriously to writing and, as a result, sooner or later, the writers from the provinces ended up hating literature, which they practised dog-tired, writing in crowded buses or on the metro, since writing otherwise robbed the hours of sleep necessary to put up with their bosses and customers and the weather and the long rides on the bus or the metro, and because this always seemed to be one step further than the place where they had arrived; the writers from the provinces always gave the impression that they would achieve literature with their next story or poem, that they were at the gates of a discovery that they weren’t in a condition to realize, though, because unfortunately to write one needs to have slept at least six hours and have a full stomach and, when it’s possible, not to work at a drugstore. Further: one can write having slept badly and while feeling atrociously hungry, but never while working at a drugstore; it’s sad but true.

– Patricio Pron, A Few Words on the Life Cycle of Frogs (from Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists

Oh, not to be a writer from the provinces! But oh, even to be that.

Picking up the pen today.

Holiday Reading: Sardinia Edition

A 9 book/2 week holiday seems like pretty good going. Decent mix of holiday fun and overdue quality reads. I *was* aiming for 10 (with William Boyd’s Restless lined up next), but with The Luminaries (hella long) and Moby Dick (often turgid) to slog through, I was happy with this:

• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré
• A Death in the Family (My Struggle #1), Karl Ove Knausgård
• Sea and Sardinia, DH Lawrence
• The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt
• Moby Dick, Herman Melville
• A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
• Revival, Vol. 1: You’re Among Friends, Tim Seeley with Mike Norton & Mark Englert
• NOS4A2, Joe Hill
• The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton

And started on the plane back:

• Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link

The lone duffer was Sea and Sardinia, in which DH Lawrence reveals himself an elitist prig, viciously stereotyping Sardinians, Sicilians, and more while at the same time bemoaning how he is stereotyped by them. Lawrence’s lack of empathy and self-awareness in this travelogue make him seem thoroughly repellent, and therefore the occasional snatches of beautiful writing ring cynically hollow.

More importantly, the gold stars go to: le Carré’s The Spy…, which is tense, absorbing, and morally disturbing; and the very funny, and equally moving, A Visit from the Goon Squad. I know I’m late to that particular party, but …Goon Squad really is a must, must, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer-just-get-on-and-do-it must-read. You know what to do.

Goldfinch, Schmoldfinch

On the opposite wall, graffiti: smiley face and arrows, Warning Radioactive, stencilled lightning bolt with the word Shazam, dripping horror movie letters, keep it nice!

The Goldfinch circles around Amsterdam. The final third of the book is set there. And the quote above was perhaps my favourite moment of that sludgy, long, and repetitious last part. Weirdly, I know the guys who painted that piece, and who used these tags all over the city (and beyond – in Barcelona, we had to stop one of them from tagging a moving street cleaning van). So reading this, I finally knew that Donna Tartt had actually spent time in Amsterdam, a fact that had been repeatedly underlined in the hype around the book.

Because something I found baffling about The Goldfinch – probably THE fiction event of 2013/14, let’s not forget – was how incredibly sloppy it was with details.

***SPOILERS FOLLOW***

Theo’s Amsterdam hotel is on the Singel canal, but after a trip to meet his pal Boris, the hotel has moved to Herengracht. Their drive from the airport to Singel takes in Nieuwemarkt, which is a nonsensical route: A to C via F. And before they leave for Amsterdam, Boris warns Theo to stock up on Duty Free liquor, because “booze only available in the state controlled shops”. In the Netherlands, of all places? Uh, nope. Was Tartt thinking of Sweden, maybe?

Since I lived in Amsterdam, it was in this section that they most leapt out at me, but the entire book is riddled with cheap errors. There are at least a couple of references to the drinking age in the US (New York/Nevada) being 18. How does an American author get something like that wrong? Especially when they’ve spent a decade working on the book…

This leaves me scratching my head when a reviewer praises Tartt’s “Dutch master’s attention to detail” (Ron Charles, The Washington Post). James Wood, in a New Yorker review more argued with than read (well, it is behind a paywall) famously criticised Tartt’s novel, arguing that the novel’s “tone, language, and story belong to children’s literature”. This of course spurred fans of the book to furious rebuttals.

But that’s not an axe I’m grinding. I found the prose tended towards the beautiful, the book’s pages littered with arresting images:

Floodlit window. Mortuary glow from the cold case. Beyond the fog-condensed glass, trickling with water, winged sprays of orchids quivered in the fan’s draft: ghost-white, lunar, angelic.

I agree with many commenters that the novel was overlong. Some of those digressions on the meaning, history, and techniques of art felt repetitious. But that might not have been a problem if the plot had been stronger.

This is another frequently praised aspect of The Goldfinch that leaves me wondering. Lev Grossman contends that “the narrative thread is one you just can’t gather up fast enough” (review tucked away behind another paywall).

Conversely, I felt that I was left holding a number of plot threads that weren’t connected to any moving parts. Tartt is clearly more comfortable with the rarified, moneyed Upper East Side/Hamptons scene – but nothing of consequence happens here. When a threat to Theo does emerge from amongst the expensive antiques, it eventually evaporates in a cloud of convenience.

Boris, and his Eastern European cohorts, come off hackneyed, and it is from this cartoonish demi monde that the issue of the stolen painting is “resolved”. But through much of the action, the narrator Theo is a passive bystander, dragged into set-up after set-up with little understanding. The major events in the life of the painting itself happen off-screen, and/or entirely without Theo’s understanding. The major threat to Theo’s freedom – that his possession of the missing painting may be discovered – is a faint note, tediously unwavering and never truly credible.

Honestly, I wanted to love this book. Maybe it was the hype, the reclusive enigma of la Tartt herself. Maybe it was overinflating how much I’d enjoyed The Secret History, all those years ago. Whatever it was, it didn’t deliver. I was promised a literary firecracker, and instead I had to slog through 700-plus pages of a soggy fuse failing to light, culminating in a whimpering misfire.

How to Read 52 Books Per Year

Have said before how much I love tracking apps/sites/gizmoids, like Last.fm and NaNoWriMo, for spurring that urge to get more done. Even if you’re only keeping score with yrslef, it’s a competitive urge. I know if my Nike+ stuff is ready to go, I’ll run more often than when the iPod is out of charge, or the armband thingy has been lost down the back of the drawer agin.

For the 2013 GoodReads Reading Challenge, I originally set a target of 20 books. This was revised to 25, 30, 35, 40, 47.5, and eventually 52. Thanks to a two-month sabbatical from work, and then from being unemployed for the last three months of the year, I managed to smash dent that target, and reached a total of fifty-five books read.

There are folk on G’Reads that set, and hit, targets of 70, 80, 90 books and probably more. I’ve no idea how they got that far, frankly. I was pleased enough with my just-over-half-a-ton.

The first thing to admit is that eighteen (18!) of the books were graphic novels. OK, comic books. They were booklength trade paperbacks/hardback-length collections. It has been suggested that having those in the list somehow invalidates the challenge. To which, with the greatest respect: balls it does.

Because the list also included hefty tomes such as The Corrections (653pp), Perdido Street Station (640pp), A Dance with Dragons (1,387pp), and the utterly monumental Infinite Jest (1,483pp). A little light, superheroic, image-based relief is just the fricken’ ticket after c.1.5k pages of David Foster Wallace’s chapter-length footnotes and interminable, if brilliant digressions.

As it goes, Infinite Jest absolutely floored me. That was a read that kept my brain fizzing throughout, an utterly astonishing work. It does go down better with a bit of research, whether during or after reading, but I’m the kind of nerd that digs that. Predictably-sadly it immediately started influencing my own humble scribblings. (You know the kind of book that for a while after you see yourself trying to emulate, right? Gotta watch that nonsense.)

And I thought that would be my read of the year, but right at the death I picked up Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies, and BY JOVE it’s a phenomenal read. For the strength of the writing, line-by-line. For the strength of characterisation – even the smallest of supporting characters leaps off the page, vivid and true. For the plot which, if you only know the tiniest bit about Henry VIII, you know roughly where it’s beheaded. Even more astonishingly, Bring Up The Bodies is the second part in what is surely shaping up to be one of the greatest literary trilogies of all time.

So anyways, 2014? I’m aiming for 50 books. It’ll be more of a stretch, since I’m not planning on not working for five months of this year. But let’s see how it goes.