Zina Rohan's Blog

I have just read Here I Am. It is the story of a family, or rather of a marriage, or rather of a man - Jacob Bloch. He is solipsistic (kind of). Trying to be good (kind of). Failing (kind of).

I don't mind that the novel is long, but I do mind the reasons for its length. Yes, okay, the author has a great facility with language - or a good Thesaurus. But having found multiple ways to say essentially the same thing he puts them all in, as if allowing us to make the choice of epithet or as if he wasn't sure which might be best. That adds length.

Then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story - and Jewishness has an ancient, self-obsessed (though admittedly self-critical) relationship to itself of mythical inclinations, Jonathan Safran Foer reaches for repetition: in paragraph structure, in sentence structure (as above), and in emotion. It's a bit like reading a folk tale, which perhaps we are in its modern American-Jewish incarnation. This too adds length, and ultimately predictability.

In the end, though, for all the tussling with his wife, his relationship to his Jewishness and to Israel, and with his diminishing sense of worth in a too-comfortable existence that he suspects has little heft, Jacob comes across as more schmaltzy than his creator can have intended, all the while filtered through a knowing irony.

Perhaps I am just jaded by yet another identity novel. Is there nothing else to write about these days?

And yet. I did read it to the very end.

I have just finishedThe Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. Truly we are lucky that James Shapiro is around and writing. First there wasA Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, and now this.

First point: read it. And if ever you were inveigled by some dreadful teacher of literature at university to discount the context behind a piece of work this superb book will un-inveigle you.

Shapiro writes so well, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph...book by book. I'm in a hurry so I will not write this at length but never (or extremely rarely) have such insights been given with so light a touch. I exaggerate, but not much. And he does what few Shakespeare scholars manage to do: he does not pretend he knows more about Shakespeare as an individual than he does, than it is possible to know; but he introduces his hypotheses against the backdrop of what is known about Shakespeare's world, the politics, the changing tensions, what other people were writing and what Shakespeare must have read.
I recommend, I recommend, I recommend!

I have just readLightning Rods, quite quickly and with my thoughts about it veering one way and another.

The lightning Rods of the title are women employed by large companies to be anonymous female providers of relief for the pent-up sexual urges of the companies' male staff. The result is supposed to be (and is) a drop in the sexual harassment that would inevitably sully the work place without them. Male satisfaction would increase productivity and female workers, less harassed, would need fewer days off sick.

The idea has been dreamed up by Joe, a failed door to door salesman, whose hopeless sexual fantasies alone in his trailer-park home are the spark for the idea that is to make him a millionaire.

The first couple of chapters had me hooked because we were convincingly inside poor failing Joe's head. But then he gets his astonishingly brilliant idea (he is to get more of them as the book progresses) and I began to wonder if this was going to be boring. It became so. Then it picked up, Then it got boring again. Finally it....stopped, because the author seemed to have run out of brilliant ideas for Joe to stumble on.

I bought the book because it was published in my country by a small UK house called And Other Stories. I wanted to support the publisher. I will support them again, but only once.

The book's cover tells me it's a satire on corporate America. But if it is it would have been much more effective at half the length - 297 pages in the edition I read. Maybe American readers, in the more puritanical USA, are expected to be more jolted by the subject matter and its admittedly deft handling than we would be on this side of the pond. Ultimately, though, the inventiveness of Helen Dewitt's characters' thought processes depend on a single riff. And you can only riff so long.

I have just read Wrote For Luck: Stories. I know D.J.Taylor as a literary critic although the fly leaf of this collection tells me he has written a number of novels. Eleven to date. I must be honest here and say that I had not read any of his fiction until now, and now I am not convinced that I will read any more.

Perhaps it's the smallness of his canvass: East Anglia, academe, literary types. In Wrote for Luck (all the stories have dates on them) but I kept thinking he had written them in the 1950s, except I knew he had yet to be born then. His England is almost entirely white (a single student in the English Department of a provincial university comes from Taiwan), and because he clearly grew up in Norwich and now lives there again, his geographical reach is small too. When he creeps into London, for example, he seems not to grasp it at all. Let me be fair, though. The two stories set in Brooklyn and Chicago DO work much better (for me), which may be a comment on my own ignorance of those places.

What troubles me most is two things. His characters are insipidly neither here nor there. It's not that I don't not care about them - I just can't remember them two pages on. And his language is oddly ponderous, grammatically heavy and at times extraordinarily old-fashioned, and people in their 20s sound as if they are well past middle age. Not once in these stories did I look up from the page in appreciation of a lovely sentence, or image, or idea. I didn't feel I learned anything. And yet they're not bad, these stories. They're just...

I have just read Music for Torching. I couldn't put it down. In fact I didn't put it down. It reads like a mixture of Desperate Housewives and The Stepford Wives, but is much, much more vicious.

Suburban New York (did I get that right?) in the late 90s: homemaker women and their businessmen husbands, with their kids and their houses and lawns and backyards (I can never get used to the idea of a yard as a garden - the Brit in me can't help but see a yard as something made of concrete). No one is likable (I don't mind that at all); the dialogue is sharp; the dystopia is powerful; the wit is pointed. But here's the thing that nagged at me all the time.

It was only through product placement, and mentions of mobile phones that I had any idea which decade we were in. Our couple-of-focus, Paul and Elaine, had apparently been 60s liberals. But in their forties, ie when we meet them, they read nothing - and I mean nothing at all; they don't watch anything on TV except possibly the weather forecast, though they do watch rented videos. So they seem entirely cut off from the world beyond their immediate concerns, and their neighbours are exactly the same.

I couldn't decide whether this was done in order to underline the navel-gazing meaninglessness of their lives, or...
It cannot be an oversight. This is A.M.Holmes after all, who is far too assured and controlled a writer to let anything slip away from her.

Help me, someone?

I have just read Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? To get hold of it I had to ask a friend who was in the USA to buy it for me because it has not been, and may not be, published in the UK. And why? Because my country is known to be the defamation capital of the world. Lawyers of course love this (as do those who win), to such an extent that our publishing industry has taken fright, and so far no one in the UK has dared bring this book out.

Wealthy Russians, of whom Putin is undoubtedly very much one, love London for its libel courts - see Abramovich vs Berezovsky, and many others. All a plaintiff needs to prove is that statements made/broadcast/printed would result in financial loss or loss of reputation. The defendant needs to prove that what was said was fair comment, true and in the public interest.

Now where this book is concerned, Karen Dawisha seems to have done her stuff. Her research has been meticulous - there are many footnotes quoting interviews, blogs, articles, other books, secret recordings...But also here and there, unfortunately, those awkward phrases like 'X was said to be' or 'widely supposed to have done' and so on. Not many, but possibly enough to make a barrister plan a long summer holiday. On the other side there is also the problem that Putin, and his henchpersons aren't especially concerned with the truth. And their pockets are very deep.

The fundamental argument Dawisha makes is that from his earliest days in St Petersburg as Mayor Sobchak's right hand man, Putin was mixing contacts with organised crime, diverted city money and a band of cronies who would accompany him later to Moscow and the top posts in government. And once there he would proceed as before but on a much larger scale, hand in glove with the FSB who were to be the ultimate money-launderers, just as the KGB had been before them.

At the Public Inquiry into the death of former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, the academic Robert Service (adviser to the Inquiry on all things Russian) cited Putin's Kleptocracy and its author as being on the anti-Putin end of the scale. (He put himself somewhere in the middle - no great admiration for the President but not quite as excoriating as Dawisha is.) At the same time he acknowledged that she had surely done her research.

I found it gripping even though at times I felt the author was going further than she needed to in pursuit of her quarry. She'd caught him already.

(By the way If you have difficulty with Russian names, don't read it: they come so thick and fast that anyone who struggles with, say, the characters in War and Peace will be plunged into existential gloom.

A friend put this book into my hands. It was Miss Marjoribanks, written in 1858 and to me entirely astonishing. Mrs Oliphant, the author, writes about Carlingford - a small English provincial town peopled with small English provincial inhabitants - and about its most important citizen, Lucilla Marjoribanks. Take care: Marjoribanks is pronounced Marchbanks* (why?) and Lucilla would not wish you to get it wrong. She is one of the world's great interferers, drawn with such constant wit and humour that Jane Austen (who might have been a tad more brief about it) might have wanted her for her own. But of course this is a Victorian, rather than a Regency, novel.

I really recommend this to everyone, for the writing, for the character and for the understanding one gets from it of the place as it was in its time. Mrs Oliphant is the bridge between Austen and George Elliott, but oddly little remembered. Let's see what we can do about this.

* Quiz for Goodreaders - especially non-English ones: how should you pronounce the following names and place names?
Cholmondeley; Dalziel; Featherstoneshawe; Pontefract; Cirencester; Menzies (although that is a Scottish name).

In 1983 I was in Prague to make a feature about Franz Kafka who had been born there 100 years before. In 1983 he was still banned in Prague, and much admired elsewhere, though not everywhere else. Since I knew this I had already done a lot of the interviews I would need with Kafka experts in the UK, but then went to Prague anyway.

I had to get 'visa support' from the Academy of Sciences to get in and register with the Centre for Foreign Journalists on arrival. I arrived and registered. The man at the desk, his elbows over some telexes from me (telexes? Well, it was 1983), said he didn't know who I was or why I was there. But I sent you those (pointing) and asked to have interviews arranged with X and Y and Z. Oh dear, he said. They're not here. They've gone away. Where?, I asked. To Finland, he said. Fishing. What, all of them? Together? Yes, he said. Odd, isn't it.

I told him I needed to interview someone about Kafka, preferably someone who could speak English which sounds better than a voiceover, although if necessary that could do too. Well, never mind all that...

Later I decided to see what would happen if I tried to borrow some Kafka form the Charles University Library. So I got someone's ticket (brave of her to lend it to me) and went to look up the catalogue. All Kafka's works were listed there. So I asked to borrow The Trial and The Castle. I'm sorry, said the librarian. We don't actually have any of the books. They've all been stolen. What, all of them? I'm afraid so, she said. Odd, isn't it.

Actually, I believed her. If books are stolen, even if they are passed from hand to hand, fewer people will read them than if they are in a library, and the authorities can always say, as they were saying indeed, Don't blame us. Blame those thieving hooligans.

Today I went to the British Library. I had reserved Peter Wright's Spycatcher. I discovered you can only read that in the Music and Rare Manuscripts room. When I arrived and presented my card the librarian couldn't find the book...at first. Then he look on the computer and saw what it was I wanted. Oh, I see, he said. Special Material. He went to get a key and disappeared.

When he came back he told me I could only sit at one of some 10 designated seats, and there was a slip in the book which instructed me that I should not leave the book unattended FOR ANY TIME AT ALL. This meant that if I wanted to go to the loo or get a coffee I had to take the book back and let him look after it until I returned. Meanwhile my readers card was held hostage.

So I asked the librarian what constitutes Special Material. Well, he said, old manuscripts and rare books are precious. But this was published in 1987, I said. Nothing rare about it at all. Well, he said, some books are deemed..er...restricted. I looked up Spycatcher on my mobile and saw that it is available at Amazon (boo! down with Amazon - see earlier posts). So I asked the librarian why there was a restriction placed on this book. No idea, he said. Odd, isn't it?

By the way, I note that Goodreads doesn't seem to list Spycatcher by Peter Wright, so you'll have to Google it. Big story behind it.

HHhH is the story of the assassination of Reinhard(t) Heydrich, the Hangman of Prague, during WWII. He was Himmler's right-hand man, and in many ways the architect of the Holocaust. (The title stands for the German phrase that was current at the time, meaning Himmler's brain is Heydrich.) His assassins were sent from London, by the Czechoslovak Government in exile. They knew they would not return. In revenge Hitler had Lidice, an entire village of people, destroyed - the people and the village too.

Laurent Binet has written a novel, sort of. But because he is writing about real people, and tells us repeatedly that he has principles about making things up about characters who actually existed, he cannot enter into the minds of his protagonists (although occasionally he does, and then gives himself a slap on the wrist). Nor can he meander away from the truth insofar as it is known. Add to this the fact that he is both an academic and French.

The result is on the one hand a satisfying device for supplying the reader, straight up, with information that would otherwise be difficult to introduce. On the other, there are the self-referential asides that interrupt the narrative, the constant questioning of its validity, the self-examination by the author as he quizzes his own motives and responses. Eventually I got irritated. I see I Gave this 4 stars. Make it 3.

By the way, the translation is excellent. Well done, Sam Taylor.

I happened to hear part of a BBC radio programme which was a half hour interview with Colin Firth. It was about the books he likes. It turns out that he is not only a rather good (and delectable) actor, but a very well-read and thoughtful man.

He talked interestingly about Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, so much so that he sent me back to it - after many years. Excellent. Such a wonderful piece of self-examination by the 'whisky priest', looping back over itself in layers of probing contradiction.