And of course a visit to Zarnowiec would not be complete without seeing the Museum Maria Konopnicka. She was born to the Wasiłowski family, and used the pseudonym Jan Sawa and others. She was born on 23 May 1842 in Suwałki and died on 8 October 1910 in Lwów. She was a poet, a novelist, a writer for children and youth, a translator, journalist and critic, and for some reason that I am sure to discover her museum is in my beautiful wife’s village.
I’ve talked about The Junior Officers Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars – US link
One slight complaint (made by many other as well on Amazon) is the misleading title. The Junior Officers Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars – US link
The Guardian has an awesome piece by John Mullan (who I met once and is a lovely man) about one of my real favourite books: American Psycho
John Mullan’s piece neatly details the charm of the protagonist:
When one of his many girlfriends weeps at the abortion she is about to have, he points out to himself how poor her taste is. “Besides, this girl’s favourite movie is Pretty in Pink and she thinks Sting is cool. So what is happening to her is, like, not totally undeserved and one shouldn’t feel bad for her.”
and this:
“I’m utterly insane . . . I like to dissect girls,” he informs the impeccably bronzed Paul Owen, as he bores on about “tanning salons or brands of cigars or certain health clubs”. But no, that won’t do it. So he takes him back to his apartment and hacks him to death with an axe.
Read John Mullan’s whole piece and then buy American Psycho
My absolute favorite writer Piers Paul Read – US link
(Read) says the leading character, Jomier, is based “a bit on myself and a bit on some people I know. We both live the wrong side of Shepherd’s Bush, but the drains don’t back up in my house. He’s a divorced atheist and I’m a married Catholic. But we do share some views on modern life.”
I haven’t read The Misogynist
Jomier broods. He broods about the present, He broods about the past. He types his gloomy thoughts onto his computer screen – a digital journal. When he has nothing more to say about the present, he returns to the past, copying entries from old notebooks onto his computer. Jomier has reached the age of retirement. His children have grown up. He lives alone in London, embittered and humiliated after his wife, Tilly, had an affair and left him for Max, an uninhibited international banker. Years later he still mourns the death of his marriage, often trying to pinpoint when, and why, it all went wrong. With little now left to fill his time other than formulaic middle-class dinner parties, Jomier seeks refuge in his journals, recalling those years when he had expectations and when he was still loved by his wife. Then Jomier falls for Judith and life starts to improve as, cautiously, they start an affair. But old habits die hard and patterns repeat themselves. It is only when Jomier’s daughter falls ill with a rare blood disorder that Jomier finally begins to reassess his feelings towards those he loves and his ability to forgive. Darkly humorous, ruthlessly satirical and at times surprisingly moving, “The Misogynist
I love Read’s gloomier stuff and I can see why he snagged such a good publisher for this work (Bloomsbury).
The Guardian article reveals much I didn’t know about Read – and I am quite the fanboy:
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(1974), went on to become a hit movie and sell five million copiesand many many others.
There is a great quote from Read about the great success of Alive – US link
It was wonderful to be so popular but it probably damaged my career as a literary author. I was a fashionable young novelist, but the fact that I wrote different sorts of books didn’t help. For instance Alive appealed to young men who liked true adventure stories, but my next book, Polonaise, was a novel about a sexually perverted Polish intellectual. Each book seemed to lose the market gained by the previous one. But at least Alive allowed me to live a comfortable life and raise four children.”
I have never read Alive – US link
The interview is fascinating and the The Misogynist
I just bought a bunch of new books from Amazon:
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by Dan Ariely. This is pop psychology book about how we behave and how, as the subtitle puts it, hidden forces influence our everyday decisions., the reviews look really good. And may be it will help me be even more manipulative?/ UK link by Patrick Hennessey. The author has apparently written a notable and thought-provoking memoir of his experiences of training at Sandhurst and of serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is an intelligent, literate piece of work that stands far above the production line of MacNab/Ryan ghost-written SAS shoot-em-ups. An English graduate, Hennessey has attempted to represent the primary experience of life as a junior officer in the modern British Army. What makes the book so notable is the candour with which he’s prepared to describe disturbing psychological developments in the soldiers’ attitude to war.
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by Mishna Wolff. I bought this for my biracial daughter on the evidence of the blurb: Mishna Wolff grew up in a poor black neighborhood with her single father, a white man who truly believed he was black. ‘He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esqe sweater, gold chains and a Kangol – telling jokes like Redd Fox, and giving advice like Jesse Jackson. He walked like a black man, he talked like a black man and he played sports like a black man. You couldn’t tell my father he was white. Believe me, I tried’, writes Wolff. And so from early childhood on, her father began his crusade to make his white daughter down with all-things black. But Mishna didn’t fit in with the other kids in her neighborhood: she couldn’t dance, she couldn’t sing, she couldn’t double dutch and she was the worst player on her all-black basketball team. Yet when she was finally sent to a rich all-white school, she was too black to fit in with her white classmates – and she was more uncool than ever. This hip, funny memoir will have readers howling with laughter, recommending it to friends and questioning what it means to be black or white in America.
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by Banksy. I was never a huge fan of Banksy as his art, to my view, has little depth. One look, a laugh, and you move on. You couldn’t stand and look for ages. But the book is supposed to be really funny. I’ll let you know…
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by Barry Davies. Hopefully this will give me the skills I need to sneak around unobtrusively…
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by Tania Kindersley. I bought this one for my wife and daughter as both of them worry too much. It is not a self-help book or a style guide, but full of kindly practical advice and information about subjects from love to grief to philosophy. Worldly, witty and wonderfully wise, this lovely book about negotiating the world if you’re a modern woman should be handed out free on the NHS.
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by Michael Light. I bought this because I love nuclear explosions and this extraordinary book photographically documents one hundred US nuclear detonations from the 215 declared atmospheric nuclear tests conducted by the US between July 1945 and November 1962. After that date the tests were carried out underground. Within that period a total of 1030 tests in total are known to have been executed. The atmospheric tests were conducted in the Nevada desert and on various islands in the Pacific. The book is divided between the desert and the ocean.I’ll let you know what they are really like once they arrive and I read them. Which might take a while as I already have three shelves of unread books…
I have just finished this book. I was reading it quite slowly as we have our new baby Stanley but I am sure that I could have finished it in an afternoon in normal circumstances. It really is that pacy and that good. A Week in December – US link
I would recommend A Week in December – US link
In the nineties I spent quite a lot of time in the Former Soviet Union and most of that in Russia. I learned to speak some Russian and really got to love the place and the people. So, when I saw that the great Piers Paul Read had written a book based in part in Revolutionary Russia I was overjoyed. Alice in Exile – US link
The main difference is the length. Alice in Exile – US link
Alice in Exile is a historical novel rejoicing in its complexity. It features Alice Fry who is an unusually free-thinking and independent-minded woman drowning in a world ruled by men. It is also the story of the two men who love her. The action starts in 1913 when Alice, the daughter of a leftist radical publisher, meets Edward Cobb, the eligible young son of a baronet who has recently quit the army to pursue his political ambitions. Edward’s family could accept his sexual liaison with a girl they consider “fast,” but when he proposes, they are appalled and try to scotch the match. Soon Alice’s father becomes involved in a scandal and it becomes clear that Edward must choose between Alice and his political career. A classic weak upper class male that features so much in Read’s work, Edward breaks off the engagement, unaware that Alice is expecting his child. Desperate, Alice accepts the offer of a rich and attractive Baron Rettenberg, returning to Russia with him to serve as a governess for his children, while Edward marries suitably, but unhappily. Two of the greatest cataclysms of the twentieth century – the Russian Revolution and World War I – serve as backdrops to Alice’s story as she raises her young son, yearns for Edward, and begins to fall passionately for the Baron despite the presence of his family.
Alice in Exile – US link
While I am not feeling so well I have been reading Mr. Toppit – US link
Luke is an acutely observant and distrustful teenage boys; he is reminiscent of Adrian Mole. Like Mole, he rebels against popularity, which is why the Hayseed books, with their yucky whimsy, have never appealed to him. Passages such as “Luke Hayseed was not sure if night was drawing to a close or if day was drawing to an open” let you see why. Unfortunately Luke is pretty much alone in his sniffy disapproval, and before long the Hayseed books are raining spin-offs: a Playstation game (“Do you dare to be Mr Toppit?”), cereal bowls, backpacks and a book of mindless reflections, The Hayseed Karma, which lodges on the New York Times bestseller list for 47 weeks. Survivors of a gruesome plane hijack claim that recalling favourite Hayseed incidents saved their sanity and Mr Toppit becomes such a terrifying symbol that, during the miners’ strike, the Daily Mirror headlines a story “Thatcher turns Toppit!” Luke’s elder sister, Rachel, and their mother, Martha, are no help to a boy suffering from a bad case of identity theft. Martha’s main characteristic is a “wilful obliqueness” As you read on you realize that she has a lot to be oblique about – while Rachel, almost permanently in rehab, has “drug dealers like other people have accountants or dentists”.
In the meantime Laurie has been catapulted to national fame by the books has become a television presenter in the Oprah Winfrey confessional mode. In spite of her endorsement of the grisly Hayseed Chronicles, and in spite of falling out with Luke when he refuses to appear on her show, Laurie appears to be a likeable character, forever mourning the disappearance of her much-loved father when she was a little girl. The reasons she gives for this disappearance, though, have nothing to do with the far nastier truth. For this is a book that is jangly with secrets, making you realize that there are few things in a family that are as menacing as withheld information.
Charles Elton’s humor is as very black and merciless as Darkwood itself. He lines up a grotesque array of professionals: publishers, BBC producers and, most memorably, the supervisor of a care home who tells Laurie that her mother Alma’s “personal-care needs might not be within our scope”. Alma is one of several parents whose shortcomings are closely observed; others include the “more progressive” types who foist the Chronicles on their suggestible children, causing years of damage. Martha, instead of dealing with her son’s problems, offers him life lessons such as “It’s vulgar to serve a choice of puddings at dinner”, while Laurie’s manager, Rick, an outwardly doting husband and father, might be guilty of slapping around his wholesome-looking wife and daughter.
I haven’t finished Mr. Toppit – US link
I was first turned on to Edward St Aubyn by an Opera Director friend. I was chatting with him about why Piers Paul Read isn’t more read or more respected, and he mentioned Edward St Aubyn. I think he said that if you enjoy mannered tales of the upper classes misbehaving then St Aubyn is your man. He recommended the Patrick Melrose trilogy, which is fantastic though quite dark in places. But On the Edge – US link
What I really enjoyed in St. Aubyn’s satire about New Age soul-searchers was both his alarmingly familiar grasp of their rhetoric and his compassion for their angst. Much like the rest of us, each of the characters is only searching for that simple, elusive quality of life: happiness. The protagonist, Peter Thorpe is a repressed, thirty something English merchant banker, in the Four Weddings and a Funeral mould of Englishman, who throws it all away to pursue his passion for a girl he spent three days in bed with but who is of no fixed address. Lured into the world of self-realisation by a chance remark of hers, trying to disguise his real reasons for being there, his quest takes him first to Findhorn and then by a bumpy route to the Esalen Foundation in Northern California, where he meets an assortment of Americans at various stages of finding themselves. There are some marvellous comic set pieces: the anti-guru guru ranting his fire and brimstone sermon on psychic freedom; hippy child Crystal’s recollections of being a nihilistic teenager, determined to stay awake until she dies; the cosmic difficulties of tantric sex. St. Aubyn’s comical mastery of the phoney voices of the New Age never cheapens the underlying seriousness of the human mind’s need to understand. Nor does it diminish the warmth of the tone.
This is another great novel by my favorite writer Piers Paul Read, and to make it more exciting it is being made into a movie featuring Alan Rickman and Kristin Scott Thomas. The Villa Golitsyn – US link
The twists are set up in Read’s usual mannered way and little is as you would expect. The concepts of love, evil, and the closeness of family are explored and the book while short gives the reader so much to think of. I don’t know if the film will be as good but there is plenty of darkness here to work with. The references to obscure Russian thinkers and even the name of the villa (Golitsyn was the last tsarist Prime Minister, and aristocratic family, and a KGB defector amongst others…) demonstrate the thoroughness of Read’s craft and his ability to deal with some of the most difficult themes.The Villa Golitsyn – US link