January 2022 Books
Towards the end of last year I got myself in a bit of a tangle with my reading. I was halfway through far too many books in different categories and what with trying to walk the tightrope of new motherhood, working and making some time for myself and my reading, I was feeling overwhelmed. So I set myself a simple task and it's one I'd recommend to any who feel a bit lost with their reading and perhaps like me have started too many books and finished too few. I had to finish all the books I was halfway through before I could start any new ones, and I would focus on one at a time. I was a little apprehensive about this because I wasn't sure how well Proust could hold my attention on his own if I didn't have something less intense to reach for also. But I was pleasantly surprised by this little task and I had a really great time immersing myself in books that I would usually read in snippets here and there. Now I read maximum three books at a time (which to be honest was all I could handle pre-baby); one physical book, one Kindle book (for reading in the dark and on the go), and one audiobook. I actually happened to have both Kindle and physical copies of the Proust and The Weird, which really gave me the best of both worlds and allowed me to focus, but sadly I don't think that is a very practical way of going about things moving forward!
Anyway, it was a very successful reading month for me, even though I didn't finish many. I think The Weird easily counts for a few though, seeing as it is over 1100 pages long and contains more than 750,000 words. So, let's dive in.
In Search of Lost Time: The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
My last experience with Proust in the form of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower was not good. The teenage narrator whining about how much he desired a whole group of girls (yes, a whole group) for hundreds of pages hardly set my world alight. But I was willing to keep pushing on with In Search of Lost Time in the hope of finding some of the magic of The Way by Swann's again. Of course, it is there in the second volume too, but I was so irritated by the narrator and his subject matter that I found it difficult to enjoy the whole reading experience.
Luckily, The Guermantes Way was much more enjoyable. It's funny because I think a lot of people dislike this volume for its long-winded depiction of Parisian society, but I found this preferable to the narrator's preoccupation with young girls. And that's not to say he isn't also irritating and pathetic in this volume too (someone on Goodreads described him as 'just a pale sticky thing masturbating in society's stairwell' which made me cackle), but I began to see that perhaps that was the point. Or perhaps that wasn't the point but I could enjoy the novel anyway. You know me, I don't necessitate a liking of any character for me to enjoy a book, but I think this has to be compensated for in content that appeals to me; the romantic and lustful stuff is not really my cup of tea, so this volume shined for me where the other did not. As I said, I also dedicated my full attention to it and found it quite immersive, something I have taken note of for my reading of the final volumes, all of which I hope to get to this year. But yes, in case you are unfamiliar with this volume, it’s mostly about the narrator's first proper forays into aristocratic society.
Back to the book though and enough of my rambling. The thing about Proust is that one minute his narrator will say something utterly profound that takes your breath away, and manages to put into words something which you didn't think could be put into words: a sensation, an inner intuitive knowledge. And then the next minute, in the same style of absolute confidence, he'll say something that seems utterly stupid and reductive. I think a lot of people perhaps read Proust and think he and his narrator are right and true about everything, but just a reminder that just because some of it is brilliant, doesn't mean that all of it is (and there's a lot of it). I give you permission to call bullshit on some of it. Again, just when I want to praise him for something I feel like it sounds like I hate him, but that's just the wonder of my relationship with Proust, I think. I sort of love him, sort of hate him, sort of love to hate him and hate to love him.
I love the uncertainty of the text, too. Sometimes I wonder at Proust's relationship with his narrator. Certainly some of it is based on his life and is semi-autobiographical. And sometimes the text seems aware of how pitiful its narrator is (one of the other characters calls him a 'hysterical little flatterer' which I enjoyed), but then at others the two seem to overlap entirely. Something to keep considering as I read. This spreads to the other characters too; at one moment we are supposed to believe that there is a sort of innate elegance in the aristocracy; in the next, the narrator is ripping them and their hypocrisies to shreds, and lamenting that he dreamed of some kind of superior society only to find that everyone talks about much the same stuff that they talk about in lesser circles. And it’s quite funny, to boot!
A word of warning; a lot of this novel is taken up with discussion of the Dreyfus affair, which stratified society at the time and brought up a lot of horrible anti-Semitic sentiment. The narrator uses it to elucidate some of his characters' inner workings, but it's worth noting that even those who are 'Dreyfusards' - ostensibly those supporting the Jewish Alfred Dreyfus - express questionable sentiments at times.
In conclusion, I am looking forward to the next volumes, though I am worried that the narrator's attention will once more stray to romance. As I said, a lot of my enjoyment of this volume came from the fact that that was kept to a minimum (relatively speaking - it's still in there!), so we will see how I get on from here on out.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro [audio]
I still have no idea what to make of this novel, but the further I get from it the more it recedes from my memory. Sometimes books I'm undecided about weigh heavier in the proceeding weeks after finishing them and sometimes they don't. I think this is probably the case of the latter. This might be because I listened to it, though. I wonder what I would have thought of The Buried Giant had I listened to it instead of reading it (as I ended up concluding that I liked that book). My relationship with audiobooks goes up and down; I don't particularly get on with them and am quite picky, but at the same time I really miss them if I haven't got one on the go. I went through a period of listening to nonfiction which I liked but then found it too much to listen to it back-to-back. In fact, I've made another realisation about audiobooks recently which is I like listening to fiction that I've read before (I'm currently listening to The Idiot by Elif Batuman); it guarantees that I'll like the book and makes for an easy listen and re-read. And then I can chuck in nonfiction and memoir when I feel like a change.
Anyway. This is not a post about audiobooks. I had read mixed reviews of Klara and I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt. In general, I would say that the first half of the book had me, but then I wasn't so sure about the rest (though, controversially perhaps, I liked the ending or at least the concept of the ending, even though it felt a bit rushed). And the more I type the more I think I did like it, and that there is perhaps more to this text than meets the eye. In fact, that is key, and lies at the heart of all Ishiguro's writing (and to be honest, any good writer's writing).
The basics. It is set in a not-so-distant future where children are increasingly doing their schooling online in the safety of their family's home (sound familiar?) Because of this, parents have begun buying intellectually advanced AFs to keep their children company and provide them with some of the socialisation they are missing. Klara is one such AF, chosen by a girl named Josie, who has some significant health problems. Klara's narration is somewhat machine-like and deceptively simple, though Ishiguro's pared-back style means she doesn't differ so drastically from some of his other narrators.
I think on the one hand that this book suffers through the abundance of dystopian literature out there today, as many have described it as a bit pedestrian regarding its too-close-for-comfort world. And indeed, this is not a novel to read for its world or world-building. Instead, it is fruitful I think to think about it in context and conversation with Ishiguro's other writing, and also look at what it is saying about Klara herself. I also haven't seen enough commentary on her relationship with the sun in this novel, though it's right there in the title. Perhaps that’s because it’s one of the weirder parts of this novel, but I think one of the best. Indeed, the depiction of Klara and her inner world, her character and her beliefs about this world (along with the interesting way that she sees which I thought was particularly clever), seems to me to be the best thing about it. It strikes me that this is a novel about the way we think and emote, and the way she thinks and emotes. And whether those two things are very different, and if they are different then how are they different? Many reviewers have described her narration style as too two-dimensional, but I think that it is the way that style opens her up that is most interesting. For me, I didn't really need to look at the world, I needed to look at the world interacting with her. Perhaps one of the problems with this novel is that the balance of the text and subtext is off. This is something Ian Battaglia said at the Chicago Review of Books though to rather different effect - he concludes that Ishiguro tells too much in Klara's constant analysis of the world, and doesn't leave enough room for the reader's interpretation. But my suggestion is this: perhaps his text seems to point too much to a subtext that isn't particularly interesting or exciting for the reader - a future world we are all too close to, done by countless other authors in possibly more effective ways - and less at the subtext that is much more interesting, the way Klara's mind works and her relationship with faith and the sun. By including too many other mysteries or things that Klara must decipher in the world around her that seem obvious or at least become obvious to the reader, Ishiguro misdirects us away from that which is most interesting.
There is something to this book for sure, and now that I've written this review it occurs to me again that it is a bit of a mystery, which is no bad thing. I continue to ponder it.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories ed. by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Where to start with this mammoth anthology? All I really need to say surely is that this is a fantastic collection of Weird stories, one that gives you a really good sense of where the genre has come from and where it is going. It is organised in chronological order (of the individual stories' publication date, not of when its authors were active) so it takes you on a real journey. It was fascinating to see how 'the Weird' has developed over time, what themes crop up again and again, as well as similar (or different) stylistic choices. It features stories from many names you'll be familiar with - Franz Kafka, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Haruki Murakami, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman - and many names you might not. As I said in a vlog, reading an anthology like this is a great way of discovering authors who are not currently publishing or are lesser-known. Sometimes it can feel overwhelming trying to find new books, especially if you are interested in reading backlist titles and authors, and so I really appreciated this anthology giving me a good idea of where to start. I highly recommend it but I also think I enjoyed it most when I focussed solely on it, rather than trying to read it alongside other books. If you were on a very strict (i.e. you actually did it) one-story-a-day system, it would work nicely with other books, but I did like reading lots of them back to back. I also mention in that vlog that I did find the first few hundred pages a bit slow-going. While many of the stories certainly had interesting elements, I did start to wonder if I'd ever come across a story that made me say, yes, I have to read more of that author. Luckily that did come, time and again, but only when we got to around the 1970s, which chimes with what I already know about my reading tastes. 1900-1960s is a hit-and-miss period for me. Anyway, I loved it. It has left a big hole in my life, and I'm already thinking about what anthology I'll try next (though perhaps I'll choose a slightly shorter one just for the time being).
