Review: Svetlana Alexievich, Second-Hand Time

It’s often said that in Russia human life has never been valued. Ever since the Romanovs installed themselves back in 1613, human beings have been at the mercy and disposal of state and state-backed power. Tens of thousands serf labourers died to create Peter the Great’s capital, St Petersburg. Plough a field almost anywhere in Russia and you turn up more recent human bones.

I don’t often read a 700 page book now, but Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history, Second-Hand Time is gripping. It’s also harrowing and I found myself putting it down at the end of a section, as if it would be indecent to hurry on to the next tale. People tell her their stories back to the 1930s and in to the early 2000s and the themes are repetitive but realised in different ways in every case. State violence, a mendacious bureaucracy, poverty, alcoholism (without end), domestic violence, forced separation of parents and children, husbands and wives, love in a cold climate, the importance of books, the failure of perestroika, a seemingly unshakeable loyalty to Stalin. And then there is the thin and uncertain line which separates those who do evil from those who try to do good.

Alexievich is a seventy year old Nobel Prize winner and what is remarkable in this book is how she elicits narratives from her cast of mainly female characters and how, in what I guess is an exceptionally good translation, those narratives pull you along. You never want to stop reading.

Many of her cast want to memorialise lost grandparents, parents, lovers, children. It’s one of the few things you can do to try to make reparation to them and to heal yourself. In the week when I was reading this book, I came across a story of a man, Andrei Zhukov, who has just completed a twenty-year  self-imposed task. He has sat in the archives and made a list of all the names of all the 40 000 NKVD officers who executed Stalin’s Terror in the 1930s. The victim count is thought to number 12 million and the Russian organisation Memorial has so far managed to list about a quarter of the names. In Alexievich's book, that Terror still affects everyone.

This book should sit alongside the kinds of memoir and historical work which I have reviewed elsewhere on this Blog – see the labels to this post.

The footnote apparatus provided by the translator to assist the reader is excellent; I noticed only one error, Latvia rather than Lithuania (page 341). As for the translation itself, I queried only kikeling (basically, little Jew) finding that little kike sounded better to me.

Trevor Pateman, Silence Is So Accurate

Available now. The book is only available in Hardback and offers 224 pages of essays in autobiography and criticism. Find it at Amazon or order from your bookseller.

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Review: Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent

The Victorians have left us so many narratives of themselves that we are spoilt for choice if we want to re-invent them for ourselves and in our own image. Sarah Perry’s historical novel – set in 1893 -  is very well crafted and constructed, the scenes tight, the prose never slack, but her characters do tend to those which will be handled without too much difficulty in the polite Creative Writing class discussion or the Sunday School (or Guardian) book club. Oh, true, there is adultery but not too much and even-handed lesbianism and male homosexuality but of a delicate kind to which even a vicar would have to give his blessing. It’s one of the helpful things about the Victorians; they did generally keep their clothes on. There is a minor sexual assault (p 178), but even then everyone appears to remain fully clothed. It sits rather awkwardly but  I assume it is there to provide one more motive for Naomi Banks to run away from home, but those motives are so dispersed through the book that I suspect readers may have forgotten them by the time Naomi reappears two hundred pages later.

Projection of our own wishes into the past is one of the risks in writing – and reading - historical fictions. Another and simpler risk is that of anachronism, the kind which a friend or an editor will spot. Sarah Perry knows her material well and has been left to slip only occasionally: a first-class stamp ( p 415), unknown to the Victorians proud of their classless system - for most of the period, one penny for a letter and a half-penny for a postcard; an urban housing situation which is unsustainable (p 282), a term which belongs in the  literary gutter anyway; and poor William Ewart Gladstone gadding about with hookers (p 48) which sounds to me so wildly out of place that surely I am wrong and it is a Victorianism revived by Sarah Perry. For most of us, Gladstone walked the streets in search of fallen women or prostitutes.

I read the first hundred and fifty or so pages – probably more - with ease and pleasure, but then there is a hundred pages where the chapters become over-burdened with sub-plots, specifically those set in London. These sub-plots take us away from the powerful device of the Essex Serpent, which is one of Perry’s big creative devices. Then it picks up again when the serpent returns. Her other big creative devices are her child characters, who despite what I presume are nods in the directions of autism and gender fluidity, are all splendidly imagined and largely unthinkable as modern children. Her mad woman in the attic, the tubercular Stella, is also very interestingly imagined. 

There is a short scene which moved me at page 387, a scene beautifully concluded, at the bottom of the page, by one of Perry’s infrequent and restrained flashes of humour.

I bought this book partly because I’d read an interview with the author in which she discussed her writing habits and partly because Waterstones had a very attractively bound and jacketed version on sale. The design and presentation of so many books in the shops is dire; this one has been thought about.

Review: Dear Willy ... Edited by Claire Ohlsson Geheb

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This is an unusually interesting compilation of family letters and personal journals, kept in a suitcase by Willy Geheb (1900 - 1988), a blacksmith's and small farmer's son from rural Saxony in the eastern part of Germany. After the First World War, he leaves his home village to make his fortune in Brazil, Mexico and finally Chicago where he becomes an American citizen in 1934. He maintains - and keeps - a correspondence with his parents and members of a large family much of which survived to be discovered after his death, though material from the period after 1947 is missing.

From the point of view of a social historian, there is much here of interest. There is the hard life of an immigrant, the ambivalence of his family about his departure, their own changing circumstances as Germany struggles in the 1920s, their prompt adoption of Hitler in 1933, and their total dependence on Chicago-based Willy and his wife Irma for material help after Germany's defeat and the incorporation of their region into the Soviet Zone of east Germany. The letters which detail the contents of the parcels they have received are testimony to the poverty of immediate post-war Germany. But the birth of children is a constant of the family history, and no one ever hints at the possibility of achieving a better life through limiting family size. For, traditionally, children were assets to farming and small artisanal families. But in this story,not all of them survive and many are plagued by ill health.

Willy's blacksmith father is a conscientious letter-writer and tries to hold together a narrative and a set of values for the whole family until his death in 1945. He is stern, moralising and does not have a moment's hesitation in adding Hitler and Nazism to the Lutheran Christianity which serves him up until 1933. One of his sons, Paul, who comes across as rather unpleasant in his earlier letters to his brother Willy becomes an active Nazi. Willy in his letters is always urging other members of his family to get out and make their fortune in the USA but none do. His own letters are lively and concerned and, in the end, after 1945, he becomes the typical migrant burdened by the material needs of those back home, though he never complains and goes well beyond the call of family duty..

The family documents itself in photographs as well as letters, and the documentation must be unusually extensive for a family where no one has much formal education, even though by the standards of their village, they are well-established and relatively prosperous.

There is a Wikipedia page for Willy Geheb's home village of Schmirma and this book should certainly be added to the references on that page. There was no point at which the translation struck me as likely to be forced or wrong, and the book reads easily with fairly unobtrusive editorial comments to help sustain transitions in the story.

Most books I review here are ones I have bought; this one was sent to me for review.

Reading To Some Purpose - Advice to a Young Academic

I sometimes imagine some post-mortem pie chart which shows how I used the hours of my life. 

Sleeping will provide the biggest slice, of course. Next might come eating but I am pretty sure that in my case it will be substantially beaten by reading. I began reading a lot when I was about eleven and, since mine was a home without books, they came at first from public libraries. In the sixth form, I began buying my own books. Newly arrived at university, my rather scary Economics tutor, the late John Corina, snapped at me, “Book a day, Pateman! Book a day!” thus setting a reading target which I often fulfilled then and, fifty years later, sometime still do. And there aren’t many books you can read in under six or seven hours, not if you read them as I always do, cover to cover. I very rarely skim a book. So Book a Day is almost a day’s work a day.

Asked that standard question about how – given a second chance - you would live your life differently, I would have to reply that I would think more about why I was using my time reading the book in my hand. Looking back, I have read far too many books for no obvious purpose, not even just for pleasure. Indeed, it would have better to have read more books for pleasure and fewer for the rather obscure purposes of self-improvement, or because the author was famous, or because it was sent to me for review, and so on through a long list.

I would certainly have written more academic papers – books, even - if instead of listening to that “Book a day!” injunction, I had told myself to read all and only that necessary to write the next paper which might then become a chapter of the next book. If any young academic ever asked my advice (they don’t), I would have to say, Always read with some purpose and the more narrowly-defined, the better.

I can see that there is a case against that view (Well, I would, wouldn’t I?). If you stumble around as a typical “general reader” (which is how I classify myself), you will chance upon things and, if you persist long enough – like decades - some things will link up and allow you some new insight denied to the researcher who sticks studiously to the literature “in their field”. That is surely true. 

Recently, I have been turning some old journal articles in Pragmatics into a book – optical scanning plus copy and paste makes it a cakewalk. I took the decision to make a consolidated Bibliography for everything rather than leave references at the end of each chapter. And when I checked through the fourteen pages which resulted, I was very impressed. Whatever the quality of the chapters - probably mixed - the Bibliography is in a league of its own. And (with two or three exceptions) I have read everything on it. But no one is going to buy my book to read my Bibliography, even though I can’t help feeling it deserves a prize for effort.

What I now see in that Bibliography is the disproportion between the effort expended and the result. Many of those things read contributed no more than a sentence in a footnote and, frankly, a sentence in a footnote is not worth several hours’ work, not unless the result is a very highly polished pearl of a sentence. But if it’s that, it shouldn’t be in a footnote in the first place and it shouldn’t be a sentence. Academics nowadays are measured for their output of orange juice, and you will be out of a job if you only produce concentrated orange juice.

I find it hard to break with old habits. Not so long ago, I ordered a dozen books off Amazon, some deliciously obscure. One of them, I knew in advance, might contribute one sentence to something I was working on. I was going to read four hundred pages on Quietistic Elements in Eighteenth Century Hasidic Thought to squeeze out that one sentence. I just had to make a pearl of it. But, for once, reason won out and after making myself skim the book I decided not to try for that one sentence.

In truth, I know there are short-cuts. Take my advice. Use them.

The Times Higher invites emailed submissions of short Opinion pieces. I sent this in a few months ago, but got no reply, so here it is on my Blog

Essay: On Finishing a Book

Someone said to me recently that you don't finish a book; you abandon it. I had already got to the point where I was tinkering and was only spinning things out just in case some voice in my head told me to Start Again!

Donald Trump solved my problem. The book is not Current Affairs, but there is a theme about America which runs through it. And I thought: If I go on tinkering, Trump will start getting in and in ways which have not been thought through. Any re-writes will surely stick out as such. True, he's there already in the background of a sentence about building walls but that's it - and I decided to keep it that way. I don't want him in a last-minute foreground.

So I signed off.   A couple of days later, Leonard Cohen died and confirmed my decision. He's in the book at least three times and I had written some nice things about him. His death gave me a further reason not to start fiddling around again with a near-final text. I didn't want to ramp up what I had already written and which had been quite carefully considered. I wrote a tribute while he was still alive and I will stay with what I wrote.

As well as working with an editor on every chapter, I found (using gumtree where lots of clever people looking for work can be found) a complete stranger to read through a late draft and it proved very helpful. I would have repeated the exercise, but a couple of emails I sent out in hope went unanswered; a third one was answered by someone Famous excusing himself as too busy.

Today I printed off a copy and read right through, just doing copy-edits and small style glitches. It's only 57 000 words. If my nerve holds, I'll send it to the typesetter on Monday. I'll keep you updated ...

Update 20 November It's gone to the typesetter a day early under the title Silence Is So Accurate and I hope it will appear in 2017. I have worked up a cover I like but this can't be finalised until the page-length of the book is confirmed - that determines the spine width.

What I don't have for the cover is something which nowadays is more or less obligatory: I don't have any Puffs from friends, family and famous declaring my book the best thing since the last best thing. Should you be Famous and reading this, a Puff would always be appreciated. Of course, you don't have to read the book ...

Well, now the spine length is settled, here is the front cover. Publication due 15 February 2017, ISBN 9780993587924. Pages 224. Price £20. Available for pre-order at Waterstones and Blackwell and Book Depository.

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Review: Paul Beatty, The Sellout

I bought this book from the Waterstone's table of novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize, read it during a week working in Germany, and by the time I got home it had won the Prize.

Novels deal with things at least some of which we will not be familiar with and sometimes will be completely ignorant of. But we manage, sometimes only partially. I don't think I understood everything in Paul Beatty's book and though I often smiled or occasionally laughed I am certain I did not get all the gags. So I am not a good judge of the book. That said, I have doubts about it which relate to other aspects than the gags I didn't get.

I felt the author was trying too hard, like a stand-up comedian on a bad night. I felt the book lacked structure, trying to do too many things and not always sure what those things were even though all the reviewers who are all over my copy are completely sure.* I felt that as it progresses it actually runs out of steam - the Supreme Court is not a climax but just a continuation. At just one point (page 266) did the book really move me in a short passage I felt could have owed something to Brecht.

I concede that this is a Minority Report. Time will tell. Go through the back list of Booker Prize winners and there are plenty there you will struggle to recognise - Was that the book about ...?  - and, if you try to read those forgotten books, you will struggle.

* It amused me that The Guardian was there on the  cover. If Paul Beatty had submitted an extract from this book for publication to that Sunday School newspaper, I am 100% sure it would have either not replied or would have set one of its endless supply of dire columnists onto him.