Recent Reads: Despair by Nabokov

I picked up this particular book for no other reason than I liked the sound of it – I’ve gradually been reading more Nabokov over the years (particularly loving “Pnin” recently) and this one intrigued me. It’s one of Nabokov’s Russian-written titles, translated (and revised) by himself later, and my edition is a nice old Penguin with a very atmospheric painting on the cover!

The book is set in 1930s Germany and Hermann Hermann is a Russian émigré who works as a chocolate salesman. He lives with his wife Lydia, and a regular visitor is her cousin, the artist Ardalion – it is hinted that they might be lovers, but never made clear. On a business trip to Prague, Hermann encounters a man who he believes to be his double – a tramp called Felix. Hermann is attracted and repelled by Felix, but eventually hatches a plan to use his double in an insurance fraud. But all does not go as planned.

That’s a short summary of what is a complex piece of work, and one that cannot easily be pinned down! From the start, we are aware that Hermann is a very unreliable narrator, and particularly in the early chapters he finds it hard to set down his story in a coherent way. There are constant digressions, discussions of the best way to tell a story, and it seems that Hermann is in some ways trying to avoid getting to the point. And as with “Pnin”, there are times when Nabokov seems to be positioning himself between the narrator and the author, putting an extra layer of storytelling into the mix.

It’s perhaps a little trite and obvious to draw comparisons with other Russian authors, but the story is strongly concerned with doppelgängers and there is much referring to Dostoevsky (as well as many other classic Russian writers). However, with “The Double” it was unclear if the second version of the narrator existed; in this story Felix definitely exists, but his resemblance to Hermann is what is in doubt.

“A few days before the first of October, I happened to walk with my wife through the Tiergarten; there on a footbridge we stopped, with our elbows on the railing. Below, on the still surface of the water, we admired the exact replica (ignoring the model, of course) of the park’s autumn tapestry of many-hued foliage, the glassy blue of the sky, the dark outlines of the parapet and of our inclined faces. When a slow leaf fell, there would flutter up to meet it, out of the water’s shadowy depths, its unavoidable double. Their meeting was soundless. The leaf came twirling down, and twirling up there would rise towards it, eagerly, its exact, beautiful, lethal reflection.”

In essence, this is a fascinating look inside the mind of a deranged killer – Hermann obviously believes Felix to be his exact double, which is revealed to be false as the story goes on. He has based his whole perfect murder plot on this resemblance, and so the whole plan collapses like a house of cards when it comes to fruition, owing to his mistaken impression. But the narration is very unsettling in that we are never sure whether Hermann is telling the truth, whether his perceptions are accurate and indeed at one point he almost insinuates that the two men have changed places and he is Felix! By the end of the story, our views of both Lydia and Ardalion have changed and they seem completely different to the portraits painted by Hermann – Lydia becoming a bullied, crushed woman and Ardalion having more strength of mind than Herman would admit.

Like all mad murderers, Hermann thinks he is an artist – that his plot is perfect – and he cannot cope when everything goes wrong. The final chapters are written in diary form as it is revealed that Hermann has made a fatal mistake in his plan and is being pursued by the authorities. The story ends on April 1st and in many ways we are still unsure of the truth of anything we have read. What the title refers to becomes clear during the finale of the story, but could also be a pun on the concept of twins, particularly as Nabokov was fluent in French and so would have understood the phrase “des pair”…

“Woe to the fancy which is not accompanied by wit.”

The theme of doubles obviously obsesses Hermann (he senses splits in his personality concerning his relationship with Lydia), and it is obviously a theme which interests Nabokov too. There is constant play with the imagery of mirrors and also prominently the portrait of Hermann painted by Ardalion, which our narrator disparages – but we are left wondering if it is a truer picture of him than he would like to admit!

Nabokov’s use of language is deliberate and precise, very clever and quite beautiful in places. This is not an easy book to read, but rewarding and involving, and towards the end very exciting. I think there are many deep themes being explored here and that it would take another read for me to really get to the bottom of it. Certainly “Despair” has made me even keener to read more Nabokov.

Revamping the Bookshelves – plus the Joy of Unexpected Finds!

Any reader of this blog might have guessed that, from the amount of book making their way onto Mount TBR recently, a bookshelf crisis might be brewing – and they would be right! The Virago and Russian shelves have been filling up to the extent that I couldn’t cram any more volumes in, even lying on top of other books. Enough became enough, and I had a bit of a shuffle around this week.

Why is it, though, that moving books about is so exhausting? All I did, in essence, was move a couple of shelves of not-often-read volumes into Middle Child’s old room where there was a little space, plus free up one shelf which had non-books on it. That was ok, but the actual expanding of the Viragos and the Russians onto the newly cleared areas seemed to be unnecessarily stressful, and I ended up dropping a large Nabokov on my toe at least twice. However, the books are now in a much more manageable state and here are some images of the improvements:

Newly tidied Viragos

This is the main VMC collection – it may look smallish but it is two deep so there are quite a few volumes here…

More Viragos – not the main collection!

I pulled these Viragos out of the main collection for a number of reasons – firstly, the books at the back are non-VMCs like the Travellers or Biographies or fiction books or even modern fiction. Secondly, at the front are may Taylors and Pyms and Lehmanns which in some cases are mixed editions and it seemed to make sense to have them separate.

Persephones

Then there is the Persephones – not so many of those so far, but they are given pride of place at the front of a shelf (particularly the two “Miss Buncle” books which were my LibraryThing Secret Santa gift and which I really *must* read soon – half term next week should be very busy….

General Russian Fiction

On to the Russians – there are a lot of them…. (well, I have been collecting them since about 1972).These two double depth shelves have general Russian fiction – note the large Nabokov which is very bad for toes.

Bulgakov and Dostoevsky

Bulgakov and Dostoevsky – well, there are so many of them that they get shelves to themselves. Behind the Bulgakovs are the Mayakovskys, which are just as numerous…

Russian non-fiction

Below the Russian fiction is the Russian non-fiction – again, much of this I’ve had since my teens so there is quite a lot. And I have to say that I *have* read most of these as I had/have quite an interest in Russian history.

Solzhenitsyn and others

The Solzhenitsyn collection also takes up most of a shelf on its own, which is understandable as most of them are rather old too. Underneath are other books of interest – Bright Young Things and Mervyn Peake mainly.

This was a job I’d been putting off for a while (well, since my last revamp) and I’m glad things are a little more in order. I’ve also left space for expansion…. not that I should, but knowing what I’m like I will need it! And despite my best resolutions, I did come home from Saturday’s trip to town with a few bargains.

First up, a really lovely Book Club edition of Rumer Godden’s “The Greengage Summer”:

I picked  up three of her Virago titles via The Book People last week and then came across this – for the ridiculous sum of 75p and it’s in really marvellous condition. Frankly, the cover alone is worth the price – I do love Book Club covers!

This modern Virago edition of “The Yellow Wallpaper” was a 30p library decommissioning bargain – it has the title story plus other pieces, so I was well pleased!

But the final find was the most interesting – in one of the newer charity shops, Youngest Child pointed out a box of hardback book club editions lurking, and a dig through brought up this book:

I confess to  never having heard of Fred Basnett or his books, “Travels of A Capitalist Lackey” but the title attracted my attention and I think this is going to be a gem – a travel book of Fred’s experiences going through Soviet Russia and beyond in the early 1960s! The book is in perfect condition and comes with map and pictures – all for £1.50. Very happy to say the least…

 

The Japanese have a word for it…..

Whilst browsing on Tumblr recently, I came across a post which pointed me to a very apt word which I think certainly applies to my book-collecting habits…

‘tsundoku’ – is defined as “the Japanese word for buying books & not reading them, leaving them to pile up”

Well, that’s definitely me – I could illustrate this post with lots of pictures of Mount TBR but I won’t – what I will be posting tomorrow is pictures of the recently tidied shelves as I have been having a bit of Book Guilt. But I’m not worried – I’m sure it won’t last long….

Recent Reads: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Leskov

My recent reading of Chekhov’s “The Shooting Party”, and consideration of the state of women in Russia (and Russian literature) reminded me of a shorter piece I hadn’t read for some time – Nikolai Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” – so I thought this would be a good time for a revisit.

This work, which should more accurately be titled “A Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, is a surprisingly dark and dramatic work, packing an awful lot into less than 100 pages. The Lady Macbeth of the title is Katerina Lvovna, married to an old, dull, provincial landowner. She is stifled at home and unable to produce a child (which is blamed on her, but transpires not to be her fault, as is revealed during the story).

“Katerina Lvovna would pass to and from through the empty rooms, start to yawn from boredom and then climb the stairs to the conjugal bedroom… She would steal an hour or two’s nap, but awake from it once again to that peculiarly Russian boredom, the boredom which reigns inside the houses of merchants, and which, it is said, makes even the thought of hanging oneself seem a cheerful prospect… no-one paid the slightest attention to the boredom that was weighing her down.”

Naturally, the moment a handsome young worker called Sergei appears on the scene, all is lost… Katerina’s young man is shiftless and disloyal, and she is forced to take desperate action to keep hold of him as her lover. Dark deed follows dark deed until we come to the blackest of all – a crime so shocking that it even shakes Katerina herself. She is not a hard woman, but desperate, and she lets her needs overcome her scruples and her knowledge of the evil she is undertaking.

Natalia Andreychenko as Katerina in the Roman Balayan film adaptation

But this evil does not go unpunished, and Katerina and Sergei are caught. There is a brutal reckoning, they are shipped off to Siberia, and soon it is clear that Sergei no longer has any interest in his old lover as she no longer has money and status. His cruelty, however, will be repaid in kind.

This is a harsh but lyrical story. It paints a vivid picture of the lengths a woman in love will go to in order to keep hold of her lover. The physical side of the relationship is obviously important to Katerina, and presumably she found no pleasure or satisfaction with her husband. The issue of the status of women comes to the fore again, as Katerina marries the first man who asks her in order to find a “good husband”. But she is trapped in an unhappy situation and so vulnerable to manipulation by the first man who gains her love. And certainly Sergei soon learns he only has to plant a seed in her mind for it to take root and the action he desires will follow, however drastic, to ensure he is kept in comfort.

Aleksandr Abdulov as Sergei in the Roman Balayan film adaptation

I was impressed again on my re-reading of this powerful work. It is highly regarded in Russia, so much so that Shostakovich turned it into an opera, and there have been several filmed versions. I only wish that more of Leskov’s work was available in English!

Recent Reads: The Shooting Party by Chekhov

I’ve slipped back into Russian reading mode, as I wanted to explore Chekhov’s longer works a little more, having had mixed reactions to my two other recent reads. I think “The Shooting Party” might be his longest work, but it’s not often talked about compared with his short stories. I picked up a Penguin Classics version, nicely translated by Ronald Wilks, and dipped in!

The book begins with an editor (AC) receiving a visitor who wants to leave him a manuscript to read. The editor is reluctant, but finds his visitor an honest-seeming, handsome man and so takes the manuscript and after a couple of months picks it up to read – and finds he cannot put it down! It is the core story of the “The Shooting Party”, which the visitor, a country magistrate, has subtitled “From the Memoirs of an Investigating Magistrate”. He informs the editor that it is based on true events, but the name he gives himself as teller of the tale is different from the one which he uses to announce himself in person. Already we can sense we are in the presence of an unreliable narrator.

The story is set in a small provincial town. Zinovyev is a young magistrate, and spends his life swinging from one extreme to another: at times, he does nothing but work diligently, leading a quiet life; but when his friend, the dissolute Count Karneyev, visits his local crumbling estate, Zinovyev is instantly drawn into a world of debauchery – drinking, orgying with gypsies and even assaulting local people. At the beginning of our tale, the Count has returned, bringing a strange and taciturn Pole with him, and the two friends begin an instant round of bad behaviour. During the Count’s stay, they encounter the heroine of the story, Olga. She is the young and beautiful daughter of a drunken forester and both the Count and Zinovyev are instantly captivated, as is the Estate Manager Urbenin.

The three men pursue Olga in their different ways, but she shocks them all by announcing she will marry Urbenin, and does so. However, on her wedding day she reveals that she loves Zinovyev and in fact instantly becomes his lover. Passions continue to rise and fall, and then Olga runs off to live with the Count. Things continue to deteriorate until a shocking attempt is made on Olga’s life – the central puzzle of this story – but who was responsible? All the various mysteries are revealed by the end of the tale, but I won’t say too much about the plot strands so as to avoid spoilers.

“The air was saturated with the exhalations of vernal greenery and caressed my healthy lungs with its softness. I breathed it in, and as I surveyed the open prospect with my enraptured eyes, I sensed the presence of spring, of youth – and it seemed that those young birches, the grass by the wayside and the incessantly humming cockchafers were sharing my feelings.

‘But why is it back there, in the world,’ I reflected, ‘that men herd themselves together in wretched, cramped hovels, confine themselves to narrow, constricting ideals, while there’s such freedom and scope for life and thought here? Why don’t they come out here?’

And my imagination that had waxed so poetic had no desire to encumber itself with thoughts of winter and earning a living – those two afflictions that drive poets into cold, prosaic St. Petersburg and filthy Moscow, where they pay fees for poetry, but provide no inspiration.”

“The Shooting Party” is often touted as no more than an early detective novel, and therefore unusual because it is a Russian one. However, it seemed to me a lot more than that and I feel it’s rather unjustly neglected. Certainly, it’s not often listed among Chekhov’s major works but it has many merits.

For a start, the writing is lovely, particularly some of the descriptions of nature and the countryside. The reader really gets a feel for the location, and nature itself seems to be taking quite a part in the plot!

“It was a fine day in August. The sun shone with all the warmth of summer, the blue sky fondly beckoned one into the distance, but there was already a feeling of autumn in the air. Leaves that had come to the end of their lives were turning gold in the green foliage of the pensive forest, while the darkening fields had a wistful, melancholic look.

Presentiments of inescapable, oppressive autumn took hold of us too and it was not difficult to foresee that things would very soon come to a head. At some time the thunder had to rumble and the rain start pouring to freshen the humid air! It is usually close and sultry before a thunderstorm, when dark, leaden clouds approach, but we were already being stifled morally: this was evident in everything – in our movements, our smiles, in whatever we said.”

The characterisation is excellent too, and the various players in this drama are wonderfully portrayed: the dissolute Count, the stolid Urbenin, the local dignitaries, Zinovyev himself. Olga is intriguing, because despite being the ostensible heroine, she is not really a very sympathetic character. Capricious, self-centre and vain, her main interests seem to be dresses and status. She is foolish and coquettish and I could not even take seriously her protestations that she loved Zinovyev, because despite giving herself to him, her desire for marriage to a Count, status and dresses seemed stronger than that love.

Although this book was written in Chekhov’s early years, perhaps intended as a pot-boiler to earn a quick rouble, it does address some serious issues. The status of women in Russia was very low at the time, as can be seen in any number of works of literature, and they were often married off to much older men where they were little more than slaves; beating and domestic violence was the norm. More liberal Russians were starting to find this state of affairs unacceptable and there is a very famous painting by Pukirev, referred to in the notes, known as “Misalliance” or “The Unequal Marriage” which sums this up.

So despite Olga’s character flaws, we can sympathise with her desire to escape from poverty and servitude, and just wish she had made better choices. Interestingly, despite our narrator’s contempt for her affairs, she married the first man who offered her a formal union and so obviously neither he nor the Count were prepared to commit to Olga but simply wanted to seduce her. As he is an unreliable narrator, she may not be as fickle as she is portrayed.

Another astonishing element to this book is how explicit the content is. The Count and Zinovyev are smacking their lips (metaphorically) at various points at the thought of new girls (presumably virgins) and there is plenty of booze and orgying with the gypsies. Zinovyev carries Olga off and has his way with her before her husband, and there is much general debauchery going on. Compared with what was happening in Victorian literature at the time, this is quite an eye-opener!

The format of a novel within a novel is effective, and also allows AC to present himself in the role of narrator and even detective! I’m not going to say too much about the solution, but personally I found it so obvious that I was actually expecting another twist that did not come! AC flags it up quite early and any seasoned crime novel reader should guess quite early on. Nevertheless, at the time of writing, the identity of the murderer was probably quite shocking. Interestingly, Chekhov has his narrator self state at the end of the book “There is no villain” but equally it seems there is no hero in this story. Our flawed, unreliable narrator ends up being quite a different character from that presented at the start of the novel, and the character development is well handled.

Chekhov himself somewhat disowned this early work, but I think it deserves better treatment. The writing is excellent, the plotting and characterisation vivid, and it’s a very readable, clever book. Although Chekhov focused very much on shorter works, on the evidence of this novel he certainly was able to put together a coherent, longer work that’s a very satisfying read! Despite its flaws, this is a complex and intriguing book with some startlingly beautiful descriptions of the Russian landscape and some wonderfully memorable characters. It’s a shame that AC never took his excursion into detective fiction any further (apart from the odd short story) as if this volume is anything to judge by, further works could have been very readable!

Treats from Leicester!

We were lucky enough to have a visit from Middle Child this weekend, coming home from Leicester to check up on OH’s recovery, and that of course was the main treat!

However, she was lovely enough to bring me home some wonderful green Viragos she had picked up for my collection (I have raved about the Leicester charity shops before – it’s a close competition between here and there for the best!)

I was *very* pleased with these lovelies as you can imagine, as they’re not titles that turn up every day and they are in pretty good nick apart from a little fading on one and sticker damage on another – thanks, Middle Child!

We had a lovely girly shop on Saturday too and I found a few more treasures locally:

These came from a charity shop which prices its books as 2 for £1, so having found the Renault I had to get something else and the Dinesen seemed the ideal choice (and a Virago for 50p is not to be sneezed at!)

These two and the following came from the British Heart Foundation charity shop – slightly more expensive at £2 each but if I bought them online they’d cost more than that and the actually condition of online books is often so variable.

This, of course, is essential for the Pym read-along so I was happy to pick it up.

Finally this:

A very sweet little Pushkin Press Stefan Zweig book I don’t have.

Enough reading matter to keep me going for ages – and to make the tbr mountain even more unstable……. :s

Recent Reads: Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham

One of the things I love about books is following my reading muse randomly and finding an unexpected gem. “Ashenden” by Somerset Maugham, the second book I’ve read by this author, turned out to be one of those! I picked up a set of his books via The Book People, a lovely collection of Vintage paperbacks with gorgeous covers at a ridiculously cheap price. I read “Up at the Villa” last year, and liked it but wasn’t really overwhelmed. However, I wanted something to contrast with what I’ve been reading recently and a book about espionage adventures during the First World War sounded like it would be quite readable – which it was!

“Ashenden believed much more in his acuteness than in a firearm, which is apt to go off at the wrong time and make a noise, but there are moments when it gives you confidence to feel your fingers round its butt, and this sudden summons seemed to him exceedingly mysterious.”

“Ashenden” is more of a collection of linked episodes, almost short stories, than a coherent novel, but is none the worse for that. The title character is apparently based on Maugham himself, and the tales on his own experiences doing just this kind of thing in WWI. Ashenden is a well-known playwright and he is approached by a Colonel, known only as R., who recruits him to collect information for the allies. Based mainly in neutral Switzerland, Ashenden undertakes a number of missions, encountering some larger than life characters along the way -  diplomats and adventurers from all manner of countries, the wonderfully named Hairless Mexican, the traitor Grantley Caypor, a travelling salesman from the USA by the name of Mr. Harrington, and even his ex-lover Anastasia Alexandrovna, an exiled Russian revolutionary. The settings are wide-ranging, from Switzerland, France, unnamed Balkan countries and ending up in revolutionary Russia.

Maugham is a deceptively good writer. What seems like simple prose is not, it’s wonderfully constructed and he’s very good at building up characters in a subtle way until you suddenly realise you have a perfect picture of them. There are long digressions which are not necessarily relevant to the business of spying, but which paint pictures of men and women and their lives, and so add to the richness of the book. Certainly this work encompasses many facets of human nature: love, adventure, cruelty, violence, art, poetry – the whole gamut of emotions and reasons for living. It is also very realistic in that much of Ashenden’s time is actually routine and dull – long hours labouring over coding a message; endless days travelling in boredom across Siberia in a train; hanging around waiting for orders. According to Wikipedia, this book was very influential on later works by authors such as Fleming, and certainly this seems to be the first work of fiction portraying a spy boss known by a single letter! This boss, R., is a masterful creation – stern, with an incredible amount of power but out of his depth in some situations where Ashenden is much more in control.

“Luxury is dangerous to people who have never known it and to whom its temptations are held out too suddenly. R., that shrewd, cynical man, was captured by the vulgar glamour and the shoddy brilliance of the scene before him. Just as the advantage of culture is that it enables you to talk nonsense with distinction, so the habit of luxury allows you to regard its frills and furbelows with a proper contumely.”

(Yes, I had to look up ‘contumely’ – which apparently means “Insolent or insulting language or treatment”!)

The book is full of bon mots and clever comments, but this apparent lightness hides much deeper subject matter. Maugham has perfected the art of wrong-footing the reader. Just as you start to think of Ashenden as an aloof, foppish kind of Bertie Wooster type, Maugham shakes you by casually dropping a shocking event into the narrative – the cold, bare portrayal of an execution; a dog’s chilling reaction to the death of its beloved master; the discovery of dead bodies on the streets of revolutionary Petrograd.

“Though he had both esteem and admiration for the sensibility of the human race, he had little respect for their intelligence; man has always found it easier to sacrifice his life than to learn the multiplication table.”

Ashenden himself is an engaging figure; shy, a little detached, full of dry wit, and gradually revealing himself more as the book goes along until towards the end we find out about his love affair with Anastasia Alexandrova. He describes this in a humorous, self-mocking way, but it is still nevertheless very affecting and we become interested in seeing how he will respond when they meet again. The ending of the book is sad and unexpected and left me quite shocked, actually.

I really enjoyed my first proper excursion into Maugham’s work and if I wasn’t halfway through a readalong, I’d be grabbing another volume off the tbr – highly recommended!

(A word of warning to those of sensitive disposition – and I hate myself for even saying this – the book is of its age and so inevitably displays some racial stereotyping. Ignore this as being something that will displayed in all books from this era, and just enjoy great writing.)