#1930Club – some previous reads!

During our Club reading weeks, I always like to take a look back at books I’ve read previously from the year in question. 1930 turns out to be a bit of a bumper year; not only do I own a good number of books from that year, but I’ve read a lot too! So here’s just a few of them…

Just a few of my previous 1930 reads…

Some of these, of course are pre-blog: there’s two of my favourite crime writers lurking in the pile, Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie. The Sayers is “Strong Poison”, a book that introduced Lord Peter Wimsey’s love interest Harriet Vane. I adore all Sayers and I would have liked to revisit this during our weekly read. Christie’s “The Murder at the Vicarage” also saw a debut, that of Miss Marple (in novel form anyway – she’d already appeared in short stories). Again, I was so tempted to pick this one up, but I went for “Mr. Quin” instead as I know “Vicarage” so well. Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” is detecting of a different kind, hard-boiled American. I love Hammett’s writing (although not everyone has enjoyed him recently…) and again was very tempted.

Katherine Manfield’s “The Aloe” is also a pre-blog read; it’s a slim and lovely Virago I’ve owned for decades and the story is a longer version of her short work “The Prelude”. A revisit to this one would have been lovely too, as her prose is gorgeous. “The Foundation Pit” by Platonov is most likely the first of his books which I read; it’s an unusual, allusive book and his writing is very distinctive. Yet another writer I’d love to go back to.

As for titles I’ve reviewed on the blog, there’s the very wonderful Jean Rhys. I wrote about “After Leaving Mr. McKenzie” relatively recently (well – 2016 actually…), and so I didn’t re-read. Yet another excellent woman prose stylist, with a haunting main character, compelling prose and a bleak outlook for women of her time and kind.

Nabokov’s “The Eye” was also a 2016 read; it’s a fascinating, tricksy and clever novella, with wonderful writing and a marvellously unreliable narrator. I love Nabokov’s prose and since I have many, many of his books unread on the shelves I should get back to reading him soon! 😀

Gaito Gazdanov is a relatively recent discovery; a marvellous emigre Russian author, many of his works have been brought out in beautiful Pushkin Press editions. “An Evening with Claire”, however, is his first novel which was brought out in the USA by Overlook Press/Ardis, and it features his beautiful, often elegiac prose in a work often described as Proustian. I believe more Gazdanov is on the horizon from Pushkin – hurrah! 😀

Not pictured in the pile above is “Le Bal” by Irene Nemirovsky. I came a little late to the party with her books; I failed in my first attempt to read “Suite Francaise” but after reading a collection of her shorter early works I came to love her writing, and “Le Bal” was one of those titles. It’s a powerful little story, portraying the dynamics of a mother-daughter relationship in all its horror and proves she was such a good writer.

So those are just a few of my previous reads, on and off the blog, from 1930. Really, it was *such* a bumper year for books, wasn’t it? So glad we chose it! Have you read any of the above? 😀

The all-seeing “I”

The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov

I came very close to reading another Nabokov for the 1938 Club in the form of “The Gift”, but alas ran out of time. However, when I was visiting Norwich earlier in the month and having a browse through the bookshops, I had a quick look at this title, one of the few by Nabokov I don’t have a copy of. It sounded fascinating (as do all his books) so I set about procuring a reasonably priced copy, and felt obliged to read it as soon as it arrived…. Well, it *is* quite short!

In fact, at 103 pages it’s most definitely no more than a novella, and could indeed be a long short story (if we must put labels on things). However, this being Nabokov, there’s plenty to think about. The eye in question is the all-seeing one of the unnamed narrator, a young man living in émigré Berlin. He scrapes a living as a tutor, and entertains himself by having a rather unenthusiastic affair with a woman called Matilda. However, when her husband gives him a sound beating in front of his charges, he decides that the best thing to do is end it all and shoots himself. Or does he….

From the start, it’s unclear whether the narrator really is dead. Although he thinks he is, some kind of consciousness continues and he (and we) can’t be sure if the surroundings and people we see are created by the narrator. They could be real, and the detachment of the narrator due to his recovering from his illness; or he could be in some other realm and simply imagining all that he tells us. Nevertheless he apparently has a job in a bookstore and mixes with a variety of other emigres – from the priggish Colonel Mukhin to the lovely sisters Evgenia and Vanya. One character in particular, the young man Smurov, fascinates the narrator and he spends much time observing the man as he falls in love with Vanya. Depending on where he sees Smurov, who with and in what circumstances, he’s presented with a different image of the young man. Who actually *is* this Smurov? Once again, the lines between reality and imagination are blurred.

Kashmarin had borne away yet another image… Does it make any difference which? For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.

All becomes clear in the end and Smurov’s real identity becomes clear, but I shan’t say how. In a way, that isn’t really the point. Instead Nabokov takes us on a kind of journey through an inner life, and gets us questioning how much of what we perceive can be trusted. The narrator is, of course, completely unreliable (as so often with Nabokov) and that adds to the joy and confusion of reading this.

Of course, this being Nabokov, the writing is also superb. The book was written in 1930, published in Russian in 1965 and translated by Nabokov and his son in 1966. Any reading of Nabokov’s work is fascinating, thought-provoking and sometimes difficult, but always worth the effort. And this shorter work would be a good place to try his writing out if his longer books seem a little intimidating. I’m rather wishing I *had* read “The Gift” for the 1938 Club now… 🙂