08/08/19: David Thomas and Helen Krasner – Travels with Cookie: Narrowboat Cruising with a Cat (2014)

The author learns that he has terminal cancer and decides to fulfil his lifelong ambition to buy and live on a canal boat. He does this with Cookie, his large, fluffy, white cat.

During their four years afloat, David saves a woman stuck in the mud and meets a seal, while Cookie – perhaps not the brightest button in the box – falls in the water a few times. But otherwise, not a great deal happens beyond boating up and down England and Wales. This is no way prevents it being an enjoyable read.

I came to this book via its co-author, Helen Krasner, whose Midges, Maps & Muesli: An Account of a 5,000-Mile Walk Round the Coast of Britain I enjoyed recently. The story of how David meets and falls in love with Helen is touching. They end up living together (she has five cats of her own) and his health miraculously improves.

I would have liked a bit more Cookie and a little less boating, but it’s to the authors’ great credit that this doesn’t become yet another sentimental “me and my pet” memoir.

05/04/19: Deborah Levy – Early Levy: Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography (2014)

This is a bind-up of two short, early novels.

Beautiful Mutants (1989):

A bunch of seemingly unrelated characters often given nicknames (The Banker, The Anorexic Anarchist, The Innocents and so on) float through the narrative seemingly without purpose.

This is an unusual novel in that it seems so disjointed, with surreal and often violent episodes depicted in poetic language. The way the characters speak is completely unrealistic – and presumably intentionally so:

“This fish has the possessed eye of a poet and tastes just as useless. In fact it tastes like a melancholy misfit. I have always hated poetry, I prefer hard mathematics or even hard drugs. Do you really think that in consuming this pescado I would consume its ideas? I have spat them out again and again. And what is The Idea? That there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird? Give it to me, I’ll take it to the market and show you sixty ways of looking at it. Poets are fuckwits. They try and legislate with language but they don’t have the roubles to bribe. On my aunt’s salmon farm they stroke the belly of hen salmon to squeeze out their eggs for breeding. Well, I have squeezed you out too.”

Certainly no one speaks like this:

“I own a prestige apartment facing the sparkle of the river, with south-facing views, a private car park, porter, video security, entry phone, swimming pool and a sauna to nurture my health, which is after all my wealth. I am given all this for good reason. I am valued; I am an irresistible proposition to men in parliaments and tycoons on committees and entrepreneurs of all kinds; my condom case bulges with the promise of liaison and adventure. I am the new pioneer; the great adventure of my generation is to destabilize everything and everyone.”

I don’t think it’s meant to be realistic. It’s a novel of ideas, constructed out of experimental language, jamming in jarring images, phrases, situations and thoughts. But I found it too incoherent to get much out of it, which I accept may be my failing as a reader.

Swallowing Geography (1993):

The second novel is no more rewarding. J.K. (a reference to Jack Kerouac) travels through seemingly unrelated scenes and locations. Again, it’s very disjointed. If anything, it becomes even more abstract as it goes on. There are characters called B, H, X, Y and Z. Levy may be trying to deconstruct identity and reveal it to be fluid and ever-shifting. But once that point has been made, what of it?

Again the language is poetic and even beautiful, but the fragmentary conversations and observations don’t add up to a great deal.

I loved Swimming Home, The Cost of Living and Hot Milk, so found this very disappointing indeed.

13/05/15: Andy Miller – The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life (2014)

The concept is good: an attempt to read 50 life-enhancing works and document that experience. The author does this in a highly readable manner and the book starts well. The first half covers the first 13 books in detail (as per his list on p.297). After that, something odd happens to the structure. He dedicates the second half to the remaining 37 books, but some of them barely get mentioned. Of course it's the author's right to structure the book however he likes, but it does feel imbalanced. Plus, this falsifies the "fifty great books" part of the project: you expect to read his thoughts on all 50 entries, not just a selection of them. I was looking forward to hearing how he related to On the Road, Catch-22, Lord of the Flies, Frankenstein and many other classics, but – confusingly – he ignores them completely.

Another issue is the tone of voice. Again, this becomes less satisfying as the book progresses. On p.201 he writes: "I did not join a book group to talk about my feelings. I wanted to talk about books: how they fit together, why they worked, the occasional miracle of fiction." So why, then, is so much of this book about his feelings rather than the books he read? There are countless personal digressions and too often he veers into chummy "blokey memoir" territory (see also Stuart Maconie, Mark Radcliffe, Andrew Collins) despite commenting at length on the "blokeishness I find disconcerting" in other men. Again, this confuses matters.

The Year of Reading Dangerously is at its best when the author writes in detail about the books themselves and what it feels like to read them – sometimes pleasurable, sometimes excruciatingly difficult, and sometimes both.