Fran Landesman - Collected Poems

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A welcome collection

It is good to have Fran Landesman's poems collected in a single volume.  I was aware of her only from odd poems in anthologies or quoted occasionally by someone else, so I am glad to be able to take a serious look at her work – and it's generally very good.

Fran Landesman generally writes in formal stanzas using both rhyme and metre.  There's often an almost childlike simplicity to her metre which in the early poems doesn't work so well; some come across as rather amateurish sub-Dorothy Parker stuff – especially as her rhythm is pretty shaky and forced at times.  However, in the later poems it's a much more effective style: more tightly controlled and the maturity and skill she's developed make the contrast much more effective between the often umpty-tumpty feel of the rhythm and the more serious content. 

Her subject matter is often love affairs gone wrong, the yearnings of the heart and the sexist nonsense which she spent a lot of time pointing out and subverting very effectively.  It's often poignant and quite penetrating, and it's also witty and sometimes genuinely funny – like Yankee Doodle Londoner about the differences between US and UK English usages, for example. To give an example of her style, I liked "She" (for Hanja) which begins:

She so pretty, She so crazy

So delightful and so lazy

She make pictures, She make babies

All her life is full of "maybes"

She can light your darkest hours

She got visions, she got powers

Everything She makes unravels

Got no money, still She travels…

A very believable and recognisable portrait, I thought.

I don't think this is great poetry, to be honest, but there's some very good verse here which is often evocative and thoughtful, and the occasional very different-feeling poem, like the extremely atmospheric "Boy" for example, brings a sense of the depth which can sometimes get lost among the bouncing stanzas.  I'm glad to have this and to have made the acquaintance of these poems.  Fran Landesman's work is well worth reading and preserving, and I can recommend this collection.

Ruth Ozeki - A Tale For The Time Being

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Readable and intelligent

I thought this a very good book in many ways and although it did take me a long time to get into it, I found it a very involving and rewarding read in the end.

Ruth Ozeki writes very readable prose which is sometimes rather beautiful but never tips over into the self-regarding. The story, well summarized elsewhere, is of a writer (Ruth) on a remote Canadian island who discovers, washed-up on the beach, a container with letters and the diary of a Japanese schoolgirl (Nao). The narrative alternates between the diary and Ruth reading it and investigating its story and its author. I confess that I found the first 100 pages or so difficult to get into and a bit stilted and self-conscious, but Nao's voice and her insights into Japanese society drew me in eventually, and I found her story involving and touching. I never quite felt the same about Ruth's sections which always felt slightly artificial and mannered to me, although Ozeki generates a very good sense of place and atmosphere around the characters.

There is a lot of philosophical content here, much of which is very good. It includes some rather profound insights about love, about growing up and learning to look outside yourself and about Zen. Late in the book there is also quite a bit about quantum physics. My heart sinks a bit when I realise that a novelist is starting on quantum physics because it often degenerates into dreadful nonsense, but to Ozeki's credit she gets the physics right, although I thought that her drawing of parallels between quantum physics and Zen were less successful and didn't really add up to that much. (But then, from Fritjof Capra's The Tao Of Physics onward there has been a great deal of nice-sounding verbiage and a good deal less real substance written about physics and Zen, so she's not alone.)

I could also have done without the mystical elements toward the end. (I won't give any spoilers) I could see what Ozeki was driving at and why she structured it as she did, but in a factual narrative it seemed a little silly in places. Not quite Carlos Castaneda, thank heavens, but heading that way at times.

This review may seem rather more critical than I mean it to be. I enjoyed the book in the end and think it had some important things to say. I did have reservations, but would still recommend it as a readable, intelligent and in places quite profound book.

Rochester - Selected Poems - Oxford

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A very good selection

This is a very good little edition, containing most of Rochester's best poems. I have a now out-of-print Penguin Complete Rochester edition, but wanted a more portably-sized volume and was also interested in what a new editor had to say. I was very pleased on all counts.

Rochester's popular reputation is generally based more on his behaviour than on his poetry. It is true that he was a spectacular rake and that his debauchery leading to an early death was the stuff of legend. This is often reflected in his work, but there is far more to Rochester than that. This is a very good selection of all shades of his poetry, from the frankly filthy (but often amusing) to the introspective and rather deep. For example, this from Upon Nothing (although I admit it lacks mathematical rigour) is a prescient summation of our current view of the origin of the universe:
"Ere time and place were, time and place were not,
When primitive Nothing Something straight begot,
Then all proceeded from the great united - What?"

Do be warned (if you don't know already) that many of these poems are not for the faint of heart or prudish. They often deal frankly with all sorts of sexual practices, and use some very blunt language including the c-word (used to brilliant comic effect in The Imperfect Enjoyment, for example), but this is fine, and sometimes genuinely tender and thoughtful poetry.

There is a scholarly and readable introduction by Paul Davis which I very much appreciated, a helpful chronology of Rochester's life and full notes on the texts. I think this is an excellent book for anyone looking for somewhere to start with Rochester or for anyone who wants a well-edited selection, however familiar you may be with him. Very warmly recommended.

Natasha Solomons - The Song Collector

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A terrific novel

I think this is a terrific novel.  The publishers kindly sent me a copy for review and I enjoyed it enormously – it is thoughtful, humane, touching and very funny at times, and it has important things to say about family, the meaning of home, the difference between artifice and genuine human experience and other things.

The story is narrated by Harry Fox-Talbot ("Fox") in two intercut times: as a young man in the years following the Second World war and as an old man in the years following the death of his wife in 2000.  Fox is a composer and devotee of folk music (the song collector of the title) and its connection to the land and its history.  The story is of Fox's life, his music, his loves and relationships and his fight to save the old family estate in Dorset as the family runs out of money.  Frankly, it doesn't sound that enticing, but Natasha Solomons writes so well and with such clear insight coupled with warmth of heart that I found it completely engrossing.

Solomons writes in lovely, unmannered, readable prose which is a pleasure to read.  She writes wonderfully well about music and has an ear for a striking simile, too, so a cup falls and breaks with "a xylophone crash" for example.  She paints vivid pictures of landscapes and seasons, and her characters are wholly believable.  Their voices, in particular, are exactly right – like the eight-year-old complaining that his mother can't distinguish good piano playing from mediocre because she has "stupid ears."  Fox's narrative voice is pitch-perfect, I think, both as a privileged young man in the forties and fifties and as a grumpy old man in the current century.  It is witty (and laugh-out-loud funny at times), perceptive and exactly right in the language he uses making him completely real to me.  He makes remarks as a young man like "I like the cellist very much, but not when he plays his cello," which tells us a great deal in a few words about both the subject and the speaker.  Then there are genuinely funny but also very perceptive comments from the older Fox on TV talent shows, and the horribly artificial perfection of a Florida retirement community, for example, and the portrait of an old man coming to terms with the modern world, his own mortality and his past is insightful, humane and very affecting.

I could go on, but this review is probably already too long.  I think this book has real humanity and profundity while being utterly engaging and easy to read.  It is funny in places and very moving in others.  I think that Natasha Solomons has established herself as a significant novelist, and I hope this attract the attention it deserves.  I loved it, and I can recommend it very warmly indeed.

David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

5/5
Review:

Unexpectedly enjoyable

I was expecting to hate this book. I forced myself to try it because people had gone on about it so much, but I really didn't like the descriptions I'd heard: 500-plus pages, visions of a dystopian future, a fractured timescale with six loosely-linked narratives each nested within the previous one, and so on and so on. It just reeked to me of a self-regarding author determined to show the judging panels of literary prizes how terribly clever he was, and with no interest whatsoever in whether anyone normal would actually be able to read the thing.

Well, I was completely wrong. I thought it was absolutely terrific. Interesting, thoughtful, readable and - most surprisingly of all - page-turningly suspenseful and exciting quite a lot of the time. I thought it had a lot of thoughtful and thought-provoking things to say about exploitation and the abuse of power, and about the possible consequences of both humanity and inhumanity. The different voices are really well done, with the historic and present-day(ish) ones sounding absolutely authentic and the future ones chillingly believable both in the language they use and what they say with it. The stories are involving, occasionally humorous, sometimes sad and sometimes extremely touching. For example, the few paragraphs when a character in a train passes some of the places of his youth and sees them much changed are really affecting, I thought, even though the character himself is thoroughly odious.

I would urge you to try this book. A good many people hated it book and did find it as terrible as I expected to, and you may hate it too, but you won't have lost much. On the other hand, you may be surprised to find it as enjoyable and rewarding as I did. It's worth the risk - if you do find it's for you, you'll never forget it.

Graham Farmelo - The Strangest Man

5/5
Review:

A cracking biography

This is a really excellent book. It is fascinating and thoroughly engrossing as well as being funny, touching and very sad in places. Some biographies are worthy and turgid, others full of racy but tenuous speculation. This is neither - Graham Farmelo has a deep affection for this subject but preserves a commendable objectivity. He gives a fine account of Dirac's life and work in prose which is a pleasure to read and with a perfectly judged leaven of amusing stories and poignant personal revelation.

Dirac was (as you will almost certainly know if you're considering this book) the greatest English physicist since Newton, and considered to be almost on a par with Einstein. That he is so little known is largely due to his astonishing reticence and at times almost hermit-like attitude to other people. Farmelo gives an excellent account of both the amusing and the sad aspects of this, and in a brief chapter at the end of the book puts forward the idea (meticulously backed by evidence) that Dirac was autistic. It's very plausible, and I particularly like the way in which he never uses the biography itself to expound this thesis. It's exemplary biographical writing.

Physicists shouldn't look to this book to give a detailed account of Dirac's work - that can be found elsewhere and this is a more general biography, giving an excellent sense of Dirac's life and why what he did was so important, with what seems to me to be a very well-balanced description of the work for the general reader. Non-physicists needn't worry too much about the physics - it is kept to a very descriptive level and even if you can't follow all of it, the book will still give great rewards.

It's a cracking book, very warmly recommended.

Neil Jordan - Mistaken

4/5
Review:

A very rewarding book

After finding the first hundred pages hard going in places I enjoyed this book very much. It is a poetic, meditative account of growing up and ageing, the choices we make and those that are made for us and how things might have turned out if either had been different. The book's central idea of the narrator and his double often being mistaken for each other is well developed and ingeniously used to illustrate what Jordan is trying to say about how lives develop, and the later part of the book has a very gripping story.

Neil Jordan has the ability to pick out those few details which capture a scene or an atmosphere perfectly. For example, the narrator as a boy in the early 60s catches a bus thus: "...I ran, jumped on to the tailboard, grabbed the rail and climbed the stairs to the upper deck. The cigarette smoke was thick, the windows dripping with condensation...", which really struck a chord with me. I am sure other readers will find flashes of their own past brought vividly to life in the same way, and it is one of the great strengths of the book.

I found the events and characters very well-drawn and believable, and Jordan also tells a very good involving story which I found quite heartbreaking in places. My only criticism of this book is that in the first hundred or so pages the fractured, occasionally confusing timescale and the extremely leisurely pace did begin to pall, and I thought the poetic language and descriptions occasionally spilled over into self-indulgence. However, the latter two-thirds of the book are really impressive and enjoyable, and have left me with powerful images and plenty to think about. It's a very rewarding book and even if you find the opening a struggle it is well worth persevering with.