MarysLibrary

The 1977 TLS poll that made Barbara Pym famous . . .

I check in most days to the Neglected Books Page, a blog that has many lists of neglected books and authors.

One of these is "The Most Underrated Books and Authors," from the Times Literary Supplement, in which both Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil mentioned the then-neglected Barbara Pym. This led to the reprinting of Pym's earlier books and the publication of a few new ones.

Also from that list:

·A. J. P. Taylor:

The most underrated book is the Authorised Version of the Bible, once the foundation of English prose, now never read in schools and rarely, I believe, in churches. If all knowledge of the AV is lost much of the classic English literature will be incomprehensible and English prose style is doomend.

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith

This hurts, it really does. I wanted to love The Silkworm. I liked the first Robert Galbraith mystery, The Cuckoo's Calling, and I think Cormoran Strike is a first-rate character. But this story drags, moving too slowly even for me. And I adore stories in which nothing happens (late Henry James for example.) This book is twice as long as it needs to be.

I stopped reading on page 228 of 454 pages. I know how it ends. Well, I think I know. I've figured out the Big Twist in the story and that fills in the blanks so that I can work out who done it, though I'm not entirely sure why. And I'm sad to realize I don't care.

Very disappointing.

But, on the other hand, the reviewer in The New York Times Sunday Book Review loved it. Look here.

 

J K Rowling in The Silkworm: “With the invention of the Internet, any subliterate cretin can be Michiko Kakutani.”

Light many lamps . . .

Of late we have been watching (streamed from Netflix) a TV program called numb3rs. Last night we saw the finale of Season 3 in which Judd Hirsch recited some beautiful poetry that perfectly wrapped up the story. The poem is called "The Death-Bed" and is from The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (1918.)

from The Death-Bed

Light many lamps and gather round his bed.
Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.
Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet.
He’s young; he hated War; how should he die
When cruel old campaigners win safe through?

But death replied: ‘I choose him.’ So he went,
And there was silence in the summer night;
Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.
Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.

                -- Siegfried Sassoon

Going without Saying

 

“It is a great pity we don’t know

When the dead are going to die

So that, over a last companionable

Drink, we could tell them

How much we liked them.

 

“Happy the man who, dying, can

Place his hand on his heart and say:

`At least I didn’t neglect to tell

The thrush how beautifully she sings.’”

                        -- Bernard O'Donoghue, “Going without Saying” (Gunpowder, 1995) He's Irish, of course.

 

The News: A User's Manual by Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton is again brilliant in The News: A User's Manual. He discusses how politics, economics, and disasters are covered by the media - or rather mis-covered. He encourages more narrative in news and less "objectivity" which he points out is almost nonexistent in today's news which is usually deeply biased. A quote:

"A contemporary dictator wishing to establish power would not need to do anything so obviously sinister as banning the news: he or she would only have to see to it that news organizations broadcast a flow of random-sounding bulletins, in great numbers but with little explanation of context, within an agenda that keeps changing without giving any sense of the ongoing relevance of the issue that seemed pressing only a short while before, the whole interspersed with constant updates about the colorful antics of murderers and film stars. This would be quite enough to undermine most people's capacity to grasp political reality -- as well as any resolve they might otherwise have summoned to alter it. The status quo could confidently remain forever undisturbed by a flood of rather than a ban on, news."

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green was published in 2009 and I think it took a while to get off the ground. I mean, who wants to read a book about two teenagers dying of cancer? But there's something appealing about the young woman in this book and the story employs a minimum of sentimentality. (This is not Love Story for the 21st Century.)

After a couple of years someone picked it up and made what my teen-age informants tell me is a terrific movie. And now everyone is reading the book, including me. And I did like it. I resent tear-jerkers so I was ready to brush this book off. But it didn't make me cry. And I think it helped me to understand better the relationships that grow between parents with sick children and among siblings of cancer victims, and the challenges a terminally ill teenager faces just dealing with the people around him, including his family.

Two Treats Coming Soon

A Spy among Friends, a new biography of Kim Philby will be published in the US in next month by an author some of us have become very fond of.  Ben MacIntyre has written a handful of extraordinary books about World War II spies, an Afghanistan adventurer, Neitzsche's sister, a French village under Nazi occupation, the man on whom Conan Doyle based his character Professor Moriarty, and more. Every one of them is splendid.

Now he turns his attention to the infamous Philby, who became head of Britain's Soviet counterintelligence during the Cold War. The damage he did is incalculable and the story of his rise to such an important post and his close friendship - or what seemed to be friendship - with MI6 officer, Nathaniel Elliot, is fascinating and heartbreaking. Philby was also close to James Angleton, America's head of counterintelligence at the CIA.

I await this new volume impatiently.

 

Also being released soon is another novel about the fictional town of Giliad by Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping, Giliad, and Home. The Lila of the title is the woman, living on the fringes of the town ofGiliad, who one day walks into the church of John Ames, the major character of Giliad. She causes a great deal of controversy in the small town but eventually marries him.

This new book is Lila's story. Robinson keeps returning to the same town and the same story, looking at it from a different point of view in each of her first-rate novels.

Again, I await the publication of this novel with impatience.

 

We Were Liars by E Lockhart

We Were Liars is a novel that will appeal to readers who enjoy peeking behind the curtain at very rich, very old families at play. And at war with one another. The narrator is a 17-year-old girl who has experienced a trauma - she isn't sure what. She is trying to reconstruct what happened on her family's personal island off Martha's Vineyard during the summer when she was 15. The title is a little puzzling because neither the narrator nor any of the other characters does much prevaricating.

Inside the front cover it says " . . . if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE." Don't let that get your hopes up for a slam-bang ending. I wasn't paying rapt attention as I read the book and I knew half way through what was going to happen. Not badly written, filled with effective metaphor, and beautifully atmospheric but weak at heart.

 

"The good people," continued he, "know not what time and trouble it costs to learn to read. I have been employed for eighteen years on it, and cannot say that I have reached the goal yet."  - Goethe

Hat tip to Laudator Temporis Acti

 

Miss Darcy in the Sun