Books Read in 2011

Below is the list of books I read in 2011.

1. Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (P.G. Wodehouse)
2. Starter for Ten (David Nicholls)
3. The Pregnant Widow (Martin Amis)
4. The Dead Hand: Crime in Calcutta (Paul Theroux)
5. David Golder (Irene Nemirovsky)
6. The Bradshaw Variations (Rachael Cusk)
7. Beer in the Snooker Club (Waguhi Ghali)
8. The Indian Clerk (David Leavitt)
9. E2 (Matt Beaumont)
10. The New Confessions (William Boyd)
11. A Place of Greater Safety (Hilary Mante)l
12. Going Loco (Lynn Truss)
13. The Pyramid (William Golding)
14. Girls in their Married Bliss (Edna O'Brien)
15. The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Monique Roffe)
16. Family Album (Penelope Lively)
17. Trespass (Rose Tremain)
18. Job (Joseph Roth)
19. Natural Curiosity (Margaret Drabble)
20. The Making of Henry (Howard Jacobson)
21. blueeyedboy (Joanne Harris)
22. The Good Angel of Death (Andrei Kurkov)
23. The Man in the Wooden Hat (Jane Gardam)
24. The Museum of Innocence (Orhan Pamuk)
25. Dial M for Merde (Stephen Clarke)
26. Solar (Ian McEwan)
27. At the Chime of A City Clock (D.J. Taylor)
28. Tiger Hills (Sarita Mandana)
29. The thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (David Mitchell)
30. Tiger's Wife (Tea Obreht)
31. The Summer of the Bear (Bella Pollen)
32. The Finkler Question (Howard Jacobson)
33. The Hand that First Held Mine (Maggie O'Farell)
34. Kaddish for An Unborn Child (Imre Kerstez)
35. Sex and Stravinsky (Barbara Trapido)
36. Great House (Nicole Krauss)
37. Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)
38. Imperial Bedrooms (Bret Easton Ellis)
39. Beatrice and Virgil (Yann Martel)
40. An American Type (Henry Roth)
41. Inheritance (Nicholas Shakespeare)
42. Another Part of the Wood (Beryl Bainbridg)e
43. The Concert Ticket (Olga Grushen)
44.  Midnight Bell (Patrick Hamilton)
45. The Siege of Pleasure (Patrick Hamilton)
46. The Plains of Cement (Patrick Hamilton)
47. The Betraya (Helen Dunmore)
48. Libra (Don DeLillo) 
49. The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
50. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Paul Torday)  
51. Tinkers (Paul Harding)
52. The Hindi-Bindi Club (Monica Pradhan)
53. The Misogynist (Piers Paul Read)
54. Slaughterhouse 5 (Kurt Vonnegut)             

Nonfiction

1. Nine Lives (William Dalrymple)
2. Elephant in the Room (Graham Swift)
3. A Feast of Freud (Clement Freud)
4. Small Memories (Jose Saramago)
5. One Morning in Sarajevo (David James Smith)
6. Indian Takeaway (hardeep Singh Kohali)
7. Swimming in a Sea of Death (David Rieff)
8. The Masque of Africa (V.S. Naipaul)
9. Mango Orchard (Robin Bayley)
10. Four Girls from Berlin (Marianne Mayerhoff)
11. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)
12. Uncle Tungsten (Oliver Sacks)
13. Stalin Ate My Homework (Alexi Sayle)
14. The Mango Orchard (Robyn Bailey)
15. Young Che: memories of Che Gueva (Ernesto Guevara Lynch)

My target, when the year began, was to read minimum of fifty books, ideally seventy five. I am happy with the eventual tally of sixty nine.

I remember starting the year with non-fiction, as I wanted to read substantial non-fiction this year. In the end, as has happened every year, I ended up reading far more fiction than non-fiction. That is because there simply aren’t very many non-fiction themes or subjects that interest me.

About the fiction I read this year. I read more than fifty novels, most of them literary, a few genre. When I look at the list the first thing that strikes me is that there are awful lot of titles that did not live up to my expectation.

So, out of fifty four, which novels I really enjoyed reading? Not many, I am afraid. 


Beer in the Snooker Club is the only novel written by the Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali (written in English). I first became aware that there was a writer called Ghali when, in 2009, I read Diana Athill’s memoir, After A Funeral. The memoir lays bare, in painful details (Athill has made a habit of publishing memoirs which are searingly painful, honest etcetera, in which she talks freely about her own foibles and somehow manages to emerge shining; it is not an easy trick to master), her relationship with an Egyptian writer who is referred to throughout as ‘Didi’. The memoir mentions that ‘Didi’ had written a novel by the publishing company for which Athill worked as an editor, and that Athill had greatly liked the novel. A little bit of Internet search revealed that ‘Didi’ was an Egyptian writer named Waguih Ghali and he had indeed written a novel entitled Beer in the Snooker Club. I ordered the book from Amazon and I am glad I read it. Beer in the Snooker Club tells the story of an Egyptian Coptic Christian, Ramos, who is a poor member of an affluent and well connected joint family. The novel is set in the 1950s; the British have left the region, officially, but their presence is very much there; the Suez crisis is still a few years away, but there is a growing sense of nationalism amongst the Egyptians. The action, such as it is, takes place in Egypt and England. Novel, via various misadventures of its protagonist, gives a snapshot of the Egyptian upper classes during a period of socio-political upheaval in that country. Acutely observed—Ghali is at his caustic best while describing the pretensions of the Egyptian rich, or the British class system--, very funny and entertaining, Beer in the Snooker Club is a pleasure to read.

Jonathan Franzon’s Freedom is that rare event, in my view, when a novel lives up to all the pre-publication hype. This is a novel which is as good as they said it was, a first class read. I have reviewed Freedom on the blog.

Another first class read was Don Delillo’s Libra. Libra is an imaginative reconstruction of the assassination of John F Kennedy, America's 35th president. Libra was first published in 1988 and had created a bit of a kerfuffle at the time of its publication. There are several strands in Libra which DeLillo handles with great aplomb. With great skill he creates for the reader a shadowy world within world. But, for me, his greatest skill is in humanizing Lee Harvey Oswald, the gunman who killed JFK (although the conspiracy-driven Libra has its own take on it, which is different from that shown in Oliver’s Stone’s JFK, also  full of conspiracy theories). DeLillo almost forces the reader to empathize with Oswald. Libra is a superb read.

The Jewish-American writer Henry Roth was an enigma. His debut novel, Call It Sleep (reviewed on this blog) is considered as a modern classic of the twentieth century. Call It Sleep was published in the 1930s. After that Henry Roth disappeared from the literary world and did not publish another novel for sixty years (surely, the longest ever writer’s block in the history). Indeed when Call It Sleep enjoyed a revival in the 1960s, many did not even known whether Roth was even alive.  Roth made a triumphant return to fiction writing in the 1990s (by that time he was well into his eighties) with an epic four-volume novel-sequence, two of which were published after his death (in 1995). In 2010 was published another, probably Roth’s last novel, An American Type, edited from the extensive notes Roth had left behind. Like all of Roth’s previously published novels, An American Type is highly autobiographical. The child protagonist of Call It Sleep is a grown man (although the name has changed), has published a novel which has attracted lukewarm praise from the critics, and is struggling with writer’s block. Roth's writing style is very lyrical,. There are some memorable characters in An American Type, in particular M (Roth’s wife in real life who, he said in an interview, saved him), whom the protagonist marries towards the end of the novel. An American Type is not a novel to cheer you on a gloomy day, but a very worthwhile read.

Slaughterhouse 5 was the novel that made Kurt Vonnegut’s reputation. I was always under the impression that I had read Slaughterhouse 5. (I have had the novel in my collection for several years.) A chat with a friend disabused me of the notion, and I read the novel in 2011. Vonnegut’s post-modern take on the Allied bombing of Dresden (that killed thousands in a single day) towards the end of the Second World War may not be to everyone’s taste, nor his minimalist style, heavy in irony. But I like it. I  knew (even without reading it) that Slaugterhouse 5 was a great novel and reading it confirmed what I had always known.

The British writer Patrick Hamilton is a largely forgotten name these days. If he is remembered at all, it is for the two plays he wrote—Rope and Gaslight—which were made into very successful Hollywood films in the 1940s. (Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar for her role in Gaslight). In the 1930s (when he was only in his twenties), Hamilton wrote three novels based around a fictional London pub named Midnight Bell. Originally published separately, these three novels: Midnight Bell, The Siege of Pleasure and Plains of Cement were published in the 1930s as a compilation entitled Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. In 2005 the BBC adapted the novels as a drama with the same title (which I haven’t seen).  The three novels—each one is a compact little novel that can be enjoyed on its own—are interlinked and tell the stories of the lives of three protagonists which overlap. At times Hamilton’s prose is a bit mannered, but these chronicles—suffused with dark humour— of the urban obsessions, frustrations, but also hope, are great reads.

Piers Paul Read is not a la mode author these days. Indeed so unfashionable was considered to be the subject of his last novel that it failed to find a publisher in the UK. The novel, Death of A Pope, was considered to be too catholic for British tastes. (It was published in America by a small, independent publishing house.) Perhaps mindful of this, the protagonist of Read’s most recent novel, the provocatively titled The Misogynist, is an atheist. The Misogynist tells the tale of a sixty something retired (and divorced) barrister who finds himself increasingly at odds with the society around him (at any rate what passes for society in London). The Misogynist is a neatly crafted novel, immensely readable not least because of the wry and ironic tone of the narrative. This is the first Read novel I have read (I avoided reading him in the past because of the reputedly religious themes of his novels; However, based on The Misogynist, which I thoroughly enjoyed, I ought to read more of him.)

I do not much read historical fiction, in particular fiction that deals with remote historical events of extraordinary significance, pullulating with real life characters. I am therefore amazed that I took to reading A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel’s behemoth of a novel (more than 800 pages) covering the first four years of the French revolution, and absolutely loved it. A Place of Greater Safety is a mix of thriller, tragedy, intrigue and romance, told in a bravura style—a compelling portrait of a society on the cusp of cataclysmic changes.

Penelope Lively, the winner of the 1987 Booker Prize, is a prolific novelist, and has not let advancing age (she is nearing eighty) slow down her creative output. The range of Lively’s novels, depending on your view, is either well circumscribed or narrow. A lot of her novels are about the trials and tribulations of middle class families. I don’t have any problem with that—better stick to what you know best. Family Album, Lively’s sixteenth novel, is like a series of snapshots—it does not have a linear narrative—of a middle class family between the 1970s and 1980s. The narrative is slightly distracting because Lively changes from first to third person frequently. I could cope with that; what I could not understand was why Lively felt the need to shift from past to present tense and vice versa in the middle of a paragraph.  On the whole, though, Family Album is an intelligent and moderately absorbing tale.

Another ‘intelligent’, 'middle class' novel, of women plagued with the suspicion that their lives are unfulfilled, which I read in 2011, was Margaret Drabble’s Natural Curiosity. If you like to read novels of middle class, middle aged women who tie themselves in knots over what they said to whom and how, and desperately want to have affairs (I do; that is I like to read such novels), you will like Natural Curiosity.

Girls in their Married Bliss is the third novel of Edna O'Brien’s celebrated Country Girls trilogy. I have reviewed the second novel of thetrilogy (Girl with Green Eyes), which I loved, on this blog. Girls in their Marrried Bliss follows the lives of the guileless and lovable protagonists who are married and living in London. It is a great read and, almost forty years after its publication, does not seem dated at all, the hallmark of a classic. It is difficult to believe that copies of O'Brien’s Country Girl novels were burnt in Ireland because of the frank portrayal of the sexual lives of the protagonists.

I read two novels of the British comic writer Howard Jacobson in 2011: The Finkler Question, which won the 2010 Booker Prize and an earlier novel, The Making of Henry. The themes of many of Jacobson’s novels are the same: highly sexed, middle aged, academic Jewish men who are tortured about their Jewishness. The Finkler Question is slightly different in that the protagonist, thus tortured, is not Jewish but suspects that he might be, or thinks he ought to be; I don’t exactly remember. But it does not matter, as, for me, the pleasure of reading Jacobson is his language. You cannot but marvel at the inventive way in which Jacobson turns a phrase. It is a rare gift, and Jacobson is a seriously comic writer. He is a treasure.

Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand that First Held Mine won the Costa (previously Whitbread) award. It is a richly imagined and moving tale of how one’s past can’t be repressed indefinitely and is only waiting, with heavy suspense, to claim what is its due. Don’t be put off by its corny title: The Hand that First Held Mine is a very good read.

David Mitchell is one of the most exciting and talented writers writing in English today. I have read two of his previous novels: Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. Both were brilliant reads. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, has, in contrast to these two novels, a linear narrative, but its canvas is still expansive. The setting is Dejima, a man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, Japan, for centuries the only access the reclusive Japanese Empire would allow to the outside world, where the Dutch East Indies Company has a trading post. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is an ambitious novel (another historical novel I read this year; but very different from A Place of Greater Safety) of intrigue and drama, and Mitchell almost pulls it off. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet may not be a masterpiece, but it is still is gripping yarn.

Another Part of the Wood is one of the early novels of the great Beryl Bainbridge. The novel is like a set-piece in a movie with a twist at the end. Written in Bainbridge’s trademark sparse style, Another Part of the Wood gives a glimpse into the type of novels Bainbridge would write in the 1970s (A Bottle Factory Outing and Injury Time, which I have reviewedon this blog).

David Golder is an early novel of Irene Nemirovsky (it might have been her first). Nemirovsky, of Russian Jewish descent, left for France with her family following the Boshevik revolution, where she achieved considerable success as a writer, and David Golder was one of her successful, if controversial novel. When the Nazis controlled France Nemirovsky went into hiding where she started writing another novel. She had not completed the novel when she was arrested, transported to Auschwitz and gassed immediately upon arrival. She was 39. The incomplete manuscript was with Nemirovsky’s daughter, who could not bring herself to look at it for almost five decades. The incomplete novel, entitled Suit Francaise, was published to great acclaim a few years ago. The success of the novel created an interest in this until-then forgotten author and many of her earlier novels are now available in English translation. David Golder is a character study of a self-made man who, now that he is dying at 68, has realized that wealth has not brought him happiness. This novel (apparently also made into a successful French film in 1930) had created some controversy because of the portrayal of a Jewish man by a Jewish writer, which was considered to be unsympathetic. Nemirovasky was regarded by some as a ‘self-hating Jew’. May be I am missing something, but I did not find the portrayal of the novel’s eponymous hero unsympathetic. Golder may be cold and ruthless and calculating, but he has a human side to him; the portrayal is not stereotypical or caricaturesque. A good read.

Matt Beaumont is not a name (I think) that is widely known outside of the UK. Which is a shame, as he is one of the funniest writers I have read. I have read five novels of Beaumont, four of which were comic novels and had me in splits. The novel I read in 2011 was E2. It is a novel, like its predecessor (Beaumont’s debut novel), written entirely in e-mails sent by various employees of an advertising firm in London. It is a motley collection of the psychopaths, weirdoes, and insane. E2 is a hilarious read; I can't remember the last time I laughed so much when I read a novel. Beaumont’s humour is situational but he also makes liberal use of irony, exaggeration and sarcasm, to devastating effect.

The Indian Clerk is an interesting novel by the American novelist David Leavitt. It traces the last five years of the life of the celebrated Indian mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan, during which Ramanujan collaborated with the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and left behind a body of work that ensured that his name would be remembered by posterity. The Indian Clerk is a very well written ambitious, dense and expansive novel of great depth. A very satisfying read.

Now the ‘also rans’.

Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most famous writer, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2006. Museum of Innocence, Pamuk’s mammoth novel (almost 700 pages) is, I believe, his first novel since the Nobel triumph. It tells the story of an obsessive love between a wealthy Turkish man and a poor woman  (how unusual is that?) with a post-modern twist towards the end which we have come to expect from Pamuk. In the novel the reader is treated to long and over-zealous descriptions of the ravishing beauty of the heroine.  The trouble is: in the absence of photographic evidence I was unable to appreciate the life-changing influence this great beauty came to have on the narrator’s life. Where the novel succeeds is in creating a vivid tabula of the Istanbul of the 1970s.

Imre Kerstez won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature. Kerstez’s oeuvre is not large; he has written, I think, a total of three full-length novels, of which I think Fatelessness is truly brilliant. The other two, at just around hundred pages, are more like novellas. Of these I read Kaddish for an Unborn Child in 2011. It is a meditation by a Jewish Holocaust survivor on why he never had children. Kaddish for an Unborn Child is a lamentation on life that has lost its meaning for the one who is condemned to live it, a proloned burst of tortured introspection by a writer who is marked by Holocaust. The novel weighs you down with its melancholy, and the ennui is quadrupled by tortuous translation.

Joseph Roth’s reputation in the English speaking world is as a writer of nostalgic and achingly elegiac novels mourning the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Radetzky March). Job is Roth’s takes on the biblical story of Job. The novel is remarkable for Roth’s lyrical description of nature.

I have not read a single novel of William Boyd which I have disliked, and I didn’t dislike The New Confessions, one of Boyd’s early novels (published first in 1988), which I read in 2011. The New Confession is a memoir of a Scotsman born at the turn of the twentieth century. The story of the ultimately inconclusive life of the enthusiastic, vain and (in some respect myopic) John James Todd is an absorbing enough tale; but Boyd has done it much better in Any Human Heart.

Nicole Krauss announced herself as a writer to watch out with her second novel, The History of Love. I had loved that novel; and it was with great expectations that I took to read Great House. Great House consists of several narratives at the centre of which is a desk. The plotting of Great House is fractured and the prose style is heavy, ponderous, and mostly monotonous. The novel was not a complete let-down, but it did not quite work for me.

Jane Gardam is a distinguished British novelist in the same tradition as Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge and Bernice Rubens (three amongst my favourite writers). She is one of the few authors who has won the prestigious Whitbread (now Costa) award twice. In 2005 Gardam published Old Filth, a story of a retired English barrister, to great critical acclaim. (Filth was an acronym for: Failed In London Try Hong Kong). The novel enjoyed considerable commercial success. The success of Old Filth probably prompted Gardam to publish The Man in the Wooden Hat, which is a kind of prequel to Old Fiilth and tells the story of 'Filth's' younger days in Hong Kong from the perspective of his wife. Written in Gardam's trademark no-fuss style, The Man in the Wooden Hat is a decent read, wryly funny in parts, but not as good, I am afraid, as Old Filth.

I read a Helen Dunmore novel after many years, in 2011. Dunmore was the recipient of the inaugural Orange Prize for fiction for her novel, A Spell of Winter. I had read it at the time and it had not worked for me. I had therefore given a wide birth to Dunmore’s subsequent novels. I decided to try The Betrayal, which I read was based on the so called ‘Doctors’ Plot’, the last of Stalin’s act of vengeance against the educated classes, before his death in 1953. That interested me. The Betrayal is a novel—to borrow a football cliché—of two halves. The first half is brilliantly paced and Dunmore builds up an atmosphere of unease. By comparison the second half is slow, laborious and the ending is a tad anti-climactic (though historically accurate).

I have read a few novels of the South African novelist Barbara Trapido. I thought that the semi-autobiographical Frankie and Stankie was brilliant. The rest (that I have read) were tolerable. Sex and Stravinsky, Trapido's most recent novel, is tolerably tolerable and mildly funny. It is like a feel-good Hollywood film, which you may enjoy while watching but should not make the mistake of taking it seriously even though it occasionally pretends it does. If you are looking for depth, here, you are diving at the wrong end.

Joanne Harris’s blueeyedboy is a thriller that has the most unreliable narrator in the history of world literature. The guy is either a fantastist or an extremely cunning killer, you are not sure which; but by the time you come to the end of the novel which has more twists than a circus contortionist’s performance, you don’t really care; you simply can’t take it all in; it is ridiculous. An easy read, though, perfect to take on holidays.

Nicholas Shakespeare is a British writer whose one previous novel I have read. It was called High Flyer and was a comedy of manners. Reading it had not convinced me that I should read more novels of Shakespeare, and for the past several years I had not read his novels, one of which (Dancer Upstairs) was made into a film directed by John Malkovich. Inheritance, Shakespeare’s most recent novel, which I read in 2011, is like two novels in one. The first one is a modern comedy of manners, which worked for me. The second, a historical tale with the Armenian massacre as its backdrop didn’t.

Monique Roffey’s The White Woman on the Green Bicycle was short-listed for the 2010 Orange Prize in fiction. It has an interesting theme—post-colonial Trinidad. In the novel Roffee tries to tackle big political themes, but the novel essentially is of unserious nature; it merely scratches at the surface. There are plenty of dramatic moments in the novel, but no real drama. However it is an undemanding read.

The fashion designer-turned novelist Bella Pollen is perhaps best known for her novel Hunting Unicorns. I read Hunting Unicorns years ago, and while I can't remember anything about it, I remember that it was an enjoyable read. The summer of the Bear is Pollen's most recent novel, which has three strands: a le Carre style mystery surrounding the 'accidental' death of a British diplomat; a family tear-jerker, as the dead man's family comes to terms with his death; and the story of a bear in the title that thinks like humans and might be a reincarnation of the dead diplomat. The Summer of the Bear is a mildly captivating read, although the story of the bear does not really sit comfortably with the other two strands of the novel and the mystery is lame. I have included The Summer of the Bear in the 'also rans' and not 'disappointments', because I had no expectations from the novel when I started reading it. 

Monica Pradhan's The Hindi-Bindi Club is a Chick Lit that tells the stories of the two generations of Indian women in America. The theme of the novel is very similar to Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club. The novel is mildly witty and the stories are mildly riveting. I have included it here for the same reason I have included The Summer of the Bear: I had no expectations from the novel and I actually found myself smiling occasionally. At the end of each chapter Pradhan gives recipes of Indian dishes. These recipes have no connection to the story, but they are yummy. (I tried the almond and raisin chicken which, even if I say so myself, was delicious). If this does not persuade you to read The Hindi-Bindi Club I don't know what will.

Finally, there is Martin Amis. What are we to do with him? There are many who believe that Amis is past his sell by date. I disagree. However, Pregnant Widow, Amis’s most recent tale of a bunch of teenagers (with enough hormones flowing to keep a Soho whorehouse in business for years) in the flower-power era, who spend a holiday in an Italian castle, does not find him in a sparkling form. That said, Martin Amis never lets me down totally. There are passages of great wit and humour in the novel, which is a descent read.

Now to the disappointments.

Cormac McCarthy is considered a great American novelist. His The Road won the Pulitzer Award for Fiction in 2007, and was also made into a film. Set in a post-apocalyptic world in an unnamed country (presumably America) without any reference to past and future, The Road is a story of a father and son travelling from one desolate scene to another. Sometimes they come across empty houses. The son is wary and tells his father to be careful. The father tells him he will be careful. The son, frequently, is not convinced, but the father tells him that they do not have a choice, and if they are at all to survive and not die of starvation they will have to take their chances and enter the house. This happens repeatedly; the only variation is in what they encounter—sometimes it is a house, at other times it is a gas station, some other times it is an abandoned ship. As for what they find in these places, sometimes they find food, sometimes they don’t. And . . . well, that’s about it. They stomp through ash; they sleep in ditches; they stomp through more ash; then they find another ditch to sleep in. The novel is about as engaging as watching paint dry.

Another award winning fiction that failed to enthrall was Paul Harding’s Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Award for fiction. At just under 200 pages Tinkers is not a big novel, but it is a slog. It is a slog for a number of reasons, one of them being there is no plot and no real story; instead Harding deluges the reader with pages after pages of impressionistic descriptions of nature. The prose is belaboured and not particularly alluring. The novel, really, had no redeeming features for me. The only thing I learned after reading Tinkers was that it is not possible to die of boredom.

Continuing with the theme of award-winning novels which are tedious beyond endurance, it would be hard to find a more tedious novel  than Tea Orbeht’s Tiger’s Wife (unless you have read Tinkers). This novel won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. Set in an unnamed country in an unnamed region (although less than subtle hints are dropped that the country is former Yugoslavia) Tiger’s Wife attempts to be an allegory and fable at the same time, and manages to be neither.  Like Tinkers, Tiger’s Wife, too, is full of descriptions of nature, which serve no other purpose than emphasizing that the author has nothing interesting to say.

By Nightfall has not won any awards as far as I am aware, but its author has. It is the latest offering from Michael Cunningham who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction of his memorable The Hours. By Nightfall tales the story of the mid-life crisis of an art-dealer who seriously considers changing his sexual orientation by contemplating to have an affair with his brother-in-law (don’t ask). True, Cunningham’s prose is crisp and finely rendered (although the protagonist’s proclivity to ask ironic, rhetorical inward questions and offer self serving faux-intellectual insights into his silly infatuation tends to grate on your nerves after a while), but that does not quite make up for the preposterous plot which seems more like a gay man’s sexual fantasy about the hidden homoerotic impulses residing within heterosexual men.

I do not find William Golding, the 1981 Nobel Laureate, an easy read. Apart from The Lord of the Flies, I have not read any novels of Golding, although, over the years, I have bought quite a few, which line my shelf (they look good). I read The Pyramid, which was described as Golding’s most accessible novel. The Pyramid depicts three episodes in the life of a young man, named Oliver. These episodes have little in common except that they take place in the same obscure English village. The premise of The Pyramid is rather slender. Golding touches upon some universal themes and there are a few funny scenes in the novel, especially the second section; but the novel, overall, has a bumpy, uneven feel to it. The Pyramid might be Golding’s most accessible novel, but it is not the more absorbing for it. 

Ian McEwan is one of the leading British novelists of our times. He is a novelist who has managed to be commercially successful and be a hit with the critics. I have read quite a few of McEwan’s novels and with the exception of an early novel, have not liked any of them. Solar, McEwan’s latest offering, has all the elements that I associate with his novels: it is over-long, verbose, and full of redundant information, with the usual splattering of the grotesque and macabre. The comedy, such as it is, fails to bring a smile to your face. The thematic focus is not sharp and the narrative is not particularly gripping. Reading Solar is like watching a performance of a stand-up comedian, desperately trying to be funny and telling an over-long anecdote (which is not funny at all), oblivious that the audience has lost interest.

The Canadian writer Yann Martel won the 2002 Booker Prize with his second novel, Life of Pi. Life of Pi was a wonderful fable with sparkling, lustrous prose. Eight years later Martel published Beatrice and Virgil, another allegory and fable. This time round Martel attempts to convey the horror of the Holocaust through an anthropomorphic donkey (Beatrice) and monkey (Virgil). It is painful to read Beatrice and Virgil: there is no driving force to the narration (despite the powerful theme of Holocaust at its heart) with its bland, flat, laborious prose, full of strange metaphors. It can be considered an achievement of sort to write a novel on the theme of Holocaust that is a cure for insomnia, although I doubt that was Martel's intention. Beatrice and Virgil is clearly a work of a writer who is struggling with the Writer's Block.

Olga Grushin is a Russian-American writer of considerable merit. Her début novel, The Dream Life of Sukhonov, was a triumph; I loved that novel. It was therefore with great expectations that I began reading The Concert Ticket (I think it is published in America under the title The Line). The Concert Ticket takes its inspiration from the 1962 concert given by the exiled Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, and weaves a tale of ordinary people who are coping with the miseries of their quotidian existence with the hope of something truly magnificent that may or may not materialise. The problem is the plot-structure is too anaemic to bear the weighty themes Grushin wants to convey. The novel is too long, and the reader's fatigue is increased by Grushen's overworked, over-elaborate, over-luxurious, and flowery prose. Grushin had kept in check her tendency to carve out exquisite sentences in The Dream Life of Sukhonov, but in The Concert Ticket, the genie is out of the bottle; the novel overflows with metaphors, which, nevertheless, fails to camouflage the fact that Grushin does not have a great deal to say. This novel is killed by a fatal overdose of over-exquisite prose.

Reading Bret Easton Ellis's Imperial Bedrooms gives you a kind of de ja vu. That is because Ellis has been doing the same thing again and again for the past twenty five years since he burst on to the literary scene with Less than Zero (many characters in Less than Zero also appear in Imperial Bedrooms): characters that are not likeable (some of them deranged), who lead shallow lives; torrid sex scenes; and gruesome, gratuitous violence. Imperial Bedrooms is a kind of noir delivered in Ellis's trademark minimalist style. But Ellis really needs to move on. What shocked in American Psycho is merely tiresome in Imperial Bedrooms. Perhaps fellow brat pack writer Jay McInerney (who I always thought was more talented than Ellis) can teach his friend how to change the trajectory of his novels and move beyond shallow, materialistic teenagers.

Rose Tremain is an award-winning British novelist. In Trespass, her most recent novel, Tremain endeavours to weave a tale of suspense and intrigue, delving into darker corners of human mind. Unfortunately not very successfully. None of the main characters is particularly believable; there is not a great deal of suspense; and the story is about as chilling as a stroll through the isles of Iceland. A disappointment. 

Paul Theroux’s A Dead Hand: Crime in Calcutta is a disaster. Words fail me to describe how awful the novel is. Theroux used to be a very good writer; there are many novels of his which I have thoroughly enjoyed. I am not even going to bother describing the plot of A Dead Hand: Crime in Calcutta. Don’t read it.

Enough about fiction. There area few other novels  I read about which I havewritten earlier on the blog.

A bit about non-fiction.

I did not read a lot of non-fiction in 2011. Of the 15 non-fiction books there were a few memoirs, the best and one I enjoyed the most was The Young Che: Memories of Che Guevara. The memoir was originally published in Spanish in the 1980s as two volumes. The English translation which came out in 2007 combines the two volumes in one. Written by Che Guevara’s father (also, somewhat confusingly, called Ernesto Guevara), the memoir focuses on Che Guvera’s early life as a child growing up in Argentina and his training as a doctor. Based extensively on the copious letters Che Guevara wrote to his family, the memoir is a moving and absorbing read that gives an insight into the mind of the man who smilingly went to his death in a remote corner of the world (at the hands of CIA agents) and who, more than forty years after his death remains an iconic figure. Five stars.

Alexi Sayles used to be a slightly unhinged (and popular) left-wing stand-up comedian in the 1980s and 1990s, before he gave that up and made an apparently successful transition to fiction writing. I have read one of his novels; I think it was called Overrun. I remember much of this novel except that it was funny in parts and not very impressive. Stalin Ate My Homework is Sayles’s memoir of growing up as the only child of left-wing parents in the 1960s Liverpool, UK. The memoir is engaging in parts and Sayles has drawn memorable portraits of both his parents, especially his Jewish mother, Molly. In 2010 I read a delightful memoir, entitled When Skateboards will be Free by Said Sayrafiezadeh, of being brought up by a single mother who was convinced that there would be a Communist revolution in America. Sayles comes from a less dysfunctional family than Sayrafiezadeh's, but his parents were not any less eccentric in their political views than Sayrafiezadeh’s.

Oliver Sacks’s Uncle Tungsten is a nostalgic trip down the memory lane for Sacks to his childhood in London and his fascination with chemicals which he shared with one of his many maternal uncles. Engaging in parts.

Four Girls from Berlin is a memoir by Marianne Meyerhoff which tells the story of her Jewish mother who escaped from the clutches of the Nazis just in time (her parents and brother were not so lucky) to arrive in America. It is a moving tale of a life unfulfilled and talent gone waste. There is a twist at the end, which hits you hard because you know that it is not imagined. 

Jose Saramago, who died a few years ago, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. In Small Memories we find the great Portuguese writer looking back upon his childhood. Full of amusing anecdotes (such as how the family came to have the surname ‘Saramago’) Small Memories is an utter delight to read. What strikes you the most when you finish reading Small Memories is that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in Saramago’s background and childhood that suggests that he was going to be, in fullness of time, the recepint of a prestigious literary award, a proof, if proof be needed, that great writers are born, not made.

Swimming in A Sea of Death is a memoir of the last months in the life of the feminist Susan Sontang, written by her son. The picture that emerges of Sontong (who died of cancer) is of a brittle, fragile woman: a woman who, on the one hand simply refused to accept her mortality; who, as her son mentions at one point in the memoir, had come to regard herself as ‘special’, after her previous successful battles against two cancers; on the other hand, as she hovered up information on the deadly blood cancer realised that this time she was fighting a battle she was not going to win. She tells her son, ‘this time I don’t feel special.’ Sontag subjected herself to excruciating treatments including the bone marrow transplant which, according to doctors was going to be tricky given Sontag’s age (they were right). Sontag, depending on your view, either went down fighting all the way, or subjected herself to avoidable pain and misery had she accepted the inevitable and agreed to palliative care. Swimming in A Sea of Death is a meditation on death and what it means to die in Western civilizations.

One Morning in Sarajevo is an account of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 1914, an event that propelled Europe towards the First World War that killed millions. The book also throws light on the lives of the young men 9About whom not a lot is known) who plotted to kill the heir apparent. It is not an easy book to read, but informative. Well worth the trouble if the subject interests you.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is one of the best pieces of investigative journalism I ahve read in recent times. That is probably not saying much, as I do not read many pieces of investigative journalism. But believe me, this book is superb. It traces the life of a poor black American woman by the name of Henrietta Lacks who died sometime in the early 1950s from a particularly aggressive type of cancer of uterus. However, the samples of cancerous cells taken from Henrietta's diseased organ, for reasons the scientists could not fathom, did not die, and stayed alive in culture for long periods. This presented the scientists with a unique opportunity to grow and study behaviour of cells in a number of conditions (using Henrietta's cells for culture mediums in which the cells grew), which, as the cliché goes, expanded the frontiers of human knowledge. In due course Henrietta's cells, which scientists labelled HeLa, were commercialised and many people became rich beyond belief. No marks for guessing that the dead woman's family was completely unaware of these developments and remained mired in poverty. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot, with great tact and sensitivity, gives a balanced picture to the reader. It is a smashingly good read. 

In Nine Lives William Dalrymple tells stories of nine remarkable individuals he meets during his travels in India.  Some of the stories (I presume they are true stories) are so unusual that they stretch the limits of your credulity. India is a strange land.

Finally, I come to Masque of Africa by V.S. Naipaul. I shall review this book later this month.

My top ten novels of 2011

1. Beer in the Snooker Club (Waguih Ghali)
2. Libra (Don DeLillo)
3. Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)
4. Girls in their Married Bliss (Edna O'Brien)
5. Slaughterhouse 5 (Kurt Vonnegut)
6. The Finkler Question (Howard Jacobson)
7. An American Type (Henry Roth)
8. Plains of Cement (Patrick Hamilton)
9. The Misogynist (Piers Paul Read)
10. E2 (Matt Beaumont)

Since I read only 15 books of non-fiction, I shall list below my top five non-fiction books of 2011.

1. Young Che: Memories of Che Guevara (Ernesto Guevara-Lynch)
2. Masque of Africa (V.S. Naipaul)
3. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)
4. Small Memories (Jose Saramago)
5. Four Girls from Berlin (Merlin Meyerhoff)

Remembering W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald was a German academician who had a distinguished career in England. When he died, ten years ago to this day, Sebald was the professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia (UEA) for more than a decade.

If Sebald had only been an academician (he published several papers on European writers in academic journals), perhaps he would not be remembered beyond a small circle of academicians and professors of European literature.

Sebald also wrote novels. At the time of his untimely death in 2001, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Sebald’s reputation in the UK as a writer of great merit was on an upward swing. Indeed there were some who felt he would win the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Not as fanciful as it may sound. In 2007, Horace Engdahl, the former secretary of the Swedish academy, mentioned Sebald as one of the recently diseased writers who would have been a worthy laureate.) Sebald had, by that time, published four novels, all written in German, originally, and published in his native Germany earlier than their English translations. His first novel was published in Germany in 1990, but its English avatar appeared only in 1999 (Vertigo). His first novel to appear in English translation was The Emigrants, which came out in 1996. In 1998 was published The Rings of Saturn. The last novel to come out was Austerlitz, published in 2001.

Austerlitz is one of the most moving novels I have read. It tells the story of a lonely, melancholy man, brought up as an only child by a Welsh Calvinist preacher and his valetudinarian wife. The man, Fred Astaire, meets the novel’s unnamed narrator when both men are in Antwerp, and a kind of acquaintanceship develops between the two. As the novel progresses, we learn that Fred Astaire was born Jacques Austerlitz. Austerlitz is a man, like the protagonists of Sebald’s other novels, burdened with memories. The burden, in this case, is puzzling, even to the man carrying the burden, because he is not actually consciously aware that he is carrying the burden. Gradually, as years go by, via chance encounters and apparently unrelated events, the memories, suppressed since childhood, break through, and slowly Austerlitz becomes painfully aware of his identity. The novel is a brilliant amalgamation of (apparent) facts and history. Right from the first page, an atmosphere of oppressive melancholy and peril envelops the reader. Austerlitz’s journey of self-discovery which brings him face to face with the horror of what happened to his parents and his people breaks your heart. Austerlitz is a man who carries with him a secret, and his torture is all the more because he does not know what the secret is. When he finally discovers it, it devastates him. I can remember very few novels which have overwhelmed me with their powerful emotional ambiance. Austerlitz is one of those novels, which, as far as I am concerned, is all the more remarkable because it is a translated work of fiction. I wonder what effect it would have had on me, had I been able to read German, the language in which the novel was originally published. (In an interview Sebald said that there were three and a half real persons behind Austerlitz. One of them was a person about whom he watched a documentary by ‘sheer chance’. This person was an ‘apparently English’ woman who was brought up in Wales in a Calvinist household. She had been brought to England with her twin. The twin had died and the woman grown up without knowing that she had a twin or her origins were in a Munich orphanage.)

To write a novel on the theme of the Holocaust is a formidable challenge. What Sebald has achieved in Austerlitz is astounding. It is a superb novel; a towering achievement.

The Emigrants is another novel of Sebald I have read and thought it was absolutely brilliant. Like Austerlitz, the novel is a potent and powerful mixture of history, autobiography and meditative discursions. In The Emigrants, Sebald tells apparently factual stories of four men and the devastation that the Second World War brought to their lives. The Emigrants is a work of fiction, though it is presented as factual accounts (one of the portraits is of Sebald’s great uncle). As in Austerlitz, there is the unnamed narrator, born, like his creator in 1944, in the waning years of the Third Reich, and who (again, like his creator) lives elsewhere but returns time and again, almost against his wishes, to the country of his birth.

The Emigrants is a strange, haunting novel. It was Sebald’s first novel to appear in English. He was past fifty when the novel was first published in England, his adopted country where he had lived since 1966 and, upon its publication, many must have wondered where he was hiding all those years.

The Rings of Saturn (which I have in my collection but have not yet read) is a digressive account of its morose narrator (also named W.G. Sebald) through East Anglia (county Suffolk). When The Rings of Saturn appeared the world of literature had begun to take notice of Sebald as a writer of considerable merit, and the novel received very favourable reviews. Sebald however was at pains to clarify that despite spending more than 25 years in England he still did not feel at home here. In an interview he said that he would feel more at home in a hotel in Switzerland (or something to that effect).

I have also read the only work of non-fiction of Sebald that has (so far) appeared in English: On the Natural History of Destruction. Like all of Sebald’s work there was a  gap of several years between the original and its English translation. The book (based on lectures Sebald gave in Zurich, in 1997) was published in Germany in 1999. The English translation came out two years after Sebald’s death, in 2003. In On the Natural History of Destruction Sebald describes and discusses the allied campaign towards the end of the Second World War. It is a powerful and striking book. Sebald does not beat around the bush in pointless euphemisms. He comes straight to the point. The Book starts with the sentence:

‘Today it is hard to form an even partly adequate idea of the extent of the devastation suffered by the cities of Germany in the last years of the Second World War, still harder to think about the horrors involved in that devastation.’

Then comes the statistics: 1 million tons of bombs were dropped on 131 German cities—repeatedly on some of them—most of which were flattened. More than half a million German civilians were killed in these raids; 3.5 million homes were destroyed; and, as the war finally came to its bloody end, 7.5 million were left homeless. More mind-numbing statistics follow: in Dresden, in February 1945 (when the Third Reich was in its last throes), the SS burned 7000 corpses in one day, civilians killed in one day by the allied bombing. (Kurt Vonnegut's classic novel, Slaughterhouse 5, was based on the bombing of Dresden, although Vonnegut's treatment of the subject was post-modern.) When Hamburg was bombed (combined British and American operation, codenamed ‘Operation Gomorrah’!) the flames of the fires that engulfed the city leapt up 2000 meters towards the sky. Sebald tells about a writer named Victor Golllancz who spent a month in the British occupied zone of Hamburg, Dusseldorf and the Ruhr. Gollancz particularly noted the profound lethargy of the Germans, which, he remarked, was the most striking feature of the contemporary German urban population. ‘People drift about in such lassitude,’ he wrote, ‘that you are always in danger of running them down when you happen to be in the car.’

What intrigued and shocked Sebald, in equal measures, was the collective silence of the German people about this unprecedented and unparalleled and wanton (and, it might be argued, with some justification, unnecessary) destruction of their land by the enemy. He writes at one point in the book:

‘.  . . with remarkable speed social life, that other natural phenomenon, revived. People’s ability to forget what they don’t want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to test better than in Germany at that time.’

It was as if, Sebald wrote, ‘the sense of unparalleled national humiliation felt by millions [of Germans] in the last years of the war had never really found verbal expression, and those directly affected by the experience neither shared it with each other nor passed it on to the next generation.’

The collective amnesia, it would appear, also affected the writers. Very few writers, Sebald notes, chose to write about the inglorious end to the Second World War culminating in ‘national humiliation’. One of them was the Henrich Boll, who won the Nobel Prize in literature. Boll’s ‘melncholy novel of the ruins’ (Sebald wrote), Der Engel Schwieg, 'was withheld from the reading public for over forty years'.

The book, upon its publication in Germany, triggered furious debate. Sebald was said to have been taken aback by the letters he received from Germany, many blaming the Jews for the Bombings. ‘This was applause from quarters,’ he said, ‘you did not need.’

On the Natural History of Destruction is an essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the madness of the Second World War.

Sebald is not an easy writer to read. I suspect that he was not an easy writer to translate either. (He was presumably proficient in English language and, although, Like Elais Canetti, he chose to write in German, his mother-tongue (it was Canetti's third language), he took great interest in and closely supervised (like Canetti) the English translations of his books.) Sebald remarked on one occasion that his medium was ‘prose, not novel’. That is apparent in all his books I have read. There is a kind of ‘stream of consciousness’ quality to his writing. His writing is not dramatic;if anything it is anti-dramatic. It is discursive and meandering at times, yet it touches your heart.  The novels that I have read were, so I felt, meditations on memory and past which come to have a profound effect on our present in ways we don’t always envisage or understand. Sebald had the ability to get to the core with minimum of fuss.

Austerlitz, Sebald’s masterpiece, and one of the greatest novels in the last hundred years, was published in the same year he died, at the age of 57, in a car accident in Norwich. Sebald was at the peak of his powers when he died, and one wonders what he would have achieved had he lived. His untimely death was a great loss to literature.

Jeremy Clarkson: Why Does He Say These Things?

Jeremy Clarkson created a bit of a kerfuffle at the beginning of the month, on the BBC programme called The One Show.

For those who do not know what The One Show is, here is a link. It is aired on the BBC every day of the week in the evening, around 19.00 hours. I watch it very rarely these days. I watched it when it first started airing, which was a few years ago. It was a dull programme featuring pointless topical reports (rising water levels in Rutland Waters) and interviews with non-entities. The programme was presented by a prematurely greying corpulent man with a face like a baked potato, and a thin woman who spoke in Irish accent (probably because she was Irish).

The corpulent man with a face like a baked potato had the air of someone who had decided, probably around the time he grew pubes, that he was a catch and was not prepared to let go of the mistaken notion despite the mounting evidence to the contrary. The woman who spoke with Irish accent, for reasons best known to her (but others could guess at), had decided to accentuate the Potato Head’s grandiose delusion by responding to every lame comment he made as if he was the greatest wit since Groucho Marx. Then the Potato Head left the programme and ‘defected’ to the rival ITV.  I think he now fronts its sports programme, where he makes similar lame comments as the ones he used to make on The One Show, which are not funny in the least. His co-presenter, the woman who spoke in Irish accent, left The One Show soon after the Potato Head left the show, and I remember reading somewhere that that was because the two of them were having it off. The Potato Head also divorced his wife, I think. (I guess I could google these two to find out whether all of this is correct, but I am not interested really in these two—despite the hundreds of words I have wasted on them so far—; the person I want to write about, and I shall come to him in due course, is Jeremy Clarkson. Besides, life is too short to find out about what P-listed celebrities on British television get up to in their sordid little lives. As a further aside, I think it is a good ploy to start anything about which you are ignorant but want to be dismissive with the words ‘Life is too short . .’. When you use these words, you are conveying that while you accept you are pig-ignorant about the subject matter, you are ignorant by choice. There are more interesting or pressing matters clamouring for your attention and they take priority over the subject matter you are choosing to be ignorant about, because it is not important.)

Anyway, back to The One Show. The show is now fronted by another man (who, from certain angles has a passing resemblance, I think, to the monkeys in the extremely addictive on-line game on my mobile called Angry Birds—Rio) and a woman who does not speak in Irish accent and has a bit more flesh on her than the woman who spoke in Irish accent.

Now to Jeremy Clarkson. He is a British Journalist and television presenter. He is a man, I should think, in his fifties (although you wouldn’t think so looking at his face; he has—there is no kinder way of saying this—not aged well, probably as a  result of spending too much time in the sun for his television programme). He is about six foot tall, has a beer gut, and he hails from Doncaster. He is not a sight for the sore eyes (or stomachs) and his insistence on wearing crumpled jeans and jackets (which are tight below his armpits) is unfortunate.

What we have established so far is: (a) Clarkson comes from the part of British isles where I wouldn’t have thought there are many who are members of Mensa; (b) he is not pretty; and (c) he has roughly the same relationship to style as a bald man has to a comb.

Yet this man of below average looks and physiognomy that betrays his partiality to lager (and pies), is one of the most successful (ipso facto richest) broadcaster, presenter, and journalist in the UK today.

How has Clarkson managed it? For a start, he is white and male, which are always good things to have under your belt if you want to be successful in Britain. Mind, being white and male do not guarantee success that would make others green, but it helps.

There may be other reasons that can explain Clarkson’s success. He probably thinks, as many successful people delude themselves, that he deserves his success and has worked very hard for it. Others might think he is one of those on whom Lady Luck has smiled.

There is no doubt that Clarkson is a forceful presence on the television programme he co-presents with two other blokes. (That one of the other two looks like a hamster and will probably need a ladder to reach the breast level of any woman who is not a dwarf, and the other who sports shoulder length hair which would have been absolutely perfect for him if he were a slim young adult and not a middle-aged bloke with a tired, puffy face, helps.) The television programme Clarkson presents is called Top Gear, which, as the imaginative title suggests, is about cars. I have never been able to bring myself to watch any of the Top Gear programmes from beginning to end, although I know blokes (usually single men who wouldn’t get laid in a women’s prison with a handful of pardon papers) who are addicted to this programme. I used to know a guy who used to tape these programmes and on Sundays watched them one after another the whole afternoon. I mean, if the sight of middle aged men (none good looking) going into raptures about, I don’t know, Nissan Sunny ZX coupe or a Lotus Turbo SE sends you into raptures then this programme is your ticket. If on the other hand you hold the view that middle aged men (none good looking) talking in a faux-macho manner (calling Audi Quattro, a turbo-motherf**ker) is indescribably sad, then give this programme a miss. That said on the few occasions when I saw part of the programme, I thought Clarkson managed to look the most impressive and witty of the three presenters (which, it might be argued, is not that difficult when the other two presenters have the personalities of a washing machine and oratorical skills of a dishwasher).

Jeremy Clarkson, I am happy to confirm, is one of the presenters of an immensely popular car programme on the BBC.

He is also an entertaining writer. He used to write—probably still does—weekly columns for The Sunday Times. It is these columns which made me admire Clarkson (although not so much that I would pay £ 2 every week to access the Times website). Clarkson is a witty writer. His view point is almost always right of the centre and contrarian. The humour relies heavily on figures of speech such as hyperbole (liberal), irony (heavy), sarcasm (frequent), paradox (ditto) and litote (occasional). He has pet hates and dislikes which he expresses in a funny, if stereotypical, manner: French are cowards, Germans are humourless, Americans are fat and simple, Russians are unscrupulous etcetera. These columns have been published as compilations and some of them have gone on to become bestsellers in the UK.

The image that Clarkson has—perhaps he has deliberately cultivated it—is of a grouchy curmudgeon who is griping all the time about anything and everything. His brand of humour is sour.

Earlier this month Clarkson was on The One Show, where he was asked his views about the public sector workers who were striking on that day.

A brief background to the strike is as follows. Britain, like the rest of European countries, is in the midst of the worst recession since the last worst recession. The recession was brought about by the greed of Bankers and the insistence of the great British Public on living beyond its means for years. The government’s coffers are emptying, and the British Chancellor, George Osborne (who always looks as if he is a couple of hundred bowel motions behind the game), in-between his hectic schedule of skiing holidays in Switzerland (where he spent £17,000 in ten days) and summer vacations in San Francisco (we are all in this together, remember?), has decided that the public sector will pay. The government has proposed sweeping changes in the salaries and pensions of the public sector workers. Needless to say that the public sector workers are not happy about it, and, at te beginning of this month, heeding calls from their union, more than 2/3^rd of the public sector workers went on strike.

It was this strike about which Clarkson was asked his view on The One Show.

Clarkson said that he would have the striking workers shot in front of their families. This was followed by a typical Clarkson type rant about the ‘gold plated’ pensions of the public sector workers. He left no one in doubt that he disapproved of the striking workers, although he was prepared to see the positive side of the strike. (The roads were empty so that he could drive his car very fast on the empty streets). In the same programme, he also expressed his annoyance at people who kill themselves by jumping in front of trains and delaying those on the trains (who presumably want to live).

The presenters looked visibly startled and uneasy as Clarkson ranted. Which suggests that either they were not informed by the producers what Clarkson was going to say or they are very good actors. Because, as Clarkson clarified to the Times (as quoted in the Guardian), his comments were not off the cuff. Before the programme he had had a meeting with the producers of the programme, going over the topics they wanted him to speak on, and he had given them an idea what he was going to say (he says).

There was a furore over Clarkson’s remarks. The public sector workers were not pleased and the BBC was flooded with four thousand complaints (three thousand and ninety nine of them probably from Dave Prentis). Prentis, general secretary of Unison, the union that gave the clarion call to strike, was beside himself with rage. He felt that Clarkson’s comments were ‘revolting’, ‘totally outrageous’, and ‘cannot be tolerated’.  (Of course these comments were outrageous and provocative and calculated to cause upset. That’s what Clarkson does. He can give a master class in being outrageous. He can start his own MBA in being egregious. The man is a wind-up merchant.)

Prentis demanded that Clarkson be sacked by the BBC and revealed that the union was seeking legal advice about what further action they could take against Clarkson and the BBC and whether his comments should be referred to the police. Prentis went on to suggest that if any children were watching the programme they could have been ‘scarred and upset by his [Clarkson’s] aggressive statements’.

I do not know whether Prentis contacted the Police about Clarkson’s ‘outrageous’ comments. Since we have not heard anything on the matter (so far), I assume that common sense has prevailed or else Prentis did contact the Police and was asked to go for a walk and find sex elsewhere. I should also doubt very much that there are young children all over the country waking up screaming in the middle of night, complaining of nightmares in which a fat, balding, middle aged man is shooting people in front of their families. I cannot believe that any children watched The One Show in the first place. In fact I cannot believe anyone between the ages of one to hundred would willingly watch The One Show which a crap programme.

Jeremy Clarkson, uncharacteristically, issued an apology, clarifying (to dolts deficient in humour) that he was joking when he made those comments. I believe Clarkson was almost telling the truth. I think he was making a point, using crude humour. That’s his style—to make jokes and comments that have the subtlety of a panzer. Sometimes it works; on this occasion it did not. That is the risk you take when you make crude jokes and ‘outrageous statements’. You run the risk of offending people.

It is beyond the scope of this post to go into the moral rights and wrongs of public sector workers going on strike (although that is not because I can’t make up my mind about it; I may not have any talent, but I have tons of opinion. I should say here that I know a few people who work in the public sector; they do very difficult jobs and I have always been impressed by their dedication and enthusiasm. Not everyone working in the public sector is a ‘Waste Disposal Strategic Advisor’ or ‘Volunteers Programme Coordinator'. Many have proper jobs, far more valuable than the useless jobs of the greedy toads in the Private Sector). Dave Prentis and his friends need to take a chill-pill, though. Clarkson’s comments need to be ignored. The other Dave (Cameron) got it right (for a change) when he said that Clarkson’s comments were silly. It is not worth taking them (or Clarkson) seriously. He probably does not take them (or himself) seriously.

Book of the Month: One Day (David Nicholls)

David Nicholl’s debut novel, Starter for Ten, was a big success and was later made into a film. His second, The Understudy, was a relatively low-key affair. A friend read Starter for Ten and opined that Nicholls ‘can write’, but there is ‘no substance in the book’. I thought I would read Starter for Ten (along with Victoria Hislop’s The Island), if I went on a holiday. Which I haven't done this year. Then I read One Day, David Nicholls’s third novel. 

Why did I buy  One Day instead of reading Starter for Ten which I already had in my collection? What can I say? I like to be unpredictable.

Through a series of snapshots of a day—15^th July, the St Swithin’s day, to be exact—repeated at yearly intervals over two decades, starting from 1988, One Day  traces the lives of two friends— Emma Morley and Dexter Meyhew. The two meet on the graduation day at Edinburgh University where they had spent the previous four years. Emma had noticed and liked the handsome Dexter ever since she saw him at a party in her first year at the University, but had had not done anything about it because she did not want to risk being spurned by Dexter who she suspects is posh and therefore in a different league. Emma has a working class background and speaks with such pronounced Northern accent that some of her university acquaintances think it is an affectation, their misconception strengthened by Emma’s socio-political views which are to the left of Lenin. She is the sort of girl who regards ‘bourgeois’ as a term of abuse, reads Unbearable Lightness of Being, and has photographs of Nelson Mandela and Che Guevara adorning the walls of her room. Dexter, who indeed comes from a very comfortable middle class background, has little reason to take notice of Emma, surrounded as he is by a bevy of girls who are only too keen to wrap themselves around him like Union Jack. He finally notices Emma—despite her attempts to spoil her good looks by intimidating spectacles—at the graduation ceremony, and the two spend the night in her room, ‘cuddling’ and ‘kissing’, and speculating what might they do with the rest of their lives. Dexter is taking a gap year—the obligatory rite of passage for the children of affluent parents—so that he can find himself in countries like India and Thailand. Beyond that he has no idea of what he is going to do other than a vague notion that he wants to be successful, make his parents proud and sleep with more than one woman at the same time. Emma entertains the romantic notion of being courageous, making a difference and changing lives through maybe art, and writing beautifully (Awwww). Neither, on this last night as students, is under the illusion that they will see much of the other over the years, although neither has the stomach to actually say so. Emma would like to see more of Dexter but knows she wouldn’t (not being in the same league and all that), and attempts to get over her disappointment by making repeated barbed witze at Dexter’s affluent background.

The story then takes a leap in time and we meet Emma and Dexter a year later, on the same day. They have kept in touch. (They would, wouldn’t they? How would the story progress, otherwise?) Dexter is in his gap year, travelling through Asia, and Emma is touring with an experimental theatre company, having decided to try out acting as her vocation, even though she is nagged all the time by the suspicion that she does not have the requisite talent. Upon his return to England, Dexter embarks on what appears to be a successful media career as a late night television presenter of outré programmes, and, as was his ambition, sleeps his way through a cavalcade of women with nice legs and terrific breasts. Emma, in the meanwhile, lurches from one soul-destroying job to another, before becoming a teacher of English (the triple A’s came handy after all) and drama in a secondary comprehensive in London. Both are in relationships that, in the words of relationship counsellors, have serious issues. Dexter is with his television co-presenter, a loud girl for whom ‘bubbliness is a way of life verging on a disorder’, while Emma starts seeing a man who was a fellow-waiter when she worked in a Tex-Mex, and whose face reminds her of ‘tractors’. The man, Ian, has the ambition to become a stand-up comedian and Emma simply does not have the heart to tell him that he is terrible at it. Emma and Dexter continue to meet dutifully, increasingly feeling that they have little left in common. Dexter, whose career is taking a downward trajectory—hastened by his willingness to snort cocaine by the garden-hose and consume alcohol in quantities that would render a man of average weight and height comatose—even if he does not know it, finds himself getting increasingly irked by Emma’s sardonic humour. He concludes that the chip on her shoulder—at not having achieved much in career despite triple A’s at university—has mutated into a millstone. Emma, on her part, sees what Dexter refuses to accept what he has become: unpleasant, inconsiderate and on a fast train to endsville. Things come to a head between them during one of their increasingly cantankerous meetings, and Emma, unable to bear any longer Dexter’s demeanour that suggests (to her) that he would rather be somewhere else than be with her, walks away from their friendship.  Neither has much luck in their relationships. The bubbly television presenter, on her way to the P list of celebrities, wisely concludes that Dexter, headed in the opposite direction, is past his sell-by-date and replaces him with an upgraded version. Emma finds escape from Ian’s awful jokes into the waiting arms of the principal of the comprehensive she works in (who seems so sexually fixated on her that you think he surely qualifies as a stalker but for the fact that the stalkee has got into his bed—metaphorically so to speak, they have sex in his office—of her own accord), and carries a two-year affair with him that is marked principally by lack of affection.

Over the next few years, Emma and Dexter meet occasionally, mostly at the wedding receptions of their university friends; and are cordial, civil and distant to each other. Dexter starts another relationship; this time with a career woman named Sylphie who talks and behaves like an agent of some alien species programmed to look and behave like humans; into the bargain she has awful petit bourgeois parents who think Dexter is a waste of space.  Dexter and Sylphie marry in due course and have a daughter. Dexter accepts that his television career is more difficult to revive than arouse Lazarus, and, heeding Sylphie’s sensible advice, gets a job offered by his flatmate from his university days who has become some sort of business magnate and is opening sandwich bars all over the place. Emma too takes several decisions, each one the motivational gurus and Life-coaches would describe as life-changing. She asks the unfunny Ian (to whom she in any case is not faithful) to sod off; she tells the sex-fiend of a principal to find someone else he can get carpet burns with; and resigns her job in the school. And becomes a free-lance writer—writing teenage fiction, drawing her own illustrations. After a lot of struggle and several rejections she finds a publisher and, to her pleasant surprise, her witty novel chronicling the adventures of her teenage heroine becomes successful, paving way—Harry Potter style—to several more installations. Things do not turn out that well for Dexter. While he is sampling sandwiches for his university friend and employer, he (the employer) is sampling Sylphie’s buns. The marriage ends after Sylphie walks out on Dexter, taking their daughter with her. Dexter is distraught and even the knowledge that his ex-parents-in-law dislike Sylphie’s new partner even more than they disliked him is not enough to console the inconsolable cuckold. Riper opportunity will not present itself to the two estranged friends to reconcile, and that’s what happens. Emma and Dexter make up. They go a step further and do something which Emma has thought about from time to time right from their university days, but Dexter hasn’t until recently: they start a relationship. In the last part of the novel we find Emma and Dexter settling into a sedate, affectionate relationship—she writes her teenage best-seller while he opens a café that is moderately successful. Surely nothing will go wrong for the two friends now. And then something unforeseen happens.

One Day is one of those novels that are absorbing, funny, sharply observed, wise, heart-warming, moving, and—for all these reasons—terrific reads. Starting in the Thatcher years, the novel traces, via its two protagonists, the lives led by millions in the Labour boom years. Mind, there is not a lot of politics in the novel; in fact, despite Emma’s intermittent hand-wringing at not being faithful to teenage socialist / left wing principles, there is hardly any. Similarly, despite an occasional nod to the flashbulb events such as the famous Labour victory of 1997 and the July 2005 bombings of the London underground, the socio-politico-cultural events of these decades form, at most, a blurred background. It is therefore all the more striking that the novel so succinctly captures the zeitgeist of those times. One Day is a remarkable social novel.

Nicholls takes great care in developing the characters of the two protagonists. Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew are totally believable, solid, well rounded characters. They have their foibles and are capable of causing hurt; they are also capable of genuine kindness. As the novel progresses, you find yourself warming up to them, getting engrossed in their lives, rejoicing in their success, and, when the end comes, they stay in your mind for a long time. Not many novels can do this. Emma Morley, in particular, is a memorable character. One Day is a deeply sentimental novel, but not once does Nicholls take recourse to cloying sentimentality. It is a deeply affecting novel, without being schmaltzy.  It is a rare gift to get the balance of emotions the exact right, and Nicholls manages it with great aplomb.

The prose of One Day is fabulous. Nicholls writes like dream. The sentences flow so smoothly that reading this novel is like floating lightly along the gentle flow of a river. As with everything else, the tone of the narrative is pitch perfect. The narrative engages you from the first page and your interest does not slag throughout its four hundred plus pages, which do not contain one otiose word. There are passages of great wit in the novel, coupled with acute observations. One Day is a fine comic novel; it is a social comedy in addition to everything else. The humour is wry but not cringeworthy. Thus Nicholls’s description of the rituals of modern marriages brings a smile to your face, but you also find yourself nodding because it rings so true.

One Day is wonderful (or wonderful, wonderful) novel (see the image below), and Nicholls is a writer in the same tradition as Jonathan Coe and Nick Hornby: a virtuoso chronicler of how it is to live in modern Britain. Five stars.