#in the end i fucking gave in and started on gormenghast even though i'm only like halfway through barchester

[bakechochin]

The Book Ramblings of June and July 2019

In place of book reviews, I will be writing these ‘book ramblings’. A lot of the texts I’ve been reading (or plan to read) in recent times are well-known classics, meaning I can’t really write book reviews as I’m used to. I’m reading books that either have already been read by everyone else (and so any attempt to give novel or insightful criticisms would be a tad pointless), or are so convoluted and odd that they defy being analysed as I would do a simpler text. These ramblings are pretty unorganised and hardly anything revolutionary, but I felt the need to write something review-related. I’ll upload a rambling compiling all my read books on a monthly basis. Well, not really monthly, but you know what I mean.

The Late Mr Shakespeare - Robert Nye I felt a further hankering for this sort of content after finishing Falstaff, and I had relative faith that this book would deliver. My feelings, however, were slightly mixed when considering what was different than Nye’s first book. Unlike Falstaff, this text isn’t written from the perspective of the text’s focus; we instead get a mediator in the form of Pickleherring, who gives us a retrospective and mythologised account of Shakespeare as told through anecdotes and spurious half-remembered tales. Without wanting to just quote huge chunks of the text’s postulating on the subject of men being shaped by the stories that are told about them, I’ll simply say that it’s all fucking great stuff, for while the book does come across as something of a cock-and-bull story with the amount of backtracking and reiterating and rewording of the same points, all of the reiterating and rewording is fantastically eloquent. What I enjoyed about Falstaff is still here, in that a fun larger-than-life world is evoked through a multitude of story snippets and accounts of events that border on folk tales, all, within the context of this book, meticulously stored away in a hundred black boxes over the years, and now shared with us as a testament to the multitude of stories told (in the context of the story) about the famous playwright, and as a big satisfied middle finger towards historical accuracy and the accounts of fuddy-duddies. This is in many ways a book for Shakespeare scholars; there’s a lot of the sort of shit in here that you’d learn as a Shakespeare academic, from attribution studies to dogmatic arguments about Shakespeare’s life and play participation (given undeserved credence here by the authoritative voice of one who knew him personally), and I’m not sure if this at all contributes to making the book good, given both my preexisting dislike for such nonsense (compared to the actual content of Shakespeare’s work) and the fact that not much is done with the information within this book. Nye seems to be reciting facts, slotting them in wherever he can, just to prove that he knows them, and in many cases his statements about Shakespeare’s life seem to all be along the lines of ’this thing was fleetingly referenced in one of his plays, and thereby it must have been contributory to one of his formative experiences'. (Plus, Shakespeare studies is, surprisingly, still a burgeoning field and a victim to changing times, and thus some of the assertions about Shakespeare and his works in this book are undermined by more recent contradictory research). No, this book’s compelling content lies elsewhere. When I first started reading I was concerned as to how compelling our narrator Pickleherring would be; he’s not so old as to be a doddering fool (which would have least given his narration some spice), and not so interesting a character archetype to be able to stand alongside Shakespeare and friends, and despite his assertions that he is a merry prankster full of mirth, this tends to only surface in the occasional moments of weird, sometimes crass erotica. This shit came up in Falstaff as well, again missing the point of sex within the context of farce or country peasant comedy by playing it entirely straight, and thus I am left with no choice but to assume that Nye has got a thing for such shite. Like Falstaff, this book’s blurb purports to answer a number of as-yet-unanswered questions about its titular character, and just fucking like Falstaff, what is revealed is not even that interesting. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: PROBABLY, YEAH, BUT ONLY IF YOU’RE LIKE, REALLY INTO SHAKESPEARE

My Papa and the Maid of Orleans and The Unruly Bridal Bed and Other Grotesques - Mynona I was fully geared up to return to the topic of over-intellectualising, a topic I haven’t touched since Kharms, when I caught a glimpse at the introduction to the first of these books that I read. My introduction to Mynona was the two of his stories featured in Tales of the German Imagination, little snippets of madness that seemed right up my alley, and yet, like Kharms, I’d be hard-pressed to state in scholarly terms exactly what it is that makes these stories work, or indeed if their success even has a scholarly explanation. I skimmed over the introductions in each of my tiny (and stupidly overpriced) books, and concluded that I would probably be alright for the most part. The tentative swipes that the introductory passages make in the direction of academia seem to just be quantifying what a grotesque is in terms of Mynona’s writings, which is all interesting shit. At its worst, the nonsense that the introductions spout about the inherent messages of Mynona’s own ‘creative indifference’ philosophies can be happily ignored in favour of simply enjoying the stories as odd and occasionally morbid little tales. Truthfully there really isn’t too much to say about these stories; the two collections that I have are the third and fourth of such that Mynona produced, meaning they’re not exactly his collected best works and the stories can be a tad hit or miss, but overall they’re very enjoyable quick reads. Both the blurb(s) and the attempts made to describe the events of the stories make them seem a lot darker than they actually are, for they often deal with bizarre or taboo themes, but this seems to me like false advertising, for when you’re reading said stories you don’t stop for a second to consider the fucked-up nature of some of the stories’ content. The tone carries it in such a way as to negate critical study, and thus I beseech anyone who tries. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: YES, IF YOU’VE GOT A DAY TO KILL AND CAN FIND THE STORIES FOR CHEAPER THAN THE NINE FUCKING QUID I PAID FOR EACH OF THEM

The Moving Toyshop - Edmund Crispin Many a time have I walked into Waterstone’s and spared a fleeting glance at the frankly ridiculous quantity of crime books there, stopping only to briefly laugh at some of the more on-the-nose titles (my favourite of which will always be Fielden’s A Quarter Past Dead). Golden Age crime fiction has always been a possibility of a genre I might want to delve into, but never an especially pressing one. My purchase of this book was something of an impulse buy in the Folio Society summer sale, and indeed my decision to purchase this book was dependant mostly on the assertions that the book was unlike other crime fiction texts. To elaborate, this is a very funny book, and I’ve been led to believe that it’s rather difficult to slot humour into a serious crime novel about murder and whatnot. It does so with a cast of eccentric and incredibly memorable characters, a plot driven mostly by chance and farce, and a fantastic aversion to seriousness, with characters often getting drunk and passing the time with such games as ‘naming unreadable books’ before venturing forth to the next slapstick shenanigans. Without wanting to, yet again, go off on a tangent about how I always seem to read ‘book B inspired by book A’ before I’ve read ‘book A’, this book is very much in the vein of Adams' Dirk Gently (with the eccentric intellectual types pursuing investigations way out of their jurisdiction) and Fforde's Thursday Next series (with rapidly escalating storylines and fourth wall breaks and hilarious set pieces, right down to the protagonist’s needlessly flamboyant car). Everything seems to be very much entwined with the humour, be it the characters or the plot, and it has proven difficult for me to say exactly what else it is about this book that made it so enjoyable to read. I blazed through it so quickly that I didn’t think about it too strongly; ultimately, a lot of the books I’ve been reading lately are like this, which makes it increasingly difficult to write rambles about them, considering that these rambles were originally intended to allow for a bit of extra academic flexing. I’m not here to break down the components of farce or slapstick or the effectiveness of literary references when constructing a story or comedy. All I can really talk about is, how does this book compare to other crime fiction? We uncover the story’s mystery slowly throughout the course of the book, with new characters coming into the fray and bringing new light to the situation, but the book’s mystery is eventually revealed to be a tad too small and too restrictive to allow for any grand revelations as to who indeed dunnit. Every now and then the book displays some fun meta-knowledge of the genre when the characters are deciding what move they are going to make next, though this does lead to a rather anticlimactic twist at the end when a promising lead is revealed to be a red herring seemingly just because the genre demands one, and the characters shrugging their shoulders to say ‘well, that’s how these sort of things go’ wasn’t quite enough to offset the feeling that things didn’t really lead to anything. The final roundup of events, and eventual reveal of the one tiny detail that answers all other questions of the mystery, is of course not really dependent on anything exciting (as I’d probably expect from the genre), but I reckon that when it comes to revealing the small but significant detail that is the crux of everything, a lot of books have a more interesting crux than this book does. But perhaps I am merely nitpicking. In any case, my feelings towards the book upon completion were overwhelmingly positive, if not because of a wholly satisfying ending than certainly because I know I’ve got a shit load more of these books to be getting on with. Therefore, it seems unlikely that my attempts to breach this new genre will lead to any further exploration for a while yet; I’ve got to read all of Crispin’s stories first. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: HELL FUCKING YES

Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle - Thomas Love Peacock I heard of Peacock some time ago in a romanticism lecture as a great and criminally underrated author, I picked up this book after skimming the blurb and introduction and learning that Peacock’s writing took inspiration from a superstar lineup of my sort of authors (Aristophanes, Rabelais and Voltaire to name a few), and started reading it recently because I was craving a Gormenghast fix but had sworn not to start any more giant fucking novels until I’d finished Barchester Towers. It makes sense that this book would be recommended to me by an old academic chap, because this seems to be a book mainly for old academic chaps; a Peacockian staple, as the introduction so refers to it as (I suspect as a means of justifying it), is that the narrative often stops dead to allocate large chunks of the story to men of various fields of academia discussing various smart affairs (in the words of Peacock himself, ‘discussing everything and settling nothing'), written in a form more resembling a drama text than prose. It’s fast and easy reading, and it’s fun to revel in the general vibe of Regency era learned men lounging in a club speaking listlessly on trifling matters over their booze. While there is humour to be found (both explicitly and quietly in Peacock’s writing style), and while I am not entirely ignorant on the era and characters within that this book is good-naturedly satirising, this book requires some background knowledge to get the most out of it. Nightmare Abbey parodies the ‘mordancy of contemporary literature’, with characters reflecting the romantic poets (all with absolutely fantastic Gormenghast-tier names) lolling around and bemoaning the times and customs and pontificating incomprehensibly on transcendental subjects and generally revelling in operating on various tiers of melodramatic morose being. The conversations that they have are often rather dense, and thus the humour tends to come from the ridiculous characters’ voices and attitudes (or occasionally the farcical antics that they get up to). Crotchet Castle is significantly more all over the shop, being a general clusterfuck of ideals and philosophies (the primary conflict being between common sense and rationality, with all the supernumerary other characters slotting in to lend their voices in pummelling the rationalist into the fucking dirt) pitted against each other; it is on occasion rather accessible, given the simplicity of the characters and their chosen philosophies to spout, but I’m really coming in on the bottom floor when it comes to rationality and political economy, so a lot of the nuance, while often enjoyable enough considering its delivery of light-hearted sarcasm, was totally fucking lost on me. Most of the characters are just mouthpieces for philosophies, some of the characters are parodies of pre-existing personages who I didn’t fucking know and didn’t care to learn about, and some of the characters are enjoyable enough because they slot into the story in other ways (such as in the trite but necessary romance subplots, forgotten about and reinstated as soon as a hackneyed conclusion is needed) or otherwise stand out on their own (such as Peacock’s stand-in, the Reverend Dr Folliott, who couldn’t give a blot about anything save his own dinner and booze, or indeed my aligned character, the deteriorationist and medieval buff Mr Chainmail, who remains ‘out of reach of [everyone’s] arguments’ from his own fortress of beef and ale (as the introduction describes), which I can fully relate to). The aforementioned romance subplots might give the reader of this ramble the impression that these stories are rather confused as to what they want to be, but the confusion (if confusion it be, and not just a juggling of ideas (hardly skilful juggling, but roll with it)) really only extends as far as the eclectic array of things within the novels. The overall intention of these pieces is to be escapism, or a conversation piece (given that much of the text is dominated by conversations), and in that regard it does its job well enough. I will say, however, that the aforementioned ‘inspiration’ that these texts take from such authors as Aristophanes and Rabelais is really just limited to occasionally quoting them, and considering that I don’t speak Greek or French, this became more of a pain in the arse than a pleasure, having to keep looking at the back for the necessary translations. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: YES TO NIGHTMARE, POSSIBLY TO CASTLE

Seven Men - Max Beerbohm I’m afraid that you’ll have to excuse the fact that I was only able to read about the titular seven men in this book, and not the promised ‘Two Others’ in the book’s re-release; I read this online on Gutenberg, dissatisfied with the prices and conditions of the physical copies of this book (as well as the fact that I couldn’t really be putting too many eggs in this basket, since I started this book on a whim after it was fleetingly mentioned in Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop), and subsequently my reading experience was a rather fragmented one, scrounging all of the individual stories in this publication together and reading them as one overall book. Let this book stand as another title in my guilty list of attempts to dip my toe into the pool of postmodernism, for the stories within it are less about seven men (well, technically six, since Beerbohm himself is the seventh) and more about stories told about them or stories that shape them. Men tell stories about themselves, find themselves shaped by their works or the rules of their works, are forgotten as soon as their works fade from public interest, etc., from everything to formally written pieces of dubious quality to spun yarns over dinner. Supernatural influences are occasionally added to facilitate some of the dafter ideas, but everything is played entirely straight, with our focal point Beerbohm, having interpolated himself into the stories, providing everything with a sense of… if not verisimilitude, than certainly seriousness. Characters find themselves entwined within their stories, sad that their works of writing will be all that remains of them (or deluded into thinking that such a legacy would be a thing to be proud of), ‘ghosts caught in a fiction solemnly protesting their reality’ to paraphrase a quote from Lawrence Danson’s 1982 piece. It all makes for a very fun read, with each story providing a different reading experience that keeps you guessing as to what to expect. Finding myself with not much else to say, permit me to give a special mention to my favourite story in the collection, ‘Savonarola Brown’. The word ‘story’ is a tad misleading, but just as I find myself calling this text a short story collection or novel for lack of a better term, a story ‘Savonarola Brown’ must be, when in reality it is mostly comprised of a deliberately atrocious farcical tragicomedy script, written, in the context of the story, by the titular Brown, who did so over the course of eight years by throwing himself into the character of his beloved Savonarola and writing the story as the characters within it determined it to be written, leading to a rambling and capriciously-changing text that never failed to make me (if only as a great fan of early modern theatre, however trite or shoddy) laugh my arse off. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: HELL YEAH

Other shit I read that I couldn’t be arsed to ramble about: The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh (an absolutely amazing and very McDonagh play that I bloody wish I could have seen and would recommend to everyone (especially if they like fucked-up shit), The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth (a very entertaining and informative book (as to be expected from my favourite etymologist) that I resisted reading for a while because I figured that Forsyth was at his best when retelling historical events, and was pleasantly surprised to see that he manages to squeeze in a shit load of interesting history shit in here as well (my favourite example of which being the story of the two main faces behind the OED)), Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (a fucking incredible book that I resisted writing a review on because a) it’s a rather serious book with some hard-hitting stuff that’s difficult to make funny and b) there are only so many ways that I can say ‘it’s good’), The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher (a bloody amazing essay with some incredible content in it, made me very envious of Fisher for being able to contrive a means of writing about exactly what he wants to write about even when it is of passing or no relevance to the essay as a whole), and Swan Song by Edmund Crispin (another Crispin novel, so I didn’t bother rambling about it when it would just be the same points as my Moving Toyshop ramble, not as funny as Toyshop for the most part and focusing on a field of study that I know very little about but a very easy and enjoyable read nonetheless).