The Kindly Ones – Jonathan Littell: Part 1 (Pages 1-40)

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I’ve gotten bored of writing structured, essay-style book reviews, and thought I’d give something different a try.  My aim in writing reviews is to provide readers with an idea of if they’d enjoy it, but also to help me reflect on the book.  To focus more on the latter, instead of waiting until I finish a book to write a post on it, I’ll try blogging as I go.  Hopefully, this will get me writing more and help me capture what it’s actually like to read the book.  I’ll also be trying to write in a style that is more personal than critical, more fan-boy than academic.  Let me know what you  think.

And now, our feature presentation…

My sister gave me The Kindly Ones for Christmas in 2010, and despite her strong recommendation, it has sat on the bookshelf unread ever since.  I was put off in part by its near thousand-page size, and in part by the critical acclaim plastered all it: “A great work of literary fiction, to which readers will turn for decades to come”; “A tour de force”;  “A monument of contemporary literature.”  There’s even a little red, round sticker on the front cover saying “Profoundly important” (this makes me wonder if it was stuck there on the production line, or if it was shipped out to bookstores later and bookstore clerks had to go around sticking little red, round stickers on every copy).  I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but since out-of-context praise sprouts on every book cover, I don’t put much value on it.  The more hyperbolic these quotes are, the more suspicious I am of them.

What really made me wary of The Kindly Ones, though, was that it’s about two subjects I’ve lost interest in reading about: World War II and the Holocaust.  This isn’t to say that I don’t recognise the scale and importance of these historic tragedies.  It’s just that they have been tackled so often and so well in literature and movies that I believed there was nothing new to say about them.

Various Pets Alive and Dead – Marina Lewycka

This review was originally published on the excellent LiteraryMinded.  Thanks to Angela Meyer for the opportunity, and the free book.

The title of Various Pets Alive and Dead might make you think it involves lots of cute animal stories and some kind of furry genocide. Instead, it’s a very political novel about the global financial crisis and the failure of the leftist ideals, played out through the intergenerational conflict of a family of hippy-commune escapees. This probably doesn’t sound like the most fertile ground for a comic novel, but its author, Marina Lewycka, milks the politics for as many laughs as possible, and even manages to throw in the odd ill-fated hamster or doomed family of rabbits.

Lewycka’s fourth novel, Various Pets Alive and Dead tells the story of Serge and Clara, and their mother Dora, who, along with her partner Marcus and the other quirky members of their collective, raised her children in an old country house on a healthy diet of free love, socialism and lentils.

Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer

A couple of weeks ago, ABC2’s Sunday Best aired Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer.  It’s second documentary by British filmmaker Nick Broomfield on Aileen Wuornos, often billed as America’s first female serial killer and subject of the 2002 hollywood movie Monster.

Broomfield formed something of a friendship with Wuornos, and this unique relationship provided him with access to her right up until the day before her execution in 2002.  His interviews with her are at once captivating, disturbing and saddening.  Wuornos is compelling from the moment she comes on screen.

There is her physical presence – a battered face, swept back blond hair and piercing, wild eyes.  Her large frame is hidden in prison orange, but it is hard to imagine a more formidable, frightening woman.  She is frank, prone to outbursts of rage and clearly delusional, becoming more and more convinced over the course of her incarceration that the police allowed her to kill as part of a conspiracy to make money off her story.  But her trust in the filmmaker also provides glimpses of a woman who, despite being hardened by a tragic life, is hungry for friendship.

Confessions of a Yakuza – Junichi Saga

Describe it

A well-written biography of an old-school Yakuza, providing an unvarnished account of the underworld and the underclass in early 20th century Japan.

What I loved

A lot of history focuses on leaders or the elite, whose names are committed to the ages by circumstance, ability or privilege.   Confessions of a Yakuza provides a window into the lives of the other half: the poor, the outcasts and the criminals, who inhabit a world where the importance of guts and luck are less veiled, and where it is harder to hold illusions about human nature.

It is the biography of Ichiji Eiji, as told to a country doctor, Junichi Saga.  Eiji is not an overly complicated character: he is tough, amoral and self-serving.  He upholds a sense of yakuza honour, but mostly out of self-interest.  At the age he recounts his tale, he is unconflicted about his past and given to only occasional reflection.  He also has a weakness for woman, which, throughout his storied career, causes him to lop off a few fingers in penance, as per the yakuza code.

God Is Not Great – Christopher Hitchens

image courtesy of The Guardian

Describe it

The late, great contrarian Christopher Hitchens’ informed and impassioned attack on religion.

What I loved

Hitchens is at his most likable when he is gushing over his political, scientific and literary heroes and their legacies.

“We [Atheists] are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.  Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.”

The breadth of knowledge that he brings to bear on his argument is impressive and exhilarating.

His most convincing argument is that societies have become more just and equal due to secular reforms.  In times and places where religious institutions hold significant power, there is greater repression, especially of minorities, and more atrocities are committed to supress the diversity of human nature.  The more tolerant approach displayed by religious institutions in developed cultures is a strategic reaction to their diminished influence.

Indian Camp – Ernest Hemingway

Describe it

The first Nick Adams short story from In Our Time, in which Nick’s father, a doctor, takes him to an Indian camp to see a complicated birth.  Described by one critic as the “master key” to Hemingway’s writing.

What I loved

It all rings true.  One of my favourite Hemingway quotes from The Green Hills of Africa goes:

“First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be and absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive.”

Perhaps the most striking word in this quote is “disinterested”, which seems a strange trait to encourage in writers.  By this, I believe that Hemingway meant that a good writer must have the ability to take a step back and observe life, dispassionately, unblinkered by dogma or fear, never turning away from notions that society deems unacceptable.

In Indian Camp, Hemingway’s commitment to truthfulness can be seen in his exploration of masculinity, one of his chief preoccupations. 

Absolutely Crabb-ulous! – The political commentary of Annabel Crabb

Who she is

ABC’s chief online political writer. She is insightful, informed and frank, but her greatest asset is her wit, which makes the dry stuff of politics accessible and fun. Also brings her warmth and enthusiasm to TV on Insiders and The Drum.  Read her columns here.

What I love (feel the need to add “about her writing and commentary” before this gets creepy)

Her conversational style and bitingly funny, deadly-accurate pop-culture similes lay bare the absurdities, hypocrisies, challenges and, very occasionally, triumphs of the Australian Democratic system. On Julia Gillard:

“Where her predecessor ached to be popular, this prime minister has made unpopularity into something of a personal art form. There’s a compelling, almost cinematic quality to her determination; it’s like watching a slalom downhill skier deliberately hitting every peg.”

Tells it like it is. Keeps it real. Straight up OG (Observer of Government). Her style brings politics down a peg to a more engaging, honest level:

“that [the mining tax] did not apply to ordinary activity but only to the whoopingly, hilariously over-profitable kind, was not fully understood during the Mining Tax Massacre of 2010.”

And being such a clear communicator, one of her chief hates is obfuscation. As she puts it, “give me a clanger-dropper over a fudger any day.”

Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway [Round 2!]

Describe it

In its story of the idle, hedonistic elite, it expresses the anxieties of the modern age – the passing of the old world, the new roles of the sexes, and man’s loss of faith in God, in ideals, in himself. Read it.

What I loved

The spare beauty and vigour of Hemingway’s prose. The strength of an active sentence, the power of that perfect verb.

It made me want to dance and drink whisky in Paris, and fish and drink wine chilled in a mountain stream in the mountains of Spain, and see a bullfight and drink from a wine skin in Pamploma. To say damn this and damn that, and “What a lot of rot” and “To hell with you, Lady Ashley.”

Shibuya No Love – Hannu Rajaniemi

I was clicking around the always excellent Guardian Books page, source of many a mid-work literature fix, when I came across this interview with Hannu Rajaniemi.  He seemed endearingly down to earth, is a fellow Murakami fan and his novel, The Quantum Thief, sounded like an interesting concept, so I followed the link to the first piece he had published, Shibuya No Love. 

I enjoyed the story, but it’s clearly the work of an inexperienced, though talented, writer.  It can be instructive to read the work of less polished authors, though, because the visible seams make it easier to understand what works, and what doesn’t.

About a Boy – Nick Hornby

I tore through About a Boy in a couple of days, even staying up late into the night to finish it, which I haven’t done in ages.  This isn’t to say that it’s the best book I’ve read in the past year, but it is the most readable, largely thanks to its very British sense of humour.  I haven’t read a lot of books whose priority is to be funny, but those that I have, such as The Finkler Question, seem to use the same kind of humour, full of understatement, overstatement and comically frank descriptions.  And like The Finkler Question, About A Boy isn’t just aiming to make you laugh: it also has something to say about some pretty dark themes, and late 20th Century England.

It does this by focusing on the unlikely friendship between Marcus, a socially awkward twelve year old burdened with a chronically depressed mother, and Will, a thirty-six year old man-child who lives a care-free life on the royalties of a Christmas pop-song written by his father.  The two meet at a picnic for single parents: Marcus is there with one of his mum’s friends; Will is there because he has fabricated a son to pick-up single mothers.