Women Who Read

Here, for your contemplation in a quiet moment, is a link to a Pinterest blog comprising a rather lovely collection of paintings of women reading: Women Who Read (Art). It's full of peaceful and relaxing images and I'm pretty sure that Leonora or Florence must be amongst them.

I'm new to Pinterest blogs but have concluded that the name has nothing to do with Harold, plays or pauses, but instead is a combination of pin (as in board) and interest (as in hobby or enthusiasm). Quite how a picture of a pumpkin cheesecake has made it onto Women Who Read is a mystery.

The Good Soldier is a good debate

What an excellent book group read Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier turned out to be; views on it diverged so sharply that we had A Good Debate last Tuesday evening at Alison's. Those who liked it really liked it .....and, as one of those who was less enthusiastic, I was left feeling rather shallow for my lack of appreciation of the book.

It is an old fashioned read, that's for sure, but at the time (written in 1915 and set a little earlier) it must have been both shocking in content and ground-breaking in form and style. We are used to and are comfortable with novels which are non-chronological and which use flashbacks to tell a story and so, perhaps, it is this familiarity with form which makes it easy to underestimate the novelty and achievement of The Good Soldier.

Whilst I didn't much care for any of the characters, I admit that there is something intriguing about Dowell, the narrator, since he is manipulated by virtually everyone else and his naivety is staggering. He too is a device; he is unreliable (not necessarily a good thing in a narrator) and as the story of the web of disintegrating relationships between Dowell, Florence, Edward and Leonora unfolds nothing is as Dowell has originally revealed to us.

We agreed that by setting his characters in an aimless vacuum of European spas with no need to earn a living and no family to distract them, Ford isolates them and allows them to be morally and spiritually lost (and, as a result, completely dishonest with each other). With no outside forces, the reader realises early on that they are unsympathetic characters on a destructive course..... the book's opening sentence sets it up: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard".

We meet again on 28th November at Sally J's when we will be discussing hopefully happier themes having read Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick, a novel inspired by Henry James by a writer who worshiped him. It is a choice which met Alison's challenge of finding a book which starts with a letter.

Man Booker shortlist on radio 4

I'm thoroughly enjoying the Today programme's interviews this week with the shortlisted authors for the Man Booker prize. However, they don't always do a good selling job on their books. This morning it was the turn of Jeet Thayil to speak about his novel, Narcopolis. Thayil has an interesting personal story; he is a highly educated, recovered alcoholic and opium addict from India's intellectual classes who has published this, his first novel, at the age of 52. It is set in the opium dens of Bombay (as it then was) in the 1970s and 80s and is obviously personal in many ways. So far, so interesting. But as soon as I learnt that the first sentence is six and a half pages long, I turned off (not literally). Now, it may be that this is a completely contextually justified, poetic, narcotic dream-like sequence, but what an off-putting thought; and as a reformed lawyer, I would find it hard to resist punctuating this mega-sentence.

In comparison, Monday's entertaining interview with a chirpy Hilary Mantel whet the appetite for the third book in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy. After she won the prize for Woolf Hall in 2009 she was reported as having plans to spend the winnings on "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll". Rebecca Jones politely asked her how this went, only to be told that it was "hideously disappointing"and that paying off the mortgage was a "bigger imperative". Maybe she'll have more fun if she wins second time around.