I think to start this post I must refer you to what Caroline wrote about Bohumil Hrabal's Closely Watched Trains, a Czech coming of age novel written in 1965 and adapted to film a year or so later to great acclaim. I think it is one of Hrabal's best known and most successful books, though he was quite prolific and possibly one of the best known Czech modern writers. I read it for her Literature and War Readalong earlier in the year (back when I was a better blogger and more in tune with the book blogging world, which I greatly hope to get back to in the new year).
I'm afraid the novel is going to get mostly a passing mention on my part (hence the reference to what Caroline wrote about it when it was fresh in her mind) as it is a classic that I struggled with. I admire Hrabal and had read him before, but I think sometimes you come to classics ill-prepared and maybe not in the best frame of mind to tackle them and that is what happened with me and the Hrabal. You know you are on to something really good, but you just can't quite grasp it on the first go.
The story is set in Nazi Occupied Czechoslovakia and takes place mostly at a railway station run by misfits and collaborators. At the center of it all is a young man who desperately wants to lose his virginity but has a few issues with his, should we say, delivery? It is a comic novel, a little crazy and over the top. It is slender, almost novella-like and really demands attention and maybe to be read in a single sitting. Carefully. None of which I did. Sometimes when you can't hold all the narrative threads together in quite the right way, the story 'loses something in the translation' (and in this case, that literally is so as this was translated from Czech). I did actually watch the Oscar-award winning film, which helped but I know it is a book where I missed something in my reading. There is more to the story than the farcical play and sexual antics. It is a novel that demands a better second reading by me sometime.
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Ah. Anita Brookner. She is infinitely bingeable if you ask me. I actually intended Leaving Home to be the first of a a good binge, but it didn't materialize (so I plan on trying again in 2018). You can put her in the Barbara Comyns category for me. As in--more please. I know it seems like she writes the same story over and over (it's not but she does write about the same themes quite a lot, but she does it so well it always feels fresh and new). Maybe I am just drawn to her protagonists (maybe I am too like them and am just trying to figure the world out so it makes sense that I want to know their stories, too). They tend to be solitary and intellectual, not necessarily by choice but certainly by circumstances. They are not poor, but at least solidly middle class and sometimes coming rather down in the world, maybe a little awkward and wishing for something more. For me that is highly relatable.
In Leaving Home, Emma is an only daughter living with a widowed mother who fears her own life will turn out much the same. She wants more. She studies landscape gardening, from an academic standpoint and ends up in Paris where she meets a vibrant, very French woman who works in the library Emma frequents. And there has her inspiration, bumps into real life, if you will. Francoise, her friend, might just be a little bit manipulative even if it is not intentional. Some people just breathe in life and exude the kind of success that seems easy and without effort. That's Francoise.
It may be effortless for Francoise, but none of the social interactions Emma takes on is ever as easy. It's not as though Emma never takes risks, but maybe she is just a little too quiet, a little too reserved for those efforts to make more than a tiny ripple. I can see Emma wishing for something more and maybe making an attempt, but that ripple is never quite enough and in the end maybe it is preferable--that solitariness. For me a Brookner novel is always a gem of a read. Just writing about this story, even at a distance makes me want to pull another of her novels from my shelves. So, yes, another Brookner will be joining a Comyns in my January pile of books!
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I am disappointed to say that my NYRB subscription-reading year was a mixed bag having read less than half the books I received, though I do have several in progress books and good intentions for most of the rest. That doesn't stop me from optimistically renewing my subscription with high hopes on potential fantastic reads. Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, however, was one of my favorite books both from the subscription and overall from my reading year. I have not read much by her but I want to read more, and even with the little I have read, I feel like I can say Family Lexicon is so Natalia Ginzburg. It was originally published in Italian in 1963 as Lessico Famigliare and just reissued this year by NYRB and translated into English by Jenny McPhee.
In her preface Ginzburg assures the reader that the events and people are real, that she did not invent a single thing, but she tells the reader to "read it as a novel, and therefore not demand of it any more or less than a novel can offer." So it is a memoir of sorts, but creatively presented? I always wonder how writers can do it, wrote about their history and tell their family stories in a way that seems to fresh and 'present' yet do so from the vantage point of many decades later. Writers do it all the time, she just seems to be more forward about putting it all into that context.
It is aptly titled because her family indeed has its own lexicon--it's own language, those intimate family traditions and habits of calling things and people and references to situations in their own particular manner. Sometimes it is a little peculiar, sometimes funny or quirky. In a sense this is much in the vein of a Comyns novel, though not exactly like it either. Ginzburg was born in Sicily to a Jewish father and Catholic mother and grew up in Turin in a country under Fascist rule. However, her family was staunchly antifascist. They were sort of quirky an bohemian and literary--just really really interesting. The book blurb calls this a book about family and language and about storytelling--all things I love reading about. And Ginzburg is a very good storyteller. And yes, she is another "must read more of her work" writers for me!