Knulp was the perfect book for me.
I had been precariously travelling around the country after an upsetting incident that ended with me losing my accommodation and then struggling with myself and the world. I find that in these times of questioning I need books more than ever and 'Knulp' by Herman Hesse was that rarest of stories found at the perfect moment. It healed some of my hurt.
With the wayward traveller Knulp I found a kindred spirit- a nomad in the world. Knulp has no occupation, yet knows a great deal of many things. He is loved by all but can never stay in one place for long as he does not want to have a home while he wishes to see the world. Others may find this irresponsible as he could have been a respectable person and practice a profession or a trade but Knulp needs his freedom to explore and discover.
Knulp earnest and sincere character made me respond to him so closely and immediately, a simple soul not wanting to complicate his life with the things that others have. For me I understood him so deeply, the need to be innocent with a wide eyed wonder about the world against the odds. To think that the book was written in 1917 shows how much of a searching of the soul the German Hesse has done, which gives it so much more of a poignant taste to Knulp's character.
Simply written and reflective it offers up a depth of feeling that other writers cannot achieve like Hesse.
The last part of the book was the most affecting aspect of the story where Knulp wonders if he has completely wasted his life, whether anything about it was good. This turns him into a fully rounded character where his experience catches up with him with a profound insight.
It is a wonderfully short novella that inspires as much as it consoles, about usual lives and our resolving ourselves to ourselves. One of my three favourite books, along with 'Auto-da-Fe' and 'The Clown' (what is it about German writers?) I highly recommend this book, particularly if you have become lost.
The Book Spy
Me and My Collection
Sunday, 29 April 2018
Friday, 9 March 2018
'The Clown' by Heinreich Böll
The tears of a clown is an old cliche and in Heinreich Böll's novel 'The Clown' we drink it deep.
Hans Schnier is the eponymous clown who befalls a romantic tragedy in his life during his late twenties. He is in love with Marie, a good Catholic, who wishes to be married traditionally while Hans has spurned such a life and wants nothing of the sort. One day Marie leaves him for another man, Zupfer, and Hans, being monogamous, is heartbroken.
Of all the novels of the Nobel Prize list this, to me, is one of the greatest, second only to Auto-Da-Fe by Elias Canetti.
So why do I think this?
I've always liked Böll's short stories and thought that they were works of great moral strength, and this seems true with his longer works. Secondly I was just leaving my twenties behind when I read this and so I could identify with the main character very well, his depression and disappointments. Lastly it is a great work of art who through one character we see the workings of a hypocritical society always talking about love and never practising it.
It's story works very well as a novel as it is told in flashbacks while having a positive narrative drive. Though Schnier is a depressed clown he is never morose, often funny and is particularly poignant as an innocent making his way through the wicked world of deceptions and betrayal. But I think some of it, especially the middle scene with his father, could be made into a good radio/ stage play. Reading it I could see it in a very cinematic way. Which is often a way of discovering if the writer is imaginatively acute or not.
Schnier's attempts to find out where Marie has gone and his obstruction from her friends and family are rigorous through a constant process of loss. Not only loss of his love but also a loss of his job as a clown. As he drinks more and becomes less and less in control of himself he finds that he is taking less money for the jobs he does. His agent, another source of agitation, is in some sense his only friend and even he cannot help him.
This clown is very much a man who in losing the one thing he does love, loses all other things and he is willing to drop out of society completely and be in the gutter. The layers of interaction give him no pleasure as he becomes increasingly at odds with those around him.
What clinches it for me as a great book is the grace of it's ending. Humble and ennobling it rescues Schnier from the very depths of tragedy and gives him a wholeness that he had lost but in a very different sense. For me this book is about the act of standing up, of trying to restore order, and failing knowing that one had tried, about living honestly and all the pain it gives you.
I enjoy German writers very much and this book is one of the finest, definitely one for book-worn humanists who need to be told such stories.
Hans Schnier is the eponymous clown who befalls a romantic tragedy in his life during his late twenties. He is in love with Marie, a good Catholic, who wishes to be married traditionally while Hans has spurned such a life and wants nothing of the sort. One day Marie leaves him for another man, Zupfer, and Hans, being monogamous, is heartbroken.
Of all the novels of the Nobel Prize list this, to me, is one of the greatest, second only to Auto-Da-Fe by Elias Canetti.
So why do I think this?
I've always liked Böll's short stories and thought that they were works of great moral strength, and this seems true with his longer works. Secondly I was just leaving my twenties behind when I read this and so I could identify with the main character very well, his depression and disappointments. Lastly it is a great work of art who through one character we see the workings of a hypocritical society always talking about love and never practising it.
It's story works very well as a novel as it is told in flashbacks while having a positive narrative drive. Though Schnier is a depressed clown he is never morose, often funny and is particularly poignant as an innocent making his way through the wicked world of deceptions and betrayal. But I think some of it, especially the middle scene with his father, could be made into a good radio/ stage play. Reading it I could see it in a very cinematic way. Which is often a way of discovering if the writer is imaginatively acute or not.
Schnier's attempts to find out where Marie has gone and his obstruction from her friends and family are rigorous through a constant process of loss. Not only loss of his love but also a loss of his job as a clown. As he drinks more and becomes less and less in control of himself he finds that he is taking less money for the jobs he does. His agent, another source of agitation, is in some sense his only friend and even he cannot help him.
This clown is very much a man who in losing the one thing he does love, loses all other things and he is willing to drop out of society completely and be in the gutter. The layers of interaction give him no pleasure as he becomes increasingly at odds with those around him.
What clinches it for me as a great book is the grace of it's ending. Humble and ennobling it rescues Schnier from the very depths of tragedy and gives him a wholeness that he had lost but in a very different sense. For me this book is about the act of standing up, of trying to restore order, and failing knowing that one had tried, about living honestly and all the pain it gives you.
I enjoy German writers very much and this book is one of the finest, definitely one for book-worn humanists who need to be told such stories.
Friday, 2 March 2018
'Snow Country' by Yasunari Kawabata
The poetry of coldness and heat are evocatively captured in Yasunari Kawabata's slim novel, serialised in the late '30s, 'Snow Country', with a doomed yet elegant love affair.
Shimamura is a Japanese man who has come to the hot springs of Yuzawa taking a break from his city affairs. At the hot spring he falls in love with a Geisha, Komako, which is a short, intense, affair but cannot last as Shimaura has to return to the city. In the novel the fleetingness of life is explored, how pleasure comes and goes from moment to moment to how best this fleetingness should be enjoyed.
It is a very Japanese style of story that looks for the importance in the smallness of things, actions and words, and is very restraint on not overwhelming the reader with too many details. The hot springs themselves serve for a unique location where this love story is played out. The steam rising into the cold air is an apt metaphor for what Kawabata looks to describe in 'Snow Country'.
The descriptions are really what makes this book as it sets the tone for the dialogue between Shimamura and Yuzawa. This could be adapted into a stage play as it is all set in one place and having the snow fall around them while they sit in the hot spring comes across as a good image for the fragility of life, the fragility of relationships and the security that comes with these things.
'Snow Country' is the perfect story for our snowy times, to be read with hot water bottle and hot chocolate at hand.
Shimamura is a Japanese man who has come to the hot springs of Yuzawa taking a break from his city affairs. At the hot spring he falls in love with a Geisha, Komako, which is a short, intense, affair but cannot last as Shimaura has to return to the city. In the novel the fleetingness of life is explored, how pleasure comes and goes from moment to moment to how best this fleetingness should be enjoyed.
It is a very Japanese style of story that looks for the importance in the smallness of things, actions and words, and is very restraint on not overwhelming the reader with too many details. The hot springs themselves serve for a unique location where this love story is played out. The steam rising into the cold air is an apt metaphor for what Kawabata looks to describe in 'Snow Country'.
The descriptions are really what makes this book as it sets the tone for the dialogue between Shimamura and Yuzawa. This could be adapted into a stage play as it is all set in one place and having the snow fall around them while they sit in the hot spring comes across as a good image for the fragility of life, the fragility of relationships and the security that comes with these things.
'Snow Country' is the perfect story for our snowy times, to be read with hot water bottle and hot chocolate at hand.
Tuesday, 13 February 2018
Winner of the Nobel Prize 2017
"who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world"
I wrote this about him in my prediction series a few years ago:
'For some reason Ishiguro reminds me of Oran Pamuk though I now how distinct they both are from each other. What I am reminded of is the attempts of the individual to reconcile him with the world around them. Like in ‘Snow’ ‘When We Were Orphans’ is about getting caught in political situations when the main characters have personal problems that they would much rather solve than the wider underlying conditions of society. It’s not that the characters do not care about the world in which they live but simply they are displaying the fundamental problem of being an individual who acquires personal burdens while expected to be part of something bigger and, almost therefore, more meaningful. It is a universal trickiness that people have to deal with but the writers’ style is marked into this worldwide condition and therefore making it their own while being applicable to the reader, whoever they might be.'
A belated congratulations to Ishiguro for the award.
Friday, 14 July 2017
'4321' Countdown to Paul Auster's Nobel Prize?
Writers work at their craft for years.
They do all sorts to survive; maintaining their finance and their mental well being on little. Word after word, sentence after sentence, writers walk their lonely path to an undisclosed destination. They can bring out book after book, and story after story, never to get attention, never to become something that may amount to something else. They are the hopeful. But by reaching a grand old age they may finally produce a fruit of such tender care that they are restored youthful again.
Dear readers I present to you 4321: Paul Auster's Great American Novel.
America has a knack of producing big novels about big themes taking hours and pages of time to both read and write. It has to in order to cope with the sheer scale of everything giving writers no end of fair copy.
Paul's offering is along the same direction and at the same time a total reversal of everything we know and expected of the Great Life of Ferguson, a man who lives so fully that he occupies no less then four lives, each one similar and yet wildly different.
To give an understanding of what this novel means to the Genre of Novels it is important to understand that Paul's account of Ferguson obeys a total understanding of the Art of the Novel and a total disregard to how a story is put together.
Let us begin with chronology. Stories work by Starting-Middling-Ending with focus on Highs and Lows and Development of Character. The conception of this novel envisions one character with four lives and consequentially has four startings, four endings and a hell of a lot of middling, with massive fluctuations of highs, lows and a forked development of character.
The tone is big in theme and scope yet the details are highly nuanced, carefully put together and a work of supreme art. Though easily readable this, be assured, is unusually complex craft that takes more than simple dedication but also an intricate understanding of not only how novels work but how films work and how politics work and how having sex works, which is not only an astounding level of detail but also of endurance.
In this sturdy American box he puts in metric tons of mainly French Continental Philosophy, Avant Garde twitches, touches and flourishes and his own chance encounters testing his abilities and stretching his talents until they seem to be unable to go any further, yet the ease and grace and suave skill he puts into all of this is not only admirable but it is a balm for the heart. Leaving the book one comes away with not merely feeling that Paul's intellectual capacity is at full flow but that his heart is on full strength and the two are beautifully combined in a book to live in.
Paul's back catalogue involves many seemingly strange and odd stories fashioned in the oldest of ways where he has consistently experimented and stayed true to the traditions of novel writing adding to the canon a truly great book, which, to this viewer's eyes suggests a full bloodied candidate to the Nobel Prize.
One hopes that the Committee finds such a book worthy enough to award it's author the highest award for literature, which is not to do disservice to his many other books that have led him to this almighty summit of a lifelong mountain Auster has valiantly climbed through all weathers and conditions, doing us the service of making his view deeply readable.
As an almost lifelong fan of your work I congratulate you and thank you for such generosity of imagination that you have willingly shared with us and wish you all the best for it's consequences and varied possibilities.
Fini
Now it's audience participation time! If you enjoyed this blog and my previous work than you can help support me in a few ways: - by being my patron on Patreon.com -give a one off donation with Buy Me a Coffee -Buy one of my literary books -Share this blog on your social media -Leave a comment, you can even recommend me book -Follow me I can't stress enough how much all this helps me and how in the long run it will help you, so if you can and you want to please support my free content so I can keep on producing my beloved blog. Live long and prosper.
They do all sorts to survive; maintaining their finance and their mental well being on little. Word after word, sentence after sentence, writers walk their lonely path to an undisclosed destination. They can bring out book after book, and story after story, never to get attention, never to become something that may amount to something else. They are the hopeful. But by reaching a grand old age they may finally produce a fruit of such tender care that they are restored youthful again.
Dear readers I present to you 4321: Paul Auster's Great American Novel.
America has a knack of producing big novels about big themes taking hours and pages of time to both read and write. It has to in order to cope with the sheer scale of everything giving writers no end of fair copy.
Paul's offering is along the same direction and at the same time a total reversal of everything we know and expected of the Great Life of Ferguson, a man who lives so fully that he occupies no less then four lives, each one similar and yet wildly different.
To give an understanding of what this novel means to the Genre of Novels it is important to understand that Paul's account of Ferguson obeys a total understanding of the Art of the Novel and a total disregard to how a story is put together.
Let us begin with chronology. Stories work by Starting-Middling-Ending with focus on Highs and Lows and Development of Character. The conception of this novel envisions one character with four lives and consequentially has four startings, four endings and a hell of a lot of middling, with massive fluctuations of highs, lows and a forked development of character.
The tone is big in theme and scope yet the details are highly nuanced, carefully put together and a work of supreme art. Though easily readable this, be assured, is unusually complex craft that takes more than simple dedication but also an intricate understanding of not only how novels work but how films work and how politics work and how having sex works, which is not only an astounding level of detail but also of endurance.
In this sturdy American box he puts in metric tons of mainly French Continental Philosophy, Avant Garde twitches, touches and flourishes and his own chance encounters testing his abilities and stretching his talents until they seem to be unable to go any further, yet the ease and grace and suave skill he puts into all of this is not only admirable but it is a balm for the heart. Leaving the book one comes away with not merely feeling that Paul's intellectual capacity is at full flow but that his heart is on full strength and the two are beautifully combined in a book to live in.
Paul's back catalogue involves many seemingly strange and odd stories fashioned in the oldest of ways where he has consistently experimented and stayed true to the traditions of novel writing adding to the canon a truly great book, which, to this viewer's eyes suggests a full bloodied candidate to the Nobel Prize.
One hopes that the Committee finds such a book worthy enough to award it's author the highest award for literature, which is not to do disservice to his many other books that have led him to this almighty summit of a lifelong mountain Auster has valiantly climbed through all weathers and conditions, doing us the service of making his view deeply readable.
As an almost lifelong fan of your work I congratulate you and thank you for such generosity of imagination that you have willingly shared with us and wish you all the best for it's consequences and varied possibilities.
Fini
Now it's audience participation time! If you enjoyed this blog and my previous work than you can help support me in a few ways: - by being my patron on Patreon.com -give a one off donation with Buy Me a Coffee -Buy one of my literary books -Share this blog on your social media -Leave a comment, you can even recommend me book -Follow me I can't stress enough how much all this helps me and how in the long run it will help you, so if you can and you want to please support my free content so I can keep on producing my beloved blog. Live long and prosper.
Monday, 20 March 2017
Love After Death
Derek Walcott has, at the age of 87 and on Saint Lucia, has died.
Only recently I have realised how important a poet Walcott has been to me.
Walcott's personal epic poem Omeros summoned my attention well before by dissertation tutor could point out it's brilliance. Even once being aware at that late stage I would have given it more than a passing look judging by his shorter previous poems for my tutor, with his brilliant literate mind, devoted much of his time to that Nobel Laureate.
My encounter with Walcott started long ago, though only have I recently known it, with his poem Love After Love, one of the few poems I discussed at length with my three, equally brilliant, Secondary School English teachers at a exam revision workshop where I was the only attendee.
Since then I have had his Selected Poems and have enormously enjoyed his poem about heroines in literature, then also dabbled with his version of the tale of Odysseus set in his own island, which is as much about his equality to The Western Canon as it is about Jamaica.
He was deeply lyrical, deeply intellectual and a sheer passionate titan of Literature, as recognised by the Swedish Academy in 1992 with his Nobel Prize.
Author of a surprising amount of theatrical work as poetry, of which I have yet to see a production. I hope dearly that I will be granted that chance.
Thursday, 13 October 2016
Nobel Prize Announcement 2016
Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature 2016:
'for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition'
Oh boy.
At least one reviewer, namely me, will have to eat their words (a strange taste, if you ask me), having previously dismissed Dylan as an impossibility, but then, this is 2016 where, apparently, the laws of the earth need not apply.
I'm not the best person to comment on Dylan's songwriting abilities. I've only listened to one of his albums, the one that has 'Tombstone Blues' on it and it was alright. I've no complaints or real problems with the choice but, it has opened up a small floodgate.
What is literature? Is now a good question.
What is it now to the committee? Will Pink Floyd now have a chance of getting it?
What the committee have done is put the cat amongst the pigeons as there was not a critic alive that would have seriously expected this.
But in the sense of goodwill I congratulate Bob Dylan for his achievement, and will have to do something for the first time for this blog. Buy some vinyl.
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