May17

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Posted on by
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

A gift from a friend, my paperback edition of #45 Brideshead Revisited has been battered by other hands. In its heavily used state, and with a picture of gowned students on the front, it seems a very suitable vehicle for this nostalgic book.

Brideshead Revisited starts in the middle of the Second World War, with the narrator, Charles Ryder, visiting somewhere which was precious to him in the free and easy years between the wars. It’s a reflective, period piece, and seemed like a good follow on from the trenches of Birdsong. 

A coming of age novel, Brideshead Revisited opens when Charles, age about 40, is unexpectedly confronted with his past, and reflects on the steps which brought him to that moment. He tells the story of the fascinating Marchmains, who’ve shaped his life, directly and indirectly, since he was befriended by the second son, Sebastian, in his first term at Oxford. 

Brideshead is a deeply reflective novel, looking back and never forward, and I think this is a product of the time when it was written. Waugh apparently wrote the book while convalescing from a wound in 1945 – by which point he, like Charles, like the rest of Europe, was no doubt heartily sick of the war and all it had wrought.

Aristocratic sinners
The Marchmains are mostly charming and all fatally flawed. None of them can quite function properly in the society that they’ve been set in. Partly, this is due to their own oddities, but partly its their religion. One of the sisters marries down, and the explanation is:

there was this faint shadow on her which unfitted her for the highest honours; there was also her religion

The faint shadow is family scandal, but it’s reiterated that:

wherever she turned it seemed her religion stood as a barrier between her and her natural goal

It seems to me – and this may be over-simplifying things but I didn’t like the book enough to care to do a deeper analysis – that it’s their Catholicism which damns them, literally and figuratively. They’re all sinners, bound for hell one way or another, and their Catholicism, a minority religion among the English upper classes, sets them apart from those around them, sets their morals at odds with the common line.

Catholics in trouble
It’s a very delicate, genteel Catholicism, inviting the cardinal for tea in the drawing room after mass. I’m used to finding a rawer, more challenging Catholicism in books – the passion and pain of The Thorn Birds, for example, or the unforgiving, granite faith which provides a backdrop to quite a lot of modern Irish literature, from chick lit to literary fiction.

For me, it’s unusual to see the Catholics on the side of immorality. The church has been influencing or dictating the nature of good and evil in Europe for close on 2000 years, and most authors seem to respect that – they fight the head on, arguing or showing that this is misguided, that is cruel and these people are corrupt. Waugh seems to be casting the entire faith as a social problem.

Further, it’s not entirely clear what the alternative is supposed to be. Charles doesn’t have a particular faith or strong lack of faith to guide him and his actions are as flawed as the rest. By asking this big question and coming up with no answer, the novel seems hopeless and hollow, all the thunder of a fear-sale-spiel with none of the dramatic solution.

I didn’t like any of the characters much. I didn’t care for the Marchmains, all repellent in their own way. Cordelia, who seemed the best of the bunch, was very much a minor character, and slipped from an irritatingly fey childhood to bland adulthood. I didn’t like any of the Oxford crowd, snotty little posh boys. I didn’t like Charles’ father, and although the awfulness of the father did make me feel more kindly towards Charles, that dissipated when I saw how he treated his wife and children.

Perhaps I’m too alienated from the mores of the time to sympathize, but the whole book felt bitter to me. Not just bittersweet, in the way that remembering something loved and lost is, but bitter and perhaps angry, as when an adult looks back and realises that, as a child, they were sold glitter disguised as gold. When I didn’t want to slap Charles, I did feel sorry for him – he had no hope, poor duck, of ever coming right after that first corrupting contact with the charming, fascinating, destructive Marchmains.

I’ve decided to try to read and review all 200 books on the BBC Big Read list. You can read more about the start of the project or see a list of all the books I’ve read and reviewed.

May15

Knit Your Socks on Straight by Alice Curtis

Posted on by
Knit Your Socks on Straight by Alice Curtis

One of the things I keep learning about knitting is that there’s always more to learn about knitting. Knitting socks on straight needles seems like an enormous faff to me – and yet someone wrote a whole book about it! Why? I needed to know, so immediately requested a review copy.

Luckily, Alice Curtis opens her book, Knit Your Socks on Straight with an explanation of where she’s coming from and what the book is about. As a yarn store owner, she encountered a fear of knitting in the round, and developed sock patterns to help her clients / students knit around that fear.

Knitting your first socks
I don’t imagine that beginner sock knitters are the only people who will buy this book, but a book like Knit Your Socks on Straight does need to cater to beginners. Curtis opens the book with several pages of chat which evolves into a technique section. The section is illustrated, but I would say not thoroughly enough – I couldn’t follow her cast on description, and I know how to do it.

However, I do like the way she talks you through the different options she’ll use (cast on, heel and toe, for example) and explains why you might choose each one. A lot of beginner sock patterns simply instruct, which means that the knitter has to take everything on trust – I know I wasn’t that trusting, and got in an awful pickle with my first sock as a result of thinking that can’t possibly be right. The patterns in this book also start with simple designs and move to more complex ones, which some beginners may find useful.

What about the seams?
Socks with seams sounds like a bad idea, but Curtis tackles it head on. She’s developed – or reinvented, or adapted – a method of seaming which seems to be both simple to do and comfortable to wear. (It’s a crochet seam, for the curious.) However, her smartest move is to make the seam a design feature. Socks are seamed up on the outside, where the seam won’t rub, and the seam is part of the design. It’s a cat-flap moment, and makes the book much more interesting.

Sadly, this is a book that might have been better as a blog post. The patterns are good, but not as exciting as that single page explaining the secret to socks on straight. There are 20 patterns in the book, by my count, and 4 of them seem to be variations on stocking stitch socks with side seams. Earlier, Curtis did a great job of explaining each choice and why it was made, here she’s presenting 4 versions of the same sock, just in different sizes and yarn weights.

The rest of the patterns are pretty good. They’re clearly explained, well-illustrated (although it’s not always clear where the seams are). A new sock knitter will probably find plenty to enjoy. I didn’t find anything I wanted to knit but this may be because I am jaded. The patterns are a mix of quirky novelty sock designs and more discrete textured patterns – there’s probably something here for everyone, and there are certainly a couple of patterns I would happily wear.

I do find it odd that Curtis chose to knit all the patterns from the cuff down. It seems like an odd limitation – sideways socks are exciting, new, and open up a whole different set of options. I expected at least one sideways sock or something with an interesting construction but this is purely a technique shift. On that basis, I feel that it would have been a kindness for Curtis to cover translating patterns from in the round to on straights, but I didn’t find anything on that topic.

Overall, the book is a good, if limited, and I think it fills a gap in the market. While I think that almost any knitter can learn to use DPNs, I don’t for a minute imagine they would all like it – and knitting, above all, should be enjoyable. Curtis’s book is a good choice for any knitter who wants to make socks without knitting in the round.

I received a review copy of this book through NetGalley free from the publishers, Storey. You can see their page about Knit Your Socks on Straight here.

May13

Ne’er cast a clout until May is out

Posted on by
Ne’er cast a clout until May is out

This is most of my knitting output for the year to date. Luckily K is taking the old saying seriously, so they’ll probably be in use for a while yet.

Hand knit socks in orangey red marled yarn, shown on hairy white legs Hand knit socks pink and black pseudo Fair Isle yarn, shown on hairy white legs Hand knit socks in in transitioning shades of brown and grey, shown on hairy white legs

Knitting socks is like a magic trick. It’s actually – and non-knitters never believe this – really very simple when you know how it’s done. Most people with the coordination to use a computer can knit a plain sock like the ones above. As sock knitting looks ferociously complicated and socks are easily portable, it’s a great party trick.

I’ve been sent a review copy of a new sock knitting book – Knit Your Socks On Straight – which takes some of the trauma out of sock knitting by doing away with the double pointed needles. If you want to knit a sock, but don’t like knitting in the round, this could be the book for you. I’ll post my review on Wednesday, so check back later in the week for the full story.

May10

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulkes

Posted on by
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulkes

The winner of my you choose what I read poll, #13 Birdsong is clearly enormously popular. Checking on Amazon, it’s still getting fresh reviews every week or so, even 20 years after its publication. I didn’t love it.

My copy – and I should really stop reading the back of books, I hadn’t realised this was an advantage to ebooks – says: “A brilliant, harrowing tale of love and war” which is immediately followed by “…among the most stirringly erotic I have read for years”. As a combination, those two sentences are quite off-putting. Fortunately, perhaps, the novel isn’t erotic (to my mind) and the sections are quite distinct – the ‘erotic’ section is entirely separate from the war section.

Birdsong is a harrowing tale of war – it’s mostly set in northern France, in the trenches of the First World War. It’s not for the faint of heart – the descriptions are necessarily gruesome and both characters and circumstance can be brutal. However, I feel like the book was well researched and well-written – I’d prefer to read All Quiet on the Western Front, but Birdsong isn’t bad.

War
The largest part of the book deals with soldiers on the front line, in the trenches, during the First World War. The whole war is covered, from 1914 to peace in 1918, and the book does an excellent job of describing shifts in attitude and tactics, the arcs of emotion and events which shaped the internal and external worlds of the soldiers at the front.

It’s grim – it’s nearly impossible to write a book on this topic and not be grim. Death is so prevalent in the books that you start to wonder how anyone could survive, not just physically but mentally, how soldiers could go through months and years of this, of watching everyone and everything around them be destroyed, and still be able to crack a joke, visit a pub or scrounge some brandy.

That they did is historical fact, and Faulkes makes the whole thing very plausible. The emotional narrative of the soldiers at war is convincing and understandable. Even the characters I didn’t care for – most of them – I wanted to survive. And yet, you know it’s impossible, so even as a reader you can find yourself detaching, deciding not to care about these characters and not quite daring to hope that these others will be OK.

The ups and downs were plausible too – one of the most memorable moments in the book, for me, was a letter from home, bringing bad news. It seemed that all the ills in the world must be concentrated on this front line, that the carnage must have sucked up all the disaster lying around, and everywhere else must be safe – and yet that’s never the case. Things can always get worse, and there’s no natural justice balancing things out so that no one gets more than a certain quota of grief.

The rest
Where the book falls down, I feel, is the bits which aren’t about war. The novel starts in 1910, in the Somme area of norther France which saw such heavy fighting only a few years later. It’s a really interesting idea – to show the ordinary before the war, the calm before the storm, and Faulkes writes well. Unfortunately, the entire section didn’t interest me. It centers around a young man and a love affair. This is the allegedly erotic bit and frankly, it wasn’t. I read a lot of romance novels, and I’ve read some absolutely awful purple prose. Faulkes isn’t the worst offender, but this really isn’t good either. The love story seems so arbitrary, every character seemed unsympathetic, and I didn’t really believe that any of them would act the way they did.

The resolution to the section – and the whole love story – was unsatisfactory. I almost thought that the characters need never have spoken to each other at all, as they spent so much time not bothering to tell each other things and going on significant glances and repressed sighs.

In addition to the 1910 section, there’s another arc, set in 1978. I didn’t like that, either. It didn’t really do its job of giving the reader the benefit of hindsight and the plot of that section is deplorably pot-boilery. It reads like a cut scene from a 1980s romance, like The Shell Seekers and is best forgotten quickly.

It’s hard to summarize my feelings about Birdsong. I didn’t love it, I don’t particularly recommend it, but bits of it were good so I wouldn’t stop you reading it either. It’s a book which, while I didn’t love it myself, I can see other people enjoying. I don’t think I’d read another Faulkes, but I don’t regret reading this one.

I’ve decided to try to read and review all 200 books on the BBC Big Read list. You can read more about the start of the project or see a list of all the books I’ve read and reviewed.

May6

La Givrine, Vaud

Posted on by
La Givrine, Vaud

If you’ve ever come out and stayed with my family in Switzerland, you’ve probably been up to La Givrine, up in the Jura. It’s at about 1200m above sea level, so the season is quite different than down by the lake and it’s pretty all year round – plus, there are at least 3 restaurants which do good food, and one which does excellent fondues.

Low hills (as we're already up a mountain) withfull snow and trees under a blue sky.

January

February

February

April

April

Mostly grass, some green, some brown, patches of snow and trees under a mostly blue sky

May

The white speckles you can see are crocuses – they’re absolutely everywhere at the moment, in their thousands. The snow’s hanging on late this year, but it’s nearly gone – there’s only these patches in sheltered spots left. Some years they don’t get enough snow to open the ski lifts, but this year the skiing was good.

If you’re in the area, it’s a very pretty place to visit – there’s a train up from Nyon, and an easy walk to several restaurants. The easiest is 20m – there’s a restaurant right at the train station – but our favourite is the the Couvaloup de Crans, about 2km / 40 minutes up the mountain.

May3

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Posted on by
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Published in 1951, #173 The Old Man and the Sea is a short book and a quick read. The novel tells the story of Santiago, the eponymous Old Man, and one particular, momentous, solo fishing trip in a long career as a fisherman.

It’s a simple book, but the writing is tight and evocative, easy to get into. I don’t have a strong opinion about this book – I enjoyed the story well enough to read it quickly, but I didn’t love it and don’t expect to read it again.

Who is Hemingway?
I can’t remember the last Hemingway I read, but whatever it was, it left a bad taste as I had a hazy mistrust of him and all his works. Research suggests he is widely considered a macho misogynist (although critics are disputing or revising that). I don’t have a clear opinion after having read The Old Man and the Sea as there are no women in it – a point I don’t argue with as there are very few characters. For most of the hundred or so pages, it is, in fact, just the old man and the sea.

The old man does talk about the sea as feminine – makes a point of it, in fact, being la mar not el mar – and it’s not a flattering comparison. But the sea can kill you easily, if you go out in a small skiff, and the relationship certainly isn’t equal so I don’t feel it’s fair to expect some kind of evolved and nuanced comparison. The sea being a cruel mistress does not have to mean that all women are cruel and capricious.

My other reason for mistrusting Hemingway is the book – it reminds me of Memoirs of a Geisha in that it seems to be about a very intense, very private world which – on the basis of the text alone – I believe the author was never part of. Having read a little about him, it seems that he spent a lot of his life hunting and fishing, and a fair amount of it in Cuba, so perhaps that was unfair.

I don’t get it
The other problem I had with the book was not at all Hemingway’s fault. The copy I read is out of my parents’ collection, a 1970s paperback with a slightly unfortunate cover (the old man appears to be wearing Cuba as a hat). The back of the book says only:

Towards the end of his life Hemingway wrote a novel so simple and yet so profound that it is perhaps one of the greatest stories ever told.

In 1954 shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The message was in huge type, hard to avoid and with no room for ambiguity – clearly, we’re supposed to draw the conclusion that The Old Man and the Sea is, in fact, one of the best books ever.

If it is, I’ve no idea why.

I did enjoy the story, as a story. I can picture the Old Man, I can picture the sea. I certainly didn’t hate the book. Like his contemporary, F Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway has a way with language – it’s the measured, careful prose which I associate with rewriting drafts by hand and wanting to leave out any unnecessary words as a result.

I can see why the novel is a great boon to scholars – it’s short and there’s a lot in it, a lot to pick apart because you can see symbolism in every paragraph. Probably the fact that the Old Man calls all fish of a certain type tuna, whether they are or not, can be read as a criticism of the imposed classifications of science on the natural rhythms and language of the people, and the flying fish are a gift from god and the young boy is symbolic of both redemption and the future and… and… But you can do this with any book, any text, if you’ve got the passion for it – I’m fairly confident that more time, energy and words have been spent on dissecting Harry Potter than Hemingway so I don’t think that’s enough to make this great.

Further, Hemingway’s novel seems to me to fall foul of the criticisms leveled at Austen – it’s narrow, it’s provincial, it’s a small story about small people. I mean, I’m all in favour of going deep with a novel, but why is a story about fishing more profound than a story about marriage or mothering or cross stitch? Hemingway may not, himself, have been the essence of macho misogyny, but the literary gatekeepers of his time and after certainly were, at least in their collective form, and for me at least, that makes their seal of approval a dark mark indeed.

Essentially, I’m lost. I’m looking for something which perhaps isn’t there, or which I’ve seen over again (I have been reading The Greats in high concentration for a year now) and dismissed. I can’t spot the specialness. I want footnotes for the back of the book, dammit. I want to know what makes this book better than Sense and Sensibility or Small Gods, because I really can’t see it and looking probably ruined the book for me.

I’ve decided to try to read and review all 200 books on the BBC Big Read list. You can read more about the start of the project or see a list of all the books I’ve read and reviewed.

May1

One of the flat bits

Posted on by
One of the flat bits

Looking down on green pastures with farm houses, in the distance green hills and blue sky

This is an entirely gratuitous photo of a green and pleasant Switzerland. The low point there is at about 700m above sea level so the hills in the background are Ben Nevis height. We drove up, climbing 400m in 20 minutes, to go on an adventure tree-scramble thing at Signal de Bougy. As we drove up a mountain in order to get some exercise running around at the top, I felt enormously grateful for engines. If I’d lived here when the main form of locomotion was foot traffic, I would never have seen this view, never mind the one from here.

Apr29

You choose: what should I read next?

Posted on by
You choose: what should I read next?

The Library in English in Geneva had its semiannual book sale this weekend. It’s not a large library, but it provides an excellent service to the English-speaking community and has been doing so for decades. They expected to have about 20,000 books on sale, and it’s one of their major fundraisers. I’ve been a member on and off since I was tiny, so I’m always happy to give them a bit of cash.

This time, I was particularly on the hunt for Big Read books and came back with 9 new ones for about CHF20 – a bargain.

A pile of secondhand paperback books shown against a mottled white background

From top to bottom they are:

  1. The Illustrated Mum by Jacqueline Wilson
  2. The World According to Garp by John Irving
  3. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
  4. Atonement by Ian McEwan
  5. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  6. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
  7. Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson
  8. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
  9. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundra

Which book should I read first?
Leave a comment by midnight on Friday, and I’ll read the one with the most votes first. I may work through the rest in the order of popularity, so you can keep voting after Friday, but no promises. The review of the winning book will probably go up on 10 May. I don’t expect many votes, so your definitely will count – in fact, the first commenter may well get their choice!

Apr26

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Posted on by
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

I love #82 I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith to bits – I remember reading it several times as a teenager, and coming back to it was a pleasure. The only downside was that I was reading my original paper copy which has a terrible ’80s cover and doesn’t have the highlight function an ebook does.

I Capture the Castle tells the story of the Marchmains, a genteel family living in a crumbling rented castle, trying not to starve while their father works – or perhaps doesn’t – on his second book, already a decade in the making. The story is narrated by Cassandra, the middle child, age 17, and is set sometime in the late 1920s or 1930s.

Dodie Smith is most famous for her children’s book, 101 Dalmations but I Capture the Castle is nothing like that. It’s a book for young adults and adults.

Poor and upper class
Families in books for children and young adults written before the Second World War regularly seem to lose all their money and slide into a genteel poverty. We saw a version of it in Little Women, it’s in Ballet Shoes and The Railway Children and the theme crops up again in I Capture the Castle. It’s an odd sort of poverty – the old-fashioned phrase ‘reduced circumstances’ seems to cover it well: the family’s income is reduced, and in general, they have to get by with only one servant and cheap jam, unlike the majority of chronically poor people, seen in works by contemporaries like Dickens, who are too poor even to be servants and never see jam at all.

In this context, I Capture the Castle stands out for two reasons: first, the family is really on the edge, hunger is a constant presence and no one ever gets quite warm and second, they’re at least somewhat aware of the privileged position that education and class have given them, although one of their class markers is that they rarely talk about either – it would be complaining, which isn’t done.

Part of what causes the Marchmain’s poverty is the era’s limited options for women. The household comprises three adult women, two adult men and a school boy, and none of the women are qualified to do work which would support the family. It’s not for lack of willingness, but out in the sticks they have limited options and setting up in town requires capital – and clothes – they don’t have, making training as a secretary or similar a pipe dream.

Beautifully written
Part of the appeal of I Capture the Castle is the writing style and the tone of the book. It’s a difficult thing to describe, but I found it charming. In some ways, I Capture the Castle is a more grown-up version of the world found in classic children’s novels like Little Women and The Secret Garden so if you enjoyed books like that, this is a pleasing book to graduate to. It’s more desperate, a little closer to modern experience, a little grittier, but still has the same charm and delicacy. (Another one is The Saplings by Noel Streatfield, which I strongly recommend.)

I could spend all day teasing out little bits of I Capture the Castle to discuss – it’s a book which bears repeated readings and I think would be a good subject to study in school or at university. One of the major themes of the book is writing and story telling, how it’s done and by whom, but it’s not a lecture, it’s an interested exploration. Another facet is the setting – it’s at once very specific and very vague. The castle, the countryside and the seasons come through clearly, and yet the year is vague. The characters are held in stasis, almost, in a world where the First World War is a hazy memory, never alluded to, and the Second isn’t even on the horizon.

I strongly recommend I Capture the Castle – and as it’s now on Kindle, you can read the beginning on Amazon to see if you’re captured by it, like I am, before you invest.

I’ve decided to try to read and review all 200 books on the BBC Big Read list. You can read more about the start of the project or see a list of all the books I’ve read and reviewed.

Apr24

Farmyard Knits by Fiona Goble

Posted on by
Farmyard Knits by Fiona Goble

Knit a whole farmyard in 15 simple patterns, from fields to farmers, chickens to cows. Farmyard Knits has clear instructions to make a complete farmyard set with animals, people and even a tractor.

I requested a review copy of this through NetGalley, and the publishers, Andrew McMeel, kindly sent it to me. I haven’t knit any of the patterns, and honestly I don’t think I will.

There are lots of things I like about this book, but sadly the designs aren’t one of them. I think the creatures and people look rather creepy, with their wide, white eyes (on a horse, isn’t that sign they’re about to bolt?) and I’m not that keen on the way some of the animals are jointed – the joints don’t move, it’s just that they look a bit odd in the way they’re attached.

I realise, however, that’ this is entirely subjective so I strongly recommend you go take a look at the cover. Do you like what you see? Then you’ll probably enjoy the book.

Clear, precise instructions
While I don’t like the designs, I am impressed with how the book is laid out. Goble seems to be writing with beginners in mind, which means she includes useful information at every step. The book opens with a list of tools and techniques – and tells you which ones the less common ones will be required for, so if you don’t want to knit the cat you don’t need to worry about satin stitch.

The patterns themselves are clearly laid out. The toys are knitted in sections which will need to be sewn up at the finish, and as usual there aren’t many pictures of the back of the animals to guide you. However, Goble does indicate where you’re starting (e.g. body is knit from neck to tail) so you know what you’re making as you knit it, and can easily match head to neck to feet when making up. I haven’t seen this before, and it strikes me as incredibly useful.

Beautifully illustrated
Farmyard Knits is part pattern book, part story book. Over the course of a day, farmers Anna and Frank, tend each of their animals and work on the farm. Each time of day introduces different creatures and the patterns to make them, and opens with a story page explaining what’s going on.

The story pages are a nice touch, and the whole book is beautifully illustrated. The knitted characters are set into drawings showing their activities – the knitted hen and her knitted eggs are sat on a drawing of a nest, the knitted pigs eat at a drawn trough which Anna fills with a drawn bucket. It’s very effective and a combination of ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ which children will understand from their own imaginary play. And hopefully they’ll recognize the distinction, and not demand a knitted trough…

All in all, if you like the designs then I can see this being a good choice for a farmyard collection. I really like the fact that there’s a tractor and a playmat of fields to go with the animals, and that it’s designed to be a playset rather than ornamentation.

I received a review copy of this book through NetGalley free from the publishers, Andrews McMeel Publishing. You can see their page about Farmyard Knits here.