Love For Books

Delve a little deeper into the lesser known works of Steinbeck

John Steinbeck is one of America’s best-loved writers and books like The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden and Of Mice and Men have cemented his place in the history books. However, some little-known works are also incredibly rewarding.

Among those works is a short novel called Tortilla Flat. This wonderful story takes place in the familiar Steinbeck setting of California. The ups and downs and moral twists and turns of a group of friends in a downtrodden part of Monterey provides the plot, which comes in the form of a number of short vignettes that are incredibly easy to digest and yet which feel full of meaning.

If your relationship with Steinbeck only stretches as far as the major works, it is definitely worth delving a little deeper.

How Greene balances escapism with intense humanity

A lot of avid readers would count escapism, imagination and depth among the most important factors that make a book a great read. These are factors that I’ve always found Graham Greene to deliver in plentiful supply.

Greene is a master at weaving imaginative stories with a dose of realistic depth thanks to his intensely human characters. The humanity of Greene’s characters in works such as The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American and Brighton Rock (to name a few famous examples) is perhaps their real strength, although the thrilling plots they must negotiate are lapped up by his massive readership.

Few authors are able to make thrillers feel as profound as Greene makes them feel. His studies of relationships and miscommunication lend his works a masterful sense of tragedy and realism whilst retaining much of the romance expected of novels read for pure escapism.

Bataille: A little adventure goes a long way

A lot of people are put off the prospect of reading Georges Bataille because they have heard stories about the disturbing, sexually graphic and fetishistic nature of his work. However, my advice would be that reading is much more rewarding if you show a little adventure.

Bataille’s Story of Eye can be described using all the terms used above, but that doesn’t make reading it an upsetting experience. In fact, it represents a literary triumph of technique and storytelling.

Bataille’s mastery of the metaphor really stands out in this landmark piece of surrealist fiction and it is a shame that some of the themes involved make it a controversial choice for study in the world’s colleges and universities.

This is just the sort of profound work that ought to make it onto the curriculum more often just to show students what the creative imagination is actually capable with relation to language and literary devices.

Bonjour Tristesse: Sex, domestic darkness and isolated scenery

The long trawl through my back catalogue of classic works of fiction led me most recently to Bonjour Tristesse, the most famous novella by Francoise Sagan.

As soon as I began reading, I knew that Sagan’s style was right up my street. The story is very simple: a young woman, her father and his lover leave Paris for a summer holiday and struggle with the ups and downs of their relationships.

That sounds very domestic and unchallenging, but Sagan delivers it beautifully and in such a way that the content feels extremely important. That’s one of the richest things about classic French literature – the ideas have gravity even if the language used to present them is pure and uncomplicated.

Sagan’s work even reminds me of the work of Bataille and other authors who flirted with surrealism with varying degrees of commitment. At the same time, it exudes a similar darkness and broodiness evident in Sylvia Plath, amongst others.

This is a true classic if you like perfectly rendered prose that can be read as lightly or as profoundly as you wish and especially if you like relationship drama, confessional first person narrative and isolated scenery.

A classic and heartbreaking work from Charles Jackson

It seems that many of the books I’ve read of late have been tales of self-destructiveness and drunkenness and none more so than Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend.

This book reads like a confessional narration in spite of its third person perspective thanks to the way the author is capable of getting into his protagonist’s sensitive, chaotic and self-torturing psyche. Jackson does this with such deftness that it makes Don Birnam’s plight all the more heartbreaking.

The humour that finds its way into this squalid story also makes the whole thing more touching – partly because it adds to the realism of the subject matter and lends weight to the themes of pity and shame that drive this human tragedy.

The book is arguably about the attitude of self-destruction that comes as a consequence of being sweet, intelligent and generous, but of expecting too much of oneself and failing to deliver. It’s a truly fantastic read.

Henry Miller on calmer confessional form

Henry Miller is considered one of the most important American writers of the last century and his reputation rests largely on famous works like Tropic of Cancer and its follow-up Tropic of Capricorn.

His unrelenting, shameless and confessional style has been the subject of great controversy and praise over the years, but his novella Quiet Days in Clichy sees him on more tranquil form.

This story could never be described as a rant in the manner of the Tropics, but it nevertheless demonstrates Miller’s deftness in confessional narratives that take in the seedier aspects of the city – in particular, as in Tropic of Cancer, Paris.

The story revolves around two artists and their sordid lives in one of Paris’s less desirable districts, among whores and madmen and constantly on the breadline. This is familiar ground with Miller, but for some reason Clichy feels very different – perhaps for its calmer and more measured approach.

One of the lesser known masterpieces of William Faulkner

Although it isn’t one of his more famous novels in the league of As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury, Wild Palms is nevertheless one of Faulkner’s masterpieces.

The book details two stories alongside one another – the first of a couple on the run from the real world in the name of flawed romance and the second of an institutionalised prisoner’s struggle to return to a world of familiarity after ‘escaping’ during a flood and rescuing a pregnant woman.

The narrative is less complicated than some of Faulkner’s more famous works, but it still examines life’s larger questions, including love, responsibility, humanity and what goes on in the hearts and minds of the ordinary folk in America’s Deep South.

For many, Wild Palms acts as a good introduction to Faulkner’s back catalogue if tackling them in chronological order is too daunting a task.

John Fante is a hidden treasure of American literature

John Fante is not really a household name when it comes to great American literature but he can actually be counted among the most influential writers working in the US in the Twentieth Century.

A number of high profile writers including the likes of Charles Bukowksi have publicly registered their admiration of Fante’s work in the last number of decades and it isn’t hard to see why once you start getting to grips with his back catalogue.

Most famous for the Bandini Quartet, a series of four novels dealing with the trials and tribulations of the Bandini family, Fante is now considered one of the hidden treasures of American literature.

Joining the Rabbit series at the age of 26

It’s taken me an awfully long time to get round to reading some John Updike, but I’ve finally started reading Rabbit, Run.

One of the reasons it’s taken me so long is the fact that this is the first novel centring on Harry Angstrom and so I’ll have a number of follow-up reads to get into afterwards.

Oddly, I’ve joined the Rabbit series at 26, the same age as Angstrom is in the first book, which means I’m probably in the ideal position to relate to him. For now, the jury’s out, but we’ll see what the next couple of hundred pages bring.

McGahern never moralises in his quest for a more faithful form of social realism

John McGahern is perhaps best known for his novels The Dark and Amongst Women, dealing with the harshness of adolescence in rural Ireland. However, I recently discovered an earlier work called The Pornographer which showed more of McGahern’s sense of humour and skill when dealing with a more metropolitan setting.

The story revolves around a writer of erotic fiction and the pregnancy that comes as a result of a relationship that is doomed from the outset. The action takes place alongside the slow decline of the protagonist’s aunt who is dying of cancer.

This book is particularly memorable for its measured sense of realism and the way it resists reducing life experience to a simple moral code. It is a feature of McGahern’s work to avoid preaching and that is something that is very evident in The Pornographer – which, unsurprisingly, was banned in Ireland for its sexual content.