Love For Books

Are short stories worth the effort?

The American novelist Cormack McCarthy famously said that writing short stories didn’t interest him because ‘anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing’.

This seems a rather extreme approach to writing, although you can’t argue with the quality of the work that McCarthy has produced himself.

It also seems to suggest that short stories belong to a genre that is more light-weight and less demanding for an author. Surely, however, the need for economy of language and effective plotting and structure places more demands on a writer, not fewer?

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.

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.

Marquez writes novels you can always take refuge in

We all have an author that we can go back to time and time again when we want a well-crafted story that just can’t fail. For me, that author tends to be Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Although there are other authors who often impress me more (Nabokov, Faulkner etc.), Marquez has never let me down.

Marquez’s novels and novellas are funny, clever, undemanding, sensitive and rich in terms of language. These are attributes that make his work timeless and the fact that he has written such a healthy collection of books means you can visit something new each time rather than returning to your well-thumbed favourite too often.

I’ve still not got through Marquez’s entire back catalogue and I’ve been reading his work for several years. Eight books in, I’m still not bored.

John Kennedy Toole – still a great loss to fiction

John Kennedy Toole committed suicide after a frustrating struggle to get his novel A Confederacy of Dunces published. It was a real waste because the novel in question is an absolute masterpiece and we have Toole’s mother to thank that it ever made it into print.

Toole’s mother carried on pushing to get his work published for years after his death and as soon as A Confederacy of Dunces was finally published it became an instant classic. Toole’s tragic death makes reading the book a bittersweet experience for his fans.

Rather than dwell on the tragedy, we can be thankful that we’ve Toole’s timeless comic leading character Ignatius J. Reilly to console us.

Hamsun – modernising the black-comic psychological novel

I’ve just finished reading Knut Hamsun’s Hunger having been exposed to a little bit of his writing during my MA degree. Hamsun has an incredible talent for squalor and humiliation, the likes of which you sometimes find in the work of such literary greats as Nabokov and Beckett.

It is likely that Hunger actually influenced those authors in style as well as in terms of the psychological themes it portrays. Poverty, creative frustration, anxiety and madness are all touched upon with humour and vividness.

It’s amazing to think that the novel was actually written at the end of the nineteenth century, such is the modernity of its overriding style. Dostoevsky is the real king of this sort of literature by theme, but Hamsun clearly has a claim towards modernising the psychological novel and giving it a new kind of flair.

The vivid prose of Nathanael West

Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust is one of those books that is over a touch too soon. The book is incredibly short, but it feels incredibly important in its commentary of human responses to the American Dream as prescribed by Hollywood.

The vivid images in the novel represent West’s real strength – that of descriptive prose. Riot scenes and cockfights are brought ferociously to life, whilst the thought-processors of the chief characters are rendered much more subtly. These sections feel full of meaning, but West never spoon-feeds us anything, rather letting us decode his material for ourselves.

West’s career was cut short by his untimely death in a car accident, but his influence has continued into the 21st century. If you want a sample of his vivid prose, The Day of the Locust comes highly recommended.