Love For Books

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.

Give yourself a break from pursuing the classics

When you’re working through a huge back catalogue of books you feel you should have read, you sometimes get to a bit of an impasse.

The difficulty lies in choosing what to read next – whether to go for a classic you feel guilty at having missed out on so far, whether to choose something random that you simply like the look of, or whether to return to something you want to engage with a second time.

Tackling all the classics out there is an endless task, but it is a fulfilling one. Having said that, you have to give yourself a break sometimes and choose something for the sheer pleasure of it to prevent reading from becoming something of a chore.

Follow your instincts and don’t feel guilty about putting things off to give yourself some light entertainment every so often.

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.

Suttree’s humanity shows a different side of Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy has always been my sort of writer. Often labelled as the natural successor to William Faulkner, his novels are always rich with stark and violent imagery skilfully deployed to paint a frightening portrait of America.

However, upon reading Suttree I discovered something new in McCarthy’s writing that had previously eluded me. The Road and Blood Meridian are terrible masterpieces, but Suttree is more powerfully human and distinctly more humorous.

There’s something recognisable in Suttree that contrasts to all that is foreign about The Road and Blood Meridian. Of course, McCarthy has a number of other novels in his back-catalogue, but Suttree is generally accepted as his most humorous and the one which comes closest to autobiography.

It’s ill-advised to attempt Suttree without a dictionary to hand unless you are, in fact, Faulkner reincarnate, but the book is in itself is a hugely rewarding experience.

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.

Lucky us for Lucky Jim

I’ve just finished reading Kingsley Amis’ classic campus comedy Lucky Jim. What is immediately refreshing about this book is that it has such a happy ending. Most classics, modern or otherwise, fall into the category of the fairly bleak – even if they are essentially comic novels.

Not so Lucky Jim. It’s easy to come away from the book with a smile on your face, even if you do have to get through some fairly excruciating scenes on the way.

It’s not difficult to see Kingsley’s influence on his son Martin Amis in the flair of his prose and his knack for rendering unmistakably British characters. This book is definitely worth a read for those who want something light-hearted to go with all the doom and gloom on their book shelves.

Hangover Square – war, alcohol and amateur philosophy

There are plenty of books out there that deal with the Second World War and its aftermath for Britain, but very few actually take a look at the attitudes involved in the run-up to this momentous event in European history.

Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square is perhaps the best example of a novel of this kind, but the great thing about it is that it is not just concerned with the sense of anxiety pervading late 1930s London – it also features a more central storyline that involves madness, sexual politics and a great deal of drinking.

Hamilton’s story concerns George Harvey Bone, who may or may not be schizophrenic. His days are spent among the shallower members of London society in the late and Hamilton uses his experience to satire the lifestyles and opinions of the age.

The result is a wonderful tale, full of artistic flair and blackly comic scenery that also deals with some more weighty issues.