Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air has transported PatLux:
I have just returned from a vicarious visit to Canada via Elizabeth Hay’s gentle and exquisitely beautiful Late Nights on Air. There are so many layers and themes to the novel and I particularly enjoyed the poetic prose in the section towards the end where four colleagues journey together through the frozen July wilderness.
And safereturndoubtful has been digging into Japanese literature with The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea by Yukio Mishima:
It is noir, based in Yokohama, and about an adolescent boy’s relationship with his mother as she embarks on a new relationship with a sailor. The boy’s group of friends behave in an unpredictable and troubled manner. It is a relatively short and haunting tale of masculinity that (published in 1956) relates to US occupation, Japan’s loss of status and the anger of youth. It can hardly be described as a beautiful book, as there are several disturbing scenes, but the setting and language make the images it conjures quite memorable.
Elsewhere, a reminder that splendid as Tips, Links and Suggestions may be, other sources of book recommendations are available. Robert Rudolph explains:
I first heard of Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone from a sales clerk at a department store on the 18th. I left the store shortly after 9:00 PM, went to the nearby book store, and was some 52 pages into the book by closing time.
It’s a remarkable medical detective story, dealing with an outbreak of an unidentified form of Ebola. The book came out in 1994, and I kept asking myself why I’d never heard of a story this good until now... and I’ve already reread parts of it.
But then again, it’s hard to beat contributors like paulburns, and his epic ongoing series of posts on John le Carré. Last week it was A Delicate Truth:
A rendition on Gibraltar involving British armed forces, an FO observer and a private American organisation funded by Republican Christian Fundamentalists goes horribly wrong. The novel is about the cover up and the effect on some of the survivors (and includes a charming depiction of rural life in Cornwall.) A few years later two of those survivors and an FO bureaucrat decide to blow the whistle. From then on it’s a race between those wanting to maintain the cover up and those wishing to go public. As usual with le Carré, the suspense is masterful, the bureaucrats self-protecting, private industry and the Americans awful.
Elsewhere, SydneyH has set aside Zola’s Germinal:
It isn’t as bad as my first impression of it, but the prose in my copy isn’t very good. It seems likely that it’s partly a translation issue. The first rank cliché in my Oxford copy is “still as a statue” on page two, and the simile is repeated, with slight variations, twice in part 1, which is where I’ve finished. The Penguin softens it a little bit, saying instead “stood waiting with the immobility of stone”. When Bonnemort uses the phrase “kick the bucket” in the Oxford to describe a near-death experience, Penguin chooses “pop my clogs”. The translator’s note in my copy said that they wanted to reconcile the text with twentieth-century English language, which could mean that they have deliberately used the more common expressions. I also cringed early on with the comparisons of the mine to a monster, and some of the melodramatic descriptions: “the wind wailed past them like a cry of hunger and fatigue torn from the bowels of the night”. It’s a shame, because Nana was wonderful. I’ll take it as a lesson to be wary about impulse-buying translated novels on sale.
Let’s end on a brighter note. MildGloster loves A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan:
Which is completely addictive, which I can’t stop reading. 220 pages in two hours. Interspersed, interrelated stories from chapter to chapter; connected characters, though years between the action. It’s almost irrelevant – maybe impossible – to give a synopsis, because it doesn’t matter: I suppose it’s about modern America but that makes it sound boring, which it isn’t. People and their relation to one another is more it, a shifting kaleidoscope of correspondence. What I’m trying to say is: it’s really, really good.
Lovely.
Interesting links about books and reading
- BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time takes on Middlemarch.
- Writers discuss writing under the influence.
- Donald Trump is good for something, after all: books sales.
- What is James Comey reading? (Oddly, he doesn’t mention Fire And Fury ...)
- A gallery of Edward Gorey cover designs for classic books.
If you would like to share a photo of the book you are reading, or film your own book review, please do. Click the brown button on this page to share your video or image. I’ll include some of your posts in next week’s blog.
If you’re on Instagram and a book lover, chances are you’re already sharing beautiful pictures of books you are reading: “shelfies”, or all kinds of still lives with books as protagonists. Now you can share your reads with us on the mobile photography platform – simply tag your pictures there with #GuardianBooks, and we’ll include a selection here. Happy reading!
