Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

OH DEAR I didn't realize I never posted this entry... I finished this two months ago now. oops. I took it over from babydaddy, in a fit of exasperation, as he had been reading it for literally two years now, and I couldn't stand watching him read it any more. And besides, the cover is right up my alley - Persian miniature paintings with horses and embracing lovers and sneaky looking men with daggers. love. it.

Didn't love love love the book, however - it's got a lot in common with The Name of the Rose, come to think of it - arty booky monkish murder mystery in which the contents of a book they're all working on are so explosive that someone is willing to kill to prevent it coming out, with lots of historical fictiony showyoffy detail (this book did have a bit more of the "look at ME and what a lot of research I did for this book!!" feel to it than was strictly necessary) so perhaps it was that i'd just read a book with a very similar structure. so, problems:

1. none of the the four illuminators working on the book really distinguished themselves in any way (a problem when they are supposed to be the main murder suspects). when you find out who the murderer was, you're supposed to think, "OMG it was that person!??!? TOTALLY didn't see that! WOW!" whereas i was a bit nonplussed by the answer here, as in, wait, who was that again? (although i did like the little twist of the very last paragraph).

2. the love interest hottie chickie that they all wanted to marry was very wishy-washy about what she wanted, ("i was happily in love with X, but I was also miserable because really i was in love with Y, and i only loved Y because i didn't know when Z, the only man I ever TRULY loved, was coming back," by which time it's hard not to think a) hunh?? and b) not sure i care who you TRULY love if even you can't make up your mind and

3. the translation felt very very very very weird and clunky, as if the translator couldn't make up his mind between slightly quaint old-fashioned English in keeping with the setting of the book (seventeenth century Turkey) or twentieth century slangy English, which led to some very awkward sounding sentences (may or may not be Pamuk's fault). the worst offense I think was when one of the characters retires for the evening having just seen the girl he's been dreaming about for the last twelve years, and the sentence is translated something along the lines of, "I retired in the evening to my bed chamber, as was my wont, but was so distracted by dreams of my beloved that I was unable to jack off." ouch! horrible horrible. Incidentally I read an article recently about the mess with Stieg Larsson's books and their translation into English, and was pleased to see that the consensus in publishing circles confirmed my sense that the translations of those books was just abysmal, and it wasn't just the case of the translator faithfully rendering Larsson's peculiar Swedish prose. anyway.

Moffat, Forster, Dunnett

Wendy Moffat, A Great Unrecorded History: A Life of E.M. Forster

Dorothy Dunnett, Queen’s Play

E.M. Forster, Maurice

E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

can't remember author's name off top of head and book is in other room, Savage Beauty: A Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

This latest biography of E.M. Forster had been recommended to me several months ago when it first came out, but buying it new in hardback seemed too decadent even for a devotee like me ($35! Eek!), so I denied myself, in a fit of bibliophilic chastity, and told myself I would just have to buy the paperback. Virtue was rewarded when I saw it just sitting there, ripe for the plucking, on the library shelf when I went to return my last round of library books (in brand new hardback, no less, which just tells you that someone with pull is paying attention to my moral accounting. And once I’d read the biography, of course, I had to go back and re-read Maurice, as I hadn’t realized _quite_ how autobiographical Maurice really was, and then the library's edition of Maurice turned out to be actually a Holy Trinity of Maurice, Howard’s End, and A Room With A View, and here at Nick Hornby, Will You Be Our Friend we have had a persistent Room w/ a View fetish for many many years, so we reread that just for good measure because we love Rupert Graves and Simon Callow in particular.

I actually found Maurice much more interesting as a re-read than I was expecting, and ultimately the biography was a bit depressing. Wendy Moffat did an OK job, I thought, going through source material and culling for interesting bits, but ultimately the biography felt like not much more than a list of Forster’s various amorous laisons throughout his life, and gave very little sense of what Forster was like to talk to, to be with, to know. I was also a little dismayed to learn that he had such a penchant for working class, dark-skinned, sloe-eyed lithe young things - could you get much more cliché than that? I mean, who _doesn’t_ thrill to a little jungle fever, right? (that‘s a joke, just in case you can‘t tell) - as I would wish for a Great Man of English Letters to be able to rise to the occasion and pick on someone of his own intellectual size, knowing that Posterity with a capital P is watching. Posterity and I both do love a passionate long-lasting love affair between two epic personalities etc etc. (see Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera from earlier blog entry…) But then I started thinking about it a bit more, and it became an exercise in exorcising my own previously unquestioned prejudices. As in, I think I can truthfully say that I am not a remotely homophobic person; I couldn’t care less what gender of person you might choose to sleep with. But I have an instinctive eeeuuuuww to the combination of older/younger, or to someone who has hundreds of partners as opposed to following a more modest serial-monogamy model, or - most snobbish of all - highly educated smart person getting it on with someone thick and not educated. So it’s hard not to roll my eyes at the stolid upperclass stockbrocker having what we are supposed to believe is a lasting relationship of real meaning with the gamekeeper - it just sounds too much like the beginning of a porno film. (I think Maurice predates Lady Chatterley, no?) But, really, who’s to say that sex is only respectable when it occurs between age- and class-matched intellectual equals, and only when it’s monogamous? (Forster and his various consorts seem always to be sending each other packets of powder to treat pubic lice with; morality aside, I definitely would have had more of a care for Posterity had it been me, and burnt any letters making reference to crab treatments.) So I struggled a bit with my own prejudices on that score, as I really _can’t_ think of a good reason, if you’re not going to have kids and you don’t care how many times you have to treat your crabs, as to why you shouldn’t sleep with hundreds of uneducated nineteen year olds as long as they want to sleep with you. (NB: last I checked, no nineteen-year-olds, educated or otherwise, had any interest in sleeping with me).

But! while as a story Maurice definitely has credibility issues, the interior description of what it felt like to come to terms with your own sexuality and to celebrate it even while society at large is doing its very best to sit on you and squash you flat I found very touching this time round. A better book than I had remembered, and particularly poignant in light of the hurt that Forster suffered throughout his life for being gay, and how pessimistic he was about homosexuality ever being acceptable to mainstream society.

Queen’s Play - more seventeenth century court intrigue; spies and scandal, about five plot twists every chapter; totally lost by the end, but I think the good guys won. Good stuff.

I’m currently half way through Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay and wowee zowee she was a heartbreaking little vixen. I’ve lost track of the numbers of men - and some women - who wrote her letters along the lines of “I must see you! I shall die if I don’t hold you in my arms again before you leave for Paris! Enclosed is a sonnet I wrote about how much I adore you, my darling!” Clearly I have been conducting my love life ALL WRONG. More on her later…