Ishiguro’s great. I haven’t read his latest book or his collection of shorts though. For me his Unconsoled is way ahead of his other works. He took the ideas and considerations in Remains into a kind of final surreal vision. I always say it’s essential to read Remains first so you can understand what a work of genius Unconsoled is.
I have not read The Unconsoled, but The Remains of the Day is my favourite and it’s been a while since I’ve picked it up. Maybe I’ll read both in sequence. Thanks for the tip.
Oooh, and The Unconsoled is about a pianist - even better. 
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I finished Walker/Chopin yesterday. I thought it was good, but maybe not the definitive monument he built for Liszt. What I like about Walker is his calm, narrating writing style, his intelligence and integrity, and the thorough research he builds his books on. As expected he painted the big picture beautifully, but I would have liked more details (first hand quotes, contemporary accounts, illustrations, etc) to get a better view of the man and his world. In addition the musical analysis felt somewhat shoe-horned in, and I never thought he properly went to the bottom either with Chopin’s disease, his piano playing or his development and influence as a composer. Still a good read, and I’m unlikely to pick up another book on Chopin any time soon unless I can get hold of Burger’s chronicle or something like it, which I think would complement Walker well.
Left in my biography queue now are da Vinci, Napoleon, Beethoven, Rubinstein and Bülow.
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Do you have a specific book in min for da Vinci? I’d like to read his story as well, but I guess there is a lot to choose from.
I bought Walter Isaacson’s recently published bio, after seeing a good review of it in a book journal last year. I’ve had it on ice now the last few months, but I read 100 pages or so in April and loved it initially, but where I am now you’re getting page after page of what’s really just descriptions of his paintings. It’s not uninteresting, he knows what he’s talking about and does point out things which aren’t easy to see for the untrained eye, but I thought it began feeling tiresome and longwinded. I hope it’s just this part of the book however, and that we’ll get back to his life, his thoughts and his work as a scientist before long.
What surprised me positively about the book is how much source material there after all is to work with for someone born almost 600 years ago. Leonardo kept a journal of sorts and a lot was written about him already in his own time, so you really feel you’re getting to know a time, a country and a person. da Vinci’s own reflections and musings on life, art, nature and society are sprinkled across the book, and are fantastic to read.
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I’m about 2/3rds through the tripartite The Vegger and it’s become brilliant – started rather slow IMO but its shift in narration in part 2 created a lot of drama & tension – turned a kind of social & mental breakdown into some art porn between in-laws. Da Vlad shall rate dis upon cumpletion.
Today I bought Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War. She won the Nobel Lit Prize in 2015. Her book Chernobyl Prayers will probably appeal to those who got deir pills from da pharmacy in dat recent TV thing about the event. I’ve decided to start with her first book, and will make it to Chernobyl after 1 or 2 more. It seems all her books are about war and catastrophe (Chernobyl).
Her first book, War’s Unwomanly Face , came out in 1985. It was repeatedly reprinted and sold more than two million copies.[22] The book was finished in 1983 and published (in short edition) in Oktyabr , a Soviet monthly literary magazine, in February 1984.[25] In 1985, the book was published by several publishers, and the number of printed copies reached 2,000,000 in the next five years.[26] This novel is made up of monologues of women in the war speaking about the aspects of World War II that had never been related before.[22] Another book, The Last Witnesses: the Book of Unchildlike Stories , describes personal memories of children during wartime. The war seen through women’s and children’s eyes revealed a new world of feelings. In 1993, she published Enchanted with Death , a book about attempted and completed suicides due to the downfall of the Soviet Union. Many people felt inseparable from the Communist ideology and unable to accept the new order surely and the newly interpreted history.
Her books were not published by Belarusian state-owned publishing houses after 1993, while private publishers in Belarus have only published two of her books: Chernobyl Prayer in 1999 and Second-hand Time in 2013, both translated into Belarusian. As a result, Alexievich has been better known in the rest of world than in Belarus.
She has been described as the first journalist to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.[31] She herself rejects the notion that she is a journalist, and, in fact, Alexievich’s chosen genre is sometimes called “documentary literature”: an artistic rendering of real events, with a degree of poetic license.[32]
I found the Unconsoled very very strange. Would be curious to your reaction to it, although there are some moments and situations in it that I very much identified with.
Had the same reaction; you can tell he REALLY REALLY loves Liszt, and with Chopin, it’s more admiration?
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Yeah, he’s way more objective with Chopin, allowing him to actually have some flaws. With the Liszt trilogy it was almost comical at times, he could do absolutely nothing wrong and - no matter the argument or situation - Liszt was always in the right.
In all fairness though I think Liszt always was in the right. Walker just set things straight.
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Oh yes, I’ve no doubt he was a saint his entire life…
What do you think Walker was off about?
It’s years since I read the books, but I remember laughing at times and actively starting to look for even a semi-criticism - which he had no problem attributing to all other characters appearing throughout. I’m not saying it wasn’t called for, but Walker almost seemed blindly in love with Liszt at times.
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Honestly, I get the same impression. Liszt can do no wrong, even when he’s meeting dat spy chick (forgot her name, but she was not a legit pianist) for random sex behind Princess Carolyne’s back.
So today I finished Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. She originally wrote this as 3 separate stories–in total under 200 pages–then joined them later on. Perhaps that’s why the first part is in first-person, and the other two parts in third. For me this book really took off in the second part.
Start spoiler – The Vegger’s brother-in-law, a video artist, uses da Veg, post-breakdown, to realise his fantasy of painting a chick in flowers and den filming da eroticism. The only downer in the whole book–aside perhaps from some vocab choices I didn’t really like (translator)–was how this second part ended, predictably with Vegger’s sister catching them. End spoiler
The third part, which focused on Vegger’s sis, had a beautiful way of drifting back into the past, into the character’s thoughts and stories. This was beautifully arranged by Kang. Intense, poetic ending too.
It’s a really good book, definitely deserves an audience.
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So I’m about 70 pages (plus her 30 page intro) into Nobel Prize-winning Alexievich’s first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, and I can tell you that this book has more emotional impact than anything I’ve read for a good ten years. I cannot believe how hard parts of it hit. In the intro she talked a lot about communicating feelings and that feeling is understanding and so on, and with these women whose oral accounts are transcribed into the book, it’s like pure emotion coming at you. This isn’t really a work of fiction. Alexievich met over 800 women in Belarus & the SU who had served in the second WW. She taped their stories, and then included parts of them into the book. So some entries are as short as a paragraph or two, while others continue for several pages. They recount the grime & horror of it, and sometimes the banality of it has its own impact. For example one woman told how she arrived at the dispatch office–to be sent to the front–not with a suitcase of food & clothes or even memorabilia and dresses, but a suitcase full of candy. Many of these women were teens, under 18. And she goes on to recount how the man in charge just went silent and seemed ashamed, as he knew where this poor girl was going off to. It’s an amazing work from a writer described as an oral historian.
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So yesterday I finished reading the most emotive book I’ve ever read - The Unwomanly Face of War. It became harder and harder to read as it went on - the part with the partisan fighters felt like a kind of emotional climax, and that went into a section of women who were mothers, either taking their children with them into war or leaving them behind, then being unrecognised or unrecognisable after the war.
This book just smashed everything else in this thread. I know it’s not fiction - it’s oral history, edited and artfully joined.- but still, it’s literature, and it really has its own place. I still can’t believe the emotional impact of the stories - they take you right down to tears and disbelief or incomprehension.
By chance just last week her kind of companion-piece to this book - one about children’s impressions of the war - was released in English, so I will get that soon.
But for now I’ll read her Chernobyl Prayer, which was the main source of that recent TV series that everyone is creaming over.
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If you’re looking for a way to escape your dragging humdrum life, and find some needed perspective, join us in The Zone
We got home. I took everything off, all the stuff I’d been wearing there, and threw the lot down the rubbish chute. I gave the cap to my little son as a present. He kept asking for it. He wore it non-stop. Two years later, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour.
You can write the rest yourself. I don’t want to say any more.
The stories aren’t as affecting as those in her first book, perhaps because – as she explained herself – she didn’t have to dig through layers of politics & social normalisation in a person to actually extract the true stories of the times. Here about Chernobyl the people, not having been trained how to think about the event, simply let them out. With the war book she had to get through a person’s (trained) BS, which is perhaps why the stories were so overwhelming.
These ones are of course intense and very saddening though. The book begins with the wife of a fireman who was part of the very first team on hand at the reactor. It’s a hard story of their love and how he was sent to Moscow to be treated, how she looked after him, how her pregnancy was unwittingly sacrificed.
Other stories so far have included soldiers (above), ‘returnees’ (villagers who returned to their homes), refugees from Tajikistan who moved into the area post-event, and a drifter / troublemaker / sinner who settled there to clear his soul:
My surname? I haven’t got a passport. The police took it. They beat me up. ‘What are you bumming about here for?’ ‘I’m not bumming about. I’m repenting my sins.’ They beat me even harder. Punched me in the head. So you can write: Nikolai, a servant of God.
And now a free man.
I’m currently looking into 20th century or contemporary Italian authors, mostly to help improve my Italian. I’m probably going to pick up some stuff somewhat at random when I go there in a couple of weeks. I’m not someone who is really interested in plot, more about character, simple prose style and realism. If I could find an Italian equivalent of early Houellebecq, that would fit the bill nicely (although I found his depiction of mental illness farcical). If anyone has any recommendations, let me know.
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Umberto Eco !
Foucault’s Pendulum is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. The Name of the Rose is probably even better.
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