thorold reads on a wintry day prickly as stubble in Q1 2025

My goldfinch, I'll toss back my head—
let's look at the world, you and I:
a wintry day, prickly as stubble,
is it just as rough on your eye?

Osip Mandelstam, from “My Goldfinch”

Welcome to my 2025 Q1 reading thread. If you want to look back at earlier threads, 2024 Q4 was here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/364645

For those who don’t know me yet, I’m Mark, from The Hague in the Netherlands (and occasionally in Cleveland, Ohio). I read all sorts of odd stuff, with sporadic diversions into the mainstream. I hope to keep track of that here — don’t hesitate to drop in to say hello or give me inappropriate reading advice…

(Stats, if I ever bother to fill them in. In the meantime, the LT year review is here: https://www.librarything.com/stats/thorold/year )

>3 thorold: What a smart way to present your LT stats! So much clearer and so much more informative.

>3 thorold: Thanks for pointing out that LT provides these annual stats and charts for us. For some reason my year in review did not include books read, only books added. Did you create the books read feature?

No, it relies on you filling in a “finished” date for each book as you read it. Sadly, LT isn’t yet magically aware of whether you have read a book or not.

>3 thorold: Just a reminder to hit “Recalculate” at the bottom of the statistics screen when you are done with the year - these stats unlike the Charts and Graphs are pre-generated and never get refreshed (thus the link allowing you to kick off the process of generation again). :)

>6 thorold: Thanks. Interesting--there must be some "magic" way/place to do this. For every book I read I enter in the comments section of my library "Read (date)."

>8 arubabookwoman: Some of the library display styles include a "finished" column. Entering the date there will get it picked up by the LT stats counter.

>8 arubabookwoman: Here you go:
--Go to your book's Main Page.
--In the left-hand column of options, choose "Edit Your Book".
--On this screen, it's about 2/3 down, in the section marked "DATES", which is between the "Languages" and "Classification" sections.
--Just fill in the "Finished" date.

It's convenient also when looking at "Your Books", because if you add "Finished Date" as an optional column in one of your Display styles, you can then sort your books by the date finished.

>7 AnnieMod: I see a "Regenerate" button, not "Recalculate." Is that the same thing, or something different?

>11 kac522: That’s the one. :) Sorry - typing from the phone today and fumbled the label.

Happy New Year, Mark. I got somewhat behind with threads in 2024, but always enjoy your reading choices.

Happy New Year! I look forward to following your reading again this year.

Thanks for pointing out those stats! Have a great 2025

Thanks, all, for the good wishes!

My first book of the new year, a DDR novel which fits into the “countries that disappeared” theme.

Rolf Schneider — still going strong in his nineties, apparently — seems to have started out as something of an establishment hack, author of dozens of useful and forgotten non-fiction titles, but he was one of the first writers to break with the DDR government and sign the protest letter in support of Wolf Biermann.

Die Reise nach Jarosław (1976) by Rolf Schneider (DDR, 1932- )

  

One of the many unexpected things about the literature of the DDR is that it gave us two of the best-known German teen-rebel novels of my youth. One of the most tantalising moments in Rolf Schneider’s 1976 road-trip novel, Die Reise nach Jarosław, is when we briefly meet Ed, the hero of Ulrich Plenzdorf’s even more iconic Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., who offers our narrator Gittie a couch to crash on after she has stormed out of her parents’ Berlin flat in a rage without any particular destination in mind. She turns him down and decides instead to travel to the Galician town where her late grandmother had lived before the war. Along the way she picks up a Polish student called Jan, who seems like the ideal travelling companion for her quest. Except that he is heading for north Germany, on a student project to explore gothic architecture, while she is headed for southern Poland. But those are just details, surely…

A lively, fun read, with lots of interesting period details. From our perspective half a century later we might wonder a little bit about just how well qualified a man born in the early 1930s would be to write from the point of view of a girl born in the late 1950s, and there are certainly a few implausibilities along the way, but on the whole Gittie is an engaging, eccentric personality and it isn’t that hard to suspend disbelief.

Ok, I can’t remember, have you read Kairos? 100% in your theme.

>16 thorold: entertaining. Love your reviews, always

>17 dchaikin: Yes, I did, and it is. Although I liked Erpenbeck’s earlier novels better.

And back to Belgium for another from my stack of old Boekenweek gifts.

De zwaardvis (The swordfish, 1989) by Hugo Claus (Belgium, 1929-2008)

  

A summer afternoon in a Flemish village turns out a lot less idyllic than it looks, with all kinds of sexual and religious tensions floating around. The involvement of a police inspector makes it clear that something has gone badly wrong, but we are left until the last page to find out precisely who has been murdered.

Hugo Claus uses the 1989 Boekenweek novella to perform another hit and run attack on the Flemish middle classes: no-one comes out of this one well, with the partial exception of the murderer, for whom Claus seems to have at least a little sympathy.

I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed your reviews, even though there is very little overlap in our reading. Happy new year!

>19 thorold: That author photo is perfect for a murder novel.
Good reading to you.

Happy New Year. I'm looking forward to following your thread again this year. Always full of surprises and interesting books, not to mention the excellent reviews.

>19 thorold: I am surprises to see there are still Boekenweekgeschenken that you haven't read.

I have been trying to catcher up with all of those that appeared between 2000 and 2022. Just today I finished Zomerhitte, the 2005 Boekenweekgeschenk by Jan Wolkers.

>23 edwinbcn: I’m focussing on the years since 1988 when I came to live in the Netherlands (opposite scenario to yours!): I think there are still two or three from those years I haven’t read. In the thirty years before that I’ve only read about one in three. Zomerhitte is one I remember not enjoying so much…

One of my Christmas books this year. Charles King teaches at Georgetown. I was planning to read his book about The Black Sea last year, but Neal Ascherson beat him to the post…

Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah (2024) by Charles King (USA, 1967- )

  

Not quite what you would expect: King is a historian, not a musician, and this is really a book about the historical context in which Handel’s great oratorio was created and the process by which it became one of the most famous and best-loved bits of Protestant religious music (by anyone other than J S Bach), rather than about the work itself. King tells us about Handel’s background and his musical career in London, about his librettist Charles Jennens, about the actress Susannah Cibber, who sang some of the alto parts in the early performances, and about Thomas Coram and his Foundling Hospital foundation, which ultimately became the main beneficiary of Messiah’s success. He also goes at some length into the background of eighteenth century wars and politics to give us some idea of how a work with such a straightforward message of Christian hope might have grabbed the attention of audiences in an age of enlightened scepticism.

Jennens was at least a Confirmed Bachelor, if not actually gay in a sense we would recognise; Susannah was a talented actress whose career came close to being destroyed by a selfish and abusive husband, and to complete the picture of all that was best and brightest in eighteenth century English society King brings in Ayuba Diallo, a Muslim scholar from Bundu in West Africa who through an unfortunate administrative error was sent to North America as a slave, but later freed when his middle-class credentials were recognised. He spent some time in Britain hobnobbing with dukes and orientalists before returning to Bundu, to work for his former captors enslaving other Africans. Unfortunately, fascinating as Diallo’s life was, King totally fails to establish any connection with Handel’s Messiah, beyond the general point that almost all the wealth that was floating around at the time ultimately derived from the profits of the slave trade. I think we knew that.

Interesting as far as it goes, but disappointingly lightweight if what you are after is to learn more about Handel and his most famous work.

A history of the Black Sea sounds fascinating. Maybe he found the golden fleece? This one seems curious though.

>26 dchaikin: Yes. I enjoyed the Ascherson book on the same subject, I expect King would have been fascinating as well. A lot of material there!

Another Boekenweek gift from the pile, while I’m on a roll…

De heilige Antonio (1998) by Arnon Grunberg (Netherlands, 1971- )

  

The 1998 Boekenweek gift, commissioned from the young Arnon Grunberg, who had made his breakthrough four years earlier with Blauwe Maandagen. Mexican teenagers Tito and Paul make friends with Kristin, the beautiful Croatian girl who joins their English class in Queens. All three of them have gone through horrible things in their early lives and welcome the fragile opportunity to play at being normal children for a short while, but we know it can’t last. Meanwhile, the boys’ mother Raffaella, a waitress, seems to be getting into a destructive relationship with Ewald Krieg, a strange young man who claims to be a successful novelist in his own country.

Grunberg sets up parallels between the women who live by keeping their admirers unsatisfied — “hungry” — and the novelist who plays with readers’ emotions. Both move towards tragedy (or at best farce) when they actually give satisfaction of some kind. Maybe a facile idea, but it works quite well in the short, intensive format of the novella.

Love the picture in >1 thorold: ! I am starring your thread, which is invariably one of the most instructive and engaging threads on LT.

>28 Dilara86: Thanks! The picture was taken in 2021, the last time we had proper winter here (briefly). We did wake up to snow here today, but it vanished within a couple of hours.

That mill (Nieuwe Veenmolen) is actually in the middle of a mess of allotments and railway tracks, and is used as a restaurant — nowhere near as rustic as it looks in the picture.

I am a bit late on this busy reading and reviewing thread to say Happy New Year, but never mind.
As always, I enjoy reading your reviews, even if I rarely post.

Aaaand now I have les Fla, les Fla, les Flamandes echoing in my head... happy new year!

I remember Grunberg as fairly funny in Blauer Montag. Would read more.

>25 thorold: Thanks for this review - I had my eye on this book but I had hoped for something rich and deep.

>25 thorold: prompted me to take this book off my shelves — I bought it when it came out, just after I had completed an Open University music course, where I had the privilege of hearing Professor Burrows lecture on baroque music, in person and on TV. I’ve referred to it frequently, but I don’t think I ever read it cover to cover before.

Handel (1994) by Donald Burrows (UK, 1945- )

  

Handel is not really the ideal subject for a biography: his professional life was a smooth progression of recognition and effective use of connections, whilst his private life was exceptionally private and free of drama. He never married, doesn’t seem to have had any love affairs we know about, and we know little about his friendships apart from those that centred on music or literature.

In the spirit of the Master Musicians series, Burrows sticks to what we know about the music and professional activities and doesn’t get involved in speculations about what Handel might have done in his free time, assuming he ever granted himself any. But he does give us a very clear account of the music he wrote and how it fitted into the life of the times. What seems to emerge is the picture of a supremely competent craftsman who had a fairly sure instinct for what his royal patrons and the theatre-going public wanted to hear. Handel wrote music to make money for himself and his partners, and he clearly didn’t believe in wasting useful musical ideas: if he (or someone else) had already written something that could be adapted to the project he was working on, and it was long enough ago that it would have been forgotten in its previous context, then why waste energy coming up with new tunes?

A very useful, no-frills biography packed with handy reference material, by an author who clearly has a great deal of respect for his subject.

As clueless as I am about music, I appreciate your review, and I’m glad the Charles King book had some useful motivational purpose.

Ive always loved his music and may just have to read that

>36 thorold: Do! But perhaps it’s a better book to borrow from the library than to own, if my history of thirty years on the shelf is anything to go by :-)

An ex-Yugoslavian novel for the disappearing countries theme. This is the third of Drndić’s books that I’ve read:

Canzone di Guerra (1998; English 2023; US title Battle songs) by Daša Drndić (Yugoslavia, Croatia, 1946-2018), translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth

  

Daša Drndić‘s short fourth novel, from 1998, which only appeared in English after her death, follows Croatian broadcaster Tea Radan and her young daughter Sara as they are forced to move from Belgrade to Rijeka by the break-up of Yugoslavia, and then find that they are “not Croatian enough“ for their new neighbours and move on into Canadian exile. Ranging backwards through the 20th century history of the Balkans, Drndić explores how the violence of history messes up ordinary lives, in essentially trivial but still distressing and humiliating ways for Tea and Sara, and far more brutally for thousands of other victims of conflict, including her own family. There are the daily humiliations of being a refugee even in a progressive, tolerant country like Canada (and Drndić is careful to remind us that Canada’s record has not always been spotless), there are the bitter ironies in the ways the independent Croatia of the nineties sometimes behaves like the Ustasha Croatia of World War II, and there is the thoughtless nationalism of most of the Croatian emigrant community in Toronto.

As you would expect from Drndić, a dark, funny, serious and unpredictably genre-jumping book, even within the novella-length format, and one that has not lost its relevance in the last 25 years.

>36 thorold: Oh! This sounds interesting. Too bad it's not available in French! It seems her only work translated into French is Sonnenschein (Trieste in English?), which is a different subject and seems really dark, without the funny side you mentionned.

>37 raton-liseur: Yes, it is a dark subject, but a very rewarding read. And it certainly has its funnier moments, if not quite in a “laugh out loud” way.

>38 thorold: Thanks, that's useful. This author seems interesting and your rec adds a lot of weight. I might decide to read from her, but not right now, I'll wait to be in the right mood.

>36 thorold: sounds fantastic. Terrific review. What a perspective she had on all that.

Another book from my Christmas pile, one that was rather oddly chosen for last year’s Booker Longlist. I haven’t come across Rachel Kushner before, so I don’t know how representative it is of her work.

Creation Lake (2024) by Rachel Kushner (USA, 1968- )

  

This seems to be aimed as a crossover between literary novel and spy thriller, partly inspired by the recent “undercover cops” scandal in the UK. Our narrator, whom we know only by her nom-de-guerre, Sadie Smith, is an investigator who lives on a diet of alcohol and painkillers and specialises in infiltrating left-wing or environmental groups by forming pretended romantic relationships with their members. Her current target is a ramshackle farming collective in a remote part of rural France whose members are suspected of sabotaging a major water-storage project.

In the course of her work, “Sadie” has to read the writings of one of the group’s gurus, a former 68-er who seems to have gone seriously off the rails, living in a cave, refusing to eat cooked food, and forming half-baked theories about the Neanderthals and how they were mistreated by homo sapiens. Ironically, he is only prepared to communicate these theories to the outside world through the medium of email. Despite the battiness of it all, Bruno’s teachings start to get under Sadie’s skin. Meanwhile, it becomes clear that the motives of the people employing her to investigate the group are far from pure, and she begins to have serious doubts about her chosen career path. Well, wouldn’t you?

Nicely written, for the most part, and with some sensible things to say about the nature of political action and the way groups work, but it somehow doesn’t tie things together in a way that works satisfactorily either as a novel or as a thriller. There are too many balls thrown up into the air and not caught.

Another short one from the pile:

From Bauhaus to Our House (1981) by Tom Wolfe (USA, 1930-2018)

  

A lively extended essay in which Wolfe mocks the way that Americans have been taken in by fast-talking, theory-laden European modernist architects in the course of the twentieth century. It’s 130 pages of very clever non-stop ridicule of the cult of the glass-concrete-and-steel box, but that’s really all it is: there is nothing here approaching the subtlety of the criticism of modernist elitism in John Carey’s The intellectuals and the masses. This is a book written to be read and enjoyed by self-justifying philistines, with heavy overtones of Mark Twain and The emperor’s new clothes. But I loved the dust-jacket…

>41 thorold: so you’re on the not-quite-amazing side of the fence. I’m with you. Fun review

>36 thorold:

So glad she's still being read.

>42 thorold:

I'm probably missing a lot because that complaint seems so counterintuitive to me... Who looks at a typical American conurbation and goes "wallah, too much modernism?!"

>44 LolaWalser: No-one, probably, but it seems that was what Tom Wolfe wanted to inspire us to do forty years ago. I think his beef was less with modernism per se than with architects who use theory, in particular modernism, as an excuse for inflicting cheap, unoriginal and ugly buildings on us. But he doesn’t seem to notice that the overwhelming majority of American ugliness comes from vernacular architecture. Or absence of maintenance.

Last year’s (worthy, but slightly unexpected) Booker winner:

Orbital (2023) by Samantha Harvey (UK, 1975- )

  

An unusual book — somewhere between a novella and a prose-poem — describing twenty-four hours in the life of six astronauts in the middle of a nine-month mission on the International Space Station. Nothing very dramatic happens, but Harvey touches on all kinds of big topics, prompted both by the high-level perspective of Earth from 250 miles up and by the human conditions of life on the space station and being isolated from friends and family. It’s slightly disorienting to be in a space-story that quite emphatically isn’t science fiction, but draws heavily on the real accounts of life in space by people who have worked in the ISS. Harvey turns the technical reports into beautiful, musical language — a short book, but one to savour slowly.

——

Fun to see a very ranty negative review by a frustrated science-fiction author on the book’s LT page — I can quite understand why he hated it (mainstream modishness, lack of plot development, failure to use the opportunities the science-fiction format gives for extending reality, etc.), but he completely misses the point of what an engaging piece of writing it is. https://www.librarything.com/work/30633637/reviews/275679783

>46 thorold: I heard a radio programm talking about this book a few days ago but had not realised it was this one, which I've seen frequently around CR those days.
Good to know you liked it, I might give it a try.

>46 thorold: I did have to chuckle at the reviewer's line: "More simply, my review could just state once and for all an inconvenient truth, in bold and in as large a font as you like: Creative Writing is not writing." The bold is the member's.

>48 labfs39: Yes, a comment in the same spirit as Truman Capote’s one-liner about Kerouac…

Back to disappearing countries, Austria-Hungary edition. There was no writer more deeply rooted in the disappearance of the Hapsburg empire than Joseph Roth. One of his first books:

Hotel Savoy (1924) by Joseph Roth (Austria, 1894-1939)

  

In the confused aftermath of the First World War, Gabriel, making his way home to Vienna from a Russian PoW camp, arrives in a town on the borders of the former Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires (presumably in Galicia), where he lands at a grand hotel he remembers from before the war. The Hotel Savoy still reflects the glory of imperial days, but when you look more closely, the grand rooms downstairs are occupied by conmen and war-profiteers, and the dingier ones on the upper floors by refugees and strays. Those who can’t manage to pay their bills have mortgaged their luggage to Ignatz, the lift-man, or are reduced to dancing naked on the stage of the cellar bar for the entertainment of local businessmen. In the distance there is talk of the arrival of the Revolution, but the bourgeois are putting their trust in the rumoured return of Bloomfield, a local man who has emigrated and made a fortune in the USA.

A kind of miniature pendant to The magic mountain, a fascinating little novel about a partial, precarious survival of pre-war K&K society in a liminal region of Europe.

— —
This one comes with an LT review by @rebeccanyc — a better class of work page altogether!

>46 thorold: glad you enjoyed Orbital. I think it’s terrific. I couldn’t read that review. Too long, too blood-eyed blind crazy angry.

>49 thorold: lovely review. I really should read Roth.

>1 thorold: Just stopping in to wish you a great 2025. I love the thread title and the picture.

>49 thorold: Thank you for reminding me to read this book. My library has a copy of it.

A very parochial book, found in one of our local little libraries. I had to do some first aid on it — it looked as though someone had dropped it in a puddle at some stage, but it wasn’t completely lost…

Ypenburg: Veroverd op de zee — van vliegveld tot woonwijk (2005) by Astrid Abbing et al. (Netherlands, - )

 

This is a kind of Festschrift commissioned by the project management team to mark the completion of the new residential suburb of Ypenburg on the eastern side of The Hague. This development, started in 1998, was part of the big expansion of housing foreseen in the Dutch government’s celebrated “VINEX” policy briefing note of 1991.

While part of the book consists, as you would expect, of planners and architects patting themselves on the back, the editors have chosen to put the emphasis on the prior history of the area, which actually turns out to be quite fascinating — as most local history is, when it’s well done. The early chapters discuss how the land was formed in the aftermath of the last ice age, the remains of a Stone Age settlement that archaeologists discovered during the construction of our shopping centre, the transition from sand dunes to peat bogs and then the gradual human exploitation of the land for agriculture and peat extraction from medieval times onwards. This is all very much the story of anywhere in the low-lying land behind the coast of Holland. In the eighteenth century some rich family from The Hague builds a country house (now lost under a highway intersection) and gives it the name “Ypenburg” because of the elm trees on the property.

In the twentieth century the story takes a slightly more unusual turn: a local businessman buys up land to create an airfield, which soon becomes popular with sport pilots and sees occasional commercial use. In May 1940, it becomes the scene of a failed airborne landing by German forces, a minor Dutch victory that delayed the surrender of the Netherlands for long enough for the government and queen to go into exile. After the war the airfield tries to re-establish itself commercially, and is the setting for some very popular air-shows, until it is taken over by NATO during the Cold War, used mainly as a (reserve) transport base and for VIP flights. An important aircraft repair and maintenance facility is set up on the site by aviation entrepreneur Frits Diepen (later part of Fokker). Diepen also ran a charter airline, an air-taxi service, and all kinds of other businesses.

After the abandonment of the site by the military — and the overdue clearance of unexploded WWII ordnance — it becomes a VINEX suburb and a famous playground for urban planners, with a bewildering range of more and less successful architectural innovation. Most of it very pleasant by the standards of what passes for urban planning in other countries, but some just weird…

Inevitably, a rather self-satisfied sort of book, and with some terrible layout choices by the graphic designers, but much more information-dense than I was expecting.

- - -


Ypenburg centre — the architect said he was trying to evoke the idea of San Gimignano. Hmm. The site of the Stone Age settlement is centre-left, just behind where the tram is passing.

>49 thorold:

I loved Hotel Savoy. Would watch it as a sitcom.

>53 thorold:

What's the date of that, 60s/70s? I'm no architect but that's what I'd call modernism done wrong, much too regular and regimental-looking for residential quarters.

>54 LolaWalser: Late 1990s! It’s less barrack-like close-up, but it certainly doesn’t look appealing when you can see a lot of it at once. Other areas of the suburb are far more attractive.

Hotel Savoy would make a great sitcom. One running joke would be the non-appearance of the Greek owner at the end of every episode.

>55 thorold:

Huh!! I'm really not up on the trends then... I thought a more "organic", "bushy", terraced sort of look overtook the rectangle a while back...

By the way, I meant to underline your point up there about the importance of maintenance to our impressions, a particularly neuralgic spot when it comes to so-called "commie blocks". Concrete is reviled, but as we saw in the California fires, American penchant for plywood and cardboard has its own risks. But concrete needs maintenance, and rare are the people who can look past the weather marks and graffiti to superior form.

Another Christmas present. I rarely watch (current) TV and I’m slightly prejudiced against TV comedians and very prejudiced against freeloading royals, so not necessarily the best person to review this…

Unruly: a history of England’s kings and queens (2024) by David Mitchell (UK, 1974- )

  

Most children have the common sense to take evasive action if told that something is going to be “funny and educational“. Sadly, as adults we seem to lose that ability…

This is a full-on narrative history of the rulers of England from Hengist & Horsa to Elizabeth I, told from the point of view of someone who earns his living being funny on British television. Since medieval monarchs were numerous and on the whole nasty, brutish and short, while their family relationships were insanely complicated but are unfortunately mostly essential to the proper understanding of what is going on, you can see that something is going to have to give if the book can earn the necessary cover blurbs indicating that it’s the funniest thing since 1066 and all that (spoiler alert: it isn’t).

What has to give in practice is the reader’s will to live. There are plenty of jokes inserted into the text, and a lot of liberal worthiness in which Mitchell has some quite sensible things to say about how we got the non-intuitive idea of government by hereditary monarchs. Any twenty-page stretch of the text, taken in isolation, is enjoyable and funny. But the thing goes on for over four hundred pages of sustained, dutiful funniness, all constructed on the same basic elements of anachronism and mild subversiveness. It’s like that engagingly ironic teacher who seems so cool when you have him for one lesson, but whom you want to murder after months and months of the same joke three periods a week…

An ideal book to give to someone who probably won‘t read it.

- - -

Notwithstanding the above, I do admit that I very much enjoyed Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow, in which Mitchell played Shakespeare. Being funny on television is not necessarily a bad thing.

Funny recommendation, and useful spoiler

>41 thorold: There are too many balls thrown up into the air and not caught.

But that is because the balls are uncatchable. I absolutely loved this book. I don’t like neat art. If everything is knowable and sewn up neatly it can be boring.

It’s a book where the whole is more than the sum of the parts. It’s not a book to make sense of. It’s saying more than one thing.

I know you know this, but see these things as flaws.

>49 thorold: I can’t get hold of this but see a copy of The Hotel Years is available on audio. Short stories but some may cover the same theme. Inspired to read them anyway.

>59 kjuliff: I’m perhaps being too hard on her because she chose to write a pretentious thriller but didn’t consider herself bound by the rules of that genre. As I said, I don’t know any of her other books, if I did I might come to a different conclusion.

>60 kjuliff: Yes, do read whatever Roth you can find, the journalism and fiction is all very interesting.

>61 thorold: - Re Creation LakeI didn’t know that Rachel Kushner chose to write a “pretentious thriller” or that there were “rules for literary genres. I’m genuinely confused.

Back to working away my small backlog of unread Boekenweek gifts. In 1984 it was the turn of Maarten ‘t Hart. I’ve read several of his novels in the past — he grew up in a very Calvinist family in Maassluis, where he spent a lot of his early years in the organ loft, communing with J S Bach. Nevertheless he decided to follow an academic career as a biologist at Leiden University, writing novels (and books about Bach) in his spare time. The themes of Calvinism, Bach, biology and cross-dressing come up in most of his novels.

De ortolaan (1984) by Maarten 't Hart (Netherlands, 1944- )

  

The 1984 Boekenweek novella is based on the rather unfashionable theme of unrequited love. Biologist Maarten (who works on stickleback behaviour) meets the Belgian postgrad Alma (mice) when she comes to Leiden for a few weeks on an exchange scheme and stays with Maarten and his wife. Over the course of many years, they bump into each other again three times at academic conferences. Maarten falls in love with her, but doesn’t do anything about it because he is married and she is engaged.

He identifies Alma with the ortolan — small, delicately coloured and elusive — and with Kierkegaard’s notion that proximity to an attractive woman helped him to feel the love of God. A Kierkegaardian world containing Alma and the feelings she inspires is somehow far more liveable than the joyless, mechanistic world that contains Calvin, Adorno and (Maarten’s colleague) Richard Dawkins. Even though he knows as a scientist that the Dawkins view of evolution makes (bio-)logical sense.

It’s all very nice, but it’s rather solipsistic. The author is obviously laughing at the narrator some of the time, but we’re clearly meant to take most of it seriously, and that is a bit tricky forty years on. Alma only barely gets an active role in the story, and Maarten’s wife and other colleagues are no more than names. Maarten likes Alma because she laughs at his jokes (most of which seem to be belittling her work) and asks him to explain things to her when the narrative requires that, but it’s hard to see what she gets out of the friendship apart from a male escort who can be trusted not to make unwanted sexual advances. Of course, Wikipedia hadn’t been invented yet, so maybe having a man on hand to explain Adorno, Bach and Kierkegaard to you was actually useful…

>62 kjuliff: Of course there are rules for genres. Wikipedia quotes Nabokov:

In an Anglo-Saxon thriller, the villain is generally punished, and the strong silent man generally wins the weak babbling girl, but there is no governmental law in Western countries to ban a story that does not comply with a fond tradition, so that we always hope that the wicked but romantic fellow will escape scot-free and the good but dull chap will be finally snubbed by the moody heroine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thriller_(genre)

“Pretentious” is my value-judgement, of course, and correspondingly debatable.

>64 thorold: And you think that Rachel Kushner was trying to write a French literary thriller and got the rules wrong?

>53 thorold: Hmm. Having been to San Gimignano, even if I close my eyes and squint at that photo I'm struggling to see the resemblances.

>57 thorold: Loved your review despite your thoughts on the book. Especially loved 'An ideal book to give to someone who probably won‘t read it. '

I do get what you mean about the comedy - I've read a few books by other authors like this where they're amusing and witty in small doses but become such a drag after a while. David Sedaris' books can feel like that for me - very quickly the humour that tickles me initially becomes wearisome.

>57 thorold: oh I love Ben Elton! did you read this other eden? had some issues but I reallu liked it. Ill try Upstart Crow

>64 thorold: that Nabokov quote is hysterical

>68 dchaikin: Laughter in the Dark-ish

>69 kjuliff: hmm. A defiant Nabokov? (Was he ever not defiant?)

>70 dchaikin: Laughter in the Dark is a of the thriller genre that breaks the rules of that genre. I was having a shot at Mark which he sensibly ignored.

>71 kjuliff: LOL!

This is a recent novel by an author I’ve somehow overlooked this far. I’m not sure now if it was a recommendation from someone here or a review I saw in the press, but anyway, it’s kept me busy for a good week:

Caledonian Road (2024) by Andrew O'Hagan (UK, 1968- )

  

Over 600 pages long and with a cast of characters so complex that it comes with a two page dramatis personae section, this is clearly aimed as a “condition of Britain” novel in the same tradition as The way we live now, The Forsyte saga and A dance to the music of time. It’s set in the London of the brief gap between Covid-19 and the Ukraine war, richly peopled as it was with Russian oligarchs, contemporary artists, hackers, Polish gangsters, fashionistas, drug-dealers and corrupt members of the House of Lords. At the centre of all this is art historian Campbell Flynn, very much a man of his time with two TV series and a bestselling Vermeer biography under his belt.

Beyond simply exposing the corruption and hypocrisy of the last years of post-Cameron Tory rule, O’Hagan seems to be trying to show us how pervasive and destructive that kind of atmosphere can be. When Campbell and other damaged-but-not-actually-evil characters try to break out of the cycle of self-interest and self-protection and do something altruistic, it almost invariably bounces back on them and causes worse harm, with the most prominent symbol of this being Campbell’s downstairs tenant Mrs Voyles, who lives in the most appalling squalor and loves to complain about it, but only becomes more and more hostile and defensive whenever Campbell tries to get repairs done in her flat.

As in Trollope, this is largely a novel about unreasonable male stubbornness, in particular Campbell’s refusal to open up about his problems to the people around him. The impact of the moral fable is, however, undermined a little by O’Hagan’s ”good” characters, who are all implausibly saintly and female (apart from one who is a gay Polish gardener). Even in a Trollope novel they might stretch credulity a little. Another weakness, typical for the genre, is that all the most interesting characters come from either the “top” or the “bottom” of society. Ordinary people only really feature as innocent bystanders caught up in the crossfire.

But still, it’s an absorbing read, and a fitting monument to an era we would probably rather forget about.

>57 thorold: Thank you (for reading it so I don't have to). Unruly was all over the bookshop display stands last time I was in the UK. I was almost sucked in by the "funny and educational" (you're absolutely right - my 10-year old would roll her eyes at that so why don't I?), but fortunately I resisted and you haven't made me regret that!

An old paperback I picked out of a Little Library nearly four years ago. Bomans was a well-known Dutch columnist, critic and humorist and an early pioneer of the art of appearing on TV panel shows. I read and enjoyed Pieter Bas a few years ago, a spoof memoir of a Victorian small-town nonentity that he wrote in his twenties.

Capriolen (1961) by Godfried Bomans (Netherlands, 1913-1971)

  

A charming mixed bag of parodies, fantasy pieces and serious essays, mostly from the 1940s and 1950s, by North Holland’s leading Dickens enthusiast. To give us a clear flavour of what to expect, the book opens with a mock-serious report supposedly describing the narrator’s work as part of a commission charged with eliminating the scandalous amounts of nudity to be found on public sculptures in Dutch cities. Gentle irony was Bomans’s favourite tone, and we find a lot of it here: it all feels delightfully old-fashioned. But it’s not just frivolity: there’s also plenty of acute artistic judgment here. When he’s talking about Nicolaas Beets or about Dickens or Goethe, he knows what he wants to say, and he has the evidence to support his opinions. Good reading fodder for a cold winter evening.

>72 thorold: this title comes up a whole lot. Glad to see your review.

>74 thorold: interesting! You read this in Dutch?

>75 dchaikin: Thanks!

Yes, the Bomans was in Dutch (like 80% of the stuff in our local little libraries). I don’t think he’s been translated much — maybe he was too much of an Anglophile to be interesting in the English-speaking world? (More likely, he was around at a time when English publishers were even less interested in translations than now.)

I read Slaughterhouse-Five for a course many years ago, but I’ve never really come across Vonnegut anywhere else in my travels. I think I had the idea that everything else he wrote was science-fiction. All the same, this one somehow found its way onto my TBR shelf a year ago. I’m not sure where it came from.

Bluebeard (1987) by Kurt Vonnegut (USA, 1922-2007)

  

Rabo Karabekian, Armenian-American widower, World War II veteran and failed Abstract Expressionist painter but successful art collector, seems to be enjoying feeling sorry for himself in his retirement on the coast of Long Island, until the bouncy widow Circe Berman (secretly a popular romantic novelist) turns up to insert herself into his household and persuade him to write a memoir. But he has a secret locked up in the potato barn…

Vonnegut has fun poking an ironic stick into the orthodoxies of fine art and literature with the assurance of a writer who has reached an age when he doesn’t need to worry too much about whose toes he treads on any more (if he ever did, that is). But he’s also teasing out a surprisingly optimistic message about the way even the most cynical and passionless hack has a moment somewhere in his life that is big enough to push him into producing real art.

- - -
I love the witty cover art of this Fourth Estate paperback, credited to Jack Smyth. It’s not often that you get a design like this that works on two levels: intriguing and attractive when you first see it and also a clever reference to something that only makes sense when you are quite a way into the book.

Another paperback off the shelf — this is a recent first novel I picked up mainly on the strength of the title, because I thought it might be a comic diversion for my semi-dormant Nobel thread. Oh well!

How I Won a Nobel Prize (2023) by Julius Taranto (USA, - )

  

When her PhD supervisor gets booted out of Cornell for inappropriate conduct, theoretical physics postgrad Helen reluctantly follows him to a controversial institute established by a libertarian billionaire on a private island off the coast of Connecticut. The Rubin Institute is a sort of game reserve for Big Beasts of academia and public life who have made the mistake of deciding that they were too important to need to follow the rules of 21st century society, and it sounds like a promising premise for a satirical campus novel. Unfortunately, this isn’t it.

There is one good — if rather laborious — joke here, but Taranto gets far too bogged down in serious but ultimately rather banal sidetracks about physics, literature, and political action on his way to that point, so that it rather fizzles out. It’s a first novel, and Taranto obviously still has things to learn about pacing and balance. It doesn’t help that I’m reading this in 2025, at a point when petulant billionaires behaving badly just aren’t as funny as they might have been when he was writing it three or four years ago.

>77 thorold:

Have you read Breakfast of champions? That's the only Vonnegut I'd hate to have missed. I picked it up the other day and started reading again but then got depressed by how nothing changed (except to get worse).

>78 thorold:

Ugh yes no. The Techbro Reich is yhe absolute worst. And what an utter travesty of what the greatest scientists wanted for humanity. Every day I cringe for poor Nikola Tesla, slimed by that POS.

cats cradle player piano and welcome to the monkey house short stories are my fav of his

>77 thorold: I think I had the idea that everything else he wrote was science-fiction.

funny you should mention that; he insisted he was not a science fiction writer

I got to see the newly-knighted Sir Alan Hollinghurst at an event in The Hague yesterday, promoting his latest novel Our evenings, which I read at the end of last year. I’ve been following his writing since he placed himself as the most out gay literary novelist in Britain with The swimming pool library in the late 1980s. (He’s also an alumnus of my old college, but we didn’t overlap there.) Very interesting to hear what he had to say about the new book and how it came to be. And nice (but perhaps also slightly disappointing!) to see that he comes across in his public persona almost exactly as you imagine him from the way he writes…

>72 thorold: Great review, I've had this book on my radar for a while. I'm not sure if your description of it as a "a novel about unreasonable male stubbornness" makes it more appealing, or less!

>83 thegaytwinkonquora: that’s really cool you saw Hollinghurst. I’m curious how Our Evenings came to be.

>84 dchaikin: The way he tells it, it seems to have been a very logical process. The protagonist Dave had to be gay, because his protagonists always are, he had to be in the arts but couldn’t be a writer or painter because he did that in his last couple of books, and thus became an actor. Hollinghurst admitted that the narrative trick of having someone from a lower social class taken up by a wealthy family was something he’d used several times before, but it’s such a useful way of giving someone an outsider’s perspective and a close view of privilege that he decided to risk doing it again. He wanted the character to be an outsider in another way besides class and sexuality, and for an actor it was especially interesting to explore the effect of someone who looked “exotic”. By detaching perceived race from actual experience of culture, making the character mixed-race with a father he never knew, he was able to sidestep the problem of cultural appropriation. And he picked on Burma because it fits in with the end-of-empire moment of the late forties but doesn’t otherwise come loaded with a lot of cultural associations for British people.

By the end of the session he almost had us feeling that we would have been obliged to write exactly the same book if we’d been in his place at that moment. Of course it can’t have been an entirely detached and linear process in real life, I’m sure there were all sorts of bits of real experience and memory that inserted themselves, but that’s evidently the way he likes to present things. He did accept that the Buckinghamshire small town Dave grows up in has elements of the Stroud of his own childhood, and the relationship between the two women was at least loosely inspired by a couple who ran a teashop in the town: he found it very interesting how same-sex couples (especially women) could exist in full public view in those days as long as they never explicitly claimed the status of being a couple.

>85 thorold: Thanks for that description of Hollinghurst's thinking. I love that kind of story about the creative process.

>85 thorold: seconding >86 rocketjk: Thanks and great stuff. I had assumed he was playing with the idea that gay men must act to fit in with gay-intolerant culture, and so acting professionally becomes a natural extension. He certainly did pursue several layers of otherness.

>85 thorold: Great explanation by Hollinghurst, and by you of course. I think I will read this. I read The Swimming Pool Library years ago, but for some unknown reason have failed to read him since.

>85 thorold: Love this. I was so disappointed that he had to cancel Cheltenham in October - I was thoroughly looking forward to hearing him talk about this book.

>77 thorold: I've not read anything by Kurt Vonnegut (and I agree this is a fabulous cover). Any recommendations on where to start? I'm not sure what to expect from his writing style.

>89 AlisonY: What a shame you missed him!

I’ve only read Slaughterhouse-Five and Bluebeard. The people who commented on Vonnegut above are probably better-qualified to say something. @LolaWalser was advising Breakfast of champions.

Slaughterhouse-Five is not much fun, but it does seem to be one of those books that everyone should have read.

>89 AlisonY: from above "cats cradle. player piano and welcome to the monkey house short stories are my fav of his

i forgot what i said but my messge got removed hmm

>90 thorold:, >91 cindydavid4: noting - thank you.

Another Christmas book, but this time one that I had asked for. The most recent of Olga Tokarczuk’s novels to have been translated to English.

The Empusium (2022; English 2024) by Olga Tokarczuk (Poland, 1962- ) translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

  

On the opening page of this novel, an engineering student arrives by train on his way to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the mountains not long before the outbreak of the First World War, so it's pretty obvious what book we are supposed to supposed to have in mind as we read this. But Mieczysław is a Pole, a citizen of a country that doesn’t exist at that moment. He’s from Lwów (now Lviv) in Galicia, then part of the Austrian Empire, the sanatorium is at Görbersdorf (now Sokołowsko) in Silesia, then part of Germany, and the book is a mere 320 pages long.

I've a feeling we're not in Davos any more...

There is lots of elegant riffing off Thomas Mann along the way, but Tokarczuk angles the set-up in a different direction, as we would expect. She uses the all-male environment of the guest-house where Mieczysław is staying next to the sanatorium as a laboratory to explore how educated men talk about women. The misogynistic ideas they express are all paraphrased from actual Great (male) Thinkers, from St Augustine to Jack Kerouac (as Tokarczuk explains in a barbed acknowledgment at the end of the book). Our viewpoint character Mieczysław is a bit of an outsider in these discussions, mainly because his protective, military-minded father has kept him away from female company of all kinds for most of his life (his mother died when he was a young child).

At the same time, there is something nasty lurking in the woods, a moist, organic threat overshadowing the neat, highly organised life of the medical community. Mieczysław gradually becomes aware of the horror that has punctuated life in the area since medieval times, but is seldom spoken of.

As always with Tokarczuk, the result is a witty, dark, and distinctly unexpected kind of novel, rooted in the history and landscape of Silesia where she lives, and full of home truths for the reader to think about. With its crime/horror theme, it’s perhaps most similar in atmosphere to Drive your plow, but of course with Mann instead of Blake. And with a lot of mushrooms of various kinds along the way too.

>94 thorold: fun review. You have removed all the intimidation I felt. I’ve read The Magic Mountain, but it’s been awhile. This is a big candidate for the International Booker longlist, and if it makes that list (soon - announcement is Feb 25), i’ll read it.

>95 dchaikin: Tokarczuk is not an intimidating writer! Despite winning the Nobel, she writes for normal people (most of the time...).

T C Boyle is one of those writers I keep coming back to because I liked his first novel so much, and more often than not he disappoints me. I think the only one of his novels I enjoyed as much as Water Music has been The road to Wellville, which of course was another take on The Magic Mountain (cf. >94 thorold:)! But when I saw this one in a local thrift store and realised from the jacket blurb that it was written in 2000 but set in 2025, I couldn't resist giving it a try. It turned out predictably depressing, but sadly that doesn't make the times we are living in any less depressing. The stuff Boyle was writing about is all still there, even if it's kicking in a little more slowly than he had it doing in the book.

A Friend of the Earth (2000) by T. Coraghessan Boyle (USA, 1948- )

  

It's late 2025, Southern California is facing the brunt of the climate catastrophe, and veteran environmental activist Ty Tierwater is holed up at a ranch belonging to a mega-rich pop star, caring for his menagerie of endangered animals. His ex-wife Andrea turns up with a hack journalist in tow, and Ty, like the protagonists of so many novels before him, is forced to face up to the ghosts of the past, in particular the death of his daughter in an anti-logging protest back in the nineties.

Boyle digs into the mixed motives that push people into protesting, the difficult relationship between "respectable" lobbying and direct action, and the futility of most protest in a world where the dice are loaded in favour of the big corporations whose services we consume even as we protest against their methods. It's a pessimistic book: in the narrator's view we've messed the planet up and it's too late to do anything to stop that. But at least some of us have the slight consolation of knowing that we tried. And maybe other species will be able to save something from the wreckage once we've wiped ourselves out. To be a friend of the earth, Ty reasons, you have to be an enemy of the people.

But of course the real fun here twenty-five years on is checking the accuracy of Boyle's dystopian projection of what's now our present (well, almost: I read the book in early 2025, and the story opens in November of that year). His version of southern California seems to have rather more floods and fewer wildfires than the real one, and he was a little too pessimistic about the pace of extinction of vulnerable plant and animal species in the world at large. He also has nothing to say about how the US government will look, and he has pop stars rather than tech bros as the only people still rich enough to live as they choose. But he does peg 2025 as the aftermath of a pandemic, with nervous people still wearing masks, which is a clever — or lucky — call!

>96 thorold: I think writing a novel about the near future is the most difficult period an author can pick. Sounds like he did pretty well with it. I read a short story by Boyle years ago that I thought was terrific but I've never returned to his writing. Maybe one day.

>96 thorold: wait, was it good or another disappointment? And you’re probably right about Tokarczuk

>98 dchaikin: Sorry, I shouldn’t set something up like that and then leave it hanging! The trouble is, “disappointment” is subjective, and I went into it with relatively low expectations this time, so it would be unfair to say it was a real disappointment. A competent novel from an experienced writer, but nothing special.

>99 thorold: that’s helpful. Thanks 🙂

And yet another from my strategic reserve of unread Boekenweek gifts. This was commissioned from poet, columnist, cabaretier and general literary personality Remco Campert, who is probably best known for the 1961 novel Het leven is vurrukkulluk.

(And I’m trying out the new “Attach review” feature):

Somberman's actie (1985) by Remco Campert (Netherlands, 1929-2022)

>101 thorold: That reminds me a bit of the narrator of Travelers a bit - he ended up in the middle of all it but early in Berlin he was as reluctant as thus guy...

>102 AnnieMod: Interesting thought. I haven’t come across that book (noting it!) but there are certainly plenty of books out there where someone gets caught up in a situation way outside their normal experience. Not so many where it works out badly — it usually seems more interesting to have them cope unexpectedly well.

Ooh I haven't seen that 'attach review' feature before!

Let me add my thanks for the account of Hollinghurst's thinking, very interesting.

>103 thorold: I read it a few days ago so it is fresh in my mind so when I was reading your review, my brain just connected the dots. Funny how that happens sometimes.

You are right about most books somehow managing to get things squared. Part of why I liked Travelers - if anything, it leans a bit into the other extreme of "if something bad can happen, it probably will" but without it sounding too made up (not even sure if I am explaining that very well).

Another book about a character thrust in over his depth...

Golding is one of those authors who always scares me a bit; his novels tend to make quite heavy emotional demands on the reader, so I never exactly rushed out to get the next one. All the same, I was quite surprised to find that I've got this far without ever reading this one.

I picked this up (somewhere?) two years ago. I do love these old Faber paperbacks, they remind me so much of school. Tucked into the back of this copy was a detailed two-page plot summary in very 1970s duplicated and faded typescript, overwritten with the student's notes (there was even a helpful sketch-map of the locations on the back in pale blue ball-point...!). I suspect it was a female student, since the 'i's are dotted with little circles...

The Inheritors (1955) by William Golding (UK, 1911-1993)

Coincidentally (?) another Faber paperback, but from a couple of decades later. This is one that turned up in the thrift store recently: I hadn’t come across Mavis Cheek before, but she sounded like the sort of writer I ought to know about.

Aunt Margaret's Lover (1994) by Mavis Cheek (UK, 1948-2023)

Back to my Boekenweek pile — I think this is the last but one unread on my shelf, although more will certainly turn up sooner or later…

For a change, Marga Minco, commissioned to write the 1986 gift, is someone I already know about, since I read Het bittere kruid a couple of years ago. She has passed away since then, at the grand old age of 103. This is also one of the handful of Boekenweek gifts that are available in English translation.

De glazen brug (1986; The glass bridge) by Marga Minco (Netherlands, 1920-2023)

I read Bitter Herbs a couple of years ago; I'll look for this one as well.

>106 thorold: Agree that Golding produces intense and demanding books. I haven't read this one: an interesting review, thanks.

>107 thorold: I've never heard of Mavis Cheek! This sounds interesting too.

I’m deep into a long but fascinating 19th-century novel, Los Pazos de Ulloa, and I’ve got a couple of trips coming up, so I probably won’t be finishing that very soon. A quickie from the top of the pile to be going on with:

The Secret Barrister: stories of the law and how it's broken (2018) by The Secret Barrister (UK, - )

The comfy are comfy, and they are also comfy with the idea of sending the poor to the devil.

Going back a bit, but Im so intrigued by Golding’s The Inheritors. Seems like it shouldn’t work. And it did, it shouldn’t age well. But sounds like you really enjoyed it.

>113 dchaikin: Yes, I enjoyed the writing, but I am a bit uncomfortable with Golding’s dark view of humanity. I was discussing him with a friend the other day, and she suggested that his view of the world was distorted by his background in authoritarian, masculine, British middle class institutions — his father taught at Marlborough and Golding became a schoolmaster himself, and of course served in the navy during WWII. My friend mentioned that there are documented cases of groups of young people from other cultures being stranded in remote places and cooperating peacefully to survive, so perhaps the boys in Lord of the flies or the primitive sapiens in The inheritors would have behaved quite differently if they’d not been to an English boarding school…

>111 thorold: I was a bit disappointed with The Secret Barrister. I felt the author went into too much detail in places - I would have enjoyed more case examples.

Certainly eye-opening, though.

>114 thorold: that’s fascinating. And a charming last line.

>116 dchaikin: :-)

Last year I read books set in Georgia and Georgia; now I’ve managed to add Galicia and Galicia in the last couple of months. I wonder how many more geographical homonyms are out there for the taking…

This is the book that’s been keeping me busy for most of the last ten days or so. It was recommended by a Spanish book-club friend who somehow missed it at school and discovered it himself quite recently. The thought of 300+ pages of nineteenth-century Spanish kept it on the TBR for a while, but I got to it eventually. And I’m glad I did — it was fun!

For those who would like to try it, there’s also an English translation available, published in the 1990s.

Los pazos de Ulloa (1886) by Emilia Pardo Bazán (Spain, 1852-1921)

For those who’ve been following my Boekenweek adventures, the Dutch TV news interviewed a lady called Ans Schras who has collected all 89 Boekenweek gifts issued up to now. I have about half that number, not including any of the real rarities.

https://nos.nl/l/2559156

Of course, I’ll have to try and remember to get this year’s now, despite the fact that I’m going away for most of next week…

19th century Spanish. Interesting. Great review

>117 thorold: Interesting. One of the things I like most about LT is hearing about books I might never have otherwise come across.

I think I might have read this one forty years ago, but if so I’d forgotten it completely…

Anthony Burgess seems to have been born with the perfect background to become a provincial British realist of the 1950s, but his Nabokov Complex always militated against that, and he spent much of his career being too clever by half. Occasionally with brilliant results that captured the attention of the reading public, as in A clockwork orange or Earthly powers, but more often than not it all fizzled out in fits of cleverness.

The End of the World News (1982) by Anthony Burgess (UK, 1917-1993)

Entertaining review. And that preface sets it up nicely. I haven’t read Burgess.

The final sprint of a very long Dutch novel I’ve been reading over the course of several years. When I started on this, I hadn’t quite realised that Maarten Koning gets to retirement age in the late eighties, at the point when I was just embarking upon a career among files and paperclips and rubber stamps. But despite all the superficial changes, the essential things about the weird parallel society that exists in workplaces don’t seem to have changed much between his generation and mine.

De dood van Maarten Koning (2000) by J. J. Voskuil (Netherlands, 1926-2008)

Apropos of nothing in particular, one of the books I brought back from my little trip to the UK this week and finished on the train journey home.

The Silent Musician (2019) by Mark Wigglesworth (UK, 1964- )

>124 thorold: A very interesting book and a fine review. Thanks! My clarinet teacher plays in a well-known orchestra here in NYC (not the NY Philharmonic). I asked him a couple of weeks ago if it's particularly difficult to have guest conductors come in. He said that sometimes it can be difficult, and that in those cases the musicians mostly rely on each other.

>124 thorold: Interesting topic even if the book had its flaws (I hate quotations when they are not really needed - it feels like the author trying to show you how witty they are). Wonderful review though :)

>124 thorold: >125 rocketjk:

The Phoenix Symphony had had the same musical director (who was serving as a conductor for most of the concerts as well except for occasional guest conductors) for a decade and he stepped down this season so we had been having guest conductors for every concert. I am not sure if it is because of the unfamiliarity with the conductors or simply the fact that each conductor makes their own program (more or less) or a combination of the two but this season had not felt as good as last one despite featuring some pieces of music I really like. The musicians are still good but something just feels a bit off.

>125 rocketjk: Thanks!
Wigglesworth talks about that kind of situation, but of course only from the conductor's point of view. It would be interesting to put both sides of the story together...

Another book I was reading on the train yesterday and finished today. I've read a couple of other books by Welsh, most recently Crime. I couldn't resist the title of this one.

If You Liked School, You'll Love Work (2008) by Irvine Welsh (UK, 1958- )

>126 AnnieMod: Yes, I know the feeling - it can be very strange to hear an orchestra playing under someone else when they've had a resident conductor with a strong personality and you have got used to the way they work together. I've experienced that both in The Hague and more recently in Cleveland, where Franz Welser-Möst is getting to the end of his tenure. A change is not always bad - Wigglesworth points out that a guest conductor can sometimes take more risks with an orchestra than a resident can get away with.

It’s Boekenweek again. This year I picked up the essay as well as the novella. I don’t always bother with the essay, but it looked like an interesting topic. Paulien Cornelisse is a stage performer who has written a number of popular books about language and how we use it.

Hèhè: over wat we zeggen zonder dat we het doorhebben (2025) by Paulien Cornelisse (Netherlands, 1976- )

>129 thorold: Sounds interesting! It's nice to see someone recognizing the usefulness of "useless" words. I just recently came across a French blog that attempts to answer all the doomsayers predicting the end of our language due to overuse of whatever expression the speaker dislikes.

Bon, ben… voilà quoi!

>130 FlorenceArt: Alors! Cornelisse also makes the interesting comment that it's often quite revealing to work out just why we might feel the need to complain about "language errors". Is it class insecurity, or the work we were made to put into learning the "correct" way to speak in childhood, or something else?

Of course, I had to read the actual Boekenweek novella as well. This year, since they are celebrating the ninetieth Boekenweek, they went back to a system they used at various times in the past, running a competition for the best 92-page novella rather than commissioning one from a specific writer. But this time without the requirement for readers to guess who the author of the winning story was. The winner was Gerwin van der Werf:

De Krater (2025) by Gerwin van der Werf (Netherlands, 1969- )

>131 thorold: Language is a very strong social marker, and we are all brought up in the belief that there is only one correct way to say things. And language is power. All those people complaining about other people's language are from the ruling class, and admitting that their usage is not necessarily more correct than others is, in a way, relinquishing power. So yes, insecurity probably plays a role, combined with the reflexes built in our childhood from all those times the adults around us corrected our usage. We all have things that annoy us in other people's way of talking, and we were not brought up to stop and think that yes, it may be annoying to us but it's just normal talk to others, and well, we'll survive the slight dissonance. I think that’s why the “linguistes atterrées” advocate including basic linguistics and history of language in the school curriculum.

>132 FlorenceArt: Perhaps not quite “the ruling class” — they usually don’t need to waste time on things like correct language — but more the people one level down from them, who feel their possession of the tools of language as one of the marks that set them apart from everyone further down the ladder…

And a book from some way down the TBR pile. I bought this in 2019 for reasons that now escape me, but I enjoyed reading it anyway.

Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son (1895-1916; this translation 2009) by Sholem Aleichem (Russia, USA, 1859-1916) translated from Yiddish by Aliza Shevrin

>134 thorold: If you enjoyed "Tevye the Dairyman," I would highly recommend the full collection, Tevye's Daughters. The collection includes a series of interlocking stories about Tevye's family, following them through several years as conditions for the Jews in the Pale of Settlement change. Quoting from my own 2015 LT review . . .

Aleichem uses the daughters, and especially the marriages they make, to illustrate the ways in which the passing of time changes the family's experiences. When Tevye, distraught over his youngest daughter Bielke's choice for a husband, tells her (and for the rest, now, I will paraphrase, for I do not have the book in front of me), "Hodel (her much older sister) wouldn't do what you're doing," Bielke replies sharply, "Don't compare me with Hodel. Hodel married in Hodel's time, and I am marrying in my time."

Mixed into the collection are other stories that are separate from the Tevye tales. One I recall as being particularly heart rending.

>135 rocketjk: Thanks! I remember that quotation from one of the stories in this collection, it obviously struck me too. The trouble with short-story writers like Sholem Aleichem is that their stuff gets republished posthumously in all sorts of different permutations at the discretion of later editors and translators, so you end up with a lot of confusing overlap. If the opportunity arises I’ll have a browse through different editions in a library and see what I missed in the Penguin Classic I read.

>136 thorold: Right--I'm currently reading an older collection of Sholom Aleichem stories published in 1946: The Old Country: Collected Stories of Sholom Aleichem, translated by Julius and Frances Butwin. I believe these were collected pre-"Fiddler on the Roof." The stories were chosen by the translators, who were both originally from Lithuania, I think. There are several Tevye stories in the collection, but not "Tevye the Dairyman" or "Motl the Cantor's Son", which I had read before. This collection has a wide range of characters who live in and around Kasrilevka, which gives it a different perspective.

>137 kac522: 1946 is definitely pre-Fiddler on the Roof, which was first presented on Broadway in 1964 (sez Wikipedia). Let the record reflect that the collection I mentioned, Tevye's Daughters, was published by Crown Publishers in 1949, translated by Frances Butwin.

Rabbit Hole Alert! -- There's a very interesting biography of Butwin here:
https://wordsenvisioned.com/?tag=frances-butwin

The webpage includes a graphic of the same dust jacket that's on the copy of the book I own.

>138 rocketjk: Thanks! Fun rabbit hole! I haven't gotten far enough in The Old Country to be bored (per the NYT reviewer), but I do agree that the first-person Tevye stories have a special spark that the others don't seem to have. But I'll keep on reading.

>138 rocketjk: oh my goodness, S.A* is one of my fave yiddishe writers and I loved the Tevye stories. Fiddler on the Roof was such a meaningful story to us, as my parents family came from a villiage in the Pale and could very well relate to it I knew much of the musical came from his stories but didnt realize all the connections. thank you so much for leading us down the rabbit hole. and I want that first page graphic!

*this was not his real name, whose real name was Shalom Rabinowitz, was a prominent Yiddish writer known for his humorous and insightful stories about Jewish life in Eastern Europe, particularly his portrayal of the fictional town of Kasrilevke and the character Tevye the Dairyman.
Here's a more detailed look at his story:

Born in Pereyaslav, Ukraine, in 1859, Shalom Aleichem moved with his family to Voronkov, a small town that later served as the inspiration for Kasrilevke. He chose the pseudonym "Shalom Aleichem," meaning "Peace be upon you" in Hebrew, as a way to conceal his identity from his relatives, especially his father, who loved Hebrew.

iterary Career and Themes:
Sholem Aleichem became a leading figure in Yiddish literature, known for his humorous yet poignant stories that explored the lives of ordinary Jewish people in shtetls (small towns) and their struggles with tradition, modernity, and social change. Kasrilevke and Tevye:
His most famous works include the stories about Kasrilevke and the character Tevye the Dairyman, which became the basis for the musical "Fiddler on the Roof".

Advocacy for Yiddish and Zionism:
Sholem Aleichem was a passionate advocate for Yiddish as a national Jewish language and also supported the Zionist movement.

Legacy:
He is considered one of the greatest Yiddish writers of all time, and his works continue to be widely read and studied.
Shalom Aleichem as a Greeting:
The phrase "Shalom Aleichem" is a traditional Jewish greeting meaning "Peace be upon you"
.
Shalom Aleichem as a Song:
The song "Shalom Aleichem" is sung by many Jews every Friday night upon returning home from synagogue prayer, welcoming the angels who accompany a person home on the eve of the Shabbat.

And another recent one from the pile. Not exactly cheery reading in current circumstances…

Who's Afraid of Gender? (2024) by Judith Butler (USA, 1956- )

>141 thorold: the emotive way such arguments are made leaves little space for actual logical challenge

This is so frustrating for me.

Another Boekenweek gift from the pile, a very old one this time. Theun de Vries was a diehard communist with a creditable record during World War II. He wrote mostly historical novels and biographies in Dutch and Frisian.

Het Zwaard, de Zee en het Valse Hart: een Sage (1966) by Theun de Vries (Netherlands, 1907-2005)

And it seems to be April, so I’d better start a new thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/369655

>107 thorold: This sounds rather fun.