Betting on books

If I was the gambling type, I might have made a quick buck this month with some clever literary bets. Two of my favourite novels of the past year have just been crowned with two major literary prizes. And I'm not saying this with the wisdom of hindsight; I've got my blog to prove it!

In May I posted a piece on an Afrikaans novel which impressed me so much that I simply had to share my enthusiasm with as many people as possible, even though this blog usually deals only with English books:  http://www.maritareadingspace.blogspot.fr/2012/05/what-wonderful-circus.html And last week my enthusiasm was richly rewarded when Sonja Loots's Sirkusboere won the South African M-Net Prize. Well done, Ms Loots.

Even bigger and better is the Man Booker Prize which was won by Hilary Mantel - once again! - for Bring up the Bodies, about which I raved in my previous post: http://www.maritareadingspace.blogspot.fr/2012/08/bring-up-books.html With this achievement Mantel becomes the first woman to win two 'Bookers' and the first author to be crowned for a novel (Wolf Hall) as well as its sequel. Brava to the marvellous Mantel.

But all this trumpet blowing is actually just a way of easing into a rather embarrassing confession. Because when it comes to the biggest literary prize of all, also announced this month, I've bombed completely. To my shame I've never read anything written by the Chinese winner of the Nobel Prize,  Mo Yan. To be perfectly honest, I didn't even know his name until last week. Although if I'd been the gambling type, I would have noticed his name on the Ladbrokes list of possible winners, with the rather high odds of 8 to 1.

Although not as high as the odds against Bob Dylan (12/1), whom I would have bet on if I was into betting. Not because I believed that he would win, but because I would have really loved it if an old rock 'n roll poet won this most respectable of all prizes. So if I had to bet on the Nobel Prize, I would certainly have lost whatever I might have made with the M-Net and the Man Booker.

Thank heavens I'm not the gambling type, after all.

Bring up the books

How does she do it? How does Hilary Mantel take a tired old piece of history that everyone in the Anglo-Saxon world knows - the story of the terrible King Henry VIII with his many wives - and transform it into a thrilling literary page-turner?

And not just once. She did it with Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and seduced millions of readers all over the world. She does it again with the sequel, Bring up the Bodies, which deals with Anne Boleyn's fall from glory and Thomas Cromwell's irresistible rise and rise. And I'm willing to bet she'll do it again with the third novel in the trilogy - for which I, for one, can hardly wait.

Which brings me to the next question: How did Hilary Mantel turn me into an avid reader of historical fiction? Into someone who can't wait for a sequel? Because, just for the record, I've never been interested in historical fiction and I don't do sequels.

Alas, I can't answer any of my own questions. All I can say with certainty is that Bring up the Bodies enchants the reader from its striking first sentence ('His children are falling from the sky') to the very last few phrases: 'There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.'

What an ending! Or should I say beginning?

More questions. How does Mantel transform the infamous Cromwell into such a likeable character? And she does this, astonishingly, without hiding his greed or his hypocrisy, his cruelty or his callousness from the reader. She just somehow polishes his image, places him in context, makes the reader understand his mind. Mantel even manages to turn King Henry VIII into, well, not exactly an admirable character, but not completely despicable either. She shows him to us as a product of a specific time and a particular place, like Thomas Cromwell, so that his obsession with having a male heir to secure the safety of his realm doesn't seem quite as selfishly stupid as we thought.

Mantel brings her marvelous eye for detail to the many minor characters too. If this was a movie (as it will probably soon be), it would have a huge cast of unforgettable characters. Though none as unforgettable as Cromwell, for whose role I already have a certain broody dark-eyed British actor in mind. I wonder if you can guess who?

Something else. I read most books in paperback versions - for practical and economic reasons - but with Bring up the Bodies I was too impatient to wait for the paperback. I read Fourth Estate's beautiful hardback version with the gold-leaf cover and Anne Boleyn's 'little neck' on the endpapers. Which of course just added to the pleasure of the experience. But I have to ask myself: How did Mantel manage to make me so impatient?

I'm beginning to suspect that Ms Mantel might have some magical powers. But please don't repeat this. As you know, poor Anne Boleyn was also suspected of witchcraft, and look what happened to her. Fact is, I want this admired author to write the sequel, as soon as possible, and I really don't care if she uses sorcery or black magic to do this.

As long as she keeps writing, so we can keep reading.

Bring up more books, Hilary Mantel!  

The sense of a thin book

I am always taken aback when I hear a fellow reader declare that he/she doesn't like thick books. Isn't that as silly as saying you don't like fat friends? Just imagine how boring your life would be if all your books and all your friends were perfectly slim!

My books are my friends and, like my real living friends, I like them in all shapes and shades: thin and fat and in-between, old and young, sad and serious and funny, easy-going and difficult-to-understand... Variety really is the spice of reading and of friendship.

Different books, like different friends, correspond to different moods and needs. At home, especially in winter, I love to relax next to the fireplace with a glass of red wine and a big, fat, swirling, overwhelming novel. In summer, especially when I travel, I tend to go for small, slight books, often volumes of poetry or short stories, for obvious practical reasons. I'm not talking of e-books, of course, I'm talking of real paper books with which I can travel lightly, books I can read on a deserted beach, in a foamy bath, on the deck of a yacht, in a tent by the light of a torch or next to a ridiculously crowded swimming pool. To name but a few of the places I've found myself reading during recent summer holidays.

And sometimes I stumble upon a really thin, practically perfect little novel that turns ordinary summer reading into an extraordinary experience. The Vintage paperback copy of Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, which I read outside during a heat wave last weekend, has only 150 pages - but oh, what wonders await the reader on almost every page! 'Barnes squeezes into it not just a sense of the infinite complexity of the human heart but the damage the wrong permutations can cause when combined' - this was the praise bestowed upon him by the venerable Financial Times - to which I can only say amen.

It is a deceptively simple tale, told in an irresistibly informal style by a wistful, often ironic first-person narrator. This is the way the divorced and retired civil servant Tony Webster, calmly and quietly living out his last years, describes his relationship with his only child, Suzie:

She's thirty-three, maybe thirty-four. Yes, thirty-four. We haven't had any sort of falling-out since I sat in the front row of an oak-panelled municipal room and then did my job as a witness. I remember thinking at the time that I was signing off on her - or, more exactly, signing myself off. Duty done, one child safely seen to the temporary harbour of marriage. Now all you have to do is not get Alzheimer's and remember to leave her such money as you have. And you could try to do better than your parents by dying when the money will actually be of use to her. That'd be a start.

And further down on the same page (102) he treats us to his ironic view of his role as a grandfather:

'You can take Lucas to watch football when he's older,' she once told me. Ah, the rheumy-eyed grandpa on the terraces inducting the lad into the mysteries of soccer: how to loathe people wearing different coloured shirts, how to feign injury, how to blow your snot on to the pitch (...) How to be vain and overpaid and have your best years behind you before you've even understood what life's about. Oh yes, I look forward to taking Lucas to the football. 

But an unexpected lawyer's letter shatters his peaceable existence and forces him to recall an almost forgotten episode from his youth. As an insecure university student, he lost his clever girlfriend to one of his best friends, the brilliant philosophy student Adrian Finn - who shortly thereafter slashed his wrists in a bath,  justifying this dramatic last act in an intricate 'suicide note' (which read more like a moral treaty) 'about the superiority of the intervening act over the unworthy passivity of merely letting life happen to you'.

Tony Webster, seeing himself as a prime example of a passive person merely letting life happen to him, has always regarded Adrian Finn as some sort of philosophical hero, but the surprising letter from the lawyer of the long-lost former girlfriend's family raises many more questions than it answers. The most important questions are about memory and morality, about the fallibility and subjectivity of both, and Webster has to start investigating - or re-investigating - his own past:

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves. (Page 95)

At this point the story Webster tells us - but, mainly, himself - becomes as gripping as a thriller, 'a whodunnit of memory and morality', as the Independent newspaper aptly called it. The concluding scenes deliver one shock after another, right up to the stunning last sentence: There is great unrest.

Hats off to Julian Barnes, who deservedly won the previous Man Booker Prize with this thin little book dealing with all the Big Themes of literature: love and hate, family and friendship, life and death. Truly a master's class in concise yet entertaining storytelling.

And now I'm off to read another small masterpiece perfectly suitable for summer: Antonio Tabucchi's Pereira Maintains, set in the sweltering heat of Lisbon in the summer of 1938 ...