Dag Solstad’s ‘Armand V’

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A whimsical story disguised as a series of footnotes referring to a phantom unwritable and unreadable novel, Solstad’s realisation of the idea that the form of a work reflects and contains its subject. It’s scrupulously rendered and requires a reader to co-create its narrative. Fascinating and gave me the idea of a multi-year exploration of human culture.

Armand V sadly brings me to the end of Solstad’s books currently translated into English, and I very much hope there will be others. His work is highly re-readable, and I’ll likely be revisiting them.

The First Traces of Human Civilisation Reading List

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Reading list for this year’s non-fiction reading project: a contemporary exploration of the first traces of human civilisation, circa 10,000-5,000 BC.

  1. Meave Leakey with Samira Leakey. The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past. Mariner Books, 2020.
  2. Chris Gosden. Prehistory: A Very Short Introduction. OUP, 2018.
  3. Rens Bod. World of Patterns: A Global History of Knowledge. trans. Leston Buell. John Hopkins University Press, 2022.
  4. Thomas Higham. The World Before Us. Penguin (Viking), 2021.
  5. Louise Humphrey and Chris Stringer. Our Human Story. Natural History Museum, 2018.
  6. Kermit Pattinson. Fossil Men. Harper Collins (Wiliam Morrow), 2021.

If there any titles you’d care to add to my reading list I am open to suggestions of anything published in the last ten years.

Solitude and Rain-Soaked Walks

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‘Who are the good people of the book?’ asks Nabokov in his dissection of Madame Bovary, a question you may well ask of Anita Brookner’s Altered States. Alan’s mother, perhaps, and more convincingly his business partner’s wife, Felicity. Brookner’s polished sentences soften the force of vengeance she brings to bear on her carefully hewn characters. After the autopsy comes the mourning that is this book’s subject.

I am pleased to read that Hermione Lee is currently working on a biography of Anita Brookner.

Small Landmarks

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I now feel that this interval, which I describe to others as a holiday, is peculiarly suited to one of my temperament, which is stolid, and my history, which is not. I accept the solitude, the routines, as old people do, and although not old—fifty-five is not old these days—I being to anticipate a time when small landmarks, such as my mid-morning coffee at the Grand Café de la Place, and my walk to the station to pick up the English papers, will be appreciated, My old age will come as no surprise to me, and something tells me that I might spend it here, in this little town of Vif—a misnomer, for no place could be more somnolent—on the Franco-Swiss border.

—Anita Brookner,  Altered States, p. 8

Small Complete World of ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’

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What compelled me to pick The Vicar of Wakefield from the shelves of the Perfect Bookshop last week I no longer recall, perhaps Virginia Woolf’s regard for Oliver Goldsmith’s only novel: ‘once we begin to read we read on, not to reach the end but to enjoy the present moment. We cannot dismember this small complete world. It hems us in, it surrounds us.’

It’s a silly story with little to commend it beyond the excellence of its sentences and what Woolf describes as its ‘tart eighteenth century humour’. I read with satisfaction—much against the grain—and the better for it.

‘However, when any one of our relations was found to be a person of very bad character, a troublesome guest, or one we desired to get rid of, upon his leaving my house, I ever took care to lend him a riding coat, or a pair of boots, or sometimes a horse of small value, and I always had the satisfaction of finding he never came back to return them.’