JFDI BOOK NOS. 10 & 11:SISTERS BROTHERS AND HARVEST

Chosen by Tom Wells



1. The Sisters Brothers  
     by Patrick deWitt. 

 

A bit of a palate cleanser.  It's the novel Quentin Tarantino would write.  And therefore it's right up Conor's dusty trail.  Conor?  Yes, this is peer pressure.  

2. Harvest by Jim Crace. 


A Booker finalist this year. It's as English as The Sister Brothers is American.  Even if TSB was written by a guy born in Canada.

Read them both and compare/contrast. 

The next meeting will be in March 2014, so there is plenty of time.

REVIEW: BOOK(?) No. 8 BREAKING BAD (SEASON 1) AND 9.BERTRAND RUSSELL

TOM WELLS

Always happy to let others slice themselves on the leading edge of culture, I finally got around to watching Breaking Bad as this month’s JFDI selection. Yep, that’s us—a book club that watches TV.  We now expect an avalanche of applications to join. Well, we would if we didn’t confess that we also had to read a minimum of three essays from the collected works Bertrand Russell as a BB companion piece.  The best of the many good things I can say about Breaking Bad is that it manages to make it cool to be a smart, sick, bitter old man. Bertrand Russell is the opposite.    

The book club assignment called for us to watch the first BB season, which contained just seven episodes.  You could watch additional episodes and even whole seasons for whatever is the scientific name for the neutralised state of extra credit.  I stuck to the basic assignment.  By the time I'd finished watching the final episode of Season 1, I did not want to go on to Season 2, but only because I thought there is no way it could be as good.  I’m assured that it is.  Many say, even better.  I can’t imagine.

I got the feeling from the story arc that the writers thought BB would be one season and out.  As a result, Episode 6 represents the true climax, with Episode 7 poised as the segue to either a new season or a blaze of glory.  And as the climactic episode of a supremely well-written series, Episode 6 may be the best single instalment of television I’ve ever seen.  It is certainly the best I can remember. 

I don’t need to rehash the premise or the many interconnected plots.  Let’s just say that high-school chemistry teacher Walter White is MacGyver’s seriously desperate twin, desperate in ways that echo loudly in a world of growing polarization between haves and have-nots, between those who play by the rules and those for whom the rules are there to be gamed.

Bertrand Russell was one of the haves—he was born Lord Russell—who happened to also play by the rules: the rules of logic-- cold, precise logic.  He appears never to have been conflicted.  He appears always to have been insufferable.  Just ask his four wives.

 

REVIEW: STONER...QUIET DESPERATION

ERIC'S REVIEW

Thoreau wrote that most men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to to their grave with their song still within them. Stoner, by John L. Williams, is a book about an unremarkable life.  Due to circumstances and his own nature, the protagonist, a college professor from a hardscrabble farming background, trapped in a loveless marriage, hemmed in by a career which peaked early, and deprived by societal conventions from pursuing his true love, ends up with his song silenced by life and the path he has taken. It is the path of least resistance, and unlike Frost's the road less travelled by, it ultimately leads nowhere.

Stoner is everyman, and his life is what Ortega y Gasset described: mi vida es yo y mi circunstancia. My life is me and my circumstance.  

He goes to college to escape the grim reality of subsistence farming, ostensibly to study agriculture. His attention is diverted to literature, and avoiding the first world war, which claims one of the triumvirate of himself and two friends, continues on in academia. He marries a thin lipped woman (my father once wisely advised me to avoid them). Their marriage is a long running silent attrition, with a wife for whom "anger was days of courteous silence, and love was a word of courteous endearment. " He has a child. A lover half his age. A long running battle which he loses with a spiteful and bitter boss. He publishes one book which sinks without a trace. He loses them all, one way or another, though he bears his fate calmly and bides his time to exact a manner of revenge. He gets cancer. Fin bref, as they say in French, game over. 

The diary of Stoner's life is filled largely with disappointments kept. At one point in mid-life he reaches a nadir where "he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy, and nothing behind him that he cared to remember." The book makes for easy, but not particularly pleasant reading, and though one can identify and sympathize with the monotone playing in the background, the overall result is that of a song left unsung by a man for whom quiet desperation became a way of life. 

3.5 out of five

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TOM'S REVIEW

STONER

Ellmore Leonard famously had ten rules for fictionwriting, a list that started as something of a joke but eventually became legendary—like the singer Tom Jones.  

I have three rules:

1.

Never describe when you can dramatise.

2.

Allow at least 10 pages for every year you chronicle.

3.

Don’t doom your characters.  

Ok, fair enough, I came up with this list after reading Stoner.The components had kicked around the back of my brain for 35 years, but Stoner made me want to write them down.  

Because Stoner is not the novel as sweeping panorama or microscopic dissection or even self-conscious art.  It is the novel as thesis. I get the feeling lifetime academic John Williams wrote Stoner to meet the publish-or-perish clause ofhis tenure application.  The writing is meticulous; the plot,lean; the characters, archetypal.  I can just see the members ofthe PhD review committee nodding their heads in condescending but impressed approval.  

But a storyteller’s job is not to satisfy critics or academics or award boards, just as it’s not to reach the widest possible audience.  It should be to dramatise with plot, character, setting and theme through language which at its best is lyrical. The best novels excel at all five elements.  The job of the thesis writer, on the other hand, is to analyse, describe and explain through language that should be purposely precise.  The chronicle of William Stoner’s 46 years at the University of Missouri is a life precisely described and explained.  It is too rarely dramatised.

What drama there is—fellow-student Masters’ rant in a pub; Stoner’s first meeting with future wife Elizabeth’s parents; his oral-exam grilling of the graduate student Walker—stands out from the mass of a story chronicling in 300 pages a 46-yearlife of quiet resignation.  Stoner makes one difficult decision in his life and it comes at the very beginning of the story when he breaks with his family and fate by abandoning agricultural studies for literature.  After that, it’s a life characterised by acceptance. As Masters tells Stoner early on in the novel,“You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you’d fight the world.  You’d let it chew you up and spit you out, and you’d lie there wondering what was wrong…. You have the lean and hungry look, sure enough. You’re doomed.”

Unlike the original possessor of the lean and hungry look, Cassius in Julius Caesar, William Stoner is virtuallyambitionless once he receives his PhD.  Even as he pursuesElizabeth’s hand and takes a stand against Walker, he resigns himself to the lifetime of joylessness that results from twoevents which in any life—let alone a storied one—would just about merit a diary entry.  Even his brief love affair with the graduate student Katherine Driscoll—his one hope for happiness—is something he slips into before allowing it tofade away.  Buddy Holly, let alone Mick Jagger, he is not.    

All of which in my mind makes him positively un-American. That may explain why Stoner, first published in 1956, is enjoying a revival here in Blighty, where the special relationship is best enjoyed with a dash of schadenfreude.  The American ideal is to refuse to accept fate or die trying, while the traditional British way is to take life on the chin with a stiff upper lip, an ironic aside or a cheeky bittersweet grumble. William Stoner can’t even manage that.    

Two stars.

JFDI BOOK NO. 7 STONER by John L. Williams

STONER

John. L. Williams

STONER on Amazon

William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely.

Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value. Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life.

4TH SEPTEMBER AT 6:30PM AT THE FOX AND ANCHOR

REVIEW:BILLIARDS AT HALF PAST NINE Heinrich Boll

TOM'S REVIEW

Here's my take on BILLIARDS AT HALF PAST NINE. 
 

Billiards at Half Past Nine (1959):  The author is the Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll who, along with a group of writers that included Günter Grass, sought to reconcile the ideal and the reality of German nationhood in the wake of the three increasingly destructive European wars his homeland had started in its brief 90-year history.

The plot chronicles three generations of the relatively unremarkable Faehmel family living in a decidedly unremarkable town in a mostly quiet corner of Germany.  Heinrich, representing the first generation, is an architect who, despite his youth and dearth of connections, is selected in the aftermath of the First World War to rebuild a local abbey suffering from near-terminal neglect. Heinrich’s son, Robert, follows his father into the building trade but gravitates away from development into demolition. Robert’s son, Joseph, takes up his grandfather’s mantle and at the book’s end is tasked with resurrecting the abbey after Robert has employed his particular skill during the 1944-45 German retreat from the Allies. Build, destroy, rebuild: the history of a nation.  

The book is therefore the opposite of a sweeping war epic.  The cast of significant characters is limited to less than a dozen. The story is devoid of the dramatised horror you might expect in a novel that takes place at the epicentre of two world wars. Instead, it depicts the small misunderstandings, hurts and betrayals that occur in any family and in any community, invariably because of regimented thinking and willingly suppressed expression. It is also about the retreat into routine—work, school, even leisure (hence the title)—in order to avoid having to address larger calamities that threaten home, village and nation. But by being set against the backdrop of the most horrific political regime in European history, otherwise mundane conflicts rise to the level of wrenching tragedy. 

This is not an easy book to get into.  It uses a narrative device common in 20^th C “serious literature” in which key information is presented seemingly randomly at the beginning of the book and then given context as the story unfolds.  It therefore helped me to write down character names as well as certain repeated themes—e.g., To the Roman children’s graves; Taste the Buffalo Sacrament; Shepherd my Lambs. And just how does the reader identify these themes?  Because my edition, superbly translated by Patrick Bowles, was thoughtful enough to italicise them. 

And when I say “my edition,” I am talking about a used English translation copyrighted in 1961 and originally sold for 6s/6d (six shillings and sixpence--or roughly $1.80 at the FX rate of the day).   I bought it online for a price which shows that inflation for Nobel Prize winning literature has not exactly kept pace with the 50-year increase in the CPI. It’s sad that a book as great as this is disappearing from English-language bookshelves.  If you try to download it in Kindle, you will fail, raising the spectre that those denied the chance to read great literature about vital history are doomed to repeat it.  

Five stars. 

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ERIC'S REVIEW

In his novel The World According to Garp, John Irving wrote about a father warning his young son to be careful about the undertow at the beach. The son misheard, and from then on imagined that lurking beneath the water was a monster called the Undertoad, quick to cause him nightmares.  As he grew up, the Undertoad came to mean an unidentifiable dread lurking offshore in the mind, a sense of foreboding that something bad was happening or about to happen. In Heinrich Boll's book Billiards At Half Past Nine, the Undertoad is omnipresent. The novel takes place in Germany, both post and pre-war, and is a kaleidoscopic view of three generations of the Faehmel family: Heinrich the 80 year old patriarch, Robert, his son, and Joseph, the grandson...all architects. By kaleidoscopic, I mean that though the action takes place in the course of a single day, Boll uses different narrators in 13 chapters and jumps randomly through more than 50 years, making the overall structure a fractured view that is ever shifting. It is often difficult to know who is talking, when, and about what, and like a mosaic, the whole picture is revealed only slowly and from a distance. This is the novel's genius, and what sets it apart.

There are some pervasive themes (time, food, ballgames), and phrases which turn up again and again: "how weary, weary these old bones." "whywhywhy", "the Buffalo Sacrament", "the Lamb." They are obtuse, but critical to an understanding of the story, and though perhaps obvious to German readers in the 1950s, they are certainly not to a foreigner today. Given the somewhat confusing nature of the novel, upon finishing it I immediately went to read some analyses online which helped. The first reference about the bones becomes clear when you get the phrase in German (Es zittern die morsche Knochen). It transpires that this is the first phrase of the number two song on the hit list of Nazi marching songs, after the Horst Wessel Lied, the SS anthem. A search on YouTube leads to you a warning that this is inappropriate, and after ticking a disclaimer (and thus no doubt immediately flagging myself as a Neo-Nazi to the Powers that Be), you see why this is such an evocative reference. To the German reader post-war, this reference would immediately bring up a vision of lines upon lines of soldiers marching and the tromp tromp tromp of jackbooted feet, blinded by their loyalty to the Fatherland. The last stanza of the song reads:

We will continue to march,

Even if everything shatters;

Freedom rose in Germany,

And tomorrow the world belongs to it .

The irony of these words resonates with every stamp. 

The Buffalo Sacrament is also a reference to the Nazi Party and to the vision of Hindenberg, the Prussian General who was the symbol for bellicose nationalism, and the Lamb of pacifists and the Church. The Faehmel family, like everyone in Germany, was the bratwurst caught between two thick pumpernickel slices of theology of National Socialism and any of its Opponents, including portions of the co-opted  Catholic Church, communists, and pacifists. The party and the war touched all. Robert, the main protagonist, was forced to leave Germany and spent the pre-War years in Holland, where he learned to play billiards. His friend Schrella, a pacifist, also escaped persecution and eventually came back. His mother Johanna was put in an insane asylum for harbouring refugees, shopped to the Nazis by Robert's brother Otto, who perished on the Eastern Front in 1942 a die-hard Nazi. This causes her to repeat "whywhywhy" as a demented person would, when in fact she is entirely lucid, and eventually plots revenge in the climax of the novel. Robert returns as a soldier and following the command of a twisted General, blows up the Abbey that his father designed, an act done at the same age (29) as his father was when he built it. His life becomes a pleasureless ritual of the same breakfast of cream cheese and paprika, and a session of billiards at a local hotel where he opens up to a young bellhop every day at 9:30 (thus giving birth to the name of the novel).

There is a semblance of reconciliation but no forgiveness amongst the characters, including the Nazi bully from Robert's and Schrella's youth who has done very well for himself.  This moral ambiguity, that justice does not really exist, clouds everything. Even at the end there is no closing of the circle.  This is partially what makes the novel so absorbing, and so chilling. What is true for the family is true for the nation. 

The writing is dense but superb. There are so many quotable quotes that one's hand instinctively reaches for the highlighter. As with any great piece of literature, the novel effortlessly moves from the universal to the particular, with recurring themes of irony and guilt, both collective and individual. Like a vast mosaic, any of the bits can be savoured either alone or as parts of the masterwork.

If a man has his conscience removed there is not even a cynic left.

Boredom can only be filled with a new religion, and the more stupid a one, the better.

Irony  is only a narcotic for the privileged.

You must add one thing yourself to what you have learned; a breath, just a breath of originality.

Politeness is the surest form of contempt.

There are two possibilities: either you know nothing, or you know everything. 

Children see time as an eternity.

Careful when you climb the ladder.

The tree is contained in the nutshell.

You haven't grown happy on your victories.

I have had to swallow lack of tact by the jugful.

It isn't a picture; it's an anecdote, and it has the further disadvantage of being true.

Ephemeral things alone are (were)  permanent.

Boll was part of a group of post-war writers dubbed the Trummerliteratur (arising from rubble). This novel is about the past, present, and future Germany (it was written in 1958).  It is about creation, destruction, and reconstruction, and this refers not only to the physical but the psyche, a psyche which will forever be haunted by the Undertoad of the Past. It is not surprising that Boll won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, but disturbing (and disappointing) that this book is not better known and is almost forgotten forty years on.   Billiards At Half Past Nine is writing which can wake you up in the middle of the night and either make you nod your head, or shudder, but it will make you think.

Five out of Five

JFDI BOOK NO. 6: BILLIARDS AT HALF PAST NINE Heinrich Boll

MESSAGE FROM MIKE HALL TO JFDI

OK, you magnificent sunsabeehatches—a BANG it is.

Our next book club selection will be:

Billiards at Half Past Nine

By

Heinrich Boll.

BILLIARDS AT HALF PAST NINE ON AMAZON

THURSDAY 11TH JULY AT THE FOX AND ANCHOR AT 6PM....FIRST ARRIVAL ORDERS THE SCOTCH EGGS AND PORK PIES

REVIEW: LONDONERS by Craig Taylor

Several inputs. Overall rating was 2.6. Lowest yet.

ALISTAIR'S REVIEW

Londoners .....

It was quite a task undertaken by young Mr Taylor, to capture the diverse characters of this old and somewhat battered city in 448 pages. We all agreed, but to varying degrees, that he failed. This really isn't really much of a surprise in a sample of 80 people out of 8 million!

We all have our separate London's, a limited geography of a handful of pages from the A to Z. In the book our Editor repeatedly takes me to familiar places with his concentration on North, Central and East London, I guess this helped me warm to the book. However it also brings it home how imperfect the spread of characters really was.

I found the editing was very tight and made the most of the material available. It was a book that I wanted to keep reading in the knowledge that if you didn't like the character the likelihood was that the next would be more engaging. This brings me to my biggest concern with the book, how much could I believe. This was one of the reasons I wanted to put the book forward. I wanted to see if we believed in all of these characters. In fiction this is always the big thing for me, do these people seem real. Now 'm sure Mr Taylor met all of these people and the stories are a fair reflection of what he was told. However people play parts every day of their lives. One thing missing from this book is a feeling that the editor gives his view of the stories. For instance does he find some tales too tall, the skip diver or the homeless guy for example. I think I mentioned that I had come across the estate agent and the version of himself that he painted to the editor was far from the impression I formed. One overriding view I was left with was is the editor naive or knowing, does he leave us to make up our own mind. Is this a success, we all enjoyed the fruit and veg wholesaler as a cheeky chappy 'cor blimey gov', so does it really matter?

Imperfect but enjoyable, a 3.5.

JOE'S REVIEW

LONDONERS: A REVIEW CUT SHORT

As a crewcut. 

It may sound harsh, and no disrespect to Alastair (one of the two Halls in our group), but….this collection of conversation/monologue snippets left me wanting.  I search for a thread of narrative, a hint of meaning or at least meandering hilarity or menace (depending on my mood) when reading.  Many books offer these aspects, sometimes well hidden, obtuse or buried in a mountain of prose (see: Faust, The Magic Mountain, etc.), but do have them somewhere.  

Not so this book.  It reminded me of myself on a bender wandering into bars and striking up conversations (soon forgotten) with random boozers.  Some quite interesting, some utterly banal.  But not a thread of continuity, such as Joe on a bender for example, did I find.

London is indeed a wondrous and wonderful city.  Full of life, but….better than this book.  Who among us shall write it ?

TOM'S REVIEW

Until 1974, I’d known West Covina CA, where I grew up, and Davis CA, where I spent two years of university. Both were hot and dry, brown eight months out of twelve and certainly in late May, which was when I rode the bus from Heathrow to Victoria Coach Station. In London even the red bricks were green, speckled and smudged with moss.”

I wrote the foregoing Saturday night, thought it was a load of girly twaddle, went to bed, slept on what it is that makes me think London is the greatest city in the world, woke up with Flock of Seagulls hair and realised I’d slept on it badly. Badda-boom!

But as I revisited what I’d written last night, I recalled that, as I was going to bed, I poked my head in the lounge where my wife Nicky and her cousin Richard—grew up in London, studied at Guys and emigrated to Canada 30 years ago—were discussing what makes a city great. Richard’s point was that Vancouver consistently tops contemporary surveys of cities where most people would like to live. Nicky’s was that Vancouver is a suburban backwater utterly lacking in what makes a city global—like Sacramento, except people want to live there.

So that made me think, what exactly are the things that make a city global and great? I came up with eight criteria: size; culture; history; finance; politics; architecture; science; and diversity. And then I came up with a list of cities that tick at least five of those boxes: New York; Mexico City; Rio; Buenos Aires; Madrid; Paris; Rome; Athens; Berlin; Amsterdam; Vienna; Moscow; Cairo; Jerusalem; Mumbai; Tokyo; Singapore; Beijing; Shanghai; Seoul; Sydney; and London.

Now you may call this list self-selecting. Assuming that Vancouver really is the city where most people want to live, it means I’ve excluded quality of air, transport, education, healthcare, housing and safety. But that’s why I don’t rate LONDONERS, because it focuses on the temporal and the commonplace. Yes, London is expensive, creaking and rude. But what makes a city great is its place not only in the present but also in history and the imaginable future. In only a few instances--the Smithfield market piece and the interview with the chef--did LONDONERS come close to capturing that. 

Which is why, to my thinking, London is the only city that meets all eight criteria. And I didn’t even include language, English, the planet’s most universal, and what is the essential ingredient of the JFDI Book Club. You can rightly argue that language a subset of culture. And you can even more rightly argue that America spread it. But you cannot argue that London—home of Chaucer (Eltham Palace), home of Shakespeare (the Globe), home of Dickens (the City et al.), home of Shaw and Conrad and Eliot (immigrants all) didn’t invent and nurture and refine it.

London is simply too great for LONDONERS. I realise now that the biggest irritant about this book is not the content itself but the critical blurbs that precede the Table of Contents. One critic posits that LONDONERS is as vital as Dickens, another that it is as timeless Pepys or Boswell. Those guys should be put in critic jail. This book is about a microscopic here and now. The London I love defies and transcends.  The London I love abides.

2 out of 5

ERIC'S REVIEW

They say you can't judge a book by its cover. Londoners, or whatever it was called, (I can only remember a bunch of brightly coloured stripes) is the exception to the rule. It was exactly like its cover. A few bright splashes of colour interspersed with many random words (something about hating liking living leaving or some such) which were a barely remembered fragmented journey through this world capital. You know, the place you can't get tired of without getting tired of life, as Sammy J said.  This book, as one of my confreres was quick to point out, is like a stochastic journey through a pub, aimless meanderings through a variety of characters who because they are not representative of anything are representative of London. Except he didn't say that. Stochastic, I mean, or indeed much of the previous sentence. I am PARAPHRASING man. The book did meander, but there were some personages to savour. The witch for one in the order of the Golden Dawn who threw her talisman over Waterloo Bridge, apparently a favourite spot for witches. The polyglot fruit and veg man (since Cockney rhyming slang qualifies as a separate language in my book). The rent boy who escaped from some nutter with rubber sheets and a gimp mask. London is all sorts, like the sweets, and you will never know what is flavour of the person sitting next to you on the train. I guess that is the main message of the book.

Okay, I must confess. I love London, but the London I love, clipping my hedges in Kew, riding bikes along the Thames, trudging in an iPod bubble on the District Line (where I have calculated I have spent well over a year of my life, much as one spends a third of one's life in bed), sampling food and culture, is obviously not the London that most encountered in this book.  So sue me. It is still a place which quite happily offers up something for everybody, without the aggression of New York, the arrogance of Paris, the audacity of Hong Kong, the sheer foreignness of Tokyo, or the bizarreness of Seoul (all places I have lived). It also has no guns (or very few).  And irony in spades. And if all else fails, you can always talk about the weather. God knows there is enough of that to fill up those awkward silences.

This book, written by a Canadian, doesn't do a terrible job of sketching out the city, and I had no trouble making it through to the end (unlike, somewhat testily and self-serving I might add, some of my confreres).   I give it 3 out of 5. If you don't like these oral history type books, I suggest you try The Good War or Hard Times by Studs Terkel, where the kaleidoscope paints a much clearer picture, not just of a city, but of a whole era.

QUOTE OF THE BOOK: Welshman is an English word meaning "foreigner", which is a bit of a cheek.

FACTOID OF THE BOOK:  In London according to a law from 1837, you are not allowed to get married outside unless you are Jewish or a Quaker.

JFDI BOOK NO. 5: DAYS AND NIGHTS OF LONDON NOW

LONDONERS

THE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF LONDON NOW

by Craig Taylor

Interviews of Londoners of every ilk.  Chosen by Alistair Hall

To be discussed on Thursday 9 May at the Fox and Anchor at 6:30PM.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Londoners-Days-Nights-London-Those/dp/1847083293

REVIEW: SPURIOUS By Lars Iyer

Spurious by Lars Iyer

Well…is this literature in the guise of non-literature, a story perceived with peripheral vision ?  Or… the great posthumous novel (as L.I. intimates in an interview) ?  Or perhaps, both ? I’m not sure, but…it is engaging in an unusual way.
 Interestingly enough it’s a story told in the first person with references almost solely in the third person.  There is no “Handlung”; i.e. plot as the Germanics (reference Kafka) would have it, but a tale of relationship, fecklessness and humor buried in the pages.  As the details of the “plot” flesh themselves out, so do the characters of the protagonists (again, perhaps somewhat exaggerated as a description).  These are men of academia, no Feynmans for sure, but apparently able enough to subsist on grants and head out to various and sundry conferences. 
I found their relationship similar to Laurel and Hardy- the question arising being: why do I have you as a friend, when you’re so ­­­_____ (inept or whatever handy insult comes to mind).  As in Laurel and Hardy, Lars really does seem inept, struck by fate, unable to control the rising, all permeating damp.  W is his friend, but in essence it seems a needy one, despite his condescension, looking for Lars’ acceptance, approval and adoration (?).  And, strange as it seems, this is funny because it mirrors friendships we see in the real world- only without the rising damp, hopefully.
All sorts of references to the greats and mysterious of the 20^th century – Kafka, Rosenzweig, Bela Tarr, etc. come up.  As an academic, most of these characters are apparently well know to L.I.  Knowing a bit about one or two of them myself, and with the aid of Wikipedia, they provide an interesting philo-litero-sophical (I made that word up) background to it all.  I’ll stick with Kafka, as I know him best having slogged through  most of his works and even having read Max Brod (who also comes up) about Kafka.  The sense of the absurd, the whimsical that is in Kafka is present in this book, although Kafka’s exposition of whimisicality (sorry Webster’s, OED or whomever) is somewhat darker than L.I.’s.  It is almost the light hand of fate- rising damp isn’t as bad as turning into a giant insect overnight or being put on trial for no discernible reason.  The Damp, however, is in a way malevolent.  It won’t be controlled or appeased, it is seemingly all conquering.  If I were Lars, I’d move, but he doesn’t.  So Laurel.
This book is not literature in the way most of us are used to.  That is apparently the point of it, but even though it celebrates the end of the “novel”, it somehow becomes one.  For me, it was like waking up with sleep in your eyes and struggling to focus.  Things won’t become clear as you try harder to focus on them, but once you gave in to the lack of clarity as the book went on,  things did become clearer and plot and character did appear, although not of an ordinary nature.  Funny and refreshing, enjoyable…but not a beach read.

Average score 3.5 out of 5 
Review by Joe Igoe

JFDI BOOK NO.4 SPURIOUS Lars Iyer

SPURIOUS  by Lars Iyer

Spurious follows W. and Lars, who dream of great philosophical and literary deeds as they bumble drunkenly through Europe. It's a raucous debut novel that forever ping pongs between intellectual seriousness and absurdist British comedy. The novel speaks with equal wit and insight on Spinoza's Ethics, the virtues of 'man bags' and why Poles are the best drinkers. It is Franz Kafka, Laurel & Hardy, Thomas Bernhard, Ricky Gervais, Maurice Blanchot and Monty Python all at once. Witty, suicidal, slapstick, foolish and profound, Spurious marks the arrival of a singular and electric new literary voice."

Chosen by Joe Igoe

The next meeting will tentaively be on Thursday, 14th March at the Fox and Anchor

REVIEW:CHRONICLE IN STONE

Chronicle In Stone—This was my JFDI Book Club selection, chosen because of a glowing review I read of the author’s body of work. Published in 1971 by Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, it’s a boy’s account of the people and events of “a strange city...old and made of stone,” one “set at a sharper angle than perhaps any other city on earth” and where “it was hard to believe...the tender flesh of life survived and reproduced.”   Those opening descriptions set the tone for a book that contains elements of European tradition even as it defies them.  Like Albania itself. 

Reading a book in translation is always fraught with interpretive danger, one magnified when the book is long on theme and imagery and short on plot and pathos.  What is invariably missed is the poetry of the language.  And yet the poetry of the imagery—e.g., the cistern, the slaughterhouse, the citadel, the aerodrome—is here in abundance. By adopting the narrative voice of a pre-adolescent boy, Kadare assumes the role of an observer of things elemental and not abstract. There are no value judgements about the people, their actions or the events that are taking place. And those events are extraordinary, as the chronicle covers the years from 1939 to 1943, when Albania and the stone city were invaded by the Italians, the Greeks and the Germans.

The book therefore puts a big burden on the reader used to a Western literary tradition that usually makes it easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, especially in books about war, where lines of morality are sharply drawn.  Here, though, in a positively medieval society where ancient prejudices and superstitions form the moral code, the ability to relate to characters without the slightest sense of place in a truly global event is a real challenge. But ultimately that is what makes this book so different from any other I have read.  And different in this case translates as memorable.

At the JDFI get-together I gave this book 4 stars, but after writing this review, I’m giving it 5. Go on, call it self-justification; I dare yuh. Other scores at the confab were a 4 and two 3s. But we all gave the food and beer at the Fox & Anchor a 6. Big thanks to Mike for choosing the venue. Bigger thanks for him opting to stay home and not projectile-vomit all over our cosy little room at the inn.    

Feliz Navidad, Prospero Ano y Felicidad

El Hombre Sin Nombre

T. Fred Wells