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

JFDI BOOK NO. 3 CHRONICLE IN STONE Ismail Kadare

CHRONICLE IN STONE by Ismail Kadare

Looks like it's my turn to pick the book and I'm going with CHRONICLE IN STONE by Ismail Kadare.  Until a month ago I had never heard of the author or any of his works, but I found out about him via a recent Independent review of a novel he has just published.  Turns out he has been a leading literary figure in his home country of Albania since his first book was published in 1963 and has been highly regarded in France for at least two decades.  It appears, though, that he has only recently been translated into English, as CHRONICLE IN STONE was written in 1971 but only translated into English in 2007.

Anyway, for a long time I've been curious about Albania, a country so contrarian even the Soviets didn't want it as a satellite, especially after I saw Randy Newman in concert in 1975 and he said that the song "Wedding in Cherokee County," which appeared on the Southern (US)-themed album GOOD OLD BOYS, was really about Albania. The song is hilarious. Albania is not. 

Date for the next JFDI con-fab is Wednesday 12 December.  Mike is going to arrange the venue.  'Til then... Tom.


Chosen by Tom Wells