Category: Books

The Story of a New Name (2012): Elena Ferrante

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Nothing would delight me more than being able to give you a picture of Elena Ferrante, but it’s a pseudonym and no one knows who she is

★★★★ ½

The Neapolitan Novels: Book II

The first installment of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels moved me deeply and there was no doubt I’d continue with the series. For various reasons this week has been challenging and so yesterday afternoon, on a whim, I bought the second book and have spent a few hours here and there absorbed afresh in Ferrante’s compelling world, by turns painfully familiar and shockingly alien. As in the first novel, the characters have a presence and reality which means one can’t comfortably dismiss them as fictional. Once again, this book has the charge of thinly fictionalised autobiography: nostalgic, fearless and merciless, a forensic dissection of the anatomy of friendship.

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Ariosto (1988): Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

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★★

Ariosto Furioso: A Romance for an Alternative Renaissance

This was a strange one. My policy of buying books by their covers usually works, but not this time. I haven’t read any of Yarbro’s books before, although her Count of Saint-Germain series has loitered tantalisingly at the edge of my mind for some time. When Goodreads recommended me her Renaissance fantasy about the poet Ludovico Ariosto, I was intrigued: the cover art caught my eye, and I eventually tracked down a copy of this edition in the US.

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To Be A King (1976): Robert DeMaria

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Many apologies for the poor image! If anyone knows a better photo of Robert DeMaria, please let me know!

★★★★

A Novel about Christopher Marlowe

I have a peculiar fascination with Kit Marlowe as an historical figure, although I’ve only ever sat through one of his plays (a student production of Doctor Faustus). To Be A King follows close on the heels of several other fictional encounters I’ve had with him, including the strikingly original Marlowe Papers. However, the most pertinent comparison for this book is Anthony Burgess’s famous novel A Dead Man in Deptford, which has a close kinship with To Be A King both in its reading of events and in its characterisation.

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My Brilliant Friend (2011): Elena Ferrante

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Nothing would delight me more than being able to give you a picture of Elena Ferrante, but it’s a pseudonym and no one knows who she is

★★★★

About a month ago, several people recommended that I should read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. Then my local bookshop devoted a window display to her, so it seemed a good time to plunge in. The novels follow the friendship between two women, the narrator Elena and Raffaella, whom Elena calls Lila. Throughout the course of the series I imagine we’ll cover most of the second half of the 20th century, but this first book sets the scene with the story of their childhood and adolescence in a modest, run-down suburb of Naples.

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The Testament of Mary (2012): Colm Tóibín

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★★★★

A woman sits in an empty house, waiting for the men who come to interrogate her. They claim to be protecting her, but she knows that they are also dangerous in their own way. They’re gripped by the urgency of an idea that needs corroboration: a story that in their own minds has taken on a different reality which they now intend to present to the world. But the woman resists. For the story that these men are trying to change is the story of her son; and the more she hears them speak, the more she realises that her own past, as she remembers it, is bearing less and less resemblance to what will become ‘fact’.

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Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2002): Claire Tomalin

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★★★★½

On 1 January 1660, a young clerk in the Exchequer in London began to keep a diary. He wasn’t the first diarist in history, far from it; but he was the first to find such potential in the form, and to make of his diary more than a dry chronicle of the times, or a self-examination of sins. This diary was different. From its very first page it showed an almost shocking candour as the young clerk recorded not only his work and social life, but also the most frank and intimate details about his marriage and his own turbulent sexual desires. This honesty sat alongside a lively intelligence which drank in all the events of the world around him. This clerk was Samuel Pepys and, from a historical point of view, he couldn’t have chosen a better moment to start such a detailed account of his life.

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Meadowland (2005): Thomas Holt

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★★★

John Stetathus doesn’t want to go to Sicily. As a fretful middle-aged accountant in the Byzantine civil service in 1036, the last thing he wants to do is to leave his comfy life in Constantinople, and traipse off overland to supervise the delivery of the pay packet to the Emperor’s troops. But he has ‘a knack for languages and a fatal tendency to listen to people‘, so his fate is sealed. And what makes it even worse is that there isn’t any decent company on the way. All he has are three Varangian guards: great brutish Northerners who don’t offer the slightest hope of civilised conversation. But travel wears a man down and so, one night (having a knack for languages), he begins in desperation to talk to them.

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A Tale for the Time Being (2013): Ruth Ozeki

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★★★★

It’s been a long time (for me) since I read a novel: the last few months have been more conducive to dipping in and out, and not really getting anywhere with anything. And so on Saturday I went on a day trip out of London, left my tablet and my phone behind, and took a book for the journey. Being alone with the book for that length of time was exhilarating: for the first time in weeks I became dragged into another world and I spent the rest of Saturday and Sunday reading. For, if it’s been a long time since I read a novel at all, it’s been even longer since I read the kind of novel that, on finishing, elicited a strangled half-yowl of frustration – not at the book itself, but at the knowledge that I just don’t have the depth of understanding in order to appreciate all the clever stuff that I’m sure is going on in there.

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Sword at Sunset (1963): Rosemary Sutcliff

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★★★★½

More than half a century after the last legions marched out of Britain, a man lies dying in a monastery, with apple trees stirring in the wind beyond his window. His name is Artos, and he has been many things: bastard-born nephew and adopted son of the old High King, Ambrosius; the Count of Britain; the leader of the Companions, a band of heavy cavalrymen sworn to his banner, who have devoted their lives to defending what remains of civilisation against the growing dark of the Saxon invasions.

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