Tag: contemporary fiction

Jeeves in the Offing (1960): P.G. Wodehouse

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★★★★

It’s extraordinary that it took me this long to get round to Jeeves and Wooster, partly because it’s exactly the kind of silly English humour that I like, and partly because I spent three very happy years eating strawberries, drinking champagne and falling out of punts at Bertie Wooster’s alma mater. I suppose I should really have been methodical and started with the first Jeeves collection, but someone donated Jeeves in the Offing (1960) to the book stall at the village fete this year, so it seemed a good place to begin.

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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012): Rachel Joyce

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★★★★

A couple of months ago, Isi invited me to be part of the jury for her English Review Competition and the winning entry was a review of this book by Ale. I hadn’t read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry at the time and Ale whetted my appetite so much that I decided to buy it. And so, during a business trip to Amsterdam this week (where I renewed my acquaintance with Gerard Bicker at the Rijksmuseum), I decided it was time to rectify the omission.

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Fludd (1989): Hilary Mantel

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★★★½

As I started this book, I had troubling flashbacks to my GCSE studies of Hard Times. The village of Fetherhoughton, where the action of Fludd takes place, has grown up around the cotton mill industry and a grimmer, bleaker, more relentlessly depressing place would be hard to find. Founded in the smoke and soot of the Industrial Revolution, the village has managed to avoid all the benefits of modernity and, in the 1950s, maintains a kind of moorland isolation.

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I, Lucifer (2002): Glen Duncan

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Mar 03, 2009 – London, England, United Kingdom – GLEN DUNCAN is a British author born in 1965 in Bolton, Lancashire, England to an Anglo-Indian family. He studied philosophy and literature at Lancaster University

★★★

I’m not familiar with Glen Duncan’s other books, but this one has caught my eye several times over the years – the concept tickled my sense of humour – and it seemed to be the perfect book for a languid, hot summer afternoon when I didn’t have the energy to tackle anything too demanding. Mind you, it won’t be for everyone: if you’re easily offended, I would steer clear (even though, in fact, the book is necessarily grounded in a very traditional vision of Catholicism).

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The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared (2009): Jonas Jonasson

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★★★★

Many of you will, most likely, already have read this: it’s been one of the hit books of the last twelve months and its cover has caught my eye many a time on bookshops’ bestsellers tables. It’s a wonder that it took me so long to get round to reading it, because Hesperus are one of my favourite independent presses; I went through a phase of compulsively buying a whole variety of books from their Classics series. Now that I’ve finally had the chance to sample The Hundred-Year-Old Man, I can completely understand why it’s been so popular. It reads like the irreverent love-child of Forrest Gump and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, feeding off the contemporary hunger for Scandi-crime novels but transporting its readers into a quirky genre that’s all on its own.

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A Virtual Love (2013): Andrew Blackman

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★★★

As you’ll have noticed, I don’t often read fiction set in the present day, but in the wake of my Robin Hobb reread I wanted to move on to something completely different. Charlie of The Worm Hole mentioned this recently in her ‘currently reading’ post, and the concept intrigued me enough that I sought it out. It turned out to be a thoroughly contemporary story about love, identity and the alluring smokescreen offered by the Internet. And it shares some of the qualities of Internet media in that it’s fresh, snappy, delivered in bite-size chunks, and very much of the moment.

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Mendelssohn is on the Roof (1960): Jiří Weil

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★★★½

In his bestselling HHhH, Laurent Binet referenced this novel about Nazi-occupied Prague, published posthumously in 1960. I assumed it was an obscure book, long out of print; so imagine my surprise when I spotted a copy in Oxfam a few months ago. I should say a few words about Jiří Weil himself as a kind of introduction (and, if you want to find out more, there is the ubiquitous Wikipedia page).

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The Woman in the Dunes (1962): Kobo Abe

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★★

This was an impulse loan from the library, which caught my eye because I’d started looking through the shelves alphabetically, hadn’t read it and thought the cover was rather elegant. I’m fond of Murakami‘s particular brand of magical realism and wondered whether this book, with its stylised and rather otherworldly story, might offer a similar experience. The short answer is that it didn’t. The longer answer is that I really wish I hadn’t bothered, and that I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m simply not cut out to read existential fiction.

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Lucky Jim (1954): Kingsley Amis

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★★★

It’s 1950 and Jim Dixon is fed up. Having served in the Second World War, he has returned to academia in lieu of anything better to do and is now at the end of his first year teaching Medieval History at an unnamed provincial university. It’s a subject for which he feels no particular affection or aptitude; indeed, he has developed a particular loathing for it. His discontent radiates outwards, encompassing the insular and petty world of the university, those of his students intelligent enough to risk exposing him for the fraud he is, and virtually all his colleagues.

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We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962): Shirley Jackson

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★★★★

I first heard about this thanks to Simon at Stuck in a Book, who has mentioned Shirley Jackson a few times over the last couple of years, always with great affection. The post that particularly caught my eye covered Simon’s thoughts on her first volume of memoirs, Life Among the Savages, which he described enticingly as the ‘Provincial Lady transferred to America’. I filed her under ‘authors to read one day’ and then, quite unexpectedly, stumbled across a copy of her most famous novella, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in my local charity shop. Without any idea of what to expect, I bought it. Indeed, because Simon had spoken highly of it and I know his fondness for Persephone Books, and because the title sounded vaguely like I Capture the Castle, I assumed (with no justification whatsoever) that it was going to be a rather heart-warming, languid tale of a well-to-do childhood in a crumbling big house. Not so.

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