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What I have read

4089 what I have read : Nathan Hill

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photo : dreamy cormorant in Marahau (windy gardens), sand bar

Hill, Nathan, The Nix,  Knopf, 2016, 752p. Yes, you read correctly, 720 pages!

Nathan Hill is a  newcomer on the American literary scene (and worldwide, since the book has been translated into 30 languages) was  published in 2016.   Nix refers to a Norwegian legend which seems to be the key to the story but  delivered at the very end. It is impossible to summarize a 752 page book in a few lines, but one can try: a presidential candidate has been attacked in public by a woman in her sixties: Faye Andresen-Anderson. Samuel Anderson, English teacher and Shakespeare specialist, is not aware of this event spread across social medias because he is busy playing  The World of Elfscape online. The woman in question happens to be  his mother, who abandoned him when he was a child. Having nonetheless become a promising writer, after the publication of a short story, he got  a substantial advance for his next book, of which he still has not written a line, but he spent the advance  money.

This starting point is the pretext that Hill uses to talk about the difficulty of living and growing up in the United States especially, or elsewhere for that matter, through two generations, his own and that of his mother, and to a certain point, that of his grandfather too, although this angle was not developed to the same extent. I can understand he had to stop at some point, because it would probably have taken a hundred more pages to treat this subject with the detail that Hill showed elsewhere and then, really, but no, that would have been too much. This is nevertheless a little disappointing because the title makes us think that everything starts from Norway, when the grandfather left Norway to emigrate to the United States, when in fact, the novel really focuses on the following generations.

This book could easily have bored me to death. The first chapter takes us into the head of an online video game player and I was tempted to say no thanks, I don’t particularly want to know what’s going on in there. We then dive into the childhood and adolescence of Samuel Anderson and again, fortunately he changes the subject, just as I am about to give up. There’s a limit to my desire to know what’s going on in someone’s head, and having already recently delved into Jon Fosse’s book and Gerald Munrane’s book, I couldn’t cope with too much more of that. I still managed to get through these moments that were a little too detailed for my liking because he writes really very well and he has a sense of humour. What kept me going, however, was the chapter where Samuel Anderson calls a student into his office to tell her that she cheated and that her assignment will be a failure. The student doesn’t see it that way and she will end up winning her case, but the reader has the pleasure of seeing how  this result can be achieved  and get the teacher fired as a bonus. Obviously, this made me laugh because it reminded me of my academic  life, which I would not now want to return to under any circumstances. Otherwise, the book goes in all directions: political history, media influence, addiction, unhappy childhood, military life and so on. However, even if the book is very, very well written and often amusing, it seems to me once again (this is not the first time I have said it) that the book would have benefited from some cuts. Or, if I had been Hill’s editor, I would have suggested that he cut some unnecessarily detailed passages to better develop the grandfather’s story, which really left me wanting more.

But the book left me wanting to read more from him, when his next book (624  pages this time) arrives at the library (hopefully I am not too far on the waiting list).

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#4068 what I have read: Deborah Levy

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photo : encountering beauty on Pohara beach. Population : 560
Deborah Levy. Real Estate,  published in English in 2021, the third volume of the trilogy of her  » living autobiography », as she calls it. I talked about the first volume elsewhere, and the second  is not in the library at the moment. She takes stock of her life, close to her sixtieth birthday , as her daughters prepare to leave their London apartment. The English title emphasizes one part of the book, where she mentions her dream house. She wonders what is a home, or why, while she is a recognized author, translated into several languages, she still cannot afford to own a house, what she would like to find in it if she had one, where she would like it to be, etcetera. That was what intrigued me about this book, because it is a theme rarely discussed. However, the book  is as much and perhaps even more a kind of daydreaming rather than a biography. A critic has said elsewhere that no one, better than Levy, knows how to talk about the everyday, essentially feminine, and that as such she describes what it means to be a woman and this is  mainly what it is :  a collection of her thoughts about her encounters, objects that are part of her life (shoes, among others), observations about strangers or neighbours, her friends, certain details of her daily life, her childhood memories,   her mother and, ultimately, the female condition. The quality of the writing makes it worth reading,  but  because the English title promised me something else,  I kind of lost interest because of the expectations I had. The French title fits much better with what is in the book, far from the idea of biography I had.
I then tried reading one of his novels, August Blue, but I took a dislike to the theme after a few pages and have given up for the moment. I will perhaps try The man who saw everything later, which was shortlisted (I think) for the Booker. And I hope that the library will soon bring in the second book of the trilogy, which will perhaps interest me more.

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#4061 What I have read : Eleanor Catton

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I finally got tempted by Eleanor Catton ‘s most recent book , “ Birnam Wood”, published in 2023, around ten years after The Luminaries which earned her the “Booker” for a book of more than eight hundred pages, which I didn’t like very much. Still, I  read it all, forcing myself to read about ten pages before falling asleep and even today, it’s a bad memory. So I hesitated before starting to read her latest publication, but the fact that this time there were only four hundred and some pages helped me take the plunge and I also was attracted to the topic . This time Catton wrote a  psychological or political thriller that draws attention to the impasses of nowadays politics.

The first protagonist is Birnam Wood, an activist collective based in Christchurch, New Zealand. Its founder, Mira Bunting , dreams of radical, widespread and lasting social change; To achieve this, the members of Birnam Wood engage in a sort of gardening guerrilla, reclaiming unused public and private land for cultivation. The other protagonist of  the novel, Robert Lemoine, is an Americain billionaire. He has officially come to New Zealand to build himself a bunker in anticipation of a catastrophic event. In reality he digs the New Zealand earth to extract billions of dollars of rare earths in a national park.

The two meet and soon, Mira believes she can use Robert Lemoine’s money and land to carry out her mission, while Robert Lemoine wants to use Birnam Wood to camouflage his operations. We also meet Tony Gallo, a young idealistic journalist, as well as a recently knighted New Zealand businessman, Sir Owen Darvish, and his wife.

The first half of the novel puts all the elements of the story in place and it’s actually my favourite part. Catton displays a light sense of humour that I hadn’t felt in the previous book. It seems to me that she is  settling scores, to a certain extent with New Zealand, where she was criticized extensively after the publication of The Luminaries , among other things, because she was not shy about her criticism of New Zealand. The Prime Minister at the time did not particularly like it and the quarrel escalated to the point where her father (a lecturer at the University of Canterbury where I worked at the time) felt the need to publicly demand that  we stop harassing his daughter (as far as I’m concerned, it’s more the dad’s intervention that I found irritating).  She enjoys  making fun of the increasingly ridiculous honours that are awarded indiscriminately to just about anyone. They disappeared for a while, but the aforementioned Prime Minister restored them so he could become a Sir himself! Since then, we have rewarded just about anyone for just about anything and it has become a joke, I completely agree with Catton. Other criticisms of New Zealand, however, sometimes seem unfair to me when it asserts that certain behaviours are typical of New Zealanders  when in fact it is typical human pettiness or jealousy. For instance, if we except the United States (but maybe it is an outdated  and unfair cliche), where becoming rich is seen as a clear sign of success, billionaires are not  particularly popular in most countries, I would say. She also mentions a negative attitude towards people who live abroad for some time, a lack of curiosity, anger from the family sometime also, but I have experienced the same (I paid a visit to somebody I had not seen in twenty years and she asked me one question, the rest of the two hours was devoted to herself. Not that I particularly enjoy being the centre of attention, in fact it is quite the opposite, but I was impressed by the lack of curiosity and the indifference). It does not seem to me to be a New Zealand thing.

I found the second part less interesting, it seemed to fall back into the habits that had annoyed me in the previous book with useless descriptions. That being said, it’s a thought I have almost every time I have read a book recently, where I find long unnecessary passages that I would have eliminated (do we do this to give the reader more bang for their buck? ?). I particularly appreciated that she gently made fun of activists and billionaires with a certain lightness. It also raises essential questions about the type of world we are building (or enduring). I found the ending disappointing, but that ‘s also been the case for quite a while with most of the books I read (or TV shows I watch).

The book will no doubt be translated into French soon , but for those who read a little English, it reads quite well. I read it in a week when I was in Pohara .

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#4022What I have read : Deborah Levy

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But before I get to Levy, a few other books I have read in the last few months 

David Lodge: Paradise News (1991), bought at last year's Nelson second-hand book fair. The back cover presents the book to us with a reflection on the notion of paradise, a description that is quite accurate. I know the author for his books on academia and he always makes me laugh or smile. Even in this book, which takes place a long way from the academic world (Hawaii, in this case), he manages to infiltrate an academic who reflects on mass tourism and its evils. I liked the book even if the last part is a bit lost.

Isabelle Allende: Violeta (2022), offered by LG. A book that examines the life of a centenarian, Violeta Del Valle, born in 1920. It begins with the description of the Spanish flu and one really wonders if it is 1920 or 2020. It then guides the reader in the intricacies of the story of a woman, her emotions and her country, wealth, poverty, the loss of loved ones and love. I liked the book, but now I don't know if I want to read any more. Not for the moment. 
John Banville: The lock-up (2023), courtesy of LG. This book is part of the Detective Benjamin Black series, which Banville first wrote under a pen name, before reverting to his own. I had read April in Spain (the previous one, published in 2021), but his most recent one is more successful in my opinion. For lovers of detective stories seasoned with the best Banville has to offer. 

As for Deborah Levy's book, What I don't want to know 2018 (borrowed from Nelson's library, now 70% open!), it is the first volume of an autobiographical trilogy by the author from South Africa living in Britain since the age of nine. She wrote this book to answer the question about why she writes. It was during a trip to Mallorca that she seems to have found the answer to this question. As soon as she arrived, she started remembering her childhood in South Africa, her father imprisoned for three years because he supported the ANC, which forced the family to emigrate to Britain when he was released from prison, after he was no longer able work. I appreciated her beautiful writing more inspiring when she leaves the facts behind, and found the beginning and the end  particularly powerful. I still want to read the following two books of the trilogy and maybe some of her fiction as well. The following sentence touched me deeply: "The way we are wired to kill. Ourselves”.
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What I have read: Ishiguro, de Vigan, Mazzeo

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What I read in bulk, Kazuo Ishiguro, Nobel Prize in Literature (2017) as well as Booker (1989) for The Remains of the Day, which I read a few years ago and which impressed me a lot. When I saw Nocturnes (2011), at Nelson's second-hand book market, I thought maybe I'd like it, even if it was five short stories, a genre I don't  usually like. And what had thrilled me in The remains of the day, the subtlety of the subject, the delicacy of the writing, bored me in these short stories having music as a common theme, with a similar subtlety, but without depth, or it's just that I don't like short stories. The Sunday Times reviewer actually summed it up nicely: 

Closing the book, it's hard to recall much more than an atmosphere or an air; a few bars of music, half-heard, technically accomplished, quickly forgotten. 

Maybe that's what he liked about the book, whereas for me, that's what bored me.
Delphine de Vigan. Nothing holds back the night (2011). Well,  I'm a little behind on new stuff, but it's too expensive to bring French books to New Zealand and I can't access Kindle or other electronic platforms either, which don't allow buying books from other countries (I don't understand why). But, I'm quite happy to have found five or six books in French at the Nelson second-hand book fair, including this one, by an author I had already read Based on  a true story (2017) , a kind of autofiction that I talked about in the blog (in French). In Nothing holds back the night, she reflects on the life of her mother, who suffered from mental illness, the silence of the family, its effect on herself and her sister, in an authentic way, where one can feel her tenderness. Many questions, a few answers, in short, she revisits in an original way, the bottomless subject of the past, the family, the origins and the reliability of memory.


The Hotel on Place Vendôme, by Mazzeo Tilar J. (2014). Basically, it's more or less the story of the Ritz hotel in Paris, through its famous patrons, since the late nineteenth century, including Proust, Hemingway, Coco Chanel, Marlene Dietrich, Ingmar Bergman, Arletty, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, but also  the German Occupation and war journalists. The author knows her subject well and the historical context surrounding particular events are well documented. A light way to understand history.