May 2017 book and film review

BOOKS

PNIN, by Vladimir Nabokov
A Russian emigree academic comes to roost in an east-coast American university. He finds a room to rent with a fellow lecturer. His needs are small, especially since his wife left him and took their son with her to shack up with yet another academic on the west coast. Here he hopes to find some peace, but will his colleagues allow it? His strange, OCD-type ways irritate the other staff, even if his students love him, and soon ways are found to get rid of him...
          Painting a character not a million miles from himself (Nabokov escaped Russia at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, wandering around Europe for a while before finding himself in America, as an academic himself), Nabokov here is at his literary and stylistic height: writing prose of unmatched quality and telling a story of beauty and, at times, great poignancy. Not to be missed.

ON BEAUTY, by Zadie Smith
A British art lecturer with a Caribbean wife and family, lives and works in Massachusetts. Then an old nemesis arrives from Britain and takes up a post in the same university. Sparks fly. Various characters become besotted with beauty of various kinds, teenage black girls with spectacular bottoms, young black dudes with a talent for rap, skinny poets with a unique way with verse. Affairs begin, end, infatuations form, unform; meanwhile only the old and grey seem to know what is really important in life...
          Zadie Smith herself is young, gifted and black (and beautiful, come to that), and has the world at her feet right now. Her books are received with critical acclaim, and sell well into the bargain. She is, we have to concede, the real deal. Reading On Beauty we can see why. She is able to tap into the zeitgeist, not only of British middle class society, but American too, with great skill and considerable subtlety. Truly she is one of the most exciting writing talents to have come out of the UK in a long time.

A TIME OF GIFTS, by Patrick Leigh Fermor
In the autumn of 1933 an 18 year-old lad decides to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. On the way he journeys up the Rhine and down the Danube on a magical journey into European history. On the way he is taken into the homes of the nobility who seem to recognize instinctively, despite his vagabond appearance, that they are dealing with a most exceptional young man...
          Expelled from the venerable Kings School, Canterbury for canoodling with a local girl, and described as possessing "a dangerous mix of sophistication and recklessness" by his tutors, Paddy Leigh Fermor has here produced what is widely recognized as one the finest travel books ever written. It is easy to see why. His prose style is measured, clean, articulate and unblievably beautiful. Take this passage, for instance, when he is walking through Holland:

"...These vague broodings brought me to the foot of a vertiginous belfry... I was inside it and up half a dozen ladders in a minute and gazing down through the cobwebbed louvres. The whole kingdom was revealed. The two great rivers loitered across it with their scattering of ships and their barge processions and their tributaries. There were the polders and the dykes and the long willow bordered canals, the heath and arable and pasture dotted with stationary and expectant cattle, windmills and farms and answering belfries, bare rookeries with their wheeling specks just within earshot and a castle or two, half concealed among a ruffle of woods..."

Or this, when he is offering his impressions of Prague:

"...The streets are as empty as the thoroughfares in an architectural print. Nothing but a few historical phantoms survive; a muffled drum... the milling citizens, the rushing traffic vanish and the voices of a bilingual city sink to a whisper. I can just remember a chestnut-woman in a kerchief stamping beside a brazier to keep warm and a hurrying Franciscan with a dozen loaves of bread under his arm. Three cab-drivers nursing their tall whips and drinking schnapps in the outside bar of a wine cellar materialise for a moment above the sawdust, their noses scarlet from the cold or drink or both, and evaporate again, red noses last, like rear-lamps fading through a fog..."

         For a long time I have wanted to "do" the Rhine, with its profusion of medieval castles and vineyards; now I see I should also explore the upper reaches of Western Europe's greatest river, the Danube, as well. Leigh Fermor brings them to life in a uniquely engaging way, discussing the history that saturates Central Europe, from the Romans, through the Barbarians, the Holy Roman Emperors, on to Empress Elizabeth, aka the "Winter Queen", direct ancestor to our current queen and then tragic Princess Elizabeth, better known as "Sissi". Want to know more about any of these, and join Paddy on his extraordinary walking tour into the bargain? Read on...

For film review, see next blog...