Oh, those Russians. I've mentioned on here before about how I find it hard to properly identify with their literature; something about being on the extreme opposite edges of Europe, my society inextricably linked with the other side of the Atlantic, theirs with the vastness of Asia.
But that's no reason not to keep trying. After all, there's a Strugatsky for every Solzhenitsyn, a Dostoevsky for every Tolstoy. And I'd actually read Mikhail Bulgakov before: his bizarre 1925 novella Heart of a Dog, about a mad scientist who creates a man-dog hybrid that goes off to become a Communist or something. The Master and Margarita is generally considered his masterpiece, and I was glad to find that it - just about - lived up to that reputation.
It's another of those novels where I simply cannot comprehend what the original publication would have looked like. Written between 1928 and 1940, The Master and Margarita is an absurdist satire of Moscow society and state-imposed atheism, as Satan and his companions descend on the Soviet Union to wreak havoc ahead of their annual party. How much of the violence, black magic, sex and ultimately Christian content that follows made it past the censors originally is hard to imagine; fortunately, as with pretty much everything else from the time, the book was eventually reissued uncut and unabridged for my reading pleasure.
And it is a fun read. Blending brilliant melodrama (an early scene where a character is decapitated by a tram is hilariously appalling), zesty dialogue and antics between Satan (or Woland as he names himself here) and his gang of misfit underlings as they go about their mischief, and cutting satire of the Russian intelligentsia so arrogant in their lack of faith, the plot races about from scene to scene at a breathless pace. Unfortunately, it's just a bit too inconsistent. Lengthy fictionalised accounts of the last days of Jesus, told from the point of view of Pontius Pilate, break up the narrative for no clear reason, characters are too numerous for sufficient development in most cases and there are moments where it tries just a bit too hard to be weird, to the detriment of the point.
But that's not to detract from what is a very witty and perceptive analysis of the perils of government interference in the beliefs of the populace, as well as an interesting interpretation of the opposing forces at play in Christian theory. Woland is a devil of the Russian Orthodox church, seeking to pervert God's creation: the Master, an infirm academic driven mad by his failure to make it as a writer, and Margarita, his lover who has grown depressed with her unfulfilling existence, see joining his ranks as their chance to transcend their problems on Earth, but to do so they mustn't lose sight of the penalties that come with it. There's also plenty of folkloric influence, as Margarita's initiation culminates in the Walpurgis Night-esque, hedonistic display of debauchery that is the peak of Woland's visit.
There are also some great scenes with a talking cat getting into a gunfight with the police, a landlord being told through the power of dreams to repent his miserly ways, and a rather gripping account of Pontius Pilate's secret service officers stalking through ancient Judea on their way to murder Judas. Like I said, a fun read.
All in all, it goes a long way to convincing me that attempting to complete the (decidedly finite) Russian canon might be a worthwhile aim.
4/5
Today I learned that the first ever Russian music video was inspired by this book. Groovy.
Ah, Eurovision. It's one of those things that slots into a singular category along with the likes of Marmite, astrology and Jeremy Clarkson: everyone out there has an opinion on it, and very few of those opinions are down the middle. Personally I'm a fan, and with Tim Moore rapidly becoming one of my favourite non-fiction writers, his book on the subject was an obvious choice.
I've always been intrigued by a loser. Because we all know that success is just down to obsessive hard work, self-improvement and, more often than not, the intangibles that just make you better than everyone else anyway; and so it's the stories behind those who come up short that are often more interesting. Eddie the Eagle, 2014/15 London Welsh, Liu Xiang pulling up before the start line at the Beijing Olympics. It's no coincidence that by far the most compelling season of Amazon's All or Nothing was the one that followed the Los Angeles Rams' dismal 2-14 season a couple of years back, or that by far my favourite YouTube discovery has been Todd in the Shadows' One Hit Wonderland: a look at the lives of artists who achieved one thing once and then not a lot else. Nul Points seems like a literary equivalent, as Moore delves into the dark side of the world's biggest talent show. What could it be like to get up there on stage, the hopes of a nation on your shoulders, only for literally millions of folks back home to ignore you completely? Well as it turns out, there are all sorts of tales to be told from before and after the big zero, from some fascinating characters who were determined - perhaps a little too much so - not to let the biggest failure of all define them.
There's Norwegian rock legend Jahn Teigen, the first to score nul points in what is generally considered the contest's modern era after his 1978 braces-twanging, high-kicking, rather tuneless performance of Mil etter mil garnered not a single sympathy vote from across the continent. He went on to form the Norwegian equivalent of Monty Python, is still respected in prog rock circles and now owns a recording studio and a micro-brewery. His is one of the more uplifting stories - in fact, it's really only matched by that of Finland's Timo Kojo, a former punk rocker who, halfway through his anti-nuclear anthem, decided for reasons that are still unclear, to start slapping himself in the face. He thought his final score was a hilarious middle finger to the establishment, although his countrymen, who take Eurovision very, very seriously, didn't agree. Still, that didn't stop him from rising to among Finland's elite; he now part-owns a country club and holds a patent for a floating golf driving range. Because of course. Oh and let's not forget Daníel Haraldsson from Iceland who had barely heard of the contest when he was thrust in at the age of 19, and went on to a successful career as an electronic musician and experimental artist. At the time of interviewing, he lived in a castle in Belgium.
Outside of that trio, things get considerably darker. You have the likes of Lithuania's Ovidijus Vysniauskus, completely nondescript on the stage and off both before and since, Austria's Thomas Forstner, who Moore almost completely failed to even track down, and Turkey's Cetin Alp - the 1983 final remains the only known footage of him performing. For others, it was worse still: rather than fading to obscurity, the likes of Portugal's Celia Lawson and Spain's Remedios Amaya were driven to a personal and financial ruin from which they never really recovered. Switzerland's wonderfully-named Gunvor Guggisberg was at the centre of a savage tabloid storm that left her bankrupt and effectively blacklisted from the entertainment industry: she went from Eurovision in May of 1998 to struggling to get bookings at local fairs by the end of the summer.
And let's not forget the utter travesty that inspired the whole book: the UK letting half a century of complacency get the better of us as Jemini took the stage in Riga in 2003, came in about half an octave flat of the backing track and spent the rest of the song failing to get back into tune... as perfomances go, it's by far the worst of any of these, most of which don't really seem notably bad compared to a lot of what's been out there. Pure and simple, an excruciating listen. Not their fault though - the track was apparently different to what they'd rehearsed with, leading to bizarre claims of sabotage in the wake of Tony Blair's entry into the Iraq conflict.
The worst story, though, would have to be that of Norwegian balladeer Finn Kalvik. A serious player in the Scandanavian folk scene, his 1981 tune Aldri i livet was penned by ABBA's Benny Andersson and featured backing vocals from the group's Anni-Frid Lyngstad; the closest, in fact, the group ever came to reappearing on a Eurovision stage after their 1974 win. In short, it deserved better; it's just impossible to pinpoint exactly why he didn't do better - too sensitive, too quiet, not enough of a show perhaps. In any case, he took the loss very badly: new releases became increasingly sporadic, the live show offers dried up and he was satirised mercilessly on Norwegian TV, all of which led to a self-imposed exile in Thailand, years of alcoholism and depression, and a seething hatred of the media that Moore ultimately feels in full force. It's a pertinent reminder of the human cost of failure and the dangers of competitive judgement of artistic endeavour.
In fact, his early encounter with Kalvik seems to put Moore off the project somewhat - in later chapters he runs out of steam; everything feels a bit more formulaic and hurried, there's less of a scratch beneath the surface of the people and more gleaned from past interviews and articles. Stylistically the prose can be clumsy at times and the witticisms do start to repeat.
But ultimately this is a fascinating insight into one of the world's most unusual events: Moore uncovers a fan community composed of flambouyant spectacle lovers and proper, committed statistics nerds, the latter of which provide a lot of the most interesting (or maybe tragic, I don't even know any more) facts in the book. Like how there is indeed a Scandanavian voting bloc, but Norway have always received far fewer points from their neighbours than they have given out, how national juries must be composed of four men, four women, four of which under 30 and four over, and how U2 bought up the staging of the 2005 contest for a future tour.
3.5/5
Yes, I've listened to all of these songs. Most are just forgettable; the worst by far is Remedios Amaya's godawful, tuneless, caterwauled flamenco-disco monstrosity Quien maneja mi barca? And of course the best is Aldri i livet.
With the tradition of reading a proper, serious book at the start of each new year now firmly in place, I decided that I could put it off no longer. It was time to read, and finish this time, Thomas Pynchon's magnum opus, Gravity's Rainbow. Seven years in the making, it remains the reclusive author's best-known work, a winner of several high-level prizes and a place on Time magazine's list of the top 100 books of the 20th Century.
I'd attempted it a couple of times before, previously getting a whole 8% of the way through (in fairness, the best part of 100 pages) before throwing in the towel. But now I came at it with more focus, more time and a willingness to put off any other books that might tempt me. So was it worth it? Hmmm...
Gravity's Rainbow is a book that, on paper at least, has a lot in common with two of my all-time favourites: Catch-22 and Infinite Jest. It shares the WWII setting and politically satirical ambitions of the former and the post-modernist style, huge cast of characters (over 400 of those) and disparate subject matter of the latter. Length-wise, it sits roughly between the two. So it's not a work to be taken on casually, and it was probably unfair of me to hold it up against them - but either way I found it very hard going from start to finish.
The plot and writing style are not so much twisting as labrynthine; it's effectively designed to get the reader lost, launching haphazardly into tangents and diversions that morph into fully-fledged chapters with no attempt to ever return to the original thread. Characters are firmly established only to disappear without trace for hundreds of pages, plot lines interweave and drift apart without apparent logic or rhythm, and the prose style, lurching from borderline academic literature to stream of consciousness to vernacular ramblings, can be enough to make you want to throw the book out of the window in despair at times. It must be said that things do get better - make it through the first part of four and you get into the groove both in terms of the story (character arcs and motives do start to slide into place) and the language, which is dialled back just enough as to be readable.
And the story, such as it is, is quite a fun one. The book opens at the house of Lt. Geoffrey "Pirate" Prentice in London in 1944, as he catches sight of a German V-2 rocket bomb on its way over the channel. We soon learn that Pirate is a member of a secretive group known as PISCES, employed by the controlling forces behind the war effort due to his ability to read the minds of others - or specifically to inhabit their dreams and fantasies and mould them to his own will. It's an intriguing premise, and one that I would happily have read a whole book on, but I never got the chance because Pynchon abandons Pirate early on, only bringing him back a couple of times much later to move the plot along. Instead, the narrative begins to focus more on Pirate's friend Teddy Bloat, assigned to track the movements of his American colleage Tyrone Slothrop, whose sexual encounters with women seem to be predicting V-2 strikes across London by a couple of weeks. It's from here that the plot really gets going, as Bloat and Slothrop are transported to the South of France, setting into motion a vast chain of events whereby Slothrop starts to get an idea of his real purpose in the war. Is it just paranoia, or has his whole life been under the control of higher powers, carefully calculating his every move for their own benefit? He decides to try to escape, embarking on a meander around immediately post-war Europe that involves plenty of escapades and colourful characters. The plot starts to come together into something of a detective story, as Slothrop decides his goal is to find the mysterious S-Gerät, a device housed in the V-2 rocket with the serial number 00000. There's all sorts of corporate espionage (the real war all along), meetings with the Illuminati and frankly uncomfortably realisitic depictions of the state of Europe around that time.
Again, I would probably have enjoyed a whole book on this plot alone, as Tyrone dashes around getting involved in drug heists, daring escapes from underground bunkers, hot air balloon chases, orgies for the continent's elite and a submarine full of Argentine rebels. Or indeed any of the mid-level sub-plots, like that of Tchitcherine, a depressed and drug-addicted Soviet career soldier trying to decide between the rest of his life in the Soviet zone of Germany or the wastes of Central Asia; or Dutch double-agent Katje Borgesius, a femme fatale for hire going around seducing information out of men; I even enjoyed the story of a lightbulb named Byron doomed never to go out and who tried to lead a global revolution through the world's electricity networks.
But Pynchon just keeps on derailing everything, setting off on endless attempts to break the reader through treatises on patents in the fields of electrical engineering and polymer chemistry (nice try, I understood a depressing amount of that), film studies (ditto), linguistics (three from three and I actually did really like that bit), and yes, a whole lot of things I couldn't get into, from theology and classical philosophy to art history and traditional American folk songs. So while the action sounds like a lot of fun, and is, it always seems to take a back seat to Pynchon's philosophical ramblings on what these long-range missles actually mean for humanity - like how we were always destined to create them, how they're an analogy for the Buddhist mandala and how, as the reader of the book, we're destined to follow the same path with it as the rocket does over the Earth. Yeah... stylistically it all feels a lot older than 1973, but looking at it from that perspective, the date of publication sits about right.
And it's a shame because there are some really brilliant moments. It's a bad choice of book to read on public transport - full of graphic sex and racial slurs and generally unsavoury subject matter - but also prone to genuine laugh-out-loud humour. There are songs and limericks and one-liners all over the places. The best scene: two stoned German drug lords sit blathering on about different strains of weed, when a troop of American soldiers come bursting in demanding to see their papers. The Germans' response completes one of the all-time great 1-2-3 punchlines. Oh, and credit where it's due for more or less tying up all of the plots properly by the end.
But that's not enough to elevate the work as a whole. It seems to be the consensus that the second read is a lot better, but I don't exactly feel compelled to go there - there's just too much slog for the reward, too much thinking involved. I know this is the kind of book I need to keep reading to further my love and appreciation of literature, but that doesn't necessarily mean this book in particular.
Or it can just be summed up by the following five-star review from goodreads.com: THIS BOOK IS ABOUT A MAN IN WW2 HE GETS ERECTIONS. I think Pynchon would have approved of that one. 3/5, although I reserve the right to change that if I ever read it again. And today I learned that this song is directly inspired by this book. Not sure what to do with that information.
There are many ways in which one can commit language to paper, and by far my least favourite of those would have to be poetry. Mostly because no one seems to be any good at it. Unpopular opinion perhaps, but Shakespeare was better at prose. So too was Wordsworth. Keats and Byron are utterly unreadable; as is most of Blake and Milton's work. A term of the WWI poets at school was enough to put me off them, and so much of everything else falls one side of bland, trite or forced. I'm not saying I could do any better, I'm saying that poetry is just extremely hard to do well. And so Shelley, Baudelaire and Christina Rossetti remained about the only poets on my good list. But now Walt Whitman's name can be added.
Leaves of Grass was Whitman's life's work. First publishing in 1855, he revisited the collection up until his death in 1892, during which time it grew from twelve to over 400 pieces. The poems touch on a wide range of topics but there does seem to be a shift over time as Whitman grew older and became more aware of his mortality - earlier poems celebrate the world around us and Whitman's optimistic humanist philosophy, and the achievements of mankind in creating the world's great societies, America among them. Then comes the American Civil War, which perhaps served as something of a loss of innocence for the writer, seeing brother turned against brother, but nonetheless providing opportunities to see small beauties in life. And then as he approaches later life, the tone becomes more reflective and solemn, showing more of an appreciation for the slower moments.
Safe to say, getting through nearly 500 pages of poetry was a task I have never even considered before. It was one I completed - but it was definitely hard going at times. Whitman employs a plodding, lengthy, free verse style that brings to mind the epic poetry of antiquity, and it's coupled with a tendency to labour the point. Several poems devolve into simply listing areas of the US or the world and describing their natural characteristics or the people that inhabit them; it's something he does very well but it comes up repeatedly. Likewise there are odd references that crop up regardless of the context - he seems to love talking about firemen, for example, or the rivers of America. But while it's a slog, at its best it is very good. It's hard not to be caught up in his enthusiasm over the natural beauty of his homeland, and his optimism for the future of humanity. He emphasises that every member of the human race should be considered equal, which was presumably pretty radical given the time and place, and states that modern society and democracy is the world's crowning achievement. I wonder what he'd make of things today.
Whitman's original edition of Leaves of Grass was short because he wanted it to be a book that the reader could carry with them and read in the open air; while I didn't manage that, I did particularly enjoy his appraisal of the natural world. Plus, his shout out to readers hundreds of years in the future did make me smile.
3.5/5
Sometimes it's better just to look on the bright side.
