Survey Test

8. 'The Assistant' by Bernard Malamud (1957)

8 books in, and the first truly memorable book. When finishing, this was a book I was deeply upset to have finished reading, with a conclusion that was fantastically fitting yet unexpected, true to the book and yet revealing deeper meanings within the seemingly simple writing style of it.

What makes me all the more euphoric about its charms is that it was near impossible to find. It's out of print and after searching at least 10 second hand bookshops, I finally managed to track down a copy in November at the Amnesty Book Fair in Blackheath. It was especially dramatic, having searched for books for well over an hour and doing a second search around, it was lying beneath a few other potential gems. I did a mini triumphant thrust and then felt suitably ashamed. The book cost £1. My wife still hasn't left me.

The book itself focuses on a Jewish Polish immigrant in 1950's Brooklyn, when the area represented poverty rather than hipsterdom, and his struggles running a store. A young west coast Italian holds up the store and in order to redeem himself becomes an assistant in the store, with seemingly positive results.

There's an incredible complexity and subtlety to the book, with revelations affecting one's attitude especially to Frankie Alpine, the Italian.

As with Another Country, I'm sure there was some relief that the writing was accessible with minimal style, and this is certainly the most accessible book. But it remains intelligent all the way through. The scenarios reminded me a little of Paul Auster, whose books I always enjoy (though I have not been able to keep up with).

Anyways, having seen a solid production of 'A View from the Bridge' I can without hesitation say that The Assistant should really be the story that captures the 1950's immigration story. If only Malamud had been married to Marilyn Monroe. Let's do this Hollywood, reclaim this story. It worked for Malamud's 'The Natural', which my friend Dan Fooks (worst segue way ever?) has watched more than 10 times.

Finished all the A's, 1/11th through this project. Let's do this!

7. 'Ape and Essence' by Aldous Huxley (1948)

7th book in and the first repeat author. From a first look it doesn't seem like there are too many authors that have managed to get two books into the list, and Burgess has chosen another of Burgess' lesser known novels. Though beyond Brave New World and The Doors of Perception (are there really still people intrigued by Jim Morrison in 2012?) it appears that Huxley's books have little lasting power in book stores. This required another epic search, and was only found on a day of specific search round bookshops in west London, and the amazing Slightly Foxed bookshop on Gloucester Road, which is so fantastically organised and deeply cared for with friendly staff, had a well-conditioned hardcover copy for £6.

Anyways, I liked the book already in that it was less than 150 pages. After Durrell and Mailer's epics, it was nice to balance this with something more direct.

The book's structure is also unique, in that after the first 20 pages providing a context for the fictional deceased screenwriter, it presents his rejected screenplay over the next 100 or so pages without notes or additional context. I loved it, except I would say that Huxley has a very loose concept of a screenplay, with next to no dialogue and long passages with descriptive prose. It's a fascinating screenplay though, and hopefully some eccentric millionaire will finance it or at least some porn parodist will once visualise the mutant orgy season that part of the book focuses on.

I couldn't help but think that people responsible for Planet of the Apes read through this in some way, seeing as it covers some of the same concepts.

Anyways, it was an interesting premise and a satisfying read.

Ranking Burgess' 99 January 2012:

1. Another Country

2. Ancient Evenings

3. After Many A Swan

4. The Alexandria Quartet

5. Ape and Essence

6. The Anti-Death League

7. The Aerodrome

6. 'The Anti-Death League' by Kingsley Amis (1968)

After hugely enjoying Another Country, this was a return to an exercise in style. No sense of historical time, multiple characters and somewhat unexplained threads of narrative are present within the book, which is often funny and has moments of interest but is seldom fulfilling.

Perhaps the slight disappointment of the book came from the fact that it once again required a crusade in order to get a copy. And I cheated a little, seeing through the web that the Ripping Yarns bookshop in North London had a copy. It's a really charming bookshop, finding a balance between organisation but with enough of a mess for one to feel like they could find a cheap gem. Unfortunately, I had to cough up £12.50 for the book, a fair price considering it's clearly quite rare and in great shape, but anything over £10 makes me feel like I'm a book collector, which is a territory I don't really want to enter. Anyways, go to Ripping Yarns!

The mention of the Anti-Death League itself is fantastic, a league with a crusade of looking at the poor points of death, but this is something brought into the book quite late on and is used more as a basis for spying on one another rather than explored. There is also quite a touching storyline between our main protagonist Churchill and his new girlfriend, but again this appears secondary to wider ideas.

I have to confess that I struggled to grasp these and this is the first time that Burgess' own review of the book was of assistance: the book essentially attacks the concept of religion, and in this sense it is a fantastic and admirable book. Just not the most enjoyable to read...

Ranking Burgess' 99 January 2012:

1. Another Country

2. Ancient Evenings

3. After Many A Swan

4. The Alexandria Quartet

5. The Anti-Death League

6. The Aerodrome

5. 'Another Country' by James Baldwin (1962)

 That's right, I'm now 1/20th of the way into this project, which is further than I ever thought I would get. And if I needed motivation to continue, and after two epics about Egypt that I admired but didn't really enjoy, then this novel was it.

This is my favourite novel of the ones so far, and I think it might be because it is the most straightforwardly written. I think this might be like the time I saw this film 'Kopps' at the Rotterdam Film Festival. The Rotterdam Film Festival, which is up there with the best things that Rotterdam has to offer, is pretty notorious for screening a whole bunch of 'difficult' films and offering few compromises in terms of films with American stars. I would try to see a good 10-12 films most years, and pretty much every one of them would be about some kind of taboo and tend to end with the main character dying or in despair. ANYWAYS, there was a Swedish comedy called Kopps that played one year and I went to see it with my buddies Bart and Sjoerd. I'm not sure I ever laughed so much at a film screening, and the rest of the sold-out audience were in fits of laughter. When I watched it a year later, having downloaded it and had to download some weird English subtitle device because it wasn't available commercially, the film stunk. It was as dumb as can be. Adam Sandler bought the rights to re-make the film in English. That dumb. The point is that the film was clearly such a relief from all the misery and difficult arthouse tendencies of the other films that this film Kopps was as much a relief as anything else, and the point of this point is that I may just love any books that tells a story in a straightforward way because it will be such a relief from all these other difficult Burgess books. Maybe this whole exercise will lead me to love Dean Koontz novels.

I'd like to think, however, that Another Country is actually a great book. And it's definitely not dumb, with lots of complex and conflicted characters, and dealing with issues of race and sexuality as fluid concepts. At times there were a few twists too many in terms of the various characters emotional disintegration, but these are never obvious or cliched.

A really enjoyable, dare I say it, page-turning novel.

Oh, I bought this in Kinsale (a lovely town) at Bookstor (a lovely bookshop). It stocks predominantly new books but, as all bookshops should do, there was a collection of second-hand books available. Hard cover and the sleeve fell apart as I read it, but such a great find.

Here's a little excerpt from the audio book (it's read by some dude from The Wire. Yeah!)

Ranking Burgess' 99 December 2011:

1. Another Country

2. Ancient Evenings

3. After Many A Swan

4. The Alexandria Quartet

5. The Aerodrome

4. 'Ancient Evenings' by Norman Mailer (1983)

The problem with reading these alphabetically, apart from it revealing a slightly disturbing personal fascination of not needing to make decisions, is that there can be a slightly unfortunate pattern of books. In this case, following a quartet of books amounting to 1,000 pages about 20th century Egypt with a 700 page novel about ancient Egypt.

For the first time, I managed to get one of the books from my list from the library, more specifically the John Harvard Library. Libraries rule, kindles drool.

I was slightly anxious about the idea of reading Norman Mailer, having only known him as a cultural commentator. And while I enjoyed his reading of the Ali-Foreman fight in the great documentary When We Were Kings, I've always been a little creeped out of his attitude towards women. Don't know much about it, not for me to judge, just always found him a little arrogant.

However, I have to say that 'Ancient Evenings' is amazingly written, grounding the most ridiculous magical spells with a realism that keeps the characters and their relationships in focus. The first 'book' (the novel is divided into 7 books) is especially enthralling, as we come across a very confused soul seeking a way out a tomb. It's mysterious and fantastical. Unfortunately, while there remains a real poetry in his writing, it becomes a more conventional evening of Menenhetet telling stories from his 4 lives.  I'm afraid I found it pretty difficult to always care sufficiently about any of these characters, though I still enjoyed it more than I had any right to as someone who cares so little about ancient civilisations.

I will say though that I'm not sure I've ever read a book over 600 pages that really needed to be that long, and it feels to me like this is another that fits into that category. It's divided into different sections and focuses on different tales, but by the end Mailer rushes through a few centuries towards the end of the book, and you kind of wish that he would just do this with a couple of the stories.

Lots of people have sex in this book too, though perverts beware, a lot of it is between men and is a little creepy. Mailer seems to have real issues to resolve through these sequences, but I'm too dumb to know what these are. No internet research cheating here!

Ranking Burgess' 99 September 2011:

1. Ancient Evenings

2. After Many A Swan

3. The Alexandria Quartet

4. The Aerodrome

While I had subjective problems with the book, it had passages so amazingly written and inventive that, at the moment, it's number 1. I'm sure Mailer just pooped his pants from the excitement that my approval brings.

3. 'The Alexandria Quartet' by Lawrence Durrell (1957-1960)

Dear Mr. Burgess,

In the lengthy process of reading this book, I contemplated the question of when one reads their longest book? I always envisioned it in my head that it would be before 25, forced at university or in the lost years thereafter. Not me man. I wait until you decide to include a four-part Egyptian epic as one of your favourite books written between 1939-1984. I decided about halfway through that I might need to just put this book as the best because I was so proud of my achievement in completing it, kind of like many contemporary film critics still insist that Birth of a Nation is a must-see simply because they managed to stay awake during its tedious 3 hour duration.

Then I realised the problematic technicality that, while you may be to count it as one novel, the title seems to clearly indicate that it is actually 4 books. 4 books with wussy 200 page lengths. Waaahhh. Damn you, Burgess!

By the time I got to Cleo, the fourth book in the quartet, my keenness to embrace the series of books had faded significantly. If Justine was fun, and Balthazar the best and most innovative of the books, playing like a 200 page twist on what Justine revolved around, Mountolive and Cleo were slightly ridiculous soap operas where characters died or did irrational things that felt slightly out of character. I stopped caring and did not really feel that Cleo provided any more of a conclusion than any of the other books.

It has some neat concepts of what truth and reality are and I don't mean to be dismissive of how this might be significant among literature circles, but again Mr. Burgess, I'm too much of a dummy to be able to appreciate this enough that I just keep thinking he might have been able to do the same in about half the time. I just wonder whether by spinning the truth so many times over 4 books it kind of overdoes it- this may have been impressive in your time, but I understood it and eventually got bored with the concept that the narrator gets stuff wrong.

One of my fascinations creeping in has been the idea of how few of these books have been turned into films, and so far it's pretty clear it's because you seem to favour books with a unique literature sensibility, things that cannot be translated onto the screen. An even bigger fascination is seeing the dreadful attempts to try to make films of these books. And when I say seeing, I mean ignoring. Look at this heap of garbage:



While I'm sorry to report that, despite my pride in reading such a long book, I was a little disappointed- I will say that this film is not indicative of the book at all. I can't even imagine any of the characters in the book fitting into a film.

Anyways Mr. Burgess, I might write a sequel to this review where everything I have said turns out to be untrue maaaaaaaannnnnn. Melt your brains with my uber-sophistication.

Until then though, I'm putting a second-rate Huxley novel above it. Controversial, I know. Am sure the Lawrence Durrell society will come round and beat me soon.

Regards,

A faithful reader