Nathan Hobby’s blog

First this blog degenerated into Nathan’s reading journal, and then no posts at all. I’m sorry. It’s all been happening at my other blog, because a lot of my thinking and attention has been tied up with faith and theology.

I started rereading Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, because it was once a favourite book, but I didn’t finish it and I can’t explain why. Then I didn’t finish Richard Ford’s Men and Women either, and I can’t explain that either.

I read two chapters of G.K. Chesterton’s St Francis of Assissi, but I didn’t like that at all. It’s something his tone - I get this in a number of books written in the first half of the twentieth century - that is so condescending, as if the reader wants to be lectured. He spends those chapters explaining what sort of biography he mustn’t write. It was written for the ‘layperson’ and I got the impression he wanted to give the layperson a good piece of his mind. I just wanted to know about St Francis, thanks. (And I don’t even like your detective stories.)

And now I picked up the Arabian Nights in this old companion volume that is just beautiful. If you flip it around, it’s got Aesop’s Fables on the other side. And the binding page is this sixties wallpaper style. The Arabian Nights are enchanting me. What sheer and beautiful craziness! A doctor lets his head get cut off and then talks back to the king after his head’s cut off to get his revenge. There’s fish which start talking when they get cooked and there’s all these interwoven repeating variations on themes, like the delay of death due to the telling of a story.

And Sinbad borrows from the Odyssey to tell the story of his escape from a Cyclops. I’m sure there’s an interesting story behind that.

I’ve stared reading Randolph Stow’s The Merry Go Round in the Sea. I can’t remember why I stopped reading it four years ago. I knew then that it was brilliant, but for some reason I didn’t have the energy.

His prose is exquisite; it’s amazing that such a brilliant writer has written about Western Australia, has walked these same streets as me. He evokes childhood with this preciseness of sensation and experience.

I feel sad thinking about Stow. He wrote four or five brilliant novels before he was thirty and then only a handful since. I wonder what happened. Why did he stop? Did he discover there were more important things to do? Or did his muse flee him?

A family legend has it that his grandmother boarded with my great-grandmother for a time. I must find out precise details from my Granny. I feel honoured to have a connection to him.

I’m re-reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement ahead of the release of the film on Boxing Day. It’s an exquisite treat. Each sentence is so well constructed, so revealing of some truth of experience, that I feel guilty reading it quickly. It’s like an extremely expensive meal that can’t even be replicated if you had the money: there are only a couple of books this good in the whole world and you can only read them so many times.

McEwan, my second favourite writer, and Auster, my first favourite writer, will both be speaking at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival. And I won’t be there. Like a fool, I hesitated, scared to ask for time off work when I was just starting a new job, and the event is sold out. It feels like a dream that first they could be speaking at the same event in the same country as me and second that I missed out.

I could feel it coming for a while. My progress was slowing. Each page was becoming a mini-marathon in itself. I was forcing myself to pick it up again. And then, halfway through p. 283 in the Penguin Classics edition, I realised I didn’t have to do this any longer. I don’t have to pour another 60 hours into finishing this brick. I can just let it go.

So I just let it go.

It’s not that it’s an undeserving book. I understand why it’s so important. Indeed, I didn’t realise how astute Dickens is, I didn’t realise his knack for catching personality and mood.

It’s probably just that I’m a bad reader. I’m impatient. I like narrative drive. DC  has little narrative drive. It ambles, it meanders.

Plus I’m having vision problems which make reading either a page or a computer screen difficult.

Reading David Copperfield I feel like I understand my grandparents better. Dickens’ England seems closer to their worldview than my own - which seems remarkable, given they were born fifty years after he died in a different country. Mr Murdstone and Miss Murdstone believe in ‘firmness’ above everything else. Manners dominate everything. Order is the most important thing.

The perfect book?

The first time I read it in 2001, every word seemed perfect. A beautiful parable without a word out of place. This time, it wasn’t perfect; some sentences jarred, the novel didn’t absorb me to the same degree.

I think a novel can only ever be perfect for a particular time and place. For one reading only.  And yet with this said, I still loved this novel.

Plot and commentary 

Compared to most novels, the plot is easy to remember; maybe this is why the term ‘parable’ seems appropriate. Here’s the plot with commentary (you might want to look away):

Jim Nashe comes into an inheritance just after his wife leaves him. He leaves his job as a firefighter and starts driving across America in a new car. He loves the freedom, encapsulated in the car with classical music at full volume.

But the money begins to run out when he picks up a hitch-hiker, a plucky young man named Jack Pozzi. Pozzi is a professional poker player, and he has a game the next night at the house of two eccentric millionaires who aren’t very good at cards. It should be easy money, and Nashe puts up his last $10 000 on a whim.

The millionaires are Flower and Stone, and they came into their money through a lottery win. I noticed for the first time the obvious parallelism - Flower and Stone forced into partnership because of good luck and, after they lose the money and then the car and then go into debt, Pozzi and Nashe forced into partnership because of bad luck.

Back up a moment. Stone has built a miniature city. It is a place of both whimsy and menace. Everything looks nostalgic, a little boy is eating an icecream on the street, but in the prison a prisoner is being executed by firing squad. There is a menacing justice in the miniature city.

(Nashe leaves the card room to look at the city; he picks out the tiny figures of Stone and Flower and keeps them. Later, Pozzi pinpoints this as the point when he started to lose. When Nashe smashed up the instruments of reality. Nashe responds by burning the two models. After this, things get worse.)

Flower and Stone extend the mixture of whimsy and menace to Nashe and Pozzi. To pay off their debt, they have to build a stone wall. The stones are the ruins of a castle the millionaires have transported from Europe. The menace comes when their supervisor begins to wear a gun and when they realise there is no way out - a huge fence blocks their way.

I’ve been thinking of Pozzi and Nashe building that wall. It’s a comforting image when I’m not enjoying work. (Which is quite a lot lately.)
 

The endings 

I find it fascinating that Auster has released into the world two official versions of the ending. In the book version, the story ends with Nashe driving into an oncoming truck when he is given a chance to drive his car again in celebration of finishing. There is little doubt that he is about to die.

In the film version, he survives the crash and is picked up the next morning by a passing driver (played by Paul Auster). It echoes strongly with Nashe picking up a badly bruised Pozzi earlier in the novel.

When I was ten, I got given a discarded library book. Unusually for me, I can’t remember its title or author.  Sometime in the 1990s, my mum threw it out. I would dearly love to find it again; I think about it at least once a week.

The plot went something like this: a young tourist (possibly Australian or English) goes to a small town (possibly in Italy or Greece). He starts having strange feelings and strange memories. He is drawn to a particular grave in the cemetery. The date of death of the man buried there is his own date of birth. He is then drawn to a house. An old woman lives there. He tells the woman that she is his mother. The woman doesn’t believe him; her son has been dead for years. He says that when he was a boy growing up in this house, he hid something he stole behind a loose brick. He goes to the brick, removes it and finds the object (whatever it is) and the woman bursts into tears.

I don’t remember the rest. There is something about a motorbike. Perhaps he died in a motorbike accident?

The cover has a skull on it? (Maybe)

It’s a small paperback, at most eighty pages. It was written for teenagers? Children?

Do you know what it’s called? Please, please put me out of my wondering.

The first list I paid any attention to was this one from Modern Library, released in 1998. In 2002, I was intimidated by how many my friend Tim had read and how many I hadn’t. Now a couple of times a year I read books from the list. It has been widely criticised because of its lack of women writers and its American focus. Fair criticisms - it is really a list of the 100 greatest American male novels written before 1960, with a couple of extras.

I only recently discovered how the list was chosen, and it made me like it less - nine writers were asked which, of a list of 400 books (published in the Modern Library) they would recommend. The books were ranked by numbers of recommendations.

That is a very limiting way to make a list! And yet I’ve made some amazing discoveries from the lists - books which have become favourites of mine, including John Updike’s Rabbit series; John Cheever’s Wapshot Chronicles and Graham Greene’s The heart of the matter.

I think the Board’s choice of James Joyce’s Ulysses as number one is a good one. It is one of my favourite novels, and an incredible literary accomplishment. I think it shows what it is to be alive better than anything else written in the twentieth century.

I have now at least begun reading 42 of the books, up from 25 back in 2002.

Being aware of the list’s limits, I would recommend it. (But you should totally ignore the Readers’ List. It is a victim of vandalism by fans of Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard etc - internet freaks who think distorting the list will make more people read their crazy books. They’re probably right.)

http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html

I spend a lot of time looking over lists of the greatest books ever written. I take notice of award winners. I listen to critics.

Unpopular things. My friends regard me as either stupid or obsessive.

 But critical opinion does matter. Critics are generally good readers who have read a lot and have informed opinions. I tend to enjoy highly recommended books. There are times I don’t; there are a number of critical darlings I just can’t abide - but I certainly have a good success rate.

They are subjective - but that doesn’t make them just a matter of taste. The amazing things about humans is our ability to share language and taste through the medium of culture. The books on many of the ‘greatest’ lists compiled have managed to appeal to many people for many years. So they might appeal to you too.

I’m going to start a series of posts on different lists available and how I’ve found them.

It’s so cliched to like Tim Winton. He’s the only Australian novelist most people have heard of. As soon as I tell people I’m a novelist, they ask if I’m going to be the next Tim Winton. I’m never sure quite how to answer that.

Well, I used to answer it by being anti-trendy - disliking Tim Winton’s work and anything else that was trendy, anything that was read comfortably in suburban bookclubs, anything that the general population liked. I enjoyed being the only person in the world who didn’t like Tim Winton’s work.

But this was based on reading The Riders when I was fourteen and Lockie Leonard when I was eighteen.

Then in 2002 I begrudgingly read Cloudstreet, and had to admit it was excellent. (I read it again two years later.) I then went on and read Dirt Music and The Turning. When I read the Turning, I had to repent completely and admit to admiring Winton immensely. It is a brilliant book, with a clean lyricism that his other work doesn’t have. (The thing I like least about Winton is what most people like most - the vernacular, slangy writing.)

I also had to change my mind a lot when I discovered that he was deeply influenced by my favourite theologian - John Howard Yoder, the Anabaptist. I’ve written two simplified versions of Yoder’s work and was amazed that another Western Australian writer admired him.

So, I’d actually really like to have a conversation with Tim. And my opportunity came when a couple swapped tickets with Nicole and I at the Australian String Quartet because the wife had a cough and wanted to be at the back. I was promoted to the second row. A couple came in just before it started and were confused by the numbering. I said to the man, ‘You’ve got the right seat.’ He said, ‘Thanks, mate.’

And then I realised it was Tim Winton.

I spent the performance rehearsing what to say to him. I didn’t want to sound like one more wanna be writer who wants to talk to Tim Winton (ie “I’m a writer too”). But neither did I want to sound conceited (ie “I’m a prize winning novelist too - not the Booker, mind.”). And I didn’t want to talk to him because he was famous - I wanted to talk to him because he was interested in Yoder and wrote good books.

I thought of how he was such a private person and seemed to hate all the publicity. I thought of all the idiots that try to introduce themselves to him.  And with my heart thumping away at the end of the performance, I kept silent and watched him walk away.