Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey

While there can be few works quite as remarkably of their time as these Confessions, at the same time it’s a good reminder of the fact that even though zeitgeists, fashions and modes of expression can change hugely, people don’t change much at all. And I’m sure the quirky little work will serve to illustrate that point for many years to come.

I was surprised how little of the composition is actually concerned with opium, but then, the title promises only confessions, not necessarily on the subject that defines he who confesses. The bulk of the slim volume is an autobiography, with some short chapters at the end discussing the pains and pleasures of laudanum consumption, linked by a brief admission that the two parts are linked only tenuously, the opium use of later years inextricably linked to the experiences of youth, they being both a cause for its use and having an effect on the vivid dreams that were its result.

But while some inkling of the mindset of an addict and a vivid impression of some aspects of life in England two centuries ago are inviting aspects of de Quincey’s work, what really fascinates is de Quincey himself, the way his stream-of-consciousness comes tumbling out in a way that makes Virginia Woolf’s prose look most affected, and the way he himself seems totally unaware of his idiosyncrasies. He admits he has less structured his narrative than ‘thought aloud’, and this is exactly right; he chases after tangents like a kitten after an unravelling ball of wool. We hear in great grandiloquent detail Quincey’s thoughts on the piano, and which Roman historian was his favourite, and bizarre episodes like the time a large swell of water in a canal required him and another pedestrian to run away, which he considered one of the only times it is permissible for a 19th-century gentleman to begin a conversation with a lady with whom he is not yet formally acquainted. But then when something really interesting comes along, like his time living in a squalid little flat with some horribly neglected little child, or when he befriends a young prostitute, the details get skipped over and we don’t hear nearly as much as we might like.

But then, that uneven sense of what is and is not important only adds to de Quincey’s perceived character – while his language is beautifully wrought and glazed in the conventions of his era, where broadness of vocabulary and sophistication of grammatical construction were prized, he dances about from subject to subject with a childlike charm that makes him very likeable. And his uneven relationship with his drug, his fear, his adoration, his feelings of being master and uncomprehending subject, make this aspect of him fascinating.

The dense language makes the slim little book quite hard to get through in casual sittings, being much better suited to an extended burst of concentration, and since the Wordsworth Classics edition I read (with the dubious choice of ‘The Death of Chatterton’ for its cover – I know that painting is often pointed to as more erotic than morbid, but he’s still dead and pretty, neither of which de Quincey was at the time!) had no annotations, I felt like a lot I might have learned would take more effort than it was worth to look up, which was a bit of a shame – though not enough for me to actually write them down and look them up. The experience of such a fine character as de Quincey, who proves fiction is often stranger than reality, is enough.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

On the same day that I finished Reading Lolita in Tehran, I had noticed a small leaflet pasted to the clear plastic of the bus-stop outside my home, a short walk from London’s Central Mosque. It called for Muslims to join a protest outside 10 Downing Street against the West’s gross misrepresentation of Islam in the media, in the attack on the faith that has stemmed from the hysterical reaction to the actions of extremists. And it’s undeniable that now must be a hard time to be a Muslim in a Western country. Knowing this, I had to wonder about a book that has spent a remarkable length of time in the New York Times’ bestsellers list, which has at its core a scathing critique of the Islamic regime in Iran by one who lived through its worst excesses. The book, Nafisi’s memoirs of life in Tehran when the revolution came, of being forced to unwillingly don the veil of Islam, yet of defying the regime and setting up a little study group in her own home to read forbidden books of Western decadence by writers like Nabokov, Fitzgerald and Jane Austen, is undeniably fascinating and undeniably a sincere and honest reflection of Nafisi’s impression of life under a brutal and misguided regime, but would I even be reading it if not for the current climate of fear and suspicion around Islam? If not for America’s defensive need to know that the lifestyle of its citizens is so much better than that of the countries of the Middle East?

Perhaps not, but then I should consider myself lucky, for if not for the sensationalistic aspects surrounding this book’s release, I would perhaps never have heard of it. And I must state that it was primarily the reference to Nabokov, perhaps my favourite writer of all time, in the title that drew me to the memoir, rather than its setting.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is essentially built up of two parts. One part is the story of Nafisi’s life, of her time teaching in a university during a period when student ideology suffocated nuance of artistic interpretation, forcing most of her students to either brand anything from the West that features flawed characters as decadent imperialist propaganda, or to rally against this opinion and veer in the other direction, to a time when the revolutionaries have gained power and morality squads are permitted to arrest and flog any woman who lets her hair show, who laughs too loudly. The other part is her literary criticism of Western writers, in particular Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen, all of whom get a section that centres on their writing. Nafisi is quick to apply the lessons these writers can tell us to her own situation – for example, the monstrous Islamic Republic becomes equated with Nabokov’s ‘dragon’ Humbert Humbert, the female citizens with Lolita: like the young victim, they are captured, made to embody an image that exists only in the mind of one who does not fully understand them.

However, because of the predominance of such comparisons, readers looking for close reading are likely to be disappointed. Nafisi is a consummate academic, living and breathing the words of writers past and present, but this is not an academic work. Nothing she says about Lolita or Invitation to a Beheading is anything beyond superficial, anything that shows any deeper understanding that can be gleaned from a cursory read. But perhaps simplification is necessary when the audience is not necessarily familiar with the subject.

While it is not necessary, it’s a good idea to read the work of the above-mentioned writers before dipping into Nafisi’s world. For example, The Great Gatsby is one of those books I’ve long intended to read, but never have. While Nafisi contextualises everything she says so that her points were coherent, there will be few surprises left for me when I come to read the book.

Essentially, Nafisi’s work is structured around these writers because that is such a great part of who she is. She is an academic and a teacher of English Literature, to the extent that everything is coloured by the pigments of the novels she reads. The real story here is of her life, of how she lived through the oppression of a regime she did not agree with, until she finally left for America ten years ago, just as the power of the Ayatollahs was waning. But all great memoirs are built out of the characters of their creators, and as well as a wilful, generous, brave and slightly winsome woman who writes in a simple and journalistic prose that is easily understood and peppered with bits of imagery so obvious that the platitudes actually become quite sweet, Nafisi is a great lover of literature, so necessarily that love must be represented in her novel. A remarkable work, over and above suggestions of it being a propaganda tool, a spyhole through which voyeuristic Westerners can peer to assure themselves of their own supremacy, it is an honest and straightforward sketch of a life lived in a terrifying but fascinating time, one that any reader will almost certainly find rewarding – and encourage you to dig out the trusty old Henry James volumes from the bottom of that pile of unread books, too!

(originally written 31.8.07)

Dom Casmurro by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

Dom Casmurro by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

While I confess to being almost totally ignorant of literature written in Portuguese, despite taking some pride in being fairly widely-read, I can at least place a large portion on the blame on the Western canon, and take a modicum of vindication from the fact that I’ve now read one of Brazil’s most famous books, Dom Casmurro, and placed it very high on my list of favourite ever novels. It’s most certainly in my top ten, somewhere.

What is most incredible about Machado de Assis’s charming little story is that it was first published in 1899, but – only in very small part thanks to a sprightly translation – reads like the most modern of novels. I don’t just mean it has a colloquial style; its short chapters, flawed and fascinating narrator and constant playful digressions are a long way ahead of their time. This book needs to find its way into global consciousness, because it deserves it.

The story is simple, indeed, plays off certain genre expectations and predictable developments in a very postmodern way. A boy called Bento is destined to be a priest, but a childhood sweetheart gets in the way, and the two young lovebirds, along with one of Bento’s friends from the Seminary, form various plans to release Bentinho from an ecclesiastical life. Finally he is released and marries the girl, Capitu, and they grow up and raise a family. All is well until Bento begins to notice that his son looks less like him and rather more like his best friend…

Machado de Assis is a supremely competent writer, his references to Shakespeare and Tacitus showing his learning while his willingness to mock his own poetic ideas keep him grounded and entirely unpretentious. He follows the slightest tangents and purposefully makes Bento scatterbrained, telling readers that the current chapter really should have been before the last one, that he wrote a certain word but then crossed it out, that he has to pick up the pace because he’s running out of paper. Subtly, much more subtly even than in Pale Fire, we come to realise that despite Bento’s apparent self-belief, he also claims not to have the best memory, and the things he’s expecting us to believe aren’t really backed up by anything more than his personal impressions and convictions; however, since his whimsical ways are so endearing, a kind of familiarity with Bento can come into being that has its peer with very few narrators, and that makes his interactions with the son he grows to fear and despise all the more shocking.

Machado de Assis’ other books are now most definitely on my reading list.

Going Postal

I forgot yesterday to write about finishing Going Postal, which was the first time since…well, about 1991 that I read one of the Discworld books out of order (not counting re-reading). And that’s only because I got in into my had that I’d already read it before I read Making Money, for some reason. Rather wish I’d read them in the proper order, too, for of the two rather samey Von Lipwig books, Going Postal is far better. Its final turn is a little weak, building itself up to be a devastatingly clever and unpredictable twist, only to be a rather simple and ineffective one…and the problem of the backlog of letters was dealt with in a rather unsatisfactory way. Otherwise, though, it was much more interesting, introducing clever new ideas, centring on more interesting characters and having an antagonist who actually seems a threat, which was rather the problem with Making Money.

Perhaps more so than other Pratchett books I’ve read recently, there seemed to be a bit more of the old acerbic venom of his older books, a little shade of anger, and not just always been a loveable old eccentric. I enjoy Pratchett when he’s cleverly distorting real-world, usually very English, institutions. And the Von Lipwig books seem to exist to focus on those – the postal service vs the Internet, the concept of currency, and the cult of celebrity. The man is very clever and has been the one novelist I’ve consistently followed since I was eight or nine years old, and I’ve either read or possess in order to read shortly, every novel he’s ever read. I can’t even say that for Nabokov or Tolkien.

The Satanic Verses

I finished The Satanic Verses last night. I’m sure that retrospectively, I’ll feel much more affection for this book than I did reading it, unless I’ve managed to get that idea so ingrained now that I always remember it first and foremost. There were undoubtedly some ideas of great brilliance here, and Rushdie has a pleasing writing style, a self-effacing grandiloquence, a way with words that suggests he has a mastery of the language but a modesty that allows him to mock himself and therefore prevent a wall being constructed between wright and reader. Nabokov has the same gift, but for his contemporary audience; The Satanic Verses was written in the 80s, and aside from some cardboard, slang-spouting teenagers, still has a certain degree of ‘hipness’.

The story is simple – if fantastical – and yet also convoluted. Two Indian men, both actors – one a brash movie star with heaps of arrogance and pride, the other a voice actor who’s spent his entire life trying to hide his heritage and fit in with the English he feels are to be venerated, even if the youth are spoiling the country’s proud heritage – are involved in the terrorist hijacking of a plane. After bonding, to a degree, during their captivity, they somehow survive the midair explosion and in plummeting to Earth, are transformed, characteristics to a degree swapped – the film actor Gibreel Farishta into the archangel who inspired his name, and the voice actor Saladin Chamcha (née Salahudin Chamchawala) into a demon. Then begins the protracted and uninteresting main portion of the book, in which Gibreel has fantasies of various stories of the archangel’s influence, like inspiring an entire village to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca, a minor story whose story-book ending is the perhaps the low point of the novel, and begins to think himself an angel searching for his powers and redeeming sinners while most around him think him merely delusional, while Saladin grows horns and a tail and is forced to hide inside the soap opera of an Indian family living in a café, where tradition and spirited youths intoxicated by Western concepts of freedom clash (and we’re supposed to accept that horns and halos could become feasible everyday fashion accessories), also getting mixed up in some very over-exaggerated political situations. This part is protracted and disjointed, and it’s hard to care about old ladies who see visions of invading armies only to be forgotten, and while Allie’s ascent of Everest was interesting to read about and justified when her character becomes a major part of the story, it could have had an equal impact at half the length.

The highlight of this part of the book is Gibreel’s visions of himself appearing to the prophet ‘Mahound’, giving a social and religious context to the Muhammad story with remarkable realism. It is this part that resulted in the fatwa against Rushdie and all the resultant criticism. It centres on the relationship between Muhammad and the sceptical poet Baal, first with Muhammad struggling against a polytheistic society with only a handful of followers, and later with Muhammad a powerful leader whose bloodthirsty underlings force Baal to seek refuge in a harem. It is the portrayal of Muhammad as a cold-hearted businessman, a sell-out who accepted false gods to get a foothold in the theocracy, only to retract his words later, and even as a liar who was claiming divine inspiration only to put himself above question – whose angel appeared at very convenient times to lay very convenient laws – which is understandably controversial. It seemed to me that a little more balance may have been preferable, but perhaps that would have undermined the purpose of the segments, and would have been difficult from Baal’s point of view.

The last part of the book is the worthwhile part, the conclusion of the pilgrims’ story aside. Here our main characters’ stories become truly significant, and once again it is the green-eyed monster that drives the plot, with Saladin cleverly and eerily sowing the seeds of Gibreel’s downfall. The very end is a little flat, and I don’t know why we need to have such a frank and detailed depiction of human decline just to make the point that one can die contented without believing in God, but the machinations and the execution of the plan, as well as how it ties into the title, is done with skill.

Ultimately, a book I’m glad I read, and certainly validated in stylistic terms, but it was frustrating, trepanning for gold when there was really too much sludge.

I think I’ll take a break with something nice and light. Philip Reeve’s cutesy steampunk-flavoured Larklight, then The Kite Runner, then some more silly fantasy, and then after that Anna Karenina?

Allan Stein by Matthew Stadler

Matthew Stadler didn’t give me much reason to read another one of his books after the flamboyant but hollow mess of The Sex Offender, but this book had a far better concept, tied to actual historical figures. It is the story of a teacher who loses his job after allegations of molesting a student (an idea that hadn’t occurred to him until he was accused, but which he actually undertakes once he knows he’s going to lose his job anyway, his attentions being ironically what turns the surly and miserable adolescent that his parents assumed was being abused into the happy boy they always wanted). His friend who works in a museum, Herbert, is interested in some paintings of Gertrude Stein’s nephew Allan, who may be the boy who modelled for Picasso’s famous ‘Boy Leading a Horse’, but isn’t very eager to go to Paris chasing it and agrees to let his friend go in his place, assuming his name. But the host family in France includes a beautiful fifteen-year-old boy called Stéphane, who is enchanting.

The first half of this book is really outstanding. The florid and poetic prose of The Sex Offender is hung around a clever, solid and believable, if highly ironic, plot. You realise that although portions of the book are indeed ‘pure pornography’, the boys are peripheral, filtered, objectified, much like Lolita: the adult seducing the youth tries to force them to be something they are not and they resist. At first, it is frustrating, reading about these supposed love affairs that are little more than sex and patronisation, with no actual connection between individuals, no love, but you soon realise that is the point, that it is the flaw of our protagonist, and the way Allan is peripheral and controlled by the desires of others and thus ends up a fairly pitiable figure reflects directly on what happens to the boys in the story.

However, in the second half the idea meanders. The actual scenes of seduction are fairly laughable, especially the one with the guitar. Ultimately, while showing hollow love affairs makes a strong point, they are uninteresting to read, and everything else in between, the abortive attempts to chase an obscure historical figure, feel like padding.

A gifted writer and a very good idea, but ultimately the story falls short of its potential and ends in a way that may be quite clever, but which is ultimately unsatisfying.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Like most British children, I grew up knowing the characters of gentle Mole, brash Toad, firm old Badger and the more forgettable, everyman Rat. The characters appeared on the periphery of my attention, speeches in drama classes being derived from dramatisation, BBC animated adaptations occasionally being replayed early in the mornings, simplified versions of the book lying about unread. But I had never actually picked up and read the book until I decided to on a whim back in uni. I began going to sports clubs less frequently in Cambridge, which meant I bathed less there, which finally meant that I didn’t finish the book until now. And I’m extremely glad I read it.

Grahame is just a very good, incredibly modern writer who expertly writes four instantly-recognisable characters. Crucially, though, he does not make his animals loveable and without fault, but rather flawed, silly and bumbling sorts, who have layers of complexity to them, so that the mild-mannered mole may be devious or selfish, the harmless Toad may genuinely be quite vicious, or the paternal badger may not always say the right thing. And most of all it is Ratty who grows and changes over the course of the book, from somewhat boring but well-meaning fellow to a really admirable and caring individual. Milne adapted the story for the stage, but while he may have had a better grasp of humour and innocence, his world certainly didn’t have the nuance or complexity of Grahame’s.

This is not to say that the humour here is lacking. It is abundant, and quite brilliant. Toad’s adventures are the most immediately funny, the undermining of his absurd puffery always entertaining, and there is one outstanding moment where the comedy jump-cut is pre-empted in the literary world by quite some years (though if there is a precedent I do not know), as an indiscretion immediately leads into a courtroom scene. There are many laughs to be had, though, and a great deal of warm smiles at expressions of friendship.

Even with all this praise, though, the book would have been a solid, well-written and deftly characterised little novel with just the right, loose balance between portraying its characters as humans and as animals, but for the fact that all of a sudden, the chapter ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ hits the reader directly in the centre of the forehead with such implacable force that the work becomes unforgettable. What a magnificent piece of writing, in the centre of a generally conventional little children’s story. The powerfully poetic descriptive passages, the mysticism, the hallucinogenic strangeness that no doubt inspired Pink Floyd to name their first album after the chapter, and the feeling afterwards of having been transported somewhere wholly unexpected and unsettling will stay with me always. Grahame flexes literary muscles and shows a strength that I could never have anticipated.

Without that, the book is a warm and nostalgic children’s classic. With it, it becomes something I greatly respect.