The Book of Dave - Will Self, War & Peace - Tolstoy

It's always difficult when you're reading a book that is more or less, begrudgingly, keeping your attention, but you know with that sinking feeling in your heart that you don't want to read any more, that it just isn't doing it for you, and it's a purgatory to continue. It's not the same as when you read something that you take an instant dislike to in a few  pages and then put it down - I'm talking here about having put some considerable investment in the reading, maybe a quarter of the way through maybe even a half way through, and although its "OK", although the writing is "good" you know that you don't want to continue any more. Especially now - sixty years old, so many more books to read, maybe not even enough time to reread all the re-reads that you want to encounter again. So it is with Will Self's Book of Dave. I've tried to read it twice now. Twice! I'm giving up this second attempt before I even got as far as I did in the last one.  It's  because I just haven't got the interest in the story . He is a great writer, his language bounces off the page in satisfying nuggets, but I just don't care for the narrative, I really don't care that much what happens, there isn't a hook pulling me through. I guess I'm still stuck in the ordinary novel, stuck in dreamy reading where you are transported into something. 

So I'm re-reading War & Peace, the quintessential big novel, for the third time - why? Well the TV series obviously. And because there was probably so much that I missed last time, and I can't remember any of the detail - I mean I first read it in the Pyrenees in 1978 in a long indian summer turning to autumn, underneath an almond tree, on the alternate days when I wasn't picking grapes on the mountainside. And the second time? I can't remember, probably twenty years ago - maybe the late nineties? So I finished the first volume (I've got an old Folio edition, different from the Constance Garnett translation that I still have in the original paperback from the 1970s, although the only thing I'm noticing is that the German characters are depicted as talking in "foreign accents", a kind of "vat do ve have veer" touch that I don't really appreciate)). It's still breathtakingly good. It is weird reading it after watching the new TV series as all the pictures in my head are from the TV, but then I kind of drill down into the detail of the sentences and get something different - a more fine grained intelligence perhaps, or a difference in emphasis.

Essentially I am ending up with a bastardized complex mish-mash of the interpretation of the TV series, my interpretation, the translation. Tolstoy seems to survive this mangling but it make me think about how much our surroundings and our feelings permeate and filter what we take from what we read. Is that what makes a great novel - something that can withstand all the interpretive pressure we bring to it and stil stand out on its own? And maybe that's why I can't finish The Book of Dave, I'm too caught up in wanting to have it my way, to get some kind of self-regarding sustenance and wisdom out of the book without being pushed too far. 

A Man in Love: My Struggle book 2 - day upon day

I've taken just to highlighting passages in  Karl Ove on my Kindle, often without any comment as they speak so clearly for themselves. It's easy then just to view my notes and marks from the menu and zip through looking for the passage I want.  That too is an eye opener because I realise how many passages I have marked that i have simply forgotten about.  That's not say that I wouldn't remember them if I had the right stimulus, but it emphasizes how much i forget, even from books that I have ready many times. War & Peace is probably a bad example, being a very long book (do I really need to say that - isn't War & Peace just synonymous with "very long book"), but when I ask myself - "What do you remember?" - and I have read it at least twice (is it three times?? why can't I remember that?), the first thing I think of is the Count having a dressing gown made of red squirrel fur.  I don't even know if that is from the book, or from a snippet about Tolstoy's life.  To be fair it is some time since I even reread it - and the first time was the Constance Garnett translation that I heaved all round France for three months and finally read in a little village in the Pyranees while working the vendange.  I have this melange of impressions - running away (or into?) battle, the socially awkward Pierre, a bet where someone drank a bottle of vodka standing on a window ledge, the Princess's stiff father, a Prince and an estate.  But here isn't much else there, it's like a forgotten faded BBC costume drama remembered for its period detail and production values.  I do better with Anna Karenina, which is not really about Anna Karenina, it's about Tolstoy, having a family and farming an estate - Vronsky and Karenina are just foils, although the image of Vronsky riding the mare to death in a race is indelible, as D.H. Lawrence said, but he is still peculiarly blank, a rather stiff and hopeless product of his times, as is Karenina. But then I reread that on holiday in Crete only ten months ago.

So today I meditate, run a little in the woods, walk down past the bakers, and think of an image, which fits with another previously written snippet, and realize I have a fully formed story to be written ( the first paras written just before this). I recall my wife's remark that I span the personal and the wider political stuff well in short pieces of writing ( although she thinks I lack the commitment and stamina for a novel), and know that the bombing of Yugoslavia will counterpoint this story of this young boy's 

...taking on seriously of Christmas as an emotionally significant commercial family event, where presents were to be bought and left underneath the Christmas tree ... 

The story begins to shape as I walk back, playing Graceland on my iPod, and the combination of the two starts, as it does now, the tears streaming from my eyes. Luckily I have sunglasses on as the tears run slowly down the outside of my cheeks, as I am not sobbing, just feeling, I don't know,  my soul's rain run across my face. Tears, anyway, that I cannot stop. Even now the keyboard is blurred, another reminder that I must learn to touch type.  People would worry if they saw me, but they wouldn't understand how this kind of feeling and weeping is essential to me - it brings me back to life.