Like Shallow Ghosts

I'm on a good-book hot-streak! Drama City indeed. What a blast. Pelecanos just pisses these stories out. Each one feels different in character and atmosphere and yet each novel is essentially the same premise.

All this after Murakami's delightful Kafka on the Shore. If you described Murakami's books to me a few years ago I would never have a read a single page. Yet they draw you in deep, entwining you in the labyrinthian plot and fantasy worlds with hints, just hints, of the modern world with jazz references. His female characters are stunning and I mean that literally (do I? I think I do...), they take your breath away (I only half mean that literally).

I've now moved on to London Fields. You have to love Amis. So easy to mock and mimic. Here is a site that has a Martin Amis diary: AMIS ON AMIS. It was difficult to read the first few pages of London Fields after reading that diary. I've read Money, Yellow Dog and the wonderful and exhilarating Experience. I certainly won't be reading Koba The Dread.

After dedicating a section of a book depicting Stalin's atrocities to the Hitch, the press justifiably ripped him apart. In his Atlantic Monthly review Hitchens takes time to refute Amis' claims:

I am compelled to say where I think it fails. And by "compelled" I suppose I must mean "obliged," since it appears on the author's own warrant that the book's shortcomings are mostly my fault. In the fall of 1999 Amis attended a meeting in London where I spoke from the platform. The hall was one of those venues where the rafters had once echoed with the rhetoric of the left. I made an allusion to past evenings with old comrades, and the audience responded with what Amis at first generously terms "affectionate laughter." But then he gives way to the self-righteousness and superficiality that let him down.

Why is it? Why is it? If Christopher had referred to his many evenings with many "an old blackshirt," the audience would have ... Well, with such an affiliation in his past, Christopher would not be Christopher, or anyone else of the slightest distinction whatsoever. Is that the difference between the little mustache and the big mustache, between Satan and Beelzebub? One elicits spontaneous fury, and the other elicits spontaneous laughter? And what kind of laughter is it? It is, of course, the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old idea about the perfect society. It is also the laughter of forgetting. It forgets the demonic energy unconsciously embedded in that hope. It forgets the Twenty Million. This isn't right:
Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetski. Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerdzhinsky. Everybody knows of the six million of the Holocaust. Nobody knows of the six million of the Terror-Famine.

George Orwell once remarked that certain terrible things in Spain had really happened, and "they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late." Martin Amis can be excused for coming across some of the above names and numbers rather late in life, but he cannot hope to get away with accusing others of keeping these facts and names from him, or from themselves. I have my own, large differences with Deutscher. But nobody who read his Prophet Outcast , which was published more than three decades ago, could possibly be uninstructed about Vorkuta or Yezhov. In other words, having demanded to know "Why is it?" in such an insistent tone, he doesn't stay to answer his own question, instead replacing it with a vaguely peevish and "shocked, shocked" version of "How long has this been going on?" The answer there is, longer than he thinks.

Here, the Hitch writes a wonderful response letter to his dear friend. I can't believe how well written this piece is.

I wince on my own behalf a good deal as I wade through, but I don't forget to wince for you as well. My sympathy is tinged with annoyance, all the same. What did you imagine would happen if you elected to write on such a Himalayan topic, and then pygmified it by addressing so much of it to me? I find myself embarrassed almost every day at the thought of an actual gulag survivor reading this.

You report on how you took the pedantic trouble to ask me - should it be Trotskyist or Trotskyite? And you add that I told you several times that only Stalinists or ignorant people say the latter. And then you go and call the POUM - George Orwell's party - "Trotskyite". By the way, that's a factual error as well as an aesthetic one, and I wish it was the only such.

You demand that people - you prefer the term "intellectuals" - give an account of their attitude to the Stalin terror. Irritatingly phrased though your demand may be, I say without any reservation that you are absolutely right to make it. A huge number of liberals and conservatives and social democrats, as well as communists, made a shabby pact with "Koba", or succumbed to the fascinations of his power. Winston Churchill told Stalin's ambassador to London, before the war, that he had quite warmed to the old bastard after the Moscow Trials, which had at least put down the cosmopolitan revolutionaries who Churchill most hated. TS Eliot returned the manuscript of Animal Farm, well knowing that his refusal might condemn it to non-publication, because he objected to its "Trotskyite" tone. I think we can say fairly that the names of Churchill and Eliot are still highly regarded in conservative political and cultural circles. You have a certain reputation for handling irony and paradox. How could you miss an opportunity like this, and sound off like a Telegraph editorialist instead, hugging the shore and staying with the script?

London Fields should be great though. In his Atlantic review, Hitchens starts with a summary of Amis' work:

In his superb memoir, Experience, Martin Amis almost casually expends a terrific line in a minor footnote. Batting away a critic he describes as "humorless," he adds, "And by calling him humorless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo ." A book in which such an observation can occur in passing is a very rich and dense one. Amis has won and held the attention of an audience eager for something very like this in reverse a synthesis of astonishing wit and moral assiduity. Even the farcical episodes of his fiction are set on the bristling frontiers of love and death and sex. With his other hand, so to speak, he has raised the standard of essayistic reviewing, mounting guard over our muscular but vulnerable English language and registering fastidious pain whenever it is hurt or insulted.

Talking of a good-book hot-streak reminds me of recent Nick Hornby article, How To Read. So prescient and so damn right, he advises to never persevere with a book you can't get in to. Just put it down. You will never get through all of life's books. Life is short. Enjoy reading. Don't make it a chore:

One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good. I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography. They were struggling. Both of these people are parents and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they ploughed gamely through a few paragraphs about the early years of a 20th-century world figure.
At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades. (One of them told me that he'd put it down for a couple of weeks, and on picking it up again was extremely excited to see that the bookmark was much deeper into the book than he'd dared hope. He then realised that one of his kids had dropped it, and put the bookmark back in the wrong place. He was crushed.)

In my dissertation on Radiohead, I used a Hornby quote that I strongly disagreed with and still do (something about the way Radiohead had betrayed their fans with Kid A/Amnesiac as no one wants to listen to difficult music when they've had a hard day at work). I really do think there's a place for him. I really enjoyed 31 Songs. His plain love for simple, straight-to-the-heart consumption of literature / music is infectious and eloquent.

As is Geoff Dyer's. He seems to be everywhere at the moment. He spreads himself so widely (not thinly however) , that most of the admiration for him seems to arise from a respect for his refusal to be typecast. He has written on an array of subjects including photography, travel, literature and has also written his own novels. One book T has told me about is But Beautiful. Dan Hill of City of Sound discusses it here:

Quite simply, But Beautiful is one of the most astonishing books I've ever read. An impressionistic, semi-fictionalised series of portraits of early jazz legends, it's also one of the great books about popular music, period. Dyer's starting points are first-hand accounts of these great musicians' lives, memoirs and liner notes, and particularly photographs - his destinations are gloriously creative evocations of a time and a sound, of the immense spirit of these extraordinary players, and the cities with which their lives and music became entwined.

He then goes on to quote the book at length. I can't wait to read it...it jumps off the page (screen) at you.