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Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #63

What I Read on My Summer Vacation

 Oh, how I wish I'd "summered" at bookstalls in the Village, or browsed the vendors along the Seine, but as always I went home to see family in Pennsylvania, which of itself is no bad thing.  Still, of bookstores and browsing there was none.  (I always think I will somehow break away for an afternoon to Pittsburgh and go to a proper bookshop, but I never do.)

Instead, as I always do, I read what I brung with me.  I wouldn't normally bother reviewing this material here, as there was little enough of it and none of it needing another mention from me, but someone asked, so I'll just run through as quick as I can the books I read while away on vacation.  Call it my summer-book-report, late and in brief.

First would be the book that did not make it out of the airport.  By the time I'd boarded my connecting flight, I'd nearly polished off Maigret on the Riviera (1932).  I left him on the aeroplane to Pittsburgh.  This one was about as  representative a Maigret adventure as any I've read, both for crime and solution, though this one finds the detective more out-of-sorts than usual, as the old boy's not one for fun and sun.  For the very Parisian Inspector Maigret, there's something soporific about all that heat and calm blue water.  Presumably his discomfort is exacerbated by our hero wearing his trademark topcoat and bowler throughout, as I can picture him no otherwise.  And then there is the frequency with which this case leads him from bar to bar.  That may have done him no favours here either, though heaven knows, the Inspector can hold his liquor.  (Seems never to occur to the man to check his coat or hang his hat, let alone to not have a third brandy with or for his lunch.)  Anyway he's a bit slow on the up-tick this time.  Still, wherever he goes, he seems to find much the same sort of crime everywhere.  If Christie's Hercule Poirot finds insidiously complicated and ingenious murders everywhere he goes, Maigret tends to find the same sort of sordid and pitiable human frailty no matter the location or the  details of the crime.  Somehow, that seems very French, and very satisfying in  world-weary way.

The other Simenon I brought was The Clockmaker (also translated as The Watchmaker), one of his noirs from the Fifties, with an entirely American setting this time, presumably to allow for a certain faithful innocence in the protagonist -- not very French, that. This was not so much a crime novel as a punishment novel, in which the father of a 16 year old boy watches helplessly as his son's delinquency leads to all sorts of anguished inconsequence.  Very French after all, non?  (Simenon's fiction has been having something of a renewal of late, what with new translations and reissues from NYRB, etc.  I'm afraid I haven't been able to make much of his non-Maigrets, of which I've now read half a dozen or so.  I keep trying, but to me they all seem like rather anaemic Jim Thompson novels, or James M. Cain without camp.  Just a bit dull, frankly.  Not bad, you understand, but hardly the deathless masterpieces as which I've seen them repeatedly described.  Meh.  For me, Maigret makes much the same case with at least the comfortable jog of genre to keep things moving at an admittedly rather leisurely pace.) 

I read one Josephine Tey this time, her first, The Man in the Queue (1929).  It is easily the silliest book she ever wrote; silly plot, silly twist, silly deductions, ridiculous finale.  It's the first appearance of her Inspector Alan Grant, though not very memorable for that.  Better I should have read her masterpiece, The Daughter of Time (1951), or even Miss Pym Disposes (1946.)  Still.  Done.

One late (1961) Christie this time, The Pale Horse, (not a Marple despite a television adaptation as such, which I haven't seen, blessedly.)  Last year, I think it was, I took a Christie that proved to be linked stories featuring a most disagreeably supernatural character, "the mysterious Mr. Quin," and a bit of mystical frippery at the end that rather spoiled the whole for me.  Not at all my kind of Christie.  For me, Christie is the supreme practitioner of the ruthlessly logical thriller, after Doyle.  However ridiculous her plots, however absurd her murders or mad her murderers, they always operate within a rational universe.  As this latest one started with a seance and witchcraft, etc., I was steeling myself for disappointment; Dennis Wheatley and weak tea.  I need not have worried.  The Pale Horse proved ruthlessly true to form as a very professional Christie puzzle.

This was my first time with William Goldman's Princess Bride, the novel.  As I said elsewhere, I am not of the right generation to remember the movie as anything much but a harmless, tongue-in-cheek fairytale.  The book I liked better.   Harmless fun.  I will say, there's a particular style of straight, smart-ish philistinism in Goldman that is funnier when he's speaking as himself, the tough, downtrodden screenwriter in his various autobiographies. Here, the smart-ass frequently shaded into just... ass.

The best of the bunch this year, again turned out to be poetry and the surprising pleasure I had reading T. S. Eliot's poetry for the first time in years.  I did not remember it well and I was impressed anew with both the music and humor, neither of which would have been virtues I necessarily associated with the master modernist.  One possibility that has just occurred to me: I might not have appreciated poems like "A Song for Simeon," and "Ash Wednesday," etc., had I not recently read George Herbert.

Finally, I finished rereading Strachey's Eminent Victorians on the shuttle back to the airport and so had to buy myself something for the plane-ride home.  I settled on A John Le Carre, A Most Wanted Man, from 2008 but recently adapted into a feature film I haven't seen.  With a magazine or two, it saw me through the ride.  I finished the book sometime after I got home, when I remembered it in my bag and fished it out again.  It was quite good of it's kind, I thought, and good to see Le Carre keeping up with the times; this one involving a doomed Russian youth, but a Muslim now, trapped in the usual hapless schemes and spy-mess.  I would note Le Carre's writing is as indifferent to style as ever.  A Le Carre from just eight years ago, but for setting and bits of plot, might as easily be from the Sixties.  Neither his writing nor his outlook would seem to have been altered an inch by the passage of time.  Surely that suggests the chief limitation -- and perhaps the chief pleasure -- of a genre writer?  I mention this only because now John Le Carre has become venerable, he is regularly mentioned as a writer who has risen above his matter.  Not a bit of it.  What he does, he does supremely well, but what he does is write espionage thrillers.  I don't see that Len Deighton or John Buchan did it any worse, or thought any less deeply about either life or literature, yet their names seldom seem much in mind any more.  Curious business.

And there we are, I think.  I might have spent more than a mention on Strachey's masterpiece, but of that book I've nattered often before and will again to any who might listen.  Meanwhile, farewell, Summer!  The Fall is here.

Packed

I still have much to do before I go to the airport on Monday, but at least this much is done.  An update, then:

I've added two Simenon novels; one Maigret, one not.  (Truth be told, I've already nearly finished the Maigret.  Couldn't wait.)  Also, a Josephine Tey, and one volume of Cowper's poems, from a three volume set I bought this week at Magus Books, and the latest issue of The New York Review of Books.

I will not even mention the e-books on my iPad.

Oh, and clean handkerchiefs.  Can never have too many clean handkerchiefs.

Into the Box and Out of the Box

One of the saddest encounters inevitably to be had in the bookstore when buying used books from the general public is the conversation in which the collector's library is reviewed and returned en masse to the seller as frankly unsaleable.  As someone in the process of breaking up my own library, I know just how this feels.  I've had to face the fact that no one will be buying my hardcover "Firsts" of Ward Just, or Nicholas Mosley, etc.; books that I thoroughly enjoyed but will probably never reread.  (Not now, anyway.  Into the box.)  No matter that nearly all my books are in excellent fiddle, with pristine dust-jackets, each preserved in a mylar cover, and so on.  Who's going to buy my collection of Stanley Middleton novels -- all but complete, and admittedly unopened for years?  Bless 'im.  Into the box.  Anita Brookner?  I saved the essays and nonfiction, curiously enough, probably because I can't honestly remember if I ever read any of it; art criticism mostly, essays, whatnot.  But the novels I read, one by one, year after year, as they came out, after I'd caught up?  Into the box.

Read 'em all.  Loved them.  Into the box.  I've donated the lot to a friend's neighborhood book sale.  Bonne Chance, Dame Anita!

And then there's this, a book I've now bought half a dozen times at the Used Books Desk, and sold through every time.  Don't misunderstand me, the book pictured is not and has never been a book of mine.  When I read Christie, I read mass market paperbacks.  I started taking her books with me on vacation a few years ago, along with who knows what literary masterpieces I may or may not have finished.  I always finish the Christie.  When I go back to Pennsylvania to visit the old people, I just buy any old beat-up paperback copy I can find, and leave it behind me to go into the permanent floating yard sale the folks run in retirement to pay for their heart medicine.  Dad might sell the book for a nickel.  When I'm traveling generally, I want something I won't feel the slightest hesitation about leaving on the plane if I finish it before we land.  Besides, I love those rather lurid old covers, particularly the "prop" covers I remember from my own reading of Christie in the Seventies.  You know the ones I mean: a flat, feauture-less background with just props, no people in the foreground; maybe a dagger, a candlestick, a string of pearls, that sort of thing.  So evocative of Clue and the rather bare-bones characterizations of the great English puzzler.  (Hell, these old paperbacks might even be, by some improbable but not impossible chance, some of the very books I'd bought at yard sales in my youth.  Could happen.  Books are like witches, the only way to really destroy one is to burn or drown it, otherwise there may still be magic in whatever survives.  Books seem to travel sometimes by supernatural means.)

This ugly old thing, this cheap Book Club Poirot in hardcovers, pictured above is no bad example of this seeming immortality.  The design of the jacket is amateurish and bad.  The binding's sound enough, the "interior is clean," as we say in the trade, but there is absolutely nothing special about this book.  I'm pretty sure this edition is just an inexpensive reprint of an earlier, doubtlessly more attractive collection of the same name.  As I said, I've sold this edition half a dozen times, for about seven bucks a go, and could sell it again tomorrow if another came along, and it will.

The book's got fifty Poirot short stories in it.  That's it's only plus.  What's more, I've never much liked Christie as a short story writer, certainly not the stories featuring her greatest detectives, Poirot and Miss Marple.  The reduction to the shorter form spoils the sauce for me; what in the novels are the characteristic and amusing eccentricities of her protagonists, in her short stories become annoying ticks, or worse.  Miss Marple loses her deliberation, her glorious sangfroid evaporating into a kind of smug omniscience; "Isn't obvious, dear?" her knitting needles working with all the self-righteous pleasure of Madame Defarge, "I knew the minute I saw those expensive shoes under the old coat..."  And Poirot!  Already more than a little insufferable -- even to Christie after the continuing demand for him began to exceed her patience -- in the short stories loses his inevitable third act apology, "But I was so foolish as to not see my mistake sooner.  If only I had, Poirot might still have saved poor Miss..." -- insert name of second body here.  Without that admission of error, before the ingenious finale, the clockwork machinery of "the little gray cells" can really grind.

Christie herself preferred her stories without her more famous characters, and she's right.  I've read half a dozen of these independent numbers in the past year and they have all the virtues of perfect puzzles, including the interchangeable, instantly forgettable but ingeniously arranged pieces that pass for people in these plots.  (By way of interesting comparison, at least to mystery buffs, consider the very different but equally satisfying short stories of Georges Simenon, who's Maigret is, if anything, like Sherlock Holmes, at his best when pressed.  And there, perhaps the difference between great characters and great  puzzles.  Does anyone really remember, or much care just what it was Maigret worked out, let alone how?  Does anyone like Holmes less for being abrasive?  Still, Christie had wit, and more than either of those other old boys, humor -- which is not the same thing.  Maigret is most endearing, particularly if he must miss his supper, but he's never really funny.  And Holmes could no more have made a joke than Watson can identify a cigarette brand by the ash.  I may get myself in trouble, should a true cultist read this, but Conan Doyle was really just too kind a man to be really witty, which is why, I think, Sherlock Holmes is both lovable and never makes me laugh; he's too self-involved to be anything but unintentionally sharp.  Christie, on the other hand, can be wonderfully bitchy.)

So here then is a dreary reprint of by no means Christie's best stuff, and yet it survives, and sells, and sells.  Why should this book continue to find new readers when other, frankly better books, by considerably better writers, much more attractive books, I say again,  don't so much go away as go straight to the dollar-a-book-table at a charity sale?

One of the first thing a new buyer working in used books has to learn is that just because a book is good, or even important, does not mean it retains it's retail value.  Particularly true of hardcover novels, literary and otherwise.  We hardly buy them anymore, unless they are very new titles, or titles that have crossed over into being "classics."  I put that word in quotations here even though I am a believer.  I do believe that there are works of art superior to their time and even the memory of their authors.  For the used book dealer though a "classic" is any book that will still sell in hardcover.  Ah, the rough judgement of the marketplace!  If a true classic is any book people will continue to read because of what's in it, the "classic" in the quotes is any book people will buy after it is out of print.  To achieve either status for even the best modern fiction is still a pretty dubious proposition.  I know just how good a novelist Stanley Middleton was.  I read him.   He was handsomely published and reviewed throughout his long career.  He won prizes.  True likewise Patrick White, who after all won the bloody Nobel!  And what's become of them?  What's become of my collection of both of them?   Into the box.

Why?  I don't suggest that any of these writers don't or won't still find readers.  Not while I'm alive, and she's in print will Anita Brookner want for a very insignificant champion.  With or without me though, I think there will always be people pleased to discover such an elegant and ethical writer.  She's never written a chapter that's not worth reading, never a misstep in either sympathy or observation of life.  I have read every novel she has ever written and will happily read any she may yet write.  As a writer I think she is a model of both elegance and maturity, unchanging perhaps in both a good and a less good way.  The fact remains, I don't know that I have ever or will ever feel the need to reread a single one of her books, nor frankly could I tell you the name of a single heroine, or honestly distinguish any title of hers from any other by either the plot or characters. While that doesn't preclude for me the pleasure in reading another book should there be one, it does not speak well, I think, for any of her books achieving the status of a classic, with or without quotes.  Neither new readers nor admirers, at least of the common variety like me, would seem to need to keep her books.  I did, for years of course, but I don't know that I ever opened them again once they had been read.  Into the box.  (May she live to be one hundred, may I abashedly say, and go out with a pen in her very elegant hand!)

Fiction, by even the most respected and admired writer, need not live forever, or even outlive it's author to be good and worth reading.  What a ridiculous standard that would be to impose on one's contemporaries!   As a bookseller, I do wish I could find a way to sell more of it, but no matter.  Not my job to right the world, even in so small a way.

The reason then the above unhappy object still sells, even if I don't much like it otherwise, would now seem to me to be it's frank familiarity.  Someone will always recognize Poirot, and Christie and want a go at this one.  These stories, in my admittedly flawed and snobbish system may not qualify as classics because I don't actually think most of them very good, but they've at least earned their quotes; they will always sell, someone will always want to read them, even if I can't imagine anyone, including me, reading them more than once.

Daily Dose

From Critical Observations, by Julian Symons

WHERE
"Where Balzac and Zola stretch out to comprehend their society, Simenon compresses society into the shape of his obsessions."

From A View of Simenon