Still Life, Sarah Winman
I quite enjoyed this although a little while after finishing it I couldn’t remember anything about it. Which is very unusual for me. Later memory returned without external assistance (i.e. looking it up) though it took a number of concentrated efforts. I liked the characters who were a diverse lot – soldier, art expert, publican, singer, composer, old man – whose predilections and situations emerged gradually over the course of the novel. And the sense of community that surrounded them – around the pub in London and later around a square in Florence. I also liked the way their stories were told – which was episodic, backwards and forwards in time, and across the two different locations. But for some reason I wasn’t terribly emotionally engaged – perhaps because of that episodic, non-linear way exposition. Lots happens – love affairs, births, marriages, friendships, betrayals, abuse, salvation. But there isn’t much tension; it’s all described at a distance. Perhaps too many characters, too much comradeship, an absence of conflict and setbacks. Lives roll along, adversity successfully met, obstacles overcome. A pleasant enough read. Damned with faint praise – which is unfair.
Cairo, Chris Womersley
This is the first of two novels are set in Fitzroy – hence my interest. Cairo is the name of an actual apartment building in Nicholson Street opposite the Carlton Gardens. It’s been there a long time, including in the 1980s when this story is set. The protagonist is a country kid come down to the big city to go to university. Where he gets caught up with a group of counter culture types and led astray; finally becoming an accessory to a widely known art crime – the theft of a Picasso painting from the National Gallery of Victoria. I found the whole set up a bit implausible. Clever kid giving up university, with access to an apartment and a car (a mercedes no less) but no family oversight, a bohemian set with unlimited resources but no visible means of support, drug addicted expert painters able to duplicate famous works within days and to hoodwink various criminal masterminds. And of course the startlingly attractive woman with whom our boy falls madly in love with on sight! I know its the genre – and probably it’s just me, not the book! I’m not keen on them. Interesting enough for the locale – but only for those who already know it.
The Diplomat, Chris Womersley
This is a follow up novel to Cairo, with the tagline that we get to follow one of the group we met in the Cairo apartments. I was hoping it would be the central character who I found a bit unbelievable but at least he had some charisma. But it was not to be. This time the protagonist is one of the painters. And what a sad sack he is! Both of these books are told in the first person. Which is something else I’m not keen on. So really my critique should not be relied upon. We get to find out a bit what happened to the others – nothing very exciting. And to the two painters – also less than thrilling. And not very interesting to me. I kept reading to find out what happened, but needn’t have bothered.
We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland, Finton O’Toole
This is wonderful and highly recommended; I’ve been waxing lyrical at dinner parties about it. He’s a terrific writer whose journalism – mostly in the New York Review of Books and Guardian. He starts this history from the year in which he is born – 1958 – just four years after me. Different years and different countries but he could almost be describing my upbringing as well as his own! The scourge of a Catholic child writ large – the insane preoccupation with sin, mostly about sex; the the fawning over priests, the hypocrisy; the misogyny. I found myself recognising so many of the attitudes of people, the situations they find themselves in, the characters they deal with and their responses to all the lunacy. The impact of the Catholic Church on Irish society at all levels – political, economic, social – and on individual lives is dissected with forensic skill. All through the selection of specific examples that drive home his points. The whole experience of growing up Catholic is encompassed – not just the worst excesses which he doesn’t gloss over but nor does he emphasise that at the expense of the rest of it. I loved his personal anecdotes about trying to be a good boy as opposed to the louche bad boy drawn in the Christian Brothers booklet. And his transcendent experiences as an altar boy. His family was upper or mid working class. His Dad a bus conductor (I loved the story about him meeting Mahammad Ali) and Fintan’s life was changed when an enterprising Education Minister kyboshed the Church’s opposition to comprehensive secondary schooling (they were opposed to girls and boys travelling together). The book nearly 600 pages but feels much shorter. It’s an easy read. But it covers all the big issues affecting Ireland over the period. Entry to the Common Market which required economic progress which required social progress, which challenged existing power structures. The Irish infatuation with history and the romantic notion of a united Ireland which required hostility to everything English even though people – especially women – were flocking there to work. And women were flocking there for contraception or abortions. The hoary old subject of sex – we didn’t have the language to talk about it Finton says. Let alone talk about sexual abuse. The cognitive dissonance, double-think and double-speak that resulted from this subservience to the church is revealed over and over. Most notably in relation to sex and attitudes to the English but really affecting everyone and everything. His discussion of the North / South divide and how opportunities to avoid the Troubles were missed is heartbreaking. All in all a great read. I think not limited to those of us who had much the same upbringing but I can’t really tell.
Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment, James R Gaines
Another terrific book warmly recommended. It was published in 2005 so may be hard to get. I read it on my iPad. It’s focussed on a meeting between Frederick the Great and J S Bach in 1747 which resulted in a Bach masterpiece- albeit one not recognised at the time. As well as the meeting and its outcome you get a very accessible biography of both men up to that time – in alternating chapters. At the time Bach’s star was waning; he died three years later. Though it was relatively early in Frederick’s reign which started in 1740, Gaines claims his best years were behind him. He had successfully claimed Silesia for Prussia and had not yet embarked on the Seven Years War which nearly killed him. He lived until 1786. Not knowing much about either of them I found it all fascinating. As the title suggests they both represented different world-views. Bach, a man of pre-enlightenment, Lutheran values; all his works dedicated to the greater glory of God. Frederick famously non religious, rational, an enlightenment man. But a musical man nonetheless – an avid flute player as well as composer of pieces for the flute. Two very different attitudes to music were represented at the meeting – Bach was for church music, the learned counterpoint of canon and fugue, exercising a centuries old craft developed from esoteric theories and rules. There’s a lot of explication about what this musical tradition meant which I found really accessible until it got to the descriptions of Bach’s actual compositions. The author occasionally interposes that it’s impossible to describe music and suggests the reader listen to particular works – which I did. Frederick, being in favour of empiricism and reason and belief in human perfectability. This was reflected in the new fashion for works known as galants – designed to please and amuse rather than aid contemplation of the Almighty. Bach’s son, Carl, employed by Frederich was a master of and famous for his galants. There were reports of the meeting in contemporary newspapers but lots of the detail is unclear. Whether Bach was summoned by Frederick or just visiting Carl, who set the terms of the challenge that was issued to him, what happened to the composition that resulted. All a bit of a mystery. Except it is known that a challenge was issued to old Bach as Frederick called him which was to improvise a fugue using twenty-one especially difficult notes . The assembled musicians who were present were all amazed that Bach improvised on the spot an exceptional response to the initial challenge of a three voice fugue. Then a further challenge to produce a work for six voices was issued. Bach didn’t do it that night (he’d never arranged a six part fugue for the keyboard) but went back home to Leipzig and a fortnight later delivered to the King a work he called A Musical Offering. There is no record of it being played for, and any response from, Frederick and the history of the piece is sad – no-one quite knows the correct order in which it should be played. There’s a great deal of musical exegesis identifying how it’s a complete rebuttal of Frederick’s modern attitude to music. I enjoyed all of that, whilst not quite understanding everything. Suffice to say that the final judgement is that this piece of music is now recognised as one of the great works of art in the history of music; thereby providing a compelling case for the proposition: that a world without a sense of transcendent and mysterious, a universe ultimately discoverable through reason alone, can only be a barren place; and that the music sounding forth from such a world might be very pretty, but it can never be beautiful. So, lots to absorb in this book which I enjoyed a lot.
Frederick The Great, Tim Blanning
Which is why I read this fuller biography. It’s very well written making it an easy read. It confirmed all the essential details summarised in the Gaines book. The famous meeting gets a paragraph. Frederick was terribly mistreated by his father who didn’t think he was manly enough and forbade flute playing and reading books, insisting instead on hunting and army drills. The evidence suggests young Frederick was gay. Old Frederick William regularly beat and humiliated his Crown Prince culminating in a shocking incident that left young Frederick traumatised and basically beaten into submission. Thereafter he had a couple of years outside the oppression of his father at his own court having submitted to an arranged marriage. But once he became King he basically put his Queen aside and henceforth his court was almost exclusively male. But he continued his music making, philosophising and reading – all aspects of his character that he considered essential. At the same time he also set about out-doing his father in military matters – starting with the war that gave Prussia Silesia and that set in train the later Seven Year War necessary for it to be retained. His achievements in battle resulting in his ‘Great’ moniker. Even as he ossified in his views and tastes as he got older, and distressingly copied his father in micro-managing everything and bullying those around him, a final judgement is he was pretty progressive for his time. I liked his tolerance – based in part on his passion for population growth necessary for economic and military reasons. And his administrative and judicial reforms, land reclamation and improved agriculture (he introduced the potato to Prussia). One of his first measures was banning torture and capital punishment for minor crimes. His support for music and the arts endured – he built the Berlin opera house. He got down and dirty on the battle-field mingling with his soldiers before and after battles and they loved him for it. He was certainly bold in battle but made plenty of mistakes – both militarily and diplomatically. He was hopeless about women – including Tsarinas and Empresses, to his detriment. Part III of the book sets our a report card on his achievements across a wide range of areas concluding that his final legacy was ‘the conviction of most Prussians that, thanks to Frederick’s achievements, they lived in a state they could be proud of’. I particularly liked the compliment Napoleon made at Frederick’s tomb, where he’d taken his officers after defeating Prussia at Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, Hats off gentlemen, if he was alive we would not be here. Anyway this was a rollicking read and overall I liked him. He wanted to be buried with his Italian greyhounds but his successor put him next to his father. Then Hitler took him up (to Frederick’s reputational detriment – as with Wagner’s). During the war they put his body in a potash mine in Lower Saxony where it was found by American soldiers. He was finally placed where he wanted – his palace at Sanssouci – in 1991. Amazing character. Great indeed.
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