Cat’s Cradle was the first Kurt Vonnegut book I read, probably 15 or more years ago. It inspired me to read everything else he wrote, and as I worked my way through his output, I omnivorously ignored advice that his later work wasn’t really worth the bother. It turns out that advice was wise (though I’m still glad I found out for myself). So if you’re a Vonnegut virgin, and more susceptible to advice than I was, my tip would be to read all his books from the 1950s and 60s (particularly the likes of Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night), approach the 1970s books with caution, and forget the stuff from the 80s and beyond. There are a few anomalies: Galápagos (1985) is interesting; I think of his last novel, 1997’s Timequake, as a bit of a return to form; and I am possibly the only Vonnegut fan who has never been able to get on with his most famous and acclaimed book, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

I reread Cat’s Cradle this week as it’s just been reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic - and not before time - with an incomprehensible but rather beautiful cover, an introduction by Benjamin Kunkel, and a terrific author photo I hadn’t seen before which for once doesn’t make Vonnegut look like a bag lady. It was published in 1963, which places it squarely in Vonnegut’s great period. On rereading it, I was relieved to find the theory holds: it’s a masterpiece of Vonnegut’s seductive, clear-eyed whimsy, and possibly his best book.

‘All right,’ said Dr Breed. ‘Listen carefully. Here we go.’

There’s a lot going on in Cat’s Cradle - easily too much for its skimpy length and truncated chapters (127 of them in 200 pages). Characters teem through the thing, ideas come and go, and the world ends: it’s a pocket epic, as indicated by the opening line, delivered with a wink: “Call me Jonah.” The narrator, whose name in fact is John, is a journalist who begins his journey by wanting to write a book about the day the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and ends it in a quite unexpected and worthless position of power.

There’s a lot going on, but it ultimately comes down to science and religion. Vonnegut was president of the American Humanist Association, who nonetheless felt that faith was too “important and honourable” to lose. In Cat’s Cradle it may seem unexpected, coming from a non-believer, that science is a source of destruction and religion one of consolation, but this is Vonnegut’s traditional portrayal of people as beings who will mess everything up given the chance. “My god - life! Who can understand even one little minute of it?”

John becomes interested in Franklin Hoenikker, one of the fathers of the atom bomb, and follows Hoenikker’s children to the island of San Lorenzo. He becomes a Bokononist, the religion founded by Bokonon (real name Lionel Boyd Johnson) on San Lorenzo as a response to the awful reality of life there:

When it became clear that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.

Bokononism is unique among religions in that it knows it’s false, but the curious thing is that its rituals work, and its precepts often make sense. It is ubiquitous on the island, yet outlawed, punishable by death through impalement on a large hook (”‘If I am ever put to death on the hook,’ Bokonon warns us, ‘expect a very human performance’”). Vonnegut’s humanism crosses barriers of rationalism and irrationalism. “Science is magic that works,” says the dying president of San Lorenzo, urging his successor to pursue and kill Bokonon. But one page later he is accepting the last rites of Bokononism, delivered by a man who calls himself “a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it’s unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name could say such a thing.”

Throughout the book people exhibit the human need to belong, whether to a religion, geographical origins, or what Bokonon calls a karass, an association of two or more people whose fates will be flung together for reasons unclear to them. It’s a routine theme of Vonnegut’s, and is dealt with less sentimentally here than in later work like Slapstick. Vonnegut’s deep pessimism about humanity (”She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for all mankind”) is tempered - or in some ways enhanced - by his absurdist wit.

‘The trouble with the world was,’ she continued hesitatingly, ‘that people were still superstitious instead of scientific. He said if everybody would study science more, there wouldn’t be all the trouble there was.’

‘He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life some day,’ the bartender put in. He scratched his head and frowned. ‘Didn’t I read in the paper the other day where they’d finally found out what it was?’

‘I missed that,’ I murmured.

‘I saw that,’ said Sandra. ‘About two days ago.’

‘That’s right,’ said the bartender.

‘What is the secret of life?’ I asked.

‘I forget,’ said Sandra.

‘Protein,’ the bartender declared. ‘They found out something about protein.’

‘Yeah,’ said Sandra. ‘That’s it.’

Cat’s Cradle is full of lively and deathly humour, and even the author himself is not above having fun poked at his vocation, as when characters discuss the possibility of a writer’s strike.

‘I don’t think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.’

‘I just can’t help thinking what a real shaking up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems…’

‘And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies?’ I demanded.

There are also some evergreen words on the US (”The highest possible form of treason is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do. …American foreign policy should recognise hate rather than imagine love. Americans are hated a lot of places. People are hated a lot of places. Americans, in being hated, are simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and they are foolish to think that they should somehow be exempted from that penalty”).

I said there was a lot going on in Cat’s Cradle, and I see I have written quite a lot and haven’t even mentioned ice-nine, the deadly substance which is central to the book, or the meaning of the title (”See the cat? See the cradle?”), or granfalloons, or the epigraph from the Books of Bokonon (”Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy”), or the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy, or the slaves who were executed in public “for sub-standard zeal”. Busy, busy, busy. So in 1963 at least, we can be grateful that Vonnegut, unlike Bokonon, listened to his own advice, as expressed by the man who was horrified by the idea of the writers’ strike:

For the love of God, both of you, please keep writing!

Carson McCullers: another in the long line of writers I’ve heard so much about that I feel I’ve read them. My sight-unseen impression of McCullers is a sort of gentler Flannery O’Connor: Southern Gothic, loners, absurdity, not so many gorings. What better opportunity to test my ignorance than with the reissue of three of her novels in Penguin Modern Classics this month: her most famous, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, her least famous (to me anyway), Clock Without Hands, and … this one.

The Member of the Wedding (1946) was McCullers’ third novel, and she was still only 29. I shan’t envy her that though, as by then she was half-paralysed from a series of strokes, and would die at the age of 50. Her sense of being an outsider, her simultaneous connection to and distance from her Southern homeland, and the blurring of sexuality which was epitomised in her choice of her genderless middle name as her professional title (her forename was Lula), are all present in this book.

Indeed much of it is there in the opening sentences:

It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world.

I was surprised to recognise these lines, or maybe they just have that instant familiarity of greatness. The tone is reprised later (”This was the summer when Frankie was sick and tired of being Frankie” … “It was the year when Frankie thought about the world. And she did not see it as a round school globe, with the countries neat and different-coloured. She thought of the world as huge and cracked and loose and turning a thousand miles an hour”), so that it becomes almost mythic.

In fact Frankie does belong - she has a family, and she is part of a trio along with the housekeeper Berenice and her friend John Henry - but in a very human way, she wants the belonging that she cannot have: to be part of the wedding of her brother and his fiancée which is to take place the next day, and not just of the wedding but of the marriage. It is her sense of what she feels she lacks that defines her, and this is another sense in which she belongs with her two companions. Berenice shows both that some people at that time - black people, like her - really know what it’s like not to belong; and also that the marriage which Frankie longs to belong to can be a source of pain as much as pleasure. Berenice has been married several times:

Ludie Freeman was a brickmason, making a grand and regular salary, and he was the man of all her husbands that Berenice had loved.

‘Sometimes I almost wish I had never knew Ludie at all,’ said Berenice. ‘It spoils you too much. It leaves you too lonesome afterward. When you walk home in the evening on the way from work, it makes a little lonesome quinch come in you. And you take up with too many sorry men to try to get over the feeling. … I loved Ludie and he was the first man I loved. Therefore, I had to go and copy myself forever afterward. What I did was to marry off little pieces of Ludie whenever I come across them. It was just my misfortune they all turned out to be the wrong pieces.’

Berenice is a voice of experience and understanding throughout the book, and the long conversations which she, John Henry and Frankie meander through on the long summer afternoon illuminate the themes of the book.

‘We all of us somehow caught. We born this way or what way and we don’t know why. But we caught anyhow. I born Berenice. You born Frankie. John Henry born John Henry. And maybe we wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught. Me is me and you is you and he is he. We each one of us somehow caught all by ourself.’

The Member of the Wedding presents itself too as a coming-of-age novel, though really that’s the least of it, but Frankie does try to accelerate her development into womanhood by beginning to refer to herself as “F. Jasmine Addams” as the story progresses. As mentioned above, the vexed question of womanhood is also in Frankie’s mind, and it’s not always clear whether she is in love with the idea of marriage as a place of belonging, or with her brother’s bride, or with the couple both. According to Ali Smith’s excellent introduction - a 25-page essay on McCullers and her books [edit: expired link removed] - McCullers herself was unclear on the issue. It is these ambiguities - along with everything else - which help the book resonate in the mind deliciously.

Smith’s introduction - included here with a separate chronology of McCullers’ life (all modern classics should be like this!) - also tells us that “she drank all day, from breakfast onwards, for most of her adult years.” This reminded me of Patrick Hamilton, who at his creative peak was getting through three bottles of whisky a day (how did he find the time to write?). McCullers shares with Hamilton a sense of place so acute - he inhabited London, she the American South - that after reading her, the locations will be forever viewed through the prism of her literature. Which is as transfiguring, and a lot less problematic, than viewing it through the bottom of a glass.

I read Gide for French A-level - La Symphonie Pastorale - and liked it better than the other two set texts (Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux and Sartre’s Les Jeux Sont Faits). Since then I’ve been meaning to read more of him; and it only took me 17 years.

Strait is the Gate (1909) was his first novel: not that he was any spring chicken, at 40, when he wrote it. The first thought I had about it was that the title is in serious need of retranslation. The original title, La Porte Étroite, has the internal resonance which the translation tries for without the asinine rhyme. And what sort of a word is strait anyway? Has it ever been in normal use as a plain adjective in the 99 years since the book was published? I mean, I get it, mainly by back formation from Straits of Gibraltar etc - it means narrow but also implies difficult or arduous - but it’s a fairly dire choice, even if it is a lift from a Bible passage. Not that I have an immediately better alternative.

Anyway, Strait is the Gate/La Porte Étroite is a love story about Jerome, the narrator, and his cousin Alissa. There’s an immediate appeal to me - much as in J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country - from the mere setting of memories of youth in the blissful countryside. However Alissa, traumatised by her mother’s whorish ways (she drunkenly flaunts her lover before her children), turns in on herself and dedicates her life to God. Now we’re in trouble, because Jerome himself (sharing a name with the ‘author’ of the Vulgate, the 5th century translation of the Bible into Latin) is no wild thing. “Self-control was as natural to me as self-indulgence to others.” Even his poor mother, widowed while Jerome was a child and “always dressed in mourning”, isn’t spared his ostentatious sobriety:

One day - it was a good long time, I think, after my father’s death - my mother changed the black ribbon in her morning cap for a mauve one.

‘Oh mamma!’ I cried. ‘That colour doesn’t suit you at all.’ The next morning the black ribbon was back again.

His dedication to this way of thinking is confirmed by the “peculiar discomfort” he feels when in the company of his aunt Lucile, Alissa’s mother, who brings out feelings Jerome would rather not face:

‘Sailor collars are worn much more open,’ she said, undoing a button of my shirt. ‘There, see if that doesn’t look better!’ and taking out her little mirror, she drew my face down to hers, passed her bare arm around my neck, put her hand into my shirt, asked me laughingly if I was ticklish - went on - further … I started so violently that my shirt tore across and with a flaming face I fled…

He has a kindred spirit then in Alissa, who similarly rejects her mother’s sexual expressiveness, and in Jerome’s mind all this conspires to make “the very idea of laughter and joy [become] an offence and an outrage … the hateful exaggeration of sin!”

Alissa declares happiness secondary to holiness, and she and Jerome both strive to be one of the “few” who “enter ye in at the strait gate,” according to Luke’s gospel: “because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”

The reader already can sense that this firm dedication to the narrow, difficult way, with resistance to temptation, can as easily become a matter for pride and piety as humility and holiness. Jerome and Alissa in their youth and idealism lack such self-awareness, however, and there follows a prolonged (seeming longer, indeed, than the punchy 128 page extent of the novel) to and fro between them, where Jerome states and restates his love for Alissa, and she ebbs and flows, declaring her dedication to him by letter when they’re apart, and going cold on him when they’re together.

It’s both frustrating and enjoyable for the reader, not least because Gide acknowledges the fictional status of the tale and the reader’s dual role: first as an innocent story-follower who wants some progress, and second as a reader of a literary text where we acknowledge the need to follow certain conventions and suspend our disbelief of implausibilities in order to extract the goodness. He tips a wink in the opening line (”Some people might have made a book out of it…”), setting up a sly contract between author and reader, and restates it later when the narrator reflects on his friend Abel’s over-dramatic expression of love: “the slight strain of literary affectation which I felt in it jarred in me not a little…”

The ending is foreseeable but there’s a reversal of viewpoint in the last dozen pages which shakes things up a little. The obvious message of the dangers of piety is pretty clear too. I am now re-fired with enthusiasm for Gide, and am all geared up to read the other book of his I have to hand, The Immoralist, apparently as interested in innocent perversity as La Porte Etroite is in perversely pursued innocence. I hope it will give me even more pleasure. But what was it Alissa said? - “Oh Lord! Preserve me from a happiness which I might too easily attain!” I’ll give it another few weeks then.

I was wondering recently about the difficulty publishers have in getting their books noticed. This must be a particular problem for those who are reissuing old titles. Certainly there are people like me for whom the badge of (say) Penguin Modern Classics or Pushkin Press is recommendation enough; but how do these books get wider attention when they’re rarely reviewed, don’t trouble the 3-for-2 tables, and aren’t written by thrusting young lovelies (or not ones that are still alive anyway)? Penguin have pushed the boat out a little with Robert Walser’s The Assistant (1908), newly issued in the Modern Classics range. The cover is one of the most stylish yet of their new look:

But watch out, because when you see it in real life it will be swagged with a vivid removable sleeve, like so:

Well, it’s a start. But, a modern masterpiece, you say? The obvious response is that if it really is a masterpiece, then someone might have seen fit to treat us to a translation some time in the hundred years since it was written.

I hadn’t heard of Walser until I read Adam Thirlwell’s Miss Herbert a few months ago. He earns a couple of pages (and a photo) there, Thirlwell considering him the progenitor of a particular type of plotless, flâneur-based story, an influence on Kafka, an underrated modernist and “one of the first people to develop the story as a place for linguistic delicacy and experiment.” However that assessment came from Walser’s later stories of the 1920s, and doesn’t seem strongly applicable to The Assistant. In fact Walser wrote three novels in quick succession - the last and best-known being Jakob von Gunten (1909) - and his career as a novelist was over at the age of 31. He would live another 47 years, but first restricted himself to short stories, then to no writing at all.

This is worth expanding on. Walser had mental illness all around in his family, and the About the Author blurb in this book is a mini-novel in itself:

After a suicide attempt in 1929, Walser’s depression was misdiagnosed as schizophrenia and in 1933 he entered an asylum in Herisau, where he remained for the rest of his life. There he occupied his time with chores like gluing paper and sorting beans. He remained in full possession of his faculties but, after 1932, he did not write. ‘I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad,’ he told a visitor. Robert Walser died of a heart attack on Christmas Day, 1956. He had been walking in the snow not far from the asylum where he had been living for 23 years.

After that, The Assistant has a lot to live up to. It’s a semi-autobiographical novel, largely free of the modernist effects we might expect. Its protagonist, Joseph Marti, is a young man who goes to work for, and live with, the inventor Carl Tobler and his family. Tobler’s inventions are simultaneously banal and bizarre: the Advertising Clock - a railway station type clock with wings out the sides to carry ads - or the Marksman’s Vending Machine - a six foot tall vending machine which dispenses small packs of bullets. As one might imagine, the business is not destined to blossom, and the progress of the story lies mostly in the tragicomic despair of Tobler to come to terms with his complete lack of the qualities needed in either an inventor or a businessman.

Marti meanwhile has his own trials, mainly in dealing with the predecessor to his job whom he usurped: Wirsich, a young man who had been sacked and reinstated many times by the Toblers, mainly because he was “an extremely precise individual, but only in a state of sobriety.” Marti also wonders how he can bring himself to ask Tobler to pay him his wages at some point… There is some interesting analsyis of power and the master-servant relationship:

People do, by the way, tend to cherish those upon whom they have been able to impose their power and influence. Wealth and bourgeois prosperity like to dispense humiliations, or no, that’s going too far, but they do have a fondness for gazing down on the humiliated, a sentiment in which we must acknowledge the presence of a certain benevolence, and of a certain brutality as well.

The spiralling difficulties of the Toblers are sometimes touching and often dramatic, particularly when Herr or Frau Tobler put pen to paper and write to one of their many creditors: or would-be creditors (”Dear Mother! I am sitting here in my house like a bird trapped by the piercing gaze of the snake - already being killed in advance…”).

Adam Thirlwell believes “Walser was fascinated by the decrepitude of language … the writing frames clichés - which are trying to cope with impossible or unmentionable realities.” Walser claims to have written The Assistant in six weeks, which doesn’t seem implausible. It meanders in a fluid and leisurely way to its conclusion, and must be of importance as a precursor to his later, apparently more radical work, as much as for itself. So bring on the stories, Penguin: red sleeve optional.

When the reliable Penguin Classics imprint thinks a new translation of a 1938 German novel has enough potential to be issued in hardback, I have to pay attention. When the translation is by the equally reliable Michael Hofmann (a poet in his own right), then my wallet sighs open with pleasure. A bibliophile and his money are soon parted.

Irmgard Keun was the partner of novelist Joseph Roth for the last few years of his life: I’ve only dabbled in Roth with his novella The Legend of the Holy Drinker, but the testimonies of Susan Hill and dovegreyreader promise much more pleasure to be had from him yet (and dgr has already mentioned Irmgard Keun on this very site). Of course, a romantic connection with a fine writer doesn’t mean that Keun’s book will be good too: it must be just a coincidence, then.

Child of All Nations (193 on the face of it sounds like pretty uninspiring stuff: a family flee Nazi Germany and seek peace elsewhere in Europe. Heard it all before. But what sets Keun’s novel apart is the uniquely charming voice of Kully, the nine-year-old narrator.

The danger of a child narrator is that the author can make it too cute, too disingenuous, or two-dimensional. Fortunately Kully is none of these things, but gets her point across:

When I was in Germany, before, I did go to school, and that’s where I learned to read and write. Then my father didn’t want to be in Germany any more, because the government had locked up friends of his, and because he couldn’t write or say the things he wanted to write and say. I wonder what the point is of children in Germany still having to learn to read and write?

Now her father is away raising money to enable them to continue their journey, and Kully and her mother are in Amsterdam, trying to stave off the day when they have to pay their hotel bills (”I get funny looks from hotel managers, but that’s not because I’m naughty; it’s the fault of my father … the waiters no longer brandish their napkins in that jolly way; instead they flick them at our table. Mama says they do it to clear the crumbs away, but it looks to me more like what you do to keep away pesky cats that have their eyes on the roast”).

Kully recounts their journeys across Germany, the Netherlands and France, with Keun meanwhile probing gently at the major issues surrounding the story. Reading it in the comfortably informed 21st century, it’s easy to forget that Child of All Nations was written when the worst of the Nazi terror was yet to come: this makes it seem both prescient and retrospectively wise. There is a postmodern sort of dramatic irony in operation: not only does the reader know more than the narrator, the reader knows more than the author. On the subject of contemporary politics Kully’s father has this to say:

‘As for fear of God? Why? Why not trust in God? I’d rather my little girl worshipped matchboxes or liqueur glasses than that she be afraid of God. Everything that’s wrong in the world begins with fear. All that mess in Germany could only result because the people there have lived in fear for ever. … First a father demands that his child be afraid of him. Then there’s school and fear of the teacher, fear of God at church, fear of military or other superiors, fear of the police, fear of life, fear of death. Finally, the people are so crippled and warped by fear that they elect a government that they can serve in fear. Not content with that, when they see other people who are not set on living in fear, the get angry, and try in their turn to make them afraid. First of all they make God into a kind of dictator, and now they don’t need Him any more, because they’ve come up with a better dictator themselves.’

Child of All Nations is very funny too, from the authorial distance from her child narrator which enables Keun to invoke some witty irony, to Kully’s father’s bold way of trying to persuade people, and in particular women (all of whom, he feels, are susceptible to his charms). Here I saw reflections of Roth’s Holy Drinker Andreas, and his doomed attempts to stave off the loss of his money.

The one disappointment is the ending, or more accurately the last leg of the family’s journey. It damages the scale of the drama, and (as Hofmann acknowledges in his afterword) “breaks the claustrophobia of the book.” But this doesn’t matter too much - Child of All Nations is all about the journey, not the destination, and that is a very fine experience indeed.

This is one of those books which has been in the to-be-read pile for some time. Often those titles end up flattened beneath strata of newer acquisitions, as for me the lure of a new new book is always stronger than that of an old new one. But I had read and enjoyed Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Another Country some years ago, and with the imminent avalanche of new books for 2008 coming ever closer,
I plucked it bravely from the depths of the pile. It’s now or never.

In truth, one of the reasons I hadn’t read Go Tell It on the Mountain before was because it was Baldwin’s debut novel, published in 1953 when he was 29, and I thought How good can it be? And the answer is … good enough, and far more assured than a first book has any right to be.

The key is in Baldwin’s full-blooded style, which immerses us from the beginning in a flood of biblical language. The setting is Harlem, where fourteen-year-old John Grimes is following in his father’s footsteps to become a preacher at the Temple of the Fire Baptized. The only problem is that John hates his father Gabriel (who is anyway not really his father) and as a consequence everything he stands for. “His father could never be entirely the victor, for John cherished something that his father could not reach. It was his hatred and his intelligence that he cherished, the one feeding the other.” He half-envies his brother Roy, whose reputation as a black sheep and a lost cause at least affords him freedom:

Roy never knew his Sunday school lesson either, but it was different with Roy - no one really expected of Roy what was expected of John. Everyone was always praying that the Lord would change Roy’s heart, but it was John who was expected to be good, and to be a good example.

John, meanwhile, must look down on the “sinners” that the family passes on the way to church, and not think too hard about whether a little sin might have something to recommend it. In rejection of his father, John instead clings to his mother, whom he fears losing as he goes from being her only son to just one among a family of children:

He remembered only enough to be afraid each time her belly began to swell, knowing that each time the swelling began it would not end until she was taken from him, to come back with a stranger. Each time this happened she became a little more of a stranger herself.

Baldwin excels in moments like this, where the feelings of a child are rendered into elegant adult observations without stripping them of their raw truth. He also gives us a classic monstrous father in Gabriel, who of course turns out to be the most interesting character in the book, and not without a little sin of his own. In the central sections Baldwin takes Gabriel, his wife and his sister and opens up their pasts to the reader. The resulting effect, of wanting to forgive what we know, is not original but nonetheless highly effective. Forgiveness in fact is one Christian trait which Gabriel notably lacks (”Your Daddy beats you because he loves you”), and in his own past we see that his inflexible anger is really directed against himself - “he saw his guilt in everybody’s eyes” - and that his rejection of John’s independence of mind comes from a knowledge of what he himself might have had. John too knows that despite his father’s nominal position as “head deacon” in the Temple of the Fire Baptized, he’s really little more than “a holy handyman.”

With the central flashbacks, Go Tell It on the Mountain goes into wider society, and touches on less obvious issues like self-limiting behaviour by disadvantaged minorities. Florence, Gabriel’s sister and the only one who will stand up to him, remembers her husband:

‘But there’s lots of good in Frank. I just got to be patient and he’ll come along all right.’ To ‘come along’ meant he would change his ways and consent to be the husband she had travelled so far to find. It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom ‘coming along’ is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive. For ten years he came along, but when he left her he was the same man she had married. He had not changed at all.

The word “fire” recurs throughout the book, and sure enough the pages burn through with Baldwin’s anger at racism, religion, and broken communities. He also is brave enough to give the book not much direct plot - John’s struggle with his family and ‘his’ faith and how we got here, about sums it up - and an ending which chillingly recalls Nineteen Eighty-Four. At one point in the story John reflects upon a course of action, fearing that he might be going too far: “I can climb back up. If it’s wrong, I can always climb back up.” Later, in his aunt Florence’s past, we see her do the same as she buys a ticket to leave her home town: “she held like a talisman at the back of her mind the thought, ‘I can give it back, I can sell it. This don’t mean I got to go.’” This understanding, not only of the way we hold ourselves back as much as others do, but also of how one generation’s weaknesses trickle down to inhibit the next, is immensely powerful and sums up the essence of the book beautifully.

For the second leg of my attempt to read Saul Bellow’s novels - or, as I’ve read several already, should I say to enjoy Saul Bellow’s novels - in fact, as I’m not that ambitious, make that to get Saul Bellow’s novels - I thought I would go for one that’s even thinner than Dangling Man. Well it is Christmas. Seize the Day (1956) was Bellow’s fourth novel, coming immediately after his breakthrough book The Adventures of Augie March. It’s regarded as representative of his output, but in a bite-sized (118 pages) portion. So let’s get stuck in.

In fact I have read it before, a few years ago, but in the time-honoured tradition, I no longer had a single thought in my head about it, other than “not as bad as Herzog.” Herzog is often regarded as Bellow’s masterpiece, so that shows how much weight you should place on the following.

The difficulty with Seize the Day, as with so many books whose reputations precede them, is the conflict between expectation and experience. I would surely have enjoyed it more without any anticipation that this would be a life-changing read. As it is, I was stuck there halfway between following the novel in my own way, and waiting for the greatness to hit me. It didn’t in any obvious way, so I went out and looked for it. Looking for greatness in Bellow by forensically examining the pages is a little like cutting open a human body to search for the soul. It is everywhere and nowhere.

There are some fine nuggets which indicate the failure status of our hero, Tommy Wilhelm, right from the start: in the third sentence, we learn that “he had once been an actor - no, not quite, an extra.” And “early in the nineteen-thirties, because of his striking looks, he had very briefly been considered star material, and he had gone to Hollywood.” Just how briefly, we soon see:

Hollywood was his own idea, too. He used to pretend that it had all been the doing of a certain talent scout named Maurice Venice. But the scout had never made him a definite offer of a studio connection. He had approached him, but the results of the screen test had not been good. After the test Wilhelm took the initiative and pressed Maurice Venice until he got him to say, “Well, I suppose you might make it out there.” On the strength of this Wilhelm had left college and had gone to California.

One thing the talent scout does volunteer is that he marks Wilhelm down as “the type that loses the girl.” Some people this might discourage. But Wilhelm is his own creation in other ways too: his real name, Wilky Adler, was abandoned, leading to the first fissure in a strained relationship with his father. Nonetheless even his father, Dr Adler, feels the need to cover up for Wilhelm’s inadequacies, describing him to a friend as a “sales executive” with an income “up in the five figures somewhere.”

Despite his troubles, Wilhelm almost laughed. Why, that bounding old hypocrite. He knew the sales executive was no more. For many weeks there had been no executive, no sales, no income. But how we love looking fine in the eyes of the world! … It’s Dad, thought Wilhelm, who is the salesman. He’s selling me. He should have gone on the road.

“Despite his troubles” indeed, because Wilhelm has not had them to seek. He is separated and his wife refuses to give him a divorce, while “giving him the works” by leeching as much of his irregular income as she can. He is living in a hotel and cannot pay his bill. His path through life, begun when he abandoned college to avoid “the narrow life of the average,” has become a dead end, or worse, a maze of possibilities, none of them very tempting. He wants freedom from his mistakes, his past and his self:

His spirit, the peculiar burden of his existence lay upon him like an accretion, a load, a lump. In any moment of quiet, when sheer fatigue prevented him from struggling, he was apt to feel this mysterious weight, this growth or collection of nameless things which it was the business of his life to carry about.

At the same time Wilhelm doubts whether he can ever be free: “Don’t talk to me about being free. A rich man may be free on an income of a million net. A poor man may be free because nobody cares what he does. But a fellow in my position has to sweat it out until he drops dead.” And his way of trying to get to be a rich man - while heading quite surely in the other direction - is to invest in … lard futures (a touch of comic genius from Bellow), at the behest of a philosophising adviser called Dr Tamkin (”I deal in facts. Facts always are sensational. I’ll say that a second time. Facts always! are sensational”). Tamkin - is he really a doctor? - is a man of “vain mustache” and “deceiver’s brown eyes.” As with Wilhelm himself and Dr Adler, Bellow’s portrayal of Tamkin is perfect and memorable, simply because he emphasises enough to make his character stick in the mind without overwriting.

Wilhelm, at a low ebb (”trouble rusts out the system”), places his trust in Dr Tamkin and his easy ways with an aphorism.

The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real - the here-and-now. Seize the day.

But Wilhelm learns that lard futures are also full of anxiety, and on the single day when the story is set, a day when “willing or not, he would take a good close look at the truth,” he finds that the future can go down as well as up, and that on the subject of losers, Nick Berry may have been a little simplistic.

So once again I find myself unable to engage on any meaningful level with the text of a Saul Bellow novel. The act of splurging my first impressions here, however, has at least raised the book in my estimation, and made me understand that there is much, much further for me to go with this man. If Wilhelm is right in saying that “maybe the making of mistakes expressed the very purpose of his life and the essence of his being here,” then the decision to have a further crack at Saul Bellow no longer seems to me quite the mistake it did just a short time ago.

What better pedigree for a book than being a Penguin Modern Classic and the source for a new film by the reliable Ang Lee? I had never heard of Eileen Chang before, but either of those factors alone would have been enough to interest me in it. The zinger is that it’s also only 150 pages and sets a new high in movie tie-in covers. Come to daddy.

Lust, Caution is a collection of five stories, most published in the 1940s when Chang was in her 20s. The title story however was begun in the 1950s and not published until 1979; so what’s another thirty years to wait for this translation? It’s a remarkable tale, a masterpiece of compression, fitting so much into its 35 pages - with even an acceleration of action at the end - that it makes perfect sense for it to become a full-length feature film. It is a story of romance, politics and betrayal, introducing us to Jiazhi (”since the age of twelve or thirteen, she had been no stranger to the admiring male gaze”) who as a member of a revolutionary sect, has been tasked to seduce Mr Yi, a government employee, and lead him to his death.

She felt a kind of chilling premonition of failure, like a long snag in a silk stocking, silently creeping up her body. … She had, in a past life, been an actress; and here she was, still playing a part, but in a drama too secret to make her famous. … In truth, every time she was with Yi, she felt cleansed, as if by a scalding hot bath; for now everything she did was for the cause.

What gives the story its richness is the compact way Chang has of fitting in the characters’ background sometimes in just one sentence, leaving plenty of space for resonance and reader reflection. Mr Yi’s wife, for example, “had a dowager’s fondness for keeping young, pretty women clustered around her - like a galaxy of stars reflecting glory onto the moon around which they circulated.”

And this reminder that people are the same the world over is useful. As the title suggests, Lust, Caution, like the other stories in the collection, is about conflict between differences: temptation and loyalty, women and men, East and West. This is particularly well depicted in the story Great Felicity, about an approaching family wedding. On the one hand, some feel drawn to the ’superiority’ of Western culture (”He put on his slippers and lay on the couch to rest while he flipped through an old Esquire magazine. The Americans really knew how to advertise their products. … Xiaobo had a degree from America, he was a real scholar”). At the same time, all the usual family conflicts and jealousies remind us of the universality of human nature. In addition, Chang, who lived in the USA from the 1950s until her death, cleverly anticipates Western readers’ expectations when she seems to give us details of authenticity:

In the grand hall, there were great red pillars entwined with green dragons. The walls were of black glass and a black glass altar held a little gold Buddha.

- before subverting it, as we nod comfortably, by adding: “This was the Orient as a little old foreign lady might imagine it.” Ouch.

Chang is especially good at capturing the essence of failure or a disappointed life, taking society not as it should be but as it is (or was), whether pointing out that a character “was still unmarried, and she was beginning to lose her self-confidence. Her little round soul had shattered, and had been repaired with white china,” or another young girl who “had a lot of siblings, so she wouldn’t get any pretty clothes until she had a likely match - but since she didn’t have anything pretty to wear, she couldn’t get a match. She was trapped in a vicious circle, doomed to spend her blooming years in wistful longing: no young woman, no matter how clever, could break her way out of a dress like that.”

This last is from In the Waiting Room, a merciless but somehow tender portrayal of the gossipy women in the waiting room of a massage clinic (which incidentally provides the only doubtful translation in the whole collection: could a child really have been wearing “split-crotch pants in a tiny floral pattern”? Each story, unusually, has a different translator). Like the other stories, it seems much more modern to our Western eyes than we would expect.

The best tribute I can pay the stories in Lust, Caution is that although Chang’s style took some getting used to, I found myself wanting more and more as there were fewer and fewer left. Thank goodness then that I already have stocked up her collection of novellas, Love in a Fallen City, which is being issued in Penguin Modern Classics along with this volume. Not least, these stories will provide a welcome dose of exoticism as the winter draws in. And who couldn’t use a little of that?

Saul Bellow is the biggie. Every writer I admire sings out in tongues of praise for him, but I have always struggled with getting much in the way of either instruction or delight from his books. And God knows I have tried. So the reissue of all his novels over the next few months seems like a good time to make a fresh start. Plus now he’s dead somehow I don’t feel so intimidated. I’m a huge fan of Penguin Modern Classics, but they’ve used Bellow to relaunch the series, and I’m not sure about the covers: there’s something seventies about that typeface, the white stripes and spine, and the faded photography. Not a brilliant first impression.

Dangling Man is Bellow’s debut from 1944, bringing us into his twin worlds of thought and fascination, and of colourful characters. The book takes the form of a journal kept by Joseph, surname undeclared, as he waits for his call-up by the Army after enlisting, when “there is nothing to do but wait, or dangle, and grow more and more dispirited.” To keep his spirits up he records his thoughts, contrary to the spirit of the day (”Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody’s business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them”).

Pretty quickly Joseph learns that to have all this free time, this freedom, leads him not only into dolour but into mischief, and he manages to start fights during the course of the novel with his wife (”Iva, it’s this situation we’re in. It’s changed us both”), his neighbours, his friends and his precocious niece Etta, who pushes him too far in a superbly ambiguous set piece. He toys with infidelity:

At the root of it all was my unwillingness to miss anything. A compact with one woman puts beyond reach what others might give us to enjoy; the soft blondes and the dark, aphrodisiacal women of our imaginations are set aside. Shall we leave life not knowing them? Must we?

It is this “avidity” which is Joseph’s other problem, his desire to experience and record everything -

We had an enormous sunset, a smashing of gaudy colours, apocalyptic reds and purples such as must have appeared on the punished bodies of great saints, blues heavy and rich. I woke Iva, and we watched it, hand in hand.

- while at the same time to know that “the real world is the world of art and thought. There is only one worthwhile sort of work, that of the imagination.” He laments the times when he could go to a bar and have discussions on “socialism, psychopathology, or the fate of European man.” But that doesn’t stop him from sharing his philosophical thoughts with us, and this is where my main problem with Bellow lies.

He is a brilliant conjurer of worlds, and in particular kind of contemporary scene, where the urban meets the human:

My shoes, their once neat points scuffed and turned up, squashed, as I walked, through half a dozen leaks. I moved toward the corner, inhaling the odors of wet clothes and of wet coal, wet paper, wet earth, drifting with the puffs of fog. Low, far out, a horn uttered a dull cry, subsided; again. The street lamp bent over the curb like a woman who cannot turn homeward until she has found the ring or the coin she dropped in the ice and gutter silt. … The awning heaved; twists of water ran through its rents. Once more the horn bawled over the water, warning the lake tugs from the headlands. It was not hard to imagine that there was no city here at all, and not even a lake but, instead, a swamp and that despairing bawl crossing it; wasting trees instead of dwellings, and runners of vine instead of telephone wires.

And his characters are often distinctive and alive. But the digressions into thought and reflection too often seem like a step back from the body of the book, and when they invariably require three or four readings for me to make sense of them, they interrupt the flow. (”Now, each of us is responsible for his own salvation, which is in his greatness. And that, that greatness, is the rock our hearts are abraded on.” Come again?)

While Dangling Man is considered by those in the know to be minor Bellow, a mere working of his muscles before he got to the good stuff, I found it to be everything I had liked and hated about his later books in embryo. I will need to keep trying then for what Martin Amis, his great admirer, calls “a transfusion from above,” and settle in the meantime for a transfusion from Bellow. The work goes on.

The great thing about an unswerving, even slavish, devotion to a series of books is that even if not everything you read is to your tastes, you still encounter authors and titles you would never have considered otherwise. My fetish for Penguin Modern Classics this week led me to Vitaliano Brancati’s Beautiful Antonio (1949).

It’s easy to presume that a book labelled a Modern Classic, particularly in translation, is going to be obscure or forbidding. But Beautiful Antonio is accessible, playful and funny.

Antonio Magnano, from Catania in Sicily, is 26 years old when the story begins in 1932, and is already famous for being the most beautiful man anyone has seen. Female observers “sweetly burned” in his presence, “and went mad with a pleasure so intense as to make them think themselves possessed by some severe aberration which jumbled up pleasure and pain.” Even his male friends are in love with him. This is something to do with his “olive-skinned visage … athletic limbs” and “eyes [that] seemed to glint with tears that sat on the uppermost curve of the cheeks.” Furthermore:

photographs of him … would halt even middle-aged women in their tracks, though laden with shopping and dragging along toddlers in floods of tears with the very hand just used to box their ears.

So nobody is surprised when Antonio marries Barbara Puglisi, the daughter of a notable figure in the town, who is almost as beautiful as he is. Everyone is surprised, however - and shocked - when three years later, it turns out the marriage has not yet been consummated.

All this gives Brancati opportunity for comic expansiveness, in a tone that straddles a line somewhere between satire and farce, with plenty of salty dialogue. He explores the macho culture of Sicily, and the peculiar position of the Church where marriage without sex is as reprehensible as sex without marriage.

“Nothing but a flop for three years?”

“Nothing but a flop.”

“Every night a flop?”

“Every night a flop.”

“How on earth?”

“Go and ask Our Father which art in heaven, he’s the one who cooks up these things.”

“I could understand it once or twice, or three times… I’ll be generous - five times. Which of us hasn’t done a flop?”

“I tell you no lie, friend. I never have.”

“Never?”

“Never!”

“In a certain sense, in the sense of a complete and hopeless flop, neither have I.”

At the same time, the background of the rise of the Fascists in Italy in the 1930s, and the people’s simultaneous hatred of them and fear of the alternative, seems to parallel Antonio’s mixed feelings on sexuality. Antonio’s uncle expresses himself accordingly when rumours reach him that Mussolini doesn’t have cancer, but just a syphilitic ulcer:

“Hell and dammit, we’re ruined. Two injections and your syphilitic ulcer goes kaput… On the other hand what happens if he dies? Who seizes power? His bunch of cut-purse henchmen? They’d slit each other’s throats while they were carving up the spoils. So then, it’s the Communist gaolbirds? Worse than the Fascists! At least the Fascists are incompetent scoundrels, and whatever crimes come into their minds they make a hash of, whereas the other lot are stern and upstanding, and make a clean job of ‘em.”

Beautiful Antonio was previously published in the UK as Antonio: The Great Lover. Neither really rolls off the tongue, and I think The Beautiful Antonio would be a fuller translation of the title (the original is Il Bell’Antonio) and would just sound better. Tim Parks, who provides the introduction to this edition, clearly agrees, as he refers to the book as The Beautiful Antonio throughout.