A beautiful, very French, novella about marriage and a pair of ear rings. Written in a slightly antique style as befits the subject, by the exotic Louise, a novelist, poet, journalist and “grand horizontale” and translated by her quondam lover Duff Cooper, the quondam British Ambassador to France. Forgive the repetition, it’s quondam thing after another.

One middle-aged man in search of The Point. A friend sent me this, and then brought him to dinner. Very funny pieces by the low life correspondent of the Spectator. In his own words: “He remains an undiscovered talent.” Modest, witty, and hilarious.

A friend sent this advanced copy for a comment, the biography of a boy growing up in Leeds Castle, but I’m afraid I found it uninteresting.

A nice 1940 edition, picked up in a second-hand bookshop in Chichester. A finely written story of the life of the Beau, who seems not only madly self-centred and utterly entitled, but vain, and not a little gay. He seems to be a bitchy queen half his life, and while he has many female admirers, with whom he gossips and corresponds, he doesn’t seem to sleep with them. Hello? Yes he is funny and foolishly brave insulting the Prince Regent when he is cut by him on Piccadilly, (“Alveney, who is your fat friend?”) but his entire life is dressing up, and three hours toilette and he changed his lingerie three times a day, so if that isn’t the height of narcissism what is? His gambling addiction and his penchant for borrowing money from his aristocratic friends makes it virtually inevitable he has to run away to Calais, where he lives in great style, but constantly on the edge of poverty by continually writing to and borrowing from old acquaintances. His sense of entitlement never leaves him, as he becomes Consul in Caen for a moment before talking himself out of a job. Perhaps this is the gamblers vice, to lose everything. He declines into squalor, sued by a former friend and thrown into prison, freed by friends, only to end up in a madhouse as reality overtakes his vanity. I thought it might make a nice play and then the Beau would of course have to be played by Simon Russell Beale. Excellent biography.

A lovely book in a lovely pocket paperback edition by Pushkin Press. Here, the sadly elderly Casanova is lingering around Mantua, waiting for permission to return to Venice, where he will accept the ignominious job of government spy. His powers waning, but not his interest in seduction, he has to face the decline of his fame, a challenge from a younger self, and encounters with both young and old females who want him virtually as a trophy, because of his reputation. At a friend’s house he behaves despicably to gain his way with a young woman who does not want him, bribing his rival, only to have to face a naked duel and his own feelings about his decline. So, then a book about mortality and morality, written by the excellent Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, whom I have always enjoyed.

My other recently discovered author is Edward St. Aubyn and I binged with great delight on The Patrick Melrose Novels. This, the final one, I had started previously, but didn’t get as it is set at the funeral of the mother of the protagonist and you really have to read them in order to understand who is what, and what they did to who. In particular here he examines Eleanor the mother, and her complicity in the awful relationship with his father which permitted this poor child to be so sadistically and brutally bullied and sexually abused. A delightfully written and sympathetic conclusion to a life examined.

The First Three Bernie Gunther novels. This has been my year for discovering the Edinburgh born Philip Kerr, and this summer I have binged on his books. Fortunately there are tons of them. His Bernie Gunther detective novels are about as good as it gets, plus they are set fascinatingly in Berlin during the Nazi period, so that we get a sense of how such an evil invades and takes over by small steps, while many were against it, but it is difficult to face the encroaching daily choices, and the risk of being murdered for speaking out. The joy of Bernie, is that he invariably speaks out, often in the face of the real Himmler, or Heydrich. Meanwhile he writes great detective fiction, shags the most delicious women, drinks and smokes and through him we see the rise and fall of Nazism and the appalling end Berlin undergoes. Invasion by the Russians? No, crucifixion please.

I was discussing with a friend how some novels which we read avidly in our teens and early twenties no longer stand up to re-reading, or we no longer regard them with such affection. Is it them, or is it us? Examples: Lawrence Durrell and The Alexandrian Quartet, Ulysses, and now I have been re-reading Catch 22 and it didn’t do it for me. Nothing wrong, I simply had had the gags and didn’t want to revisit the territory. Whereas Dickens gets better by the re-read, apart say from The Old Curiosity Shop and the nauseating Little Nell and the wildly unfunny Pickwick Papers. The exception for me with Lawrence Durrell is his excellent book Provence.

Well not for the first time I change my mind. I loved this book on second reading. He is so completely funny. The opening few chapters are hysterical. The Northern novelist self-mockery, the observation of the state of published fiction, of the dearth of readers, all superbly realised. I had the feeling I would enjoy it more the second time and should give it another go and I did. Perhaps too, in paperback it seems less portentous, more mocking of the serious novel, than being that. It is that, serious, too, and ends with fine irony, his wife whose literary pretensions he has scoffed at throughout, turns out to be the successful one, but even then he succeeds, succeeds in writing “popular” fiction under a pseudonym, while the mother in law whom he fancies goes off with his publisher. I did it a disservice. I was wrong. As we say up North “Is it me, or can you smell gas?”

At some point in the summer I re-read this, which brings back three of his favourite characters—Jack Foley from Out of Sight, Cundo Rey from La Brava, and Dawn Navarro from Riding the Rap—for “ a twisting, explosive, always surprising masterwork of crime fiction.” Foley was the Clooney one.

Read in a day. Impossible to put down. The first I have read since he died, but of course he isn’t any more dead to me than he ever was. He’s alive the minute you pick up his amazing pages. And I will go on reading him until I pop off. I would guess it’s about 80% dialogue, but he seems able to establish real believable characters whom you think you know, and are certain to visualize, almost instantaneously. How does he do that? Of course the basis of his books seem to be Westerns, there are good men and there are bad men, and here he actually ends with a shoot-out. It’s also subtitled High Noon in Detroit. In the matter of Alvin B. Guy, Judge of Recorder’s Court, City of Detroit: The investigation of the Judicial Tenure Commission found the respondent guilty of misconduct in office and conduct clearly prejudicial to the administration of justice. The allegations set forth in the formal complaint were that Judge Guy: Was discourteous and abusive to counsel, litigants, witnesses, court personnel, spectators and news reporters. 2) Used threats of imprisonment or promises of probation to induce pleas of guilty. 3) Abused the power of contempt. 4) Used his office to benefit friends and acquaintances. 5) Bragged of his sexual prowess openly. 6) Was continually guilty of judicial misconduct that was not only prejudicial to the administration of justice but destroyed respect for the office he holds. Ride down Woodward Avenue into the Motor City, toward a deadly show-down between dedicated homicide detective Raymond Cruz and a psychopathic murderer, “Oklahoma Wildman” Clement Mansell, who picked the wrong town to kill someone, even if it was only a crooked judge. Murder in Motown! Mansell picked the wrong place to go on a rampage. Homicide Detective Raymond Cruz doesn’t care who it is; nobody kills in his town.

Scholarly but slightly dull. So much is unnecessary. I abandoned at half time, which is the wrong time to abandon Marlowe. I shall perhaps take it up again later and skim, because the subject is interesting if the author is not.

This lovely Philip Kerr novel has a sympathetic German protagonist who was a cop in Berlin during the Nazi era. He has survived the war, and this one is set in post war Peronist Argentina, with Eva herself appearing, It reveals startling “facts” about how Argentina constructed its own death camps for poor Jewish immigrants. The country (and story) is filled with real life escaped German Nazis, such as Mengele and Boorman and ex-Policeman Bernie Gunther is hired to pursue an escaped serial killer amongst the Nazi émigrés, a Berlin crime previously encountered in an earlier novel. A fascinating and unusual tale and my favourite of his so far. He is really good and I have enjoyed passing along recommendations to happy people.

Defender of the Realm  1940-1965 I am also still working through this classic monster book on World War Two. It is intriguing to read what is going on in that tiny brave beleaguered island as they face the appalling sacrifices of six years of total war, held together by the wilful bravery of one of the finest drinkers the planet has ever known. I appear first as a tiny molecule around the North African campaign and then am born just at the time that the tide of war has finally turned.  There will still be almost another three years of world carnage, culminating in the birth of nuclear warfare, the rise of America, and the exhausted decline of Great Britain as a world power, having pawned her all (to America) to barely survive. Major stuff.

Continuing my summer bi-lingual reading I am still slowly working through this in French. I have the translation to hand. Emma is with Rostand. It’s as good as I can get in French reading and improves both my language skills and my appreciation of Flaubert’s cinema-like rendition of scenes and emotion.

A nice copy, an unabridged re-publication of the original Shakespeare and Company edition published in Paris by Sylvia beach in 1922 tempted me once again to give this a go. About a quarter way through I was tempted by something else and set it aside for a while. It’s not in my top 100… It’s amongst the world’s top unread books.

It starts out so energetically, with such force, so well written like a meteor, with the tale of Sabbath’s passion for his Croat mistress and the consequences of their sexuality, and then suddenly and unexpectedly collapses into a long almost incessant moan of complaint by the sixty year old puppeteer, who causes his wife Roseanne to collapse into alcoholism, his other actress wife Nikki to disappear, and a young student to expose him (accidentally) as a serial molester of students. Meanwhile he blusters on and on, justifying his geriatric sex antics that one grows quite tired of his endless justifying of his own desires, and his harking back over his happy days with the whores of South America. He is such a brilliant writer and this book is filled with his effortless bringing to life of scenes, but in the end I tired of it and decided to put it to one side.

So, just to prove it is possible to read many books at once I read this fine biography, by a Cambridge Historian, of the tragic Queen who fell into the hands of the all-powerful Elizabeth.  Her end is well known, but her beginnings in the Court of France under Catherine de Medici, married to Henri II of France, her education by his mistress Diane de Poitiers and her Uncles, the occasionally all-powerful Guises is a fascinating tale. Mary is married to the weakling King of France Francis II, who doesn’t last long, after which she returns to Scotland for the first time as an adult and has to deal with the obnoxious Knox, the mistrustful and inscrutable Protestant enemy Cecil and his vacillating virgin Queen as well as the jealousies and intrigues of the Scottish nobles and the powerful surges of Protestant and Catholic hatred. One can feel nothing but pity for her as she has husbands and friends murdered around her, falls for the horrible Bothwell, is kicked off the throne and imprisoned in England for nineteen years by the insanely jealous Elizabeth, before leading Cecil’s secret service to the proofs of her desperate plots to escape, her inevitable trial for treason and the tragic farce of her execution. The stagecraft which she employs, to set herself up as a Catholic Martyr, is her final scene of Tudor Reality TV. The Kardashians have nothing on her. This is the best book I have ever read on her.

A novel about sex in old age. And a good one. He picks up the tale of a character who first appeared in The Last Picture Show and who he has revisited often. Duane Moore comes home to find a young attractive executive working in his office. He fancies his shrink, and she, deep in grief, abandons the profession to give him some much needed tips on sexual pleasure. The beneficiary is obvious, but satisfying. Highly enjoyable. Like sex in old age….

From the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger I really enjoyed these tales set in Kittur, India. However, I did find that the track of the stories were similar, people seeking to rise above their station and falling from their aspirations, as they banged against the class and caste systems of this Indian city. Once this pattern emerged, I found them harder to enjoy, as each protagonist suffers the same fall, and so they are all about loss and disappointment, which is perhaps an Indian attitude. Or maybe it’s Oxford?

I was shocked at how good these four novels are. First of all he writes better prose than Bruce Chatwin and the tales he tells are full of dark truth. You know these things took place. I was actually shocked by the child molesting which occurs early in the first novel in the sequence Never Mind and the books explore the attempt by the protagonist Patrick Melrose to put his life back together after his appalling father bullies and assaults him in the early sixties in Provence. But they are also brilliantly witty and hilarious. In Bad News the tale jumps starkly forward to the now grown boy’s junkie years in New York, to return in Some Hope to an hilarious account of an upper class birthday party with an outstandingly funny pillorying of Princess Margaret which had me laughing out loud with joy. He captures the whole braying world of a really nasty class of English people which is at once a joy to read and a necessary corrective from the soft soap opera of the dear aristocrats portrayed so untruthfully and nauseatingly in Downton Abbey. Funny, and bitter, and satirical, it is at once better and grittier than Evelyn Waugh, and that from me. (?) I read all four in one lovely Picador Paperback original which restores one’s faith in Publishers. I can’t wait to get home and finish At Last, the final book in the series, which I was enjoying, but got distracted from when I picked it up from Mr.B’s last year. I understand now why. It is important to read them in order.

Well yes I’d read it before ( in July 1998) but who doesn’t love this first tale of US Marshall Raylan Givens, tracking the corrupt bookie who flees to Italy to avoid being hit by a fat, lazy Florida mob boss. Leonard says that Raylan is his favourite character and no wonder, he really is the old Western sheriff, with his country hat and his cowboy boots and his unshakeable pursuit of villainy. I love Justified and it’s Raylan than makes it work and it was a treat all the way to read this again. This book ends where the TV series begins, with his fast draw down on the Zip at a restaurant table.

I can’t believe I have never read this beautiful poem of a book before:  elegant, short, exquisitely written interweaving tales of the inhabitants of a small Northern Californian fishing town. It’s the refreshing non-judgemental attitude of Steinbeck to his characters that makes it so enjoyable.  That and his prose. How’s this for an opening? “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories, and flophouses. It’s inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody.” First Published in 1945 I read a beautiful Penguin Steinbeck Centennial Edition paperback, set in Bembo. I shall read it again.

Finished the month with a Leonard. I had never read one of his Westerns before and of course he never disappoints. Is it Oscar Wilde, the good end happily, the bad unhappily, that is the point of fiction? Anyway it leaps off the page and is excellent summer reading.

I found a nice signed limited first edition of this autobiography of King David and was enjoying it, as was he, until I suddenly lost interest, because no plot had yet kicked in. Odd isn’t it, that that’s the hook that lands the fish. If you don’t tell us a story you’re just talking, and no matter how clever or how witty you are it just won’t do.  So I laid it aside. I had intended to re-read Catch 22 before finding these two at Iliad. I see it’s down in my list of books pre-1992 before the list began and they were all shipped from London.