Books of the Year 2020

 

Some of the books of the year - I tend to give away the books I enjoyed most, so this is an incomplete selection of all the chosen titles. The best ones always get away!

Not much to celebrate about 2020, which went downhill from March onwards with coronavirus and final stages of Brexit, but despite everything, there were some books I encountered during the year that were truly inspiring (and some of them I even finished). Here is a quick list of eight books (and one art exhibition) that impressed, entertained, or challenged, and all took my mind off other things. 

Norman Scarfe (ed), A Frenchman’s Year in Suffolk, 1784

This book only arrived in December, but already it has proved fascinating. Norman Scarfe is no doubt a monarchist, a reactionary, and against everything the French Revolution stood for, but I forgive him everything for bringing to life the diaries of the La Rochefoucault brothers during the year they spent in East Anglia. Their accounts of the everyday life of the English upper classes – their drinking, their hunting, and their impoliteness – is a wonderful corrective to the accounts of insiders such as the dreadful Parson James Woodforde, writing at a similar time, but utterly complacent and self-serving. Scarfe’s edition is a model of good scholarship: everything explained at the foot of each page, with illustrations of people and places, and a scene-setting introduction. It’s lovely to see this book has been reprinted four times since its first publication in 1987. 

Grace Paley, Collected Stories

What a discovery! She wrote only three collections of short stories, in 1959, 1974, and 1985, no novels, and yet managed to write pioneering experimental fiction, as well as being a political activist and campaigner. Her stories draw on her lower-class Jewish background in the tenements of New York, with many of the characters reappearing in several stories. She is never afraid to experiment (which means that some of the stories go nowhere, or simply fall over) but you forgive her for the success of some of the other stories. These stories have an immediacy, a vividness, that grips the reader, in great contrast to the more leisured, cossetted atmosphere of Updike. You suspect that for every Updike there is a Grace Paley somewhere looking after the kids and writing on the kitchen table. Best of all, Paley has no axe to grind; she writes believable fiction, not to prove a thesis. And her dialogue rivals Damon Runyon’s!   

Calvino, Italian Folktales

This vast collection of hundreds of tales constantly defeats my expectations. I’ve written about it at length elsewhere; suffice it to say here that I find it is consistently entertaining, while ploughing through collections of Grimm or Afaneseyev’s Russian folktales becomes heavy going.  However (two weeks later), just a minor update, after having read 155 of the 200 tales: I wish Calvino had exercised a little more rigour in his selection. Several of the tales repeat elements found elsewhere, and are not great tales in their own right. I think the selection could have been further reduced by around 20%. It would still remain the definitive selection of Italian folk tales. 

Susan Woodford, Greek and Roman Art (2020)

A real achievement, this one, in a series by Thames and Hudson, entitled Art Essentials, along the lines of Gallimard Decouvertes. There are plenty of introductory guides on the subject, several of them by Susan Woodford herself, so this one should have been unmemorable. What made it stand out was that is in full colour, with an integrated layout, with the excellent choice of illustrations, captions that read as if she has actually looked at the work in question (“the elegant pose of the statue folds into unintelligibility”), a good glossary and further reading section. All in all, a highly successful use of the concise format to focus on the essential artworks and artists. Very easy to read, and very inspiring to make me want to go and see some of these things in museums. 

Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869)

It may be thought cheeky to select a book that I’ve only read a few hundred pages of. Given the size of the novel, however, these few hundred pages are as long as some novels. And you can already see some themes emerging. You notice the omniscient narrator, who tells us what to think, for example, that we should be fond of Pierre, and that we should see the social life of the rich in Moscow and St Petersburg as shallow: “Here in Moscow we are more occupied with dinner-parties and scandal than with politics.” It’s a clever trick, to give the appearance of neutrality, but to lead the reader by a hundred signs into agreeing with Tolstoy’s often peculiar ideas. 

Tim Parks, Medici Money (2006)

Medici Money is my nomination for book of the year. Discovered in the Amnesty Bookshop, Cambridge (remember second-hand bookshops?), at a price of £3, Tim Parks’ Medici Money turned out to be a real page-turner – pretty impressive when you think it is a book about banking and economics! But the combination of Parks’ accessible but informed writing style, and the astonishing subject matter, made this book a winner. I will never again look at the word “Medici” without suspicion, and the book has changed the way I see the Renaissance in Florence. 

Machiavelli, Florentine Histories

Inspired by Tim Parks (above), we read the first two hundred pages or so of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories. The pattern seems to be clear: the city of Florence places its hopes in an individual or group to free them from a tyrant, only to discover that the resulting political situation is worse than ever. Unfortunately, the edition was a rather stodgy and unhelpful one. You need some assistance to make a contemporary historian accessible.  

Van Eyck exhibition, Ghent

This was certainly the exhibition of the year, even if the show was rather distorted into comparison of Flemish versus Italian art, with the winner being, of course, Van Eyck, the local; I wrote about it here.

Defoe, Captain Singleton (1720)

Defoe is remarkable for writing fiction that seems amazingly realistic, despite his not having any experience of the situation describe. Here, Captain Singleton is a pirate who crosses Africa from east to west with his band of followers. 

A Much-maligned town: Opinions of Reading 1126-2008 (2008)

I chose this book as a tribute to the small publishers across the UK who produce books about a place, for a local readership. Reading, not a city that you would immediately associate with publishing, has one of the best local publishers, The Two Rivers Press. I don’t see any truly local publishers like this in Oxford or Cambridge, which is a shame. Plenty of publishing about the universities - but that's not the same thing.   

Should we worry about not liking Céline Dion?

Cover of the original 2007 Continuum edition

Carl Wilson (not the former Beach Boy, but a Canadian music journalist) is a deeply troubled man. Given the assignment of writing about Céline Dion (for the book Let's Talk About Love, a title in a series published by Continuum, each volume devoted to individual albums) he agonises for over 150 pages about whether it is OK not to like the album he presumably has been commissioned to write favourably about. He must be worried, because he quotes from works on aesthetics (David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Clement Greenberg) as well as academic sociology (Pierre Bourdieu, Petersen (actually Peterson), and Kern) to try to come to terms with his unease. He deserves top marks for honesty, at least. 

Wilson asks an interesting question, if you persevere beyond his mixed metaphors (“Schmaltz circles the rim but seemingly never wholly dissolves in the melting pot, bubbling up again decade after decade.” [p62]) and the odd vocabulary (see my post on music journalists’ style). He is most interesting when moving furthest away from his own response, and weakest when describing Ms Dion, perhaps because he has nothing much to say about her music. As an experienced music journalist, you think he could say something more specific than “her voice is nouveau riche” [p72] and “her singing is aspirational” (and I don’t think he means she pronounces her “h”s). He describes his problem, but despairs of ever resolving it. At one point he states: “For all the sense I’ve been able to make of Céline, why am I still bored?” [p74]. 

Personally, I wouldn’t worry about not liking Dion’s music, but sadly for Wilson, he appears condemned to feeling guilty about some popular music he cannot respond to. Let’s look at the reasons he gives for justifying liking Dion’s music: 

She had a challenging upbringing. As one of 14 children, born to a poor Quebecois family, and not initially speaking any English, Dion progressed the hard way. Nonetheless, that’s not a justification for the music either. 

She is a nice person. I don’t doubt that Ms Dion is a very nice person, but that’s not going to make me like her music. In my teens, I went with my girlfriend to a Donovan concert. I’m sure Donovan was and is a lovely, sincere, person, but I found the music utterly uninteresting. 

It’s impossible to describe your response to some musicians [a bit desperate, this one, from a music journalist]. “It’s not uncommon for musicians to bypass taste categories when they hear technical achievement, and Céline seems to be such a case.” [p67] 

Dion’s music is not white, nor black, but schmaltz. Wilson hears Dion’s music as “black music”, but on reflection, decides her music is neither black nor white; “the only unhyphenated label I can find is “schmaltz”. If nothing else, this response characterizes Wilson's unique way of reasoning. 

My response is tribal, not intellectual: “our guts tell us certain kinds of music are for certain kinds of people” [p19]. “My aversion to Dion more closely resembles how put off I feel when someone says they’re prolife or a Republican: intellectually ‘I’m aware how personal and complicated such affiliations can be, but my gut reactions are more crudely tribal.” [p19].

In other words, he can’t do anything about this matter of taste; that’s just how he is. Later in the book he considers taste in a more formal way (that’s where Hume and Kant come in) and moves, I think, to a useful conclusion, but doesn’t in the end respond to his own findings. “The question is whether anyone’s tastes stand on certain ground, starting with mine.” 

I think the problem is more simple than that. Hume, Kant, and even Clement Greenberg talk about appealing to some kind of authority, who can provide a neutral judgement. But in pop music, there is no such authority. Pop music is just another commodity, to be bought and sold. The only authority is sales figures, which make Dion without doubt one of the greatest stars ever. As consumers, we humans have just one main task in life: to purchase. For most of us, the only individuality we can express is our preference for A or B, for Dion or Dylan. Through these preferences, we make friends or lose friends. We believe we are free because of that choice, but even when Wilson describes Bourdieu’s famous survey in the 1970s on “discrimination”, that “taste is a manifestation of a quest for social status … to perpetuate the class structure”, he is not convinced. It is no choice; most of popular music is created so that young people can identify with a group (as well as representing something that their parents do not like). Popular music journalists beyond their teens, like Wilson (born 1967, and writing Let’s Talk about Love at the age of 40), struggle to make any sense of it, yet they lived through it; does he not remember? For Wilson, the bands and singers he liked in his teens are the ones that are “real”; the others, like Dion, incomprehensible. Why else would Rolling Stones concerts be full of audiences in their sixties? 

Pop bands and singers come and go, regardless of their cultural significance, and, as Bourdieu points out, cultural significance may well be determined by a different group to the consumers of the music. Consumers of the music may not like this presence or absence of cultural significance, but it doesn't matter to them. At the time, the important thing for the consumer is to have a preference: X is my favourite; I hate Y. Likes and dislikes create bonds and establish identity. Wilson more or less recognises this, at times: “It’s most blatant in the identity war that is high school, but music never stops being a badge of recognition.”[p19] 

Dion is a badge; nothing to do with autonomous value in the eyes of critics. As Wilson memorably describes, she “tastes good” to her audience, even if she is not “in good taste”. As a music journalist, he worries about good taste; music consumers do not. It might have been a problem for his book commission, but he can rest assured that most Dion admirers will not even know that his book exists. His secret is safe, despite publication.

The Style of Music Journalism

 

I’m reading a book by Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk about Love. Wilson is a music journalist, and it’s a long time since I’ve read any music journalism. I vaguely remember seeing articles in New Musical Express, during the 1970s when I was a student, and perhaps I was more tolerant at that time, but today this writing strikes me as very peculiar. As for the argument of the book, that is for a later post, but here I will try to clarify the main features of the music journalism style. You could say that much of the NME journalism could be excused as the result of enthusiastic youthful ardour by the writers, but Wilson was 40 when he published Let's Talk about Love. 

Mixing things up

Wilson constructs sentences by combining formal and informal, academic and popular discourse. This technique is certainly arresting: I stop reading with every example. I can’t decide if the technique is thereby successful or simply confusing: 

“This epidemic of second thought made critical scorn generally seem a tad shady.” [p15]

 Perhaps it is simply that Wilson confuses us with his baroque melange of metaphors:

 “Once pop criticism had a track record lengthy enough to be full of wrong turns, neither popular nor critical consensus seemed like a reliable guide.” [p15]

Using a phrase “track record” in the context of pop music seems likely to confuse. And a long track record isn’t necessarily full of wrong turns – it might just be long. 

Mixed metaphors

“After the tumult of the early 1990s, when ‘underground’ music was seized on by the mainstream and just as quickly thrown overboard” [p15]

“For four years her legions have tithed their salaries to fly to Los Angeles for her nightly revue” [p18]

Mixed metaphors are not confined to Wilson's writing. There are plenty of other examples, such as a review of the Wilson book by another (former) music journalist, David Zahl, who writes: 

Having authoritative taste in cutting edge music is a particularly cruel mistress, especially in an age when technology has put so many extra players on the field. 

Sentences that defy expectations

One of the challenges that AI teams are working on is to parse an English sentence correctly – to understand its meaning. Most English sentences are quite straightforward, but I feel sorry for the AI experts to have to deal with such illogical constructions as these: 

“The epiphany was ethical, but it led to musical enjoyment”.

That word “but” worries me. Are ethical actions not enjoyable? Does enjoyment have anything to do with ethics? 

References for the favoured few

A further confusion is references to popular culture where it is assumed that the reader knows what Wilson is talking about. For example: “[I had] gotten married (to a woman with a severe Gummo fixation)”. Do we know what Gummo is? It’s a cult film about teenage boys. As Wilson himself points out, pop music criticism often “hinges on turning your readership into an incrowd [with] the power to exclude”. [p16]

Perhaps the real challenge when writing about popular music is that the subject matter can be so banal, that the journalists feel they have to embellish their text to provide more interest. Perhaps you might say I am being unfair to Wilson, as his book makes a serious point - but that is for the next post. 

The Bridget Jones phenomenon

Being Bridget Jones, a TV documentary about the Bridget Jones books and films prompted a re-evaluation of the character. What made the Bridget Jones character so memorable? Is there anything more to be said about her?

It was clear from the documentary that what is memorable is not the males, however much screen entertainment they provide (usually based on rivalry). Hugh Grant versus Colin Firth, or Colin Firth versus Patrick Dempsey was not what we remember about the films: three of them, from Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001), based on the book of the same title (1996), up to the film Bridget Jones's Baby (2016). By the end the story declines into wish-fulfilment, but there is enough in the earlier films and books to reflect on. 

No, the abiding achievement of Helen Fielding is to record female insecurity. Women have gained so much in the last 150 years, and yet hesitancy and lack of confidence remain very common in women. As Germaine Greer stated in the TV programme, we all of us have Bridget Jones moments, waiting for the phone to ring. I realised when she said this that she was referring to women, but it could equally refer to men. Here is a limitation of these films: all the leading males are secure in their roles; they are strong-jawed ciphers. Real men might sit waiting for the phone to ring, but not these males. Even Colin Firth, although he may be slow to reveal his true feelings, is a world-class lawyer.

Of course the reality is more complex than that. Bridget is the woman who is on the edge of her class, as you sense her creator Helen Fielding is. Fielding grew up in a small industrial suburb of Leeds in Yorkshire, and then went to Oxford as an undergraduate in the 1970s, where she will have encountered a very different, more polished world. “She seemed not to have read any books”, said her contemporary Richard Curtis, revealing perhaps more than he realised. It would be typical of Jones to reveal that she hasn’t read books, which the more poised public-school educated male undergraduates haven’t read either, but can confidently talk about in conversation.

The Bridget Jones character sits uncomfortably with feminism. Already, 20 years after the first film, we all realise that the attitudes would no longer be tolerated – groping women’s bottoms is not a matter for laughter any longer. The Jones character is not what many women want to dwell on (however much her attitudes, fear of failure, obsession with trivia, chronic insecurity) might be shared by males. “Will I get married” is not high on the feminist agenda.

While we can all agree that the obsession with weight and body image is sad and misguided, although very much the result of a world presenting images of female models who are spectacularly thin as a norm to be emulated, we might be a little more uncomfortable about other aspects of Jones’ character.

Making a mess of things in public (particularly with lawyers, given that Mark Darcy is a barrister) makes us feel at one with Jones, but sometimes the character exploration goes further and raises some questions. Jones’ talent for making a fool of herself in public is, I think, more than simply representing her background and openness. Fielding/Jones argues for a particular female attitude, not just rejecting the driven professionalism of some of the women in the TV company where Bridget works, but in the second film, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), her journalistic efforts are lame and amateurish. By comparison, Hugh Grant reveals himself to be an accomplished and relaxed presenter. He would get a job over her any day. Am I reading too much into the stories, but is there perhaps some underlying plea by Fielding for human failure rather than business success? After all, at the end of three full-length films, Jones finally gets married. Who does she choose? The charismatic, sexy, supremely confident and talented millionaire, or the repressed English lawyer who is anything but streetwise, but looks honest. The fact that he’s probably also a millionaire doesn’t mean she is marrying only for love.

What it means to be British

Some words have become highly emotive for me in recent years. I cannot hear the words “Brexit” any longer without a sinking feeling, but now it has extended to include “British”, and “Britain”. The terms are chilling because the effect of Brexit, now it has happened, and perhaps unintended by the supporters of Brexit, has been to sharpen the distinction between Britain, and everything British, from the rest of the world. As Brexit inexorably takes place, something that seems to happen in slow motion (we are now years after the fateful referendum and the point of withdrawal has still not been reached) a kind of slow poisoning results from every mention of the word “Britain”. The Brexit mentality, the focus on myths from history that are brandished to demonstrate British uniqueness (such as “We stood alone” during World War Two, ignoring when it suited Churchill the contribution of all the peoples in the British Empire), seems to turn a screw in my brain with every mention of “Britain”.

So I can no longer ignore mentions of “British” sport, or books on “British” this or that, with a certain pang. I have now started to feel uncomfortable with any aspect of nationalism. So much so that only now, many years after the event, I begin to question the rather insidious propaganda aspect of having studied “English literature”. Why study a subject that threatens to produce a kind of jingoism by its very title? Is not the veneration of Shakespeare, unthinkingly labelled the world’s greatest playwright, a pawn used by many in the relentless emphasis on the superiority of things British? I dutifully read the rather small-scale body of medieval English literature, not questioning why it was seen in a completely detached fashion from medieval European literature, particularly French, which in many ways has a much more coherent corpus. I didn’t question why my degree ignored the vast body of Anglophone literature from the Caribbean, from India, from Africa – none of it mentioned in a three-year course on “English” literature. What was meant by “English” was, of course, the literature of Britain, not literature in the English language. A handful of English literature academics such as John Bayley would bravely write about Tolstoy, but such an attitude was becoming slowly squeezed out behind a mask of professionalism, of sticking to Eng Lit.

Having seen the unthinking populism that generated Brexit attitudes, I would seriously contemplate abolishing all national sport. Why drape a United Kingdom flag around athletes when they win an international event? Why even persist in the concept of a United Kingdom when it becomes increasingly apparent that the colonialism Britain imposed on India and African nations it controlled applied also to Ireland and to Scotland? That there never was a United Kingdom, just an efficient myth-making hegemony that included, I realise to my horror, university departments of English Literature? Just as a university department of theology is a crude attempt to hide religious propaganda behind the veneer of Enlightenment-inspired rational study, as if theology takes an equal place alongside chemistry and biology as an exercise of pure judgement? What am I doing in this island nation which appears determined to sever all ties with the European mainland and sail off incoherently in insignificant isolation?

Calvino's Italian Folktales

 

Calvino, Italian Folktales, 1971 edition

Big collections of fairy tales can be dull – and I speak as a great defender of fairy tales. But I always turn to Italo Calvino with pleasure and anticipation. Why is this?

Back in 1956, Calvino was invited by publisher Giulio Einaudi to compile a representative volume of Italian folktales (Fiabe Italiane). The resulting book has been for me a source of entertainment and pleasure ever since I first encountered it in the 1970s. Calvino was an ideal choice to compile a representative collection of Italian folktales, to be placed alongside Grimm: his trilogy of fairy-tale inspired fiction, collected as I Nostri Antenati (our ancestors), was written between 1952 and 1959, that is, contemporaneous with the two years he spent compiling the folktale collection.  

Calvino makes it quite clear he has adjusted and rewritten the tales as he sees fit (“I enriched the text selected from other version and whenever possible did so without altering its character or unity, and at the same time filled it out and made it more plastic. I touched up as delicately as possible those portions that were either missing or too sketchy” (Introduction, p xix). Does his rewriting make the stories more appealing, or is it perhaps that Italian folktales are more enjoyable to read than, say, Russian tales?

Calvino reveals some of his motivation behind the compilation in his introduction. First, a clarification. The book is entitled in English “Italian Folktales” contains not simply fairy tales, but a mixed bag including witches, fairies, kings and princesses, but also tales of cunning, popular religious tales and curiosities. Indeed, some of the stories contain no magical events at all (for example, no 56, “Lose your temper, and you lose your bet). The Italian title Fiabe Italiane could mean “Italian fairy tales” or “Italian folk tales” and Calvino states quite in his introduction (p. xx) that fairy tales comprise only a part of his collection. He also included “popular narrative components of various kinds … which held me by their beauty”. Hence he includes, as the Grimms do not, examples of the still continuing folk religion, the inspiration behind The Golden Legend, and some of those lovely tales about St Peter at the gates of Heaven.

Calvino’s compilation was not limited simply to selecting the stories. His goals were to select representative stories from all the regions of Italy. However, Calvino explains in his introduction that the geographical designation he provides for each story doesn’t mean the story originated there, merely that Calvino selected his version of choice from that region. Calvino makes it quite clear that some regions of Italy are richer in folktales than others, notably Tuscany and Sicily. His attempts to try to create a collection with tales from each region strikes me as a curious survival of the 19th-century Italian determination to forge a nation out of very disparate regional elements. In any case, Calvino redefines his region as the Italian linguistic area (so including Nice) rather than the present-day boundaries of Italy (he excludes South Tyrol as largely German-speaking). Hence I am worried by the single word at the end of each story: “Bologna”, or “Montale Pistoiese”, which suggests to the casual reader that the tale is from just one location. He makes it clear in the notes that he blends and merges versions from all over Italy.  

He rewrites them, or sections of them! He is unapologetic about this: he follows the proverb “The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it”. Critics such as Jack Zipes have great pleasure in identifying how the Grimms changed their sources to fit the profile of a growing middle-class bourgeois class, but it seems less well-known today that Calvino was doing exactly the same thing to the folktales he selected. Despite our contemporary ideas of establishing the best text, fairy tales remain a genre where changing the story is perfectly OK.

Finally, Calvino tries to recreate a mythical pure, unadorned, form of the tales, as if to preserve their essential character. The notes to the tales are fascinating evidence of this practice – for example, no 80, “Fearless Simpleton”: “Pitre’s text closes with the hero’s head cut off … but since that brings an element of fantasy into an otherwise realistic narrative, I thought it best to exclude it”. In other words, Calvino has tried to create folk tales closer to his idea of what a tale should be than any of the actual examples in front of him. So much for textual fidelity. But if the resulting text is so enjoyable, should we be worried?

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