Tag: book review

Heaven and earth

Reading Alexei Navalny’s book ‘Patriot’ has been a sobering experience. It is a conventional biography until his return to Russia after poisoning in 2021. From then on it’s the imposition of evermore stringent limitations on movement, not least the tiny cell, and on freedom of expression: his journal which takes up the second half of the book includes over 100 pages from 2022 and just 20 in 2023. He was murdered in February 2024. The sheer guts of Navalny and utter, indeed vile, vindictiveness of Putin mirror in extreme form the battle lines of our time.

At the other extreme has been the Artemis mission to and around the moon. Physical space constrained but limitless space beyond the capsule. Navalny didn’t have to go back to Russia, but he calculated that, if not in his lifetime, should they take his life from him, but in the lives of those that follow him, a world of limitless possibilities would be opened up in Russia. People might see this as a wild aspiration, when we’re always falling short, but to have aspirations is where freedom lies.

I’ve also been reading the remarkable, ‘Orbital’, the Booker-prize winning novel in 2024. We’re aboard the space station, four men, two women, two of the men being Russian. The Russians have separate quarters, Again, space constrained, but without gravity they have freedom of movement. Every ninety minutes they complete a circuit of the earth, and it is a thing of wonder, of colour and light, where human habitation only becomes visible when cities and roads light up as earth and spacecraft turn their backs on the sun.

‘This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another?  With the earth? Can we stop…’

Constraints of space are also a focus of the 2025 Booker-prize winning novel, ‘Flesh’, when a Hungarian boy in a Budapest high-rise escapes via the army to England, to a security job and marriage to his boss’s widow, to the greatest riches, and then … I’ll let the ending take you by surprise. Where ‘Orbital’ is about wonder, and imagination, ‘Flesh’ is pared down, contained in a world where sex is the stepping-off point. The two novels, ‘Orbital’ and ‘Flesh’, exist at different poles. Wonder is open-ended, reaches the stars. Escaping privation on the other hand is a roller-coaster, you claw up, you’re cast down, upward mobility with the threat of downward always present.

Hungary is also in the news because of the recent election, and the ousting of the kleptocratic populist and aspiring autocrat, Viktor Orban. I don’t want to push parallels too far – or maybe I do. We’ve seen twelve years of a government encroaching on everyday freedoms. But not to the extent that an election could be fixed, though Orban tried his best. It was just this kind of attack on political and personal liberty that could possibly have been stopped in its tracks maybe twenty and more years ago in Russia.

Hungary can now be open again to Europe and the EU, and enjoy ordinary freedoms. We can parallel their absence for Navalny with the freedoms now opening for Hungary. And the freedom to wonder, whether you’re bound to the ground or circling in space, at all the earth has to offer.

Before I sign off I’ll also put in a word for Pope Leo, new to the job, but taking on Trump, Trump as aspirant Jesus (as he depicted himself in Truth Social)), and Trump as tyrant. For Pope Leo it is simply a case of speaking truth. He of course can speak from the elevation of a papal chair. But given his opponent, it takes courage.

Navalny was speaking from prison. That took courage to a whole other level. As he wrote from prison in 2022, ‘I knew from the outset I would be imprisoned for life – either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of the regime.’

The old democratic certainties are gone, maybe forever, but we can still aspire to them, always, if we can, keeping one step ahead of the bad guys.

All about books

A friend of mine lent me ‘Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader ‘ by Anne Fadiman. And I will be forever in her debt.

Lending books – something Fadiman doesn’t have a chapter on in her wonderfully erudite and obsessive and mesmerisingly enjoyable book. I’m sure she does lend books to friends but books are for her, as they are for me, about ownership. Norma will get her book back – and I’ll buy my own copy.

One problem when you borrow a book: you can’t annotate – scrawl untidily in the margins. For Fadiman a well-annotated book is better than a clean one – so much better a used and loved and cherished book than a virgin tome, maybe even (sacrilege) with pages still uncut.

She loves typos, as we all do, especially if we’ve been editors. And I started my publishing life as a Penguin copyeditor. She quotes a prize find from a friend of hers, a sentence in a manuscript sent to a San Francisco publisher:

‘Einstein’s Theory of Relativity led to the development of the Big Band Theory.’ (Could, I wonder, E be for Ellington and M for Miller?)

She’s also wonderful on plagiarism, and I fully acknowledge my source. Ex Libris, by Anne Fadiman.

‘One day when Sir Walter Scott was out hunting, a sentence he had been trying to compose all morning suddenly leapt into his head. Before it could fade, he shot a crow, plucked a feather, sharpened the tip, dipped it in crow’s blood, and captured the sentence.’

I like this and would like to replicate it, out on one of my walks, or long-distance runs, but I don’t hunt, and I don’t think I’d be too keen on plucking a dead crow. Writing in blood? Maybe. To establish an undying bond, over a dead crow? Maybe not. But there are sentences which occur, phrases, at the wrong moment, with no pen or pencil to hand, and typing into ‘notes’ on my iPhone seems a bit feeble. So what to do? I could carry a catapult and practise my skills, in the manner of David, with a stone or two. But I might kill a Philistine and miss the bird…

Fadiman having put aside a much-loved pen now uses a word processor. And she does what I do, she ‘moves the rejected phrases to the bottom of the screen, where they are continuously pushed ahead of the text in progress like an ever-burgeoning mound of snow by a plough’.

Great, but snow hardly describes my mis-spellings and mis-statements. I’ve used the same ploy writing serious e-mails, pushing rejected text to the bottom just in case it’s useful. Then forgetting it’s there and sending the e-mail with gibberish attached.

Both Fadiman’s parents were writers. A distinct advantage, if you as the offspring are also that way inclined. If not I guess you take up pogo-stick dancing, or similar, and pretend that’s your passion. It’s not just in the blood that books are found. They’re also out there, on the shelves, in your library, your attic. (‘No way will we have books in the dining-room,’ I remember being told.)

My problem is that while the shelves are bespoke and individual shelf heights can be adjusted, that means removing all the books from one section of my library, adjusting the shelves, and then discovering that, yes, you can now display your art books upright, but you’ve no longer room for those awkward over-sized B-format Penguins. I can cope with the Adeles (A-format), it’s the Emperors that cause the problem.

Fadiman quotes from three-times prime minister William Ewart Gladstone’s inspired and obsessive 29-page tome ‘On Books And The Housing Of Them’. He fantasised about library shelves on (tram)rails, so the shelves can be pushed together, and pulled out as need be. But maybe not in my sitting room, which doubles as my main library. (The Benedictines at Douai Abbey spent £1/2million on doing just that, building a wonderfully compact library containing tens of thousands of volumes from the libraries of now defunct and monkless monasteries. The books had nowhere else to go. How often are they consulted, I wonder? Theology I guess does go on forever.)

They read aloud a lot in the Fadiman household. Not least bedtime reading, when she and her husband read aloud to each other. She approves of the poet Heine, who ‘read Don Quixote to the trees and flowers in the Palace Garden of Dusseldorf’. That’s the kind of snippet I like. Not just any book, or any place. And not just quoting or murmuring, but reading aloud to the trees and flowers.

There were empty benches in the Parks in Oxford this afternoon. The sun was shining. I had my book with me, I could have sat down – and read aloud. I had trees and flowers all around me.

Books do get squashed between other books, and if they’re thin and almost spineless, they’re forgotten. A problem I recognise. But worse for me is having to tuck books behind, in a second rank, as a necessity, being the only way I can house all my books. (Yes, I have thought of buying a large house in the country, or a small house, with one very big room. Two can share a single bed, and we all had galley kitchens once.)

My Penguins, hundreds of them (once a Penguin always a Penguin), already on an unreachable top shelf, have a front and a back row. (The back row isn’t happy.) I’ve catalogued them all, so I know what’s there, but sometimes it seems almost quicker to go out and by a new book.

But, one big advantage – surprise. ‘I never knew I had that,’ I’ve exclaimed a few times.

Gladstone believed that his shelving system might ‘prevent the population of Great Britain from being extruded into the surrounding waters by the extent of their own libraries’. Maybe he imagined a future where we’d all be literate, and we’d put away all trivial pursuits, and buy books, and read – but instead we have our televisions, and our computers. We and our surrounding waters are safe…

I’m on the side of libraries, but say that to almost anyone these days and they look askance, they look amazed. Serious bibliophiles who mull and mutter through endless happy hours in libraries were then and are even more now a breed apart.

I will continue to mull and mutter.