Reading the Russians - the Anna Karenina Fix by Viv Groskop

Viv Groskop is an author, columnist, playwright, broadcaster and comedian. She become obsessed in her teens by all things Russian after reading Anna Karenina and believing the name Groskop was of Russian origin. This led her to two Russian degrees and to living and working in Russia. Eventually she discovered her family originated from Poland and her name means “Fat-head” but this has not diminished her love of Russia and its literature.

The Anna Karenina Fix is a lively, witty overview of the Russian classics and sets out to show they are not deep, difficult and intimidating but can be enjoyed by everyone. The 11 short chapters feature 10 of the great Russian authors, Turgenev, Pasternak, Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky etc with her hero Tolstoy starting and finishing the book with chapters on Anna Karenina and War & Peace.

The chapter titles give a flavour of Viv Groskop’s light-hearted style. Chapter four for example is titled: 

“How to Survive Unrequited Love” – A month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev – (Or: Don’t fall in love with your best friend’s wife).

The introduction deals with the vexed issue of Russian names, including the exasperating problem of diminutives. How do you keep up when Alexandra is referred to as “Sasha”? Her own name Viv, became “Vivka” (Little Viv) which was misheard by her Russian landlady as “Veepka” (Little VIP) which in turn mutated to “Vipulenka” (Dearest Teeny, Tiny Little VIP).

The book is a vibrant mixture of humour, insight and anecdote, with incidents from her own life in Russia thrown into the mix. It is a very enjoyable, page-turning read and at the end of it you will have had the door flung open on what for too many of us is the closed world of Russian literature. She makes clear in her introduction that the book is not intended to be an academic thesis, but instead:

“It's an exploration of the answers these writers found to life's questions big and small and it's a love letter to some favourite books which at one point helped me to find my identity and buoyed me up when I lost it again.”

Until a few years ago One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch was the only Russian novel I’d read – see chapter 8 in The Anna Karenina Fix. Written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1962 the novel is set in a labour camp in Stalin’s Russia. Despite the harrowing setting, the story is full of humanity and wisdom, and is often included in lists of the world’s great novels. At just 209 pages it is an easy place to dip your toe in the water of the Russian classics.

Three things propelled me deeper: the first was a visit to St Petersburg where my daughter, Anna was doing a prelim course in Russian prior to studying for a year at the university in Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia – she always wanted to live where there was plenty of snow! Surrounded by all things Russian made me want to get to know the country through its literature. The second was our book group choice of First Love by Turgenev which was a short, easy read and prompted me go on to read his Fathers and Sons. The third was the BBC adaption of War & Peace in January 2016. I’d had a three-volume edition of the novel sitting on my shelves for years and knew if I watched it on TV I’d probably never read it. So, I decided it was now or never and finished it in 20 days. It was such a marvellous read that I went on and read Anna Karenina too.

If you’ve been put off reading the Russians then Viv Groskop will hopefully inspire you to give them a go and if nothing else you will have read a very stimulating introduction to some great literature. As the Telegraph review states; “Explored with dancing wit, affection and brilliance. Passionate, hilarious, joyful”.

 

 

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Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee

 

In the Spring of 1957, an American publisher received the first novel from 31-year-old Harper Lee. “The spark of the true writer flashed in every line," her editor said, but nevertheless declared it not fit for publication – “more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel". Lee and her editor completely reworked the manuscript and three years later, one of the great classics of the 20^th Century, “To Kill A Mockingbird”, was published.

For me, and for many others, it is in the top rank of favourite novels, and Atticus Finch is one of the great literary heroes. So, when the reclusive Harper Lee published “Go Set A Watchman” in 2015, a supposed sequel, it created a stir. Atticus Finch of all people had turned racist; the saint had turned sinner and I determined never to read it. But horror of horrors, last year it was chosen for our book group and I had to bite the bullet. What a revelation – I loved it and read it twice!

GSAW is not a sequel but the original manuscript from 1957. It was written when the US Supreme Court had ruled that education in every state must be de-segregated and the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People was growing in power and influence. The southern states felt under threat and the deep tensions that emerged form the background to the novel.

We are 20 years on from TKAM and “Colour-blind” Jean Louise Finch returns to her hometown to find her New York values are not only at odds with Maycomb but tragically at odds with her much-revered Father and also her would-be husband. The flashbacks to childhood where black and white lived alongside each other in a separated harmony and where six-year-old Scout had no understanding of the currents building in the black community contrast sharply with the present where the currents are running strong, and the demand for equal rights is not only tearing the community apart but also tearing Jean Louise from those she holds dear.

At a church service she hears this text from Isaiah:

“For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.” (Is 21:6)

“Fallen, fallen is Babylon; And all the images of her gods are shattered on the ground.”

Isaiah saw the coming destruction of Babylon and liberation of the Jews from captivity, and Jean Louise sees the coming liberation of African-Americans from subservience to full citizenship, but her contemporaries are oblivious. In a social gathering, young women she grew up with talk openly of doing away with the Negro race. She reflects on how the great words of the Gettysburg Address have become a grotesque parody:

“Conceived in mistrust and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created evil.”

“I hope the world will little note nor long remember what you are saying here.”

She thinks, “I should like to take your head apart, put a fact in it, and watch it go its way through the runnels of your brain until it comes out of your mouth. We were both born here, we went to the same schools, we were taught the same things. I wonder what you saw and heard.”

At a key point in the novel she confronts Atticus and her language is visceral:

“Atticus, I’m throwing it at you and I’m gonna grind it in: you better go warn your younger friends that if they want to preserve Our Way of Life, it begins at home. It doesn’t begin with the schools or the churches or any place but home. Tell’ em that, and use your blind, immoral, misguided, nigger - lovin’ daughter as your example. Go in front of me with a bell and say, ‘Unclean!”

She wants no more to do with Maycomb and no more to do with Atticus. But her uncle halts her flight.  He says, she has revered her father too much and turned him into a God - “And all the images of her gods are shattered on the ground.”

A famous passage from TKAM is:

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”

Her uncle makes Jean Louise realise that her conscience, her Watchman as he calls it, is not the same as her father’s and she needs a new relationship with him, adult to adult.

GSAW is an uncompromising call for justice seen through the eyes of an adult, but it was transformed into TKAM narrated by a child. Was this because Harper Lee could not reconcile the Old Testament voice of the prophet calling for justice and righteousness with the New Testament message of mercy and forgiveness? TKAM removed the conflict between Atticus and Jean Louise, the cry of the prophet was silenced, and Atticus was able to stand Christ-like, for mercy and forgiveness.

If you have never read either, then do read TKAM. But I found GSAW far more powerful in the themes it explores; more realistic and less idealistic than TKAM.

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Shadow Play by Joseph O'Connor

Shadowplay is a wonderful, lyrical novel set around the life of Bram Stoker and his time as manager of London's Lyceum Theatre in late Victorian London. The two stars of the Lyceum were its owner Henry Irving, a vain, demanding martinet and Ellen Terry, witty, seductive and very much in control of her own destiny.



The story is a marvellous imagining of this three-sided relationship and switches between first and third person, letters and dialogue to weave a compelling narrative. Anyone who has  enjoyed O'Connor's Star of The Sea will find more riches to feast on here. You lose yourself in the London where Oscar Wilde is on trial by day and Jack the Ripper walks the East End by night.

Ellen Terry, on Hery Irving:

"Make no mistake he was a peerless actor. The greatest I'll ever see. Majestic, powerful, like an animal not a man. You couldn't look away not even for a second. It was as though your neck was in a vice and your eyes on the stage....

Trouble is he adored the applause and that gets in the way. There's a certain sort of actor, a clap-hound I call them, who do anything for the applause, set himself on fire if he needs to. Harry was King of the clap-hounds. He did it too often. It was like watching the world's greatest concert pianist juggling coconuts in a booth on Southend Pier. Fine, so far as it goes. But there's a Steinway behind you darling. Give us a ruddy tune while you're up there."

But what of Dracula? This one book, famous the world over, is why we know the name Bram Stoker -who knew he was a theatre manager? Throughout Shadowplay, we see Bram, a struggling author, forever twarted by his day job. He sneaks away to an attic, haunted by the ghost of  a dead servant girl, to write stories and a novel but nothing sells; yet slowly a new story is developing in his head. As Shadowplay unfolds, hints of Dracula begin to emerge - a stage painter called Jonathan Harker, a box of earth, the blood and horror of the Ripper, a lunatic assylum where an inmate eats flies, a visit to Whitby. Behind the genesis of Dracula is the shadow world of the theatre, a place of drama, emotion and other worlds, where actors lose their identity and Shylock, Hamlet and Ophelia never die.

Article about Bram Stoker by Joseph O'Connor 

Much better review of Shadowplay in The Times

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Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck

This is a truly joyful book and a worthy sequel to Cannary Row. All Steinbeck's wit, compassion and wisdom are on display and a kaleidoscope of characters, familiar and new, populate the story with doubtful schemes, homespun wisdom and unfailing benevolence. It's a gentle, philosophical treatise on loneliness, failure and friendship and it's a love story to warm your heart.

From the opening sentence Steinbeck sets the mood with his laid back, conversational style. This is a book to read on a garden chair, with your feet up, the sun shining, the bees humming and a glass of something close at hand. A book to savour at a leisurely pace, and a journey to enjoy that leads to a most satisfactory ending.

​Doc, a marine biologist has returned from the war to his old life but is plagued by a restlessness he can't pin down. Suzy arrives in town to join the other girls in the Bear Flag, the local bordello, but she doesn't fit in. Fauna, the no-nonsense and kindly Madame sees Suzy as the perfect cure for Doc's ills. How this matchmaking plays out is the main thread of the novel.

"It was Fauna’s conviction, born out of long experience, that most people, one, did not know what they wanted; two, did not know how to go about getting it; and three, didn't know when they had it."

Steinbeck fills the book with a rich cast of supporting characters and meanders away from the main story into their lives. So we have brief encounters with a flipflopping Chinaman, a Seer living on the beach, Frankie, a boy with severe learning difficulties, Jingleballicks, an eccentric scientist and the bowlers and the butterflies of Pacific Grove. Individual threads woven into the story all helping to create an atmosphere of time and place.

But the main counterpoint to Doc and Suzy's journey is Mack, and the boys of the Palace Flophouse. Their ramshackle, vagrant lives have no great purpose and consist mainly of drinking, and dreaming of ways to make money.

The character of Hazel is a delight. He's simple, innocent, gullible and loyal, who believes because the stars are aligned and he has nine toes, he must become President of the United States. His love of Mack and Doc lead him to one drastic act that breaks the deadlock between Doc and Suzy. 

"Thinking is always painful, but in Hazel it was heroic. A picture of the process would make you seasick. A grey whirling furore of images, memories, words, patterns. It was like a traffic jam at a big intersection with Hazel in the middle trying to get something to move somewhere. "

And here's what Doc says to Hazel who has come to help him in his laboratory:

"I like to have you sit with me Hazel. You are the well the - original well. A man can give you his deepest secrets. You don't hear or remember. And if you did, it wouldn't make any difference because you don't pay attention. Why you're better than a well because you listen - but you don't hear. You are a priest without penalties, an analyst without diagnosis."

I love Steinbeck's ability to build a picture and mood in just a few words, his mix of philosophy, and celebration of the human spirit - people will not accept the advice of a friend but will accept the advice of a horoscope chart.

“Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man.”

​Steinbeck takes a series of stories and characters, set in poverty, hardship, and degradation and sprinkles them with holy water. He strips the sin off the sinners and gives absolution.

 If  you're a romantic, read it; if you're a world-weary cynic there is plenty here to lift the mood, give pause for thought and raise a smile.

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A Woman In Berlin

This is a compelling, heart-rending read. It is a diary kept by a young German woman in Berlin in the Spring of 1945. The diary was published anonymously in the 1950's and caused a great stir and a lot of hostility. It was re-published in the 1970's and a film was made in 2009. After her death the author was revealed as Marta Herta, a journalist.
She is unsparing about the fate of so many women, including herself who were raped by Russian soldiers. As a calculated means of survival she deliberately sought to attract Russian officers who would protect her from other soldiers and also supply her with food.
"Tuesday 24th April Around Noon. No news. We're completly cut off. Some gas but no water. Looking out of the window I see throngs of people outside the stores. They're still fighting over the rancid butter...."
Monday 28th May: "The future weighs on us like lead. All I can do is brace myself for what's to come and try to keep my inner flame alive. But why? What for? What task awaits me? I feel so hopelessly alone."
Wednesday 6th June: All I know is that we Germans are finished. We’re nothing but a colony, subject to their (The Allies) whims. I can't change any of that I just have to swallow it. All I want to do is steer my little ship through the shoals as best I can. That means hard work and short rations, but the old sun is still in the sky and maybe my heart will speak to me once more. One thing's for sure my life has certainly been full - all too full.
Simon Garfield, Observer Review: Reading A Woman in Berlin in one afternoon is an unnerving sensory experience: the walls close in, the air thickens, shrieks from children playing nearby adopt a sinister air. This is an all-enveloping book, a lyrical personal journal …. it leaves a deep scar.
The book brought home to me yet again, how ordinary people are powerless against the powerful. Powerless against those who are able to create mass movements of ideology, fed by propaganda, in order to bring about their own grandiose designs. Yet ordinary people are the ones who suffer most.

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Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an award-winning Nigerian author who writes about her homeland and how its people are conflicted between their own unique African identities and the onrushing tide of Westernisation.

 Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus was set in a time when Nigeria was ruled by an army dictatorship; her second, Half of a Yellow Sun, covers the civil war at the end of the 1960s when the state of Biafra attempted to form a separate country for the Igbo people. Americanah moves to more recent times when teachers and lecturers are on strike, causing many students to leave Nigeria to seek higher education in the USA or UK. Adichie is a very talented writer and I would strongly recommend all three.

In Americanah we follow the lives of Ifemelu and Obinze from the friendship of their school days through to a growing affection and a deepening relationship in their teens. They have become soulmates but are now forced apart when Ifemelu leaves Nigeria for the USA to continue her stalled education. She expects Obinze to follow her, but he is unable to do so and ends up in the UK. Unable to pay her rent and unable to get a job Ifemelu cuts herself off from all contact with Obinze, not replying to his many letters and emails.

Here are two intelligent, aspirational, young Nigerians seeking an education worthy of their talents but now seen as strangers and aliens, having to fight to achieve status and recognition against immigration barriers and endemic racism. Their ambitions are frustrated at every turn and Obinze is forced back to Nigeria.

Adiche studied in the USA and cleverly throws a strong light on racist issues by means of Ifemelu starting a blog called "Raceteenth". Some blog posts are interspersed with the text of the novel and take the reader out its fictional world into the harsh reality of the real thing.

One particularly moving episode in Americanah is the election of Obama as the first black president of the USA

Blaine was crying holding Araminta who was crying then holding Ifemelu squeezing her too tight and Pee was hugging Michael and Grace was hugging Nathan and Paula hugging Araminta and Ifemelu was hugging Grace, and the living room became an altar of disbelieving joy.

Her phone bleeped with a text from Dike, “I can't believe it. My president is black like me.” She read the text few times her eyes filling with tears.

On television, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama and their two daughters were walking onto a stage. They were carried by the wind, bathed in incandescent light, victorious and smiling. 

“Young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled, Americans have sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of red States and blue, states. We have been and always will be the United States of America”

Remember those heady days when the world seemed to turn a corner of tolerance and hope? Read this and weep.

Although this novel is rich in many things, the central core is a love story. Can young love survive change and maturity, the separation of distance and time, and the emotional turmoil of other relationships?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has given a TED talk on "The Danger of a Single Story" and this beautifully written novel challenges the reader to open his/her mind to the multitude of stories of other people and other nations so we may better understand our common humanity.

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All Quite On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

“1917” is a current must see film. I’m told it is not to be missed, but I won’t be going. No matter how good, it cannot better the film I saw inside my head last month when I read “All Quite on The Western Front”

"Continuous fire, defensive fire, curtain fire, trench mortars, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words but they embrace all the horrors of the world"

Your name is Paul Bäume. You are a young German student, looking forward to completing your education, meeting pretty girls, having fun and making your mark in the world. But suddenly that world has vanished. You are in the army, lying in mud at the bottom of a shell hole and WWI is raging around you. You could die at any moment.

"We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing from ourselves, from our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces."

The suffering and terror of war make no sense to Paul and his friends. He has no quarrel with young Frenchmen or Englishmen. No desire to kill them. Yet, in desperation for his own life he does kill a French soldier in hand-to-hand combat. As he lies exhausted at the bottom of a shell hole full of remorse, he watches the man slowly die. He examines the man's papers; he sees he was a printer; he sees the photographs of a wife and children. In his shame, he makes a promise to the dead man that should he survive he will fight against the things that have wrecked both their lives. Such killing must never happen again.

The utter waste of war pervades the whole book. No more so than in a hospital where Paul is recovering from a leg wound. He is lucky, he will live and walk again but around him men are dying from all manner of terrible wounds on every part of their bodies.

"How pointless all human thoughts, words and deeds must be, if things like this are possible! Everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilisation weren't even able to prevent this river of blood............Only a military hospital can show you what war is."

All Quite on The Western Front is a wonderful novel, immersing the reader in the lives of a small group of young men as day after day they face the unimaginable horror of trench warfare; only able to endure through comradeship, ingenuity, humour and courage.

"Summer, 1918. Never has life in its simplest outline seemed so desirable to us as it does now; the poppies in the fields near our base camp, the shiny beetles on the blades of grass, the warm evenings in the cool, half dark rooms, black, mysterious trees at twilight, the stars and the streams, dreams and a long sleep. Oh life, life, life!"

Do read it, especially if you’ve been to see “1917”. Which is the better film do you think?

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The month of June:13 1⁄2 By Sharon Olds

As my daughter approaches graduation 

and puberty at the same time, 

At her own calm deliberate serious rate,
She begins to kick up her heels, 

jazz out her hands, thrust out her hip bones, 

chant I'm great! I'm great! 

She feels 8th grade coming open around her, 

a chrysalis cracking and letting her out,

it falls behind her and joins the other husks on the ground,
7th grade, 6th grade, 

the purple rind of 5th grade, 

the hard jacket of 4th when she had so much pain,

3rd grade, 2nd, 

The dim cocoon of 1st grade 

back there somewhere on the path, 

and kindergarten like a strip of thumb-suck blanket 

taken from the actual blanket they wrapped her in at birth.
The whole school is coming off her shoulders 

like a cloak unclasped, 

and she dances forth in her jerky sexy child’s 

joke dance of self, self, 

her throat tight and a hard new song coming out of it, 

while her two dark eyes shine above her body 

like a good mother and a good father 

who looked down and love everything their baby does, 

the way she lives their love.

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Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan

I bought this book on the strength of watching Christmas University Challenge. Lucy Magan was captain of the Trinity Hall team and was introduced as a writer for the Guardian and Stylist magazine and as the author of Bookworm. This sounded to be my kind of book so I ordered it and read it over just 3 days.

Lucy Mangan is a very witty writer and the book just carries you along, as annecdote follows annecdote from her reading life, often including her Father (a reader & thinker), her Mother (a doer and talker) and her younger sister (child lego fanatic and computer nerd). Here's a sample:

A few years ago I mentioned to my sister that I was planning to visit Penhurst Place in Kent for the first time. ‘Oh yes’, she said. ‘Dad and I went there once when I was little’.

‘Without me?’ I said, ever alert to potential acts of favouritism and not about to let an intervening three decades dampen my outrage.

‘Yes, of course’, she said, looking baffled. ‘We used to go every weekend.'

‘Penhurst Place?’ I said, equally baffled in my turn.

My sister is not known for love of either Philip Sidney , Renaissance poetry or Elizabethan architecture. She likes computers, dogs and Mythbusters on Discovery Channel.

‘No, turd,’ she said - she has never shown me the full measure respect I feel is due to elder sisters – ‘different places on the Magan Magical Mystery tour’.

It transpired that she and Dad used to set off in the car every Saturday and take it in turns to choose whether to go left or right at each junction and see where they ended up.

‘And where was I?’ I asked.

‘Where do you think you were?’ She said. ‘You were at home. Reading. We told you we were going every time and you never broke eye contact with your stupid books. Sometimes you'd wave goodbye as you turned a page.’

During the course of this highly entertaining memoir Lucy Mangan ranges over 250 books from nursery pre-reading days when her Dad would buy books and read them to her, through to her own voracious reading of primary and secondary school. There is a cornucopia of information about the books, their authors and illustrators, so Bookworm is also a potted history of writing for children from earliest days to the near present. She tells how different books affected her and of her likes and dislikes. 

She says "I had a strict and enduring rule against books in which animals - especially talking animals - were a predominant feature" and then goes on to say how this caused her to miss out on Peter Rabbit, The Wind in The Willows, Tarka The Otter and other animal-centric stories. Eventually she realises this is simply a mindless predjudice and comments, "What. An. Idiot."

She is obviously a bookworm at the top end of the scale, bordering on insanity and seems to have copies of almost all the books she has ever read with over 10,000 in her house. Though when a book dealer came to view them she says, "He came. He saw. He left."  There were no pristine collectors' items but simply well-worn readers' copies. She had, he said, what looked like a jumble sale hoisted on the walls.

As an adult reader she still needs her daily reading "fix" but now does not get absorbed as easily or as fully. Daily life and her critical faculties are more in play and it needs a powerful page to be able to banish them from her mind. Something that all life-long bookworms can relate to - I certainly do.

My early reading was the 50's and 60's so there is little overlap for me in the books, no Biggles, no Jennings, and no cowboy books and I've no idea of the teenage joy to be had from Sweet Valley High or Judy Blume, but this is essentially a book about the joy of childhood reading and this bookworm enjoyed every page.

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