intense sensations

The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a huge, ambitious novel and at first I felt like I was adrift in a small boat on a vast, unfathomable ocean. Eventually, though, I got my bearings and I surrendered to the thrill and pleasure of it. In a way it is unlike any other novel by Dostoyevsky and yet it has echoes of all of them and a foreshadowing too of his last, great masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov.

These are the “notes” of Arkady Dolgoruky, writing of events that occurred one year earlier when he was just 19 years old. Writing in the first person and trying to preserve the truthfulness of his immature impressions as he sets out to meet his “accidental family”, Dolgoruky is like a teenage version of the narrator in Notes From The Underground. He rebels against the socialist ideology of Russian intellectuals in the mid nineteenth century with its insistence on rationalism and the idea that people will do what is morally right simply because it is logical to act in a way that is for the greater good of society. As we all know, people are not like that. They are selfish, passionate and perverse. Dolgoruky has his own agenda. He wants to become as rich as Rothschild. But he also yearns for something more spiritual. He would like to be able to look up to his father, who is a landowner, and much of the novel is about the relationship that develops between father and son as Dolgoruky confronts his father in St Petersburg and unravels the details of his mysterious past. Dolgoruky is learning as he goes and at the end of the novel he is much wiser and more settled. So one aspect of the ambitiousness of this novel is how it seeks to convey that process of adolescent self-discovery, of bewilderment and error, through a first person narrative where the narrator has, now, in the present, a different perspective from what he had then during the events of the story. You can only properly appreciate this technical achievement of the novel when you read it for a second or third time because there is so much else going on in it.

I will not try to comment on the plot. Some people say it is melodramatic as if that’s a failing. Well, maybe it is but I love melodrama and I particularly love Dostoyevsky’s melodrama. The story really comes alive in the last two hundred pages as all the strands of the plot come together and build towards a sensational climax. To return to the oceanic metaphor, it is like a tidal surge that sweeps you up and hurtles you towards the shore.

This is one of Dostoyevsky’s greatest gifts to humanity, works that allows us to experience the exhilaration and thrill of reading. You have to be careful not to rip the pages because you know, even while you are racing through them, that you are going to come back and read them again because the ideas are so deep and the characterisations are so fundamentally truthful.

But there are flashes of brilliance earlier in the novel too. When Dolgoruky acquires some money and starts gambling he is like the narrator of The Gambler. Of course, Dostoyevsky was a gambler too, and he brings to this section of the story first-hand knowledge of how it feels to be an addict and how you rationalise your addiction and give it, also, an aesthetic dimension, as if you are doing something beautiful. These are the ineluctable Dostoyevskian themes. Heightened sensibility, passion, addiction, and the contradictions in our natures that make us at once sublime and shameful.

I really enjoyed the conclusion of the novel too, a sort of calm reflection on events by Arkady’s former tutor. It puts everything into context and is funny in a dry, novelistic sort of way. In fact there is quite a lot of dry humour in the novel. I do not usually think of Dostoyevsky as being funny. But he is clearly a very self-conscious artist and creator. None of his effects are “accidental”. And occasionally he will let you glimpse the artist behind the art, his dry, self-conscious sense of humour, as he sets the events of his story into some wry perspective, using his unsuspecting and immature narrator as a tool.

But there is a real seriousness of purpose here, in the conclusion, as in the rest of the novel. The author never loses sight of the spiritual dimension. Though we may at times despise Dolgoruky, we cannot dismiss him because he is like all of us. Yes, I say that even though I am a woman and I nearly dropped the book in disgust at the way Dolgoruky talks about women. I forgive him that even though I am not a Christian.

I may not be a Christian but I certainly have room in my heart for one strange, gentle, irritable, patriotic, prejudiced, epileptic and holy Russian Orthodox believer in Christ who can do a word-perfect imitation of adolescence. God bless you, Fyodor Mikhailovich! Rest in peace.

Oh, but for the record, women are not snakes.

The Measure of a Man by Marco Malvaldi

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a story that fires your imagination. The setting alone is enough to get you excited — Renaissance Italy — a time of miraculous advances in every field of human activity.

Marco Malvaldi, being Italian, has access to many books about this period in the language of those who experienced it. What a thrill it will be, I thought, to be led into this astounding world by a worldly Italian, a man of science who is an award-winning writer of crime fiction! And what a choice of detective! Not your plodding and jaded police inspector so loved by modern crime writers, but a true man of genius, an inventor, an artist, a man whose brain teemed with ideas and discoveries — Leonardo Da Vinci!

At first I was very disappointed. Marco Malvaldi is as flippant in his novels as I am in my reviews. I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy his sense of humour and his sense of drama is often ill-judged and sententious. The image below is typical.

“Trotti looked up. The moment had come to play all-in, as Texas Hold’em poker players would have said, had they witnessed the scene — highly improbable, given that America had been discovered barely a year earlier and during those months the conquistadores had had other things on their minds, like wiping out the natives, rather than inventing card games.”

There are good things in the book, however, if you can see beyond the anachronistic jokes.

The novelist has organised a vast amount of material very logically so that it is easy to keep track of a great number of characters. Complicated social situations have been rendered in broad brush strokes. Even the science and matters of high finance are easy to understand. For all this, Marco Malvaldi deserves praise. You can read this book quickly and, if it whets your appetite for a more immersive and comprehensive exploration of Renaissance Italy, there is a very helpful note at the end with some suggestions for further reading.

The plot is ambitious in scope but the actual outline of the plot is somewhat formulaic. I won’t spoil it by summarising it here even though the same summary could apply to hundreds of modern crime novels.

Overall I enjoyed reading this but I was left wanting a longer, more serious book, with more depth to the characters. I like humour in a novel, in fact I would go so far as to say it is essential, but I would have preferred this book without the jokes, especially this one:

“Ludovico was silent for a moment. His face turned scarlet.
Then he burst out laughing. A belly laugh, like a boy who sees a man slipping and falling on the ice or a woman making twenty-six maneuvers to park her old clunker in a spot big enough for two.”

I cannot drive, so I don’t take this joke personally, but really, this image does nothing to illuminate the characters or the epoch. I think it is possibly Marco himself who is driving the old clunker.

The Robbers and Wallenstein by Friedrich Schiller

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve been wanting to write a review of The Robbers for months but unfortunately this wild and unruly play is packaged up in this Penguin edition with Schiller’s late masterpiece about Wallenstein and the Thirty Years War, which I haven’t read and probably won’t read until next year.

One thing is certain. I am bound by more rules in my reading than young Schiller was in his writing.

It is easy to adopt a superior attitude to The Robbers. The characters are like the feral scrawls of a cave dweller who is haunted by recurring nightmares. Their actions make no sense. The killings are rampant and random. The violence is completely unjustified. And yet without it all the rhetoric would be hollow.

So the work seems immature. Even Schiller himself didn’t know what to make of it. All these ideas just exploded out of him and he tried his best to give them shape. It appears he changed his mind a few times and probably never quite succeeded in getting down on paper exactly what it was he wanted to say.

But I loved the play’s boldness. And I loved Schiller’s description of it as ‘a novel in dramatic form.’

It is completely appropriate to me that the plays of Schiller, of Shakespeare, Sheridan, Racine, Corneille and even the plays of Moliere, whose comic genius, we are told, was apparent in his performances as much as in his verse, should all exist now as books to be read. I can best appreciate these plays by reading them so it is very consoling to know that Schiller had no expectation of ever seeing The Robbers on stage.

And I really enjoyed reading The Robbers. The translation by F.J. Lamport is first rate. It is so good I forgot I was reading a translation. The language rolls along like a smoke billowing out of a furnace. At times it echoes Shakespeare. It burns up Corneille and Racine who are like fragile cinders in its wake.

Schiller’s ambition is vaulting. Technically, he is not quite there yet but there is no doubting where he is going. He is like a fireball lighting up the end of the eighteen century and blazing a trail for generations of geniuses who will draw inspiration and sustenance from his vision.

His plays make excellent operas and there is an excellent rendering of The Robbers by Verdi in gorgeous lyrical music that tames the chaotic energy of its source. But you can’t make The Robbers beautiful. It is ugly and damnable.

And youthful and immature though it is, it has the immaturity of budding genius. It has the glimmer of greatness.

Schiller is not just a writer who was great in his time. He towers above all our contemporaries and The Robbers is an astonishing piece of writing, like a comet in the dark. I loved it.

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Neuromancer by William Gibson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It being a gloriously sunny spring day, I accepted a friend’s invitation to Kew Gardens. I was flirting outrageously, I suppose. We were in the hothouse when I asked him, ‘If you could sleep with anyone past or present, who would it be?’

‘What about the future?’

I assumed he was going to say something flattering like ‘You, Vanessa. Eternally and only you.’

‘Choose anyone you like,’ I said.

‘Molly from Neuromancer.’

Some quick neural re-programming was required.

‘Don’t tell me you haven’t read it,’ he chided.

‘I’ve read everything. But I have difficulty remembering it all. Is she the one with –‘

‘– the blades. Yes. And mirror shades grafted into her eye sockets. Don’t look so revolted. Aren’t you going to ask me why?’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because she’s cool!’

‘Didn’t she also have a cut-out so she could switch off during sex?’

‘Only bad sex. Besides, it stopped working when she had her reflexes enhanced.’

‘For the motors on those razors. Yes. Don’t you think she might be kind of demanding?’

‘Oh, totally.’ He had a glint in his eyes. He seemed almost exciting in that exotic heat.

‘And you could cope with that?’

‘I’m up for the challenge,’ he said.

‘Have you had some motorized cyber enhancement I don’t know about?

‘Like to find out?’

‘Not if I’m going to be disappointed.’

‘Oh, I don’t think I would disappoint you, Vanessa.’

A mechanical hiss startled us and sprayed warm mist into the thick atmosphere.

‘You know how she paid for those cybernetic enhancements, don’t you?’ I said.

‘Of course. Prostitution. It’s corny, I know…’

‘Very dark.’

‘Is it?’

‘I recall a scene,’ I said, ‘where she woke up with a politician and a dead woman covered in blood.’

‘Well, that was a bit unfortunate.’

‘Then she killed the politician.’

‘I don’t remember that,’ he said. ‘But it’s a surprisingly prevalent fantasy these days.’

We walked through the hothouse exit into the fresh outside air. The light was blinding but I felt a sudden chill.

‘Oh my God! The future is fine as a topic but does it have to be so dystopian?’

‘Actually, I live in hope,’ he said, fixing me with those melting brown eyes.

I pulled down my sunglasses and touched his cheek with a blood red fingernail. ‘Hope is its own reward, they say.’

‘No, that’s virtue.’

‘You should make a virtue of hope, Richard.’

‘That’s not my style.’

‘Then, at least you have Neuromancer. A novel to be read more than once, I think.’

‘Definitely.’

‘We’re agreed on that,’ I said.

In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein by Fiona Sampson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book left me dissatisfied but I’m in a mood to be generous and award it five stars for lucidity, readability and the fact that it provoked me to try and express my feelings about it in this review.

It is not new to go “In Search Of” a towering literary figure. I have at least one other “In Search Of” biography in this very room with me right now. But it is nevertheless exceedingly apt, apt with a poet’s precision, to be In Search of Mary Shelley. And Fiona Sampson is a poet who writes with extraordinary attention to detail, gleaning everything she can from every surviving sentence of Mary Shelley’s novels, journals and letters, and those of her friends, so the book actually lives up to its title. Fiona Sampson is, for sure, a woman in search of Mary Shelley, and she is searching for her very conscientiously in the enduring and compelling words that Mary Shelley wrote.

And I really sympathise with that search. I share it. I have been searching for a while. I am searching more than ever now after finishing this tantalising book.

For Mary Shelley is elusive. She is, still, in a way, anonymous. She hides behind precise and evocative language. She defies even the modern magnifying lens of scholarly scrutiny. Some carping critics are still not entirely decided, as they were undecided at the time, how much of Frankenstein she wrote. Or, indeed, who wrote which entry in the shared journal that she kept with that young firebrand she ran off with.

Fiona Sampson believes, I think, in what she calls evidence-based biography. So she looks hard at the evidence. But then she believes in adding a little bit of conjecture, even fantasy, wild surmise, guesswork, interpretation and opinion.

I like her for that. It’s done tactfully and respectfully. Her opinions are very interesting and plausible. And while I was imbibing them I started to form opinions of my own. You can read many things into some of Mary Shelley’s letters. Her omissions, too, are suggestive. Her motives in many key moments of her life are open to question.

It is not that she is duplicitous. Not at all. She is, I think, courageously open, principled and bold. But she is also very shy, very private, very modest. She shuns the limelight. She draws a veil over many things, even in her private journal.

But she isn’t afraid of anything and she throws herself into a passionate life with the man she loves and does right by him all the time that he is alive and all the long years following his death.

I have the most devoted and indelible respect for Mary Shelley. I have always been fascinated by her, ever since, many years ago, I first opened a book of poems written by Percy Bysshe, which was based on Mary Shelley’s two editions of 1839. (This was Thomas Hutchinson’s Oxford University Press edition of 1919.) She writes captivating vignettes about their life together between those poems. They are like miniature biographical essays, all the more moving for the fact that she was forbidden to write a biography of her husband by her father-in-law, on whom she depended for the education of her son. You can tell she adored her husband and cherishes his memory. But she is also very sensitive, respectful and objective. This is very moving. She honours him by staying true to his intentions, in spite of the obvious pain it must give her, reading back many of those lines.

But it is very hard, actually impossible, to discover what she was really thinking most of the time. Normally you can discover a writer’s true spirit through her works. But I even wonder how much of her novels and stories were as heartfelt and sincere as they might have been had she not felt so bereft, felt so deserted, betrayed even, by her friends and family.

Fiona Sampson’s intense, slim volume, does much to illuminate some of the dark corners of Mary’s life. But it is inviting rather than revelatory. She shines her torch and says, “Look, here is something fascinating … ” but she doesn’t rummage or despoil.

Go and read the letters. Read the journals and novels and biographical notes. What do you make of them?

Who was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, really? Was her literary life, “the last stuttering of the revolutionary spark that her mother Mary Wollstonecraft ignited?”

I don’t know. But I am grateful to Fiona Sampson for making me feel much wiser than I was 10 days ago.