extreme legibility

  • in which peter cameron attempts to remember the books he’s read before he forgets them

    The publisher and date listed always refer to the edition of the book that I read; illustrations are chosen for the graphic appeal and may not correspond to the edition that is cited. Photographs are always of the author (unless otherwise indicated).

  • the picnic at sakkara

    The Picnic at Sakkara by P. H. Newby (Knopf, 1955)

    Picnic1Everyone’s hapless and floundering in this gently satiric novel set in Egypt in the 1950s.  Some wry comedy and a sweet buoyancy keep this haphazardly plotted novel engaging.  It sustains one’s interest but doesn’t leave one with much.  A sort of combination of Waugh and Forster, and inferior to both.

  • anglo-saxon attitudes

    Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996)

    RO60063238Enjoyed it, but felt it could have used some fine-tuning.  But perhaps its charm and singularity come from that unabashed use of cartoony elements: caricature, coincidence.  An odd, somewhat silly book, but also endearing.  Full of bright bold un-nuanced characters, it would make a terrific miniseries; great roles for British character actors.

  • summer will show

    Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner (Virago, 1987)

    Images-5A curious and disappointing book.  Elegantly written with style and wit, but the characters all seem false and inscrutable and consequently hard to engage with or care about.  So reading its nearly 400 pages becomes a chore.  Sylvia, an upper-class British woman lives a life of quiet content and gentrified privilege until her two children die of smallpox.  She then travels to Paris to get another child out of her wayward estranged husband but instead falls in love with his mistress, a captivatingly ugly Jewish storyteller and amateur revolutionist.  The French Revolution of 1848 ensues, with disastrous results for the Jew but ultimately life-changing results for Sylvia.  The book could have used a good editing.  There’s a lot of repetition and unnecessary exposition.  And while the love affair of the two women is a daring and interesting development, it is related too obscurely to impact the reader.

  • a state of change

    A State of Change by Penelope Gilliatt (Capuchin Classics, 2009)

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    A very odd, brilliant, engaging, and perplexing book.  The story of a Polish emigre to the UK after WWII and her life there for the next two decades.  Kakia is a delightful and admirable character: intelligent, creative (she is an artist/cartoonist), sensitive, humorous and ends up with Harry, an equally sympathetic and admirable man.  Their mutual friend and Kakia’s former lover, the soulless Don, is a charismatic malcontent and serial womanizer.   The story moves forward in specific scenes of dialogue and omniscient narration skipping through the years.  The Capuchin edition I read was riddled with typos and mistakes, which made it very difficult and frustrating to read, but nevertheless Gilliatt’s wiley brilliance shone through.  This is the kind of book that made the reader feel he was in the presence of an accessible superior mind.

  • love’s shadow

    Love’s Shadow by Ada Leverson (Norton, 1962)

    AdaLeversonBook One of the Little Ottleys trilogy.  Charming: an upper-class romance played out in Edwardian London.  Nicely quirky characters and delightfully foolish dialogue.  Light but not lacking: souffle-light. 

  • night letters

    Night Letters by Robert Dessaix (St. Martin’s Press/Wyatt, 1997)

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    Beguiling, intelligent, elegantly idiosyncratic: a writer recently diagnosed with AIDs, which he perceives as a death sentence, flees his native Australia to wander randomly around the globe and ends up in Venice, after shorter stays in Locarno and Vincenza and Padua.  The book is comprised of letters he is writing every night and sending back to a friend (unidentified) in Sydney.  These letters are not realistic but rather long fantasias on life, death, love, art, and history and are interposed with two long stories the author is told by a woman in Locarno (about a Baroness) and a professor in Venice (about a courtesan).  These tales are vivid and well-told, but not as interesting as the author’s own ruminations, and seem a bit like unnecessary padding.  But a lovely — and despite its tragic premise — delightful book.  By the author of Corfu, which I read last year.

  • under the net

    Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (Reprint Society, 1955)

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    Murdoch in a light, farcially comic tone.  Jack Donoghue, a drunken literary ne’er-do-well wanders around London and (briefly) Paris, encountering a motley collection of philosophers, shopkeepers, film producers and film stars, some human and some canine.  The pace is lax and rambling and one often wants to admire Jack a bit more than one does, but ultimately Jack and the book arrive at a touching and satisfying ending.  Second-rate Murdoch, I’d say, but appealing in its modesty and charm.  Includes a beautifully written interlude in Paris on Bastille Day (the best chapter in the book).  And the dog is very well depicted. 

  • miss mackenzie

    Miss Mackenzie by Anthony Trollope (Penguin, 1993)

    Delightful.  Our heroine, Margaret Mackenzie, is plain, middle-aged (at 35) and poor, but manages by employing her considerable charm, integrity, and intelligence to marry the decent Baronet Sir John Ball, and become Lady Ball.  With two delectable villains — the present Lady Ball and the squint-eyed Reverend Maguire — and a plot that involves bad business loans and contested wills, this is Trollope at his most entertaining.

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  • some hope

    Some Hope by Edward St. Aubyn (Open City Books, 2005)

    Images-2The third in this trilogy (now five books) about a decadent and dangerous English family finds our hero sober and drug-free, but still involved with society’s high life — very high, in fact, as Princess Margaret makes an enjoyable nasty appearance at the house party that serves as the book’s centerpiece.  Once again St. Aubyn relates the cruel and petty behavior of unsympathetic characters with elegant, but sometimes labored, prose.  A bit more appetizing than the second (NYC) installment, but still leaves a bad taste in one’s (my) mouth.

  • because of the lockwoods

    Because of the Lockwoods by Dorothy Whipple (Macmillan, 1949)

    Delightfully readable novel of life in a provincial English city and two families, one rich and evil and the other poor and good.  Schematic and obvious, but cleverly plotted.  Thea Hunter, a young woman of ambition and pride, is an engaging and sympathetic heroine, and the snobby Lockwoods — especially Mrs. and the awful twins — are deliciously hateful.