Murder in Samarkand
by Craig Murray
(Mainstream Publishing)
Never have readers been able to contemplate as many new titles, South African and international, as in 2006. But if this is the best of times for variety, it is also the worst of times for considered choice.
Faced with an Everest of books, how does the average reader even begin to clamber up its lower slopes? Comes the time, comes the book: John Sutherland’s lucid, learned and witty How to Read a Novel (Profile Books). Subtitled A User’s Guide, it’s essential reading because it grips like a thriller while painlessly enhancing enjoyment and appreciation of the novel.
Sutherland — formerly an English professor and Man Booker Prize chairman last year — understands the conditions under which readers toil these days. “The modern reader is like an explorer,” he writes, “cutting his way through the jungle with a machete — slashing a path to that single volume which is, just now, wanted.”
In just 250-odd pages Sutherland takes readers — and potential readers — through all aspects of the novel, from titles, epigraphs and first words to genres, intertextuality, reviews, bestsellers and the prize novel, ending with a chapter on whether novels are of any use. In between, he covers the nitty-gritty of the codex book, debates the virtues of hardbacks versus paperbacks and helps one choose, rather than merely buy, one’s books.
My reading next year will be better informed, more enjoyable and infinitely more edifying thanks to Sutherland, whose assertion that “a clever engagement with a novel is one of the nobler functions of human intelligence” is triumphantly demonstrated in his book.
In hindsight, then, 2006 has been my year of reading haphazardly. The books that follow (and Sutherland above) are my favourites of the year and exclude fiction (much of it local), which will be covered later in this Hit List series by our chief fiction reviewer, Jane Rosenthal.
The most welcome of returns, A Man Without a Country (Bloomsbury) revokes Kurt Vonnegut’s promise that he would never write another book. In this slim volume of reflections, assorted essays and morsels of memoir, all lessons in style, it is Vonnegut the humanist who shines through. He touches on animal rights, the dangers to the planet posed by United States President George W Bush, age and ageing, craven media behaviour, the destruction of Dresden by Allied firebombing, the pleasures of being a Luddite.
His 15 pages on creative writing are a dazzling, mischievous and wise masterclass, direct and devoid of nonsense. In another segment, he writes: “Do you realise that all great literature — Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade — are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being?”
I’m cheating a little with Andrew Delbanco’s Melville: His World and Work (Picador), as this appeared in hardback last year. (Price and other differentials in selection that John Sutherland outlines in How to Read a Novel applied!)
Herman Melville died in obscurity on September 28 1891, eight weeks after his 72nd birthday. But Moby Dick, his concordance to the world, lived — and lives — on. More than 50 years ago, in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, CLR James marvelled at how Moby Dick had predicted and explained the world of the 1940s and 1950s.
In the absence of primary material — Melville destroyed letters received and kept very terse journals — Delbanco makes his prime source the stories and novels, and unearths a rich vein of autobiographical gold. He argues that the posthumously published Billy Budd is that second act in American lives that Scott FitzÂgerald denied — and reminds us that the dying Thomas Mann described it as “the most beautiful story in the world”.
Delbanco’s biography offers new windows into the mind and genius of Melville, and emphasises why he is always the most contemporary and urgent of novelists.
For Francis Wheen, Karl Marx is the most contemporary and compelling of thinkers. Wheen is of course no stranger to Marx. His biography, Karl Marx (Fourth Estate, 1999), is a warmly human portrait of the philosopher, painting him as a Dickensian gentleman living in hard times but in a far from bleak house.
Wheen’s new book, Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography (Atlantic Books), is an iconoclastic look at the book. Wheen advances — and sustains — a remarkable thesis: that Marx’s masterpiece is a hugely ambitious literary undertaking, both frustrated and propelled by its creator’s perfectionism and vast knowledge of literature. According to Wheen, we are in the realm of the Gothic novel with Capitalism as The Creature, or as a Dracula-like figure (Marx’s famous description — “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour” — is on the back of the dust jacket).
It is cogent, incisive (a wonderfully economical 121 pages) and a fluent reminder that whatever capitalists, neo-conservatives, neo-liberals and the Fukuyamas of the world may think, Marx will not go away. Indeed, as Wheen concludes, “he could yet become the most influential thinker of the 21st century”.