Well Christopher Hitchens passed away this morning and I loved the imagery that was conjured up of his tour of the bible belt with his book “God is not Great” and the ide aof him as a man who disliked sleeping “because he did not rate being unconscious” and that he had such a prodigious gift as a writer he could down a bottle of scotch and still be up bright and early the next morning and throw three thousand words up in the air and have them fall on the page in perfect and wonderful composition.

I am thinking about his friendship with Martin Amis which makes a deal of sense to me, I see them as of the same peer group.  Ironically or as luck would have it I am reading “Time’s Arrow” (when my BeBook is charged up), and this has the suprising premise of telling the tale of a life with time reversed, ro at least this is what I understand so far.  Amis has not wriitten a long volume, rather a lightweight for him, but it is going into minutiae of details such as ingestion in the bathroom and recomposition of food to one’s plate etc  which make for unusual reading.

I have yet to understand how the book as a whole hang’s together, but it is making a very different read to “ The Pregnant Widow”, which I received last Christmas and which was very much what I had expected of Amis (and quite good fun for a holiday read too).

So it came to pass that a poet called their anthology of poems “Bicycles” and of course this means I had to reserve it at the library… After a patient few weeks it arrived and I am thrilled to say I have “discovered” a new poet whom I very much admire.  It goes against a few of my prejudices to do so, but she is undeniably so full of life and it shows so well that all stereotypes and prejudices fly out the window before it.  This, it seems to me, is almost the test of good poetry.

Her name, if you do not already know it, is “Nikki Giovanni” and below is one of her works for you to judge for yourself

Balances

in life
one is always
balancing

like we juggle our mothers
against our fathers

or one teacher
against another
(only to balance our grade average)

3 grains of salt
to one ounce truth

our sweet black essence
or the funky honkies down the street

and lately i’ve begun wondering
if you’re trying to tell me something

we used to talk all night
and do things alone together

and i’ve begun

(as a reaction to a feeling)
to balance
the pleasure of loneliness
against the pain
of loving you


  Nikki Giovanni

So what of my prejudices that are happily overthrown?  One of them is her nationality, American.  The second is her “celebrity status” as she was the poet in residence or on the staff I think at “Virginia Tech” when they suffered one of those mass shooting “events” that seem to have become almost commonplace now.  Alongside that is her pride in her black American heritage and overcoming her ancestral past.

So far (I have not taken in as much of her work as I should like) it  seem love really is “her thing”, that and America and she sort of represents that in a way to me with her youthful take on many things.   I was sufficiently impressed by the dozen or so of these poems I have read that already “anything by Nikki Giovanni” is an item on my Christmas list and do not intend to rush through the rest, she is one of those poets one wishes to savour and “save up” the work of rather than tear through it and be left wanting more.

There was time in my youth when I enjoyed nothing better than working my way through the works of J.P. Donleavy.  I read all he had written and then would savour his new writings as I came across them.  For some reason they all seemed better in paperback, ideally second hand.  The library was possible, but in those days this likely meant hardback.

But never mind the format or cover; how I enjoyed those books!  I even managed to like “The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival and Manners”  (not the easiest of titles to remember!).  This was found in a second hand bookshop and eagerly picked up, but turned out not to be a novel at all. I clearly remember some jokey sort of unusual guidance with line drawn and maybe whacky illustratuions here and there, not his usual writing at all.  I suspect rereading may make it appear puerile from my vague memories.

Not so “A Fairy Tale of New York”, which I have recently begun rereading, though reading out loud to my beloved.  I have only managed one chapter so far so shall not say too much more until further into the book.  But I am so relishing it all over again it is a real thrill!  And I do believe the reading out loud is so suited to the style of writing he has (even if I cannot manage a Bronx accent to save my life!).  If it is in audio book format I think this will be a real treat, soon enough we shall discover!

To be continued….

I approached this book, the last months for my library book group, with eager anticipation.  Then I attended the group before getting through more than a couple dozen pages, and listened to the book be roundly criticised.  And then I read the rest of the book.  So it is interesting to me how I now react to the book.

One of the reasons I was eager to read the book was simply what I think is a great title.  I am fairly convinced the title alone is a large part of the reason for th ebooks apparent success.  The other reason is that one of the main subjects in this fictional account is the figure of Nicola Tesla.  Throughtout my youth my father and a friend were often fiddling with a Tesla coil in the basement and placing razor blades in the middle of pyramids to sharpen them, and other such weirdly trendy things in the zeitgeist of the times.  So I was eager to find out more.

The book is written with some engaging language, in places the descriptive prose is positively poetic.  The research seems to be fairly sound, and I have to admit I was quite well engaged with the New York of the times the novel is concerned with, primarily around the thirties and forties one imagines.  However the main “meat” at the centre of the novel promises much but fails to deliver anything one can truly get ones teeth into.  Someone at the reading group said I may as well ready the first thirty pages and the last thirty, I would not be missing much.  I could not take this advice, but looking back over the book I can see just what he meant!

The other problem is that one is unsure how accurate the impression one gains of Nicola Tesla is.  Granted, Ms Hunt is creating a fictional character, but there are so very many direct quotes and facts which she has drawn on and placed within the work that I think it is flawed if it does not try to faithfully recreate at least the author’s impression of the character.  And do so without adding a mish mash of fiction to muddy the waters.  Now the only test of this is to research oneself - and I have not yet done so, but if I have time intend to, look into the life of Mr Tesla.  In this case there is plentiful material to draw on.  Someone from the book group had looked into his own autobiographical volumes and I imagine they could be fascinating.  There was one aspect I seriously enjoyed and which the reading group surprisingly overlooked; this was the description of a newly opened and extensive public library in New York.  If I ever get to visit New York I should like to trackthis building down and visit it (assuming it is based in fact and still exists).  I enjoyed the use of this setting thorougly and thought it was quite cleverly deployed, far more so than the New Yorker Hotel which I became bored by.  Also after looking the hotel up in Wikipedia I do believe I actually stayed there when visiting New York in the ninetties and I am sorry to say it had none of the features on display that are so well portrayed in the novel. Perhaps it says something that I found the locations more engaging than most of the characters!

Having said all this there is something the book tries to do which I think is what it was intended to be about.  I am not sure I would get it from the first and last thirty pages.  I believe the intense relationship between a father and a daughter is sketched in a little after the opening of the novel.  Then in concluding the prose seems to shift up a gear as the daughter deals with the death of her father and her future after the loss.  I do believe this is what Samantha Hunt might have taken as the central theme, but then again it could have been a love triangle which seems to be sketched in (and how much truth in that?), it could have been a romance (one is always tantalisingly offered but not really portrayed in the novel), it had many possibilities but ultimately tried to approach all of them and therein lies the failure in my opinion.

Still, great title it must be said! I wonder if the title helped garner the Orange prize nomination and other awards?  Somehow I suspect contacts and networking are everything there and the title largely incidental…  By the way I like the openning page of her website linked above - worth a click, though I suspect completely opaque from an accessibility viewpoint.