Havant

Adventures in Literature - Reviews

Note: These full-length reviews were mostly by group members during 'Lockdown' in 2020 and will continue whenever someone writes one! They were previously accessed individually in links from our monthly meeting notes. But in the interests of saving space and reducing the complexity of Havant U3A website they have been archived here. From September 2020 the shorter written reviews will be added to the monthly meeting notes, which will then be archived annually. I would have liked to have built a fully indexed archive to act as a resource for all U3A members but the U3A system is too basic to facilitate that! Anyway, still going 2022-

'Le Grand Meaulnes', by Henri Alain-Fournier, 1912

This charming novel, written in 1912 by Henri Alain-Fournier, sometimes translated as ‘The Great Meaulnes’ or ‘The Secret Domain’, is one of France’s most read classics. It is only tangentially about ‘coming of age’, that is the transition from childhood to adulthood, since the chief character Augustin Meaulnes, does not really grow up. He tragically continues to pursue the fairy-tale dream of romantic love. In a sense, he is trapped in the enchanted castle from which he has failed to rescue the princess.

Set at the turn of the 20th century and narrated by François, the son of the village schoolmaster in rural central France, the novel evokes the life, the seasons, the landscape and the playground games and politics of the boys.

The story begins with the arrival of Augustin Meaulnes as the only boarder at the school. He was quickly christened 'The Great Meaulnes' because of his great height and also because he quickly established himself as a somewhat aloof leader. The shyer, younger François becomes his friend and confidant partly because they are thrown together by living in the same house and because Augustin, being a couple of years older defends François from the local bully.

In a short review it is almost impossible to talk about the 'lost domain' that Meaulnes finds, and the beautiful girl, Yvonne, he falls in love with, without going into details about the events that led him there and the subsequent events that prevented him from finding it again without it sounding rather prosaic. The writing really does express the breathless anxiety and passion of youth.

Meaulnes is impulsive, a loner really, with a strong sense of purpose but prone to go off on wild goose chases. François remains steady and by dint of good luck and detective work unravels the mystery and becomes good friends with Yvonne. But of course it ends tragically - as did the life of the author at age 28. *****

'If We Were Villians' by M.L. Rio

This a debut novel published in 2017. It is a murder mystery centred around a tightly knit group of seven Shakespearean thespians studying at a fictional elite arts academy in Illiinois. So tightly knit and pretentious are this group that they shun those outside this inner circle and communicate between themselves using Shakespearean quotes.

In the plays the group are always cast as the characters having the same personality traits as their own. However, for the annual Halloween performance the status quo is dropped and some of the re-cast main characters upstage the original “stars”. This results in elements of the (tragedy) plays spilling over into real life with the resultant tragic death of one of the group.

Detective Colbourne is in charge of the investigation and must pit his wits against the remaining group who are putting on their performances of a lifetime to convince him of their innocence.

Haunting and atmospheric, the novel has all the drama and intrigue of a Shakespeare tragedy. It evokes a sense of impending doom as one witnesses the gradual downward spiral of morality and betrayal. The style of the book takes the form of a play; each Part is an Act with a prologue, followed by Scenes, adding to the melodrama.

I believe the genre this book belongs to is called Dark Academia. It is reminiscent of “The Secret History” by Donna Tart and less so, the “Gentlemen and Players” trilogy by Joanne Harris.

***** Christine Dove

‘Behindlings’ a novel by Nicola Barker, 2002

As far as I can remember, ‘Behindlings’ is the book that started me off as a big fan of Nicola Barker. Described inside the cover as “perhaps the most gifted young writer at work today” (that’s 2002)

All the hallmarks of her earlier work are here in Behindlings: the amazing similes; the puzzles and clues; the outrageous characters; the margins of society and the bleak marginal settings. In this novel, the ‘streams of consciousness’, thoughts and feelings of the characters are developed further. This can be disconcerting. Most people don’t articulate their thoughts in this way before speaking: we don’t know what synapses are firing whilst our brain gets its act together, we take for granted that our thoughts emerge fully formed as we speak. What Barker does is give us an idea of the subconscious fizzings and popping of anxiety, anger, frustration, ecstasy and so on, with speech as the tip of the iceberg of all that frantic activity. Not all the time of course, that wold be too wearing!

The main character, Wesley, is a puzzle, an enigma, a mean intellectual prankster who can sometimes be surprisingly tender. Superficially he is a tramp or hobo, young and resourceful. He sleeps where he can and eats what he finds - roadkill, seagulls or from bins outside restaurants. But he is stuck. A while back, one of his schemes went wrong, someone drowned, there was negative publicity, the press became involved, cover-ups, commercial interests, too much attention.

As a result we find him circumnavigating daily the coastline and marshes of Canvey Island. The small band of dedicated followers, or ‘behindlings’ as he calls them, have become disrupted both by outsiders and locals. Who are genuine followers and who are spies? Wesley is finding it increasingly difficult to keep them at a distance: he likes to be followed but he doesn’t like anyone getting too close.

Then there is Katherine Turpin, beautiful and sensual but utterly slovenly and self-destructive. All the men and, one suspects, some of the women are captivated by her. None more so than the gentle, giant, red-haired Dewi, the carpenter who lives opposite her. He maintains the exterior and garden of her bungalow immaculately; he is in love with her but she rejects him scornfully and cruelly. She sleeps around and deliberately maintains a bad reputation.

Each of the behindlings has a reason for following. They are lost souls, putting their faith in a man who can’t help them, has his own demons. Only Wesley knows exactly what has happened and what is happening now.

I find it impossible to summarise the actual plot. There are amazing sequences of events, poetic descriptions, calamitous cinematic scenes, near deaths: at one point Wesley’s nine-year-old daughter turns up with a reindeer and nearly drowns.

As Sharon said in the meeting, some authors' books you have to read more than once to get everything. Then Barker’s writing sticks in your head and alters the way you see the world.

Time to read some more!

CS 15/10/22

‘Cutting For Stone’ by Abraham Verghese, 2009

I’m glad I reread this book—perhaps not the most appropriate one when you’re having surgery! It is such a wonderful experience. In some ways it is melodramatic: shocking and Dickensian in its scope but modern, frank, humane and full of love.

Even to attempt to describe the story is difficult there is such a large cast of characters. It opens with Sister Mary Praise, a Roman Catholic Nun, newly qualified as a hospital nurse in Madras, being sent to Africa by her Mother Superior. Funding comes from Baptist Churches in America. She arrives in Aden on a stinking cargo ship where she is supposed to meet a contact. The port is appalling and frightening and the Mother Superiors connections appear to be non existent. By some miracle, the doctor who has looked after her on her awful voyage told her that he is the chief surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She arrives there exhausted, alone and near to death. Something has happened to her in Aden which we are not told but which we can guess.

The novel is a wonderful evocation of life in Ethiopia after the Emperor Haile Selassie returns from exile. With all its religions, superstitions and different cultures, including Mary’s own, India in the 1950s and its diaspora.

The hospital is like a family with large poor, illiterate and malnourished population. The only qualified medical staff besides Mary and Dr. Stone, who together become experts in pioneering liver transplants, are : Dr Hema, the hospitals gynaecologist and Dr Ghosh (another Indian from Madras) who is the general medical doctor. All the other staff are unqualified but trained in the hospital.

Seven year after she arrives, Sister Mary Praise dies on the operating table after giving birth to twins during a caesarian performed by Dr. Ghosh, with the help of Dr. Hema and a textbook. Thomas Stone, who was supposed to be in charge, has a breakdown and is thrust out of the way by Hema after he tries to extract the twins by force. Once the other doctors take over, Stone flees.

Almost immediately Dr. Hema decides to adopt the twin boys whom she names Marion and Shiva. She also agrees to marry Dr. Ghosh—a love story in itself.

The novel follows the various lives as the boys grow up and begin to help and become involved in the work of the hospital; one shock after another, one beautiful moment after another. It sounds unbelievable but the details are accurate, as are the circumstances, settings and medical descriptions. Abraham Verghese is an American doctor who was born in Ethiopia to Christian parents from Kerala, India. He studied at medical college in Madras.

’Red Pill’, 2020, by Hari Kunzru - Chris Shaw March 2022.

My first thoughts: a certain Kafkaesque quality builds to start with. It’s a kind of glimpse behind the illusionist’s curtain to see the ugly machinery that is the reality - or is it?

It is set in the few month’s leading up to Donald Trump’s election to president and based on research done by Kunzru when he attended a fellowship for 3 months at a conference centre in the suburbs of Berlin.

Imagining himself as an academic writer, interested in the Romantic Lyric poets of the early 19th century, who is suffering writer’s block, a crisis of confidence. His wife , a civil rights lawyer, is concerned about him and they decide he should apply for this scholarship at The Dieter Centre on the shore of Lake Wansee, a suburb of Berlin. He is successful and the fellowship comes with a reasonable stipend, however, he doesn’t read the small print. The centre’s strict rules and requirements, such as the open-plan-study area where all the fellows must do their work, immediately begin to reinforce his anxiety. It soon becomes apparent that he cannot cope with this and he starts a series of daily walks, insists on working and eating in his room when he can get away with it.

He becomes obsessed with a right-wing European philosopher, Joseph Le Maistre, 1753-1821; a German Romantic poet, Heinrich von Kleist 1777-1811, whose grave he comes across on his walks, and a brutally violent American TV cop series called, ‘Blue Lives’. The corrupt cop, the lead character in Blue Lives, quotes Le Maistre along with Heraclitus, Schopenhauer and others. It is when he has a chance encounter with Anton, the show’s creator, that a serious case of paranoia sets in. He develops the idea that Anton is part of an Alt-Right group that is plotting the downfall of democracy and replacing it with absolute rule.

The fact that he is at Lake Wansee , not far from the house where the infamous Nazi meeting took place in 1942 to work out the ‘Final Solution’, only adds to his paranoia. His obsession with Anton, his failure to meet the requirements of the fellowship and his strange behaviour lead to the author being expelled. He loves his wife desperately and wants to please her, not let her down, but as his paranoia develops he stops contacting her so as not to worry her. It is when he develops a full-blown psychic episode and follows Anton, or so he imagines, to a remote Scottish island that the novel builds to a dramatic climax. He awakes in a mental hospital in New York (after being discovered by his wife, following extensive detective work, in a hospital in Glasgow).

As he gradually recovers, in the care of his loyal wife, it is the period of the presidential election. His wife Rei is a leading campaigner for Hilary Clinton. The novel ends with the disastrous election of Trump. Will his wife’s love enable him to recover fully or will he continue to believe that he is being controlled by hidden forces?

Kunzru managed to make me feel the anxiety and paranoia of the author. It didn’t unfold like a conspiracy thriller and at times I wondered where the story was going. In the end I wasn’t sure whether Anton was part of a global conspiracy or just part of the Zeitgeist, one of the many far-right powerful influencers and agitators. Anyway, a cleverly constructed psycho-drama. Read it if you dare!

It became clear after the 2020 election and following the storming of the White House in January 2021 that America had narrowly avoided a slide towards totalitarianism. Investigations also showed that far-right groups were clearly linked to conspiracy theorists and that even the Russians had a hand in the manipulation of public opinion.

Chris’ Book of the Year 2021, 'A Tale For The Time Being’ by Ruth Ozeki, 2013

This most remarkable novel manages to be a history book, a treatise on Zen Buddhism, a commentary on nature, climate change and the reality of war. Ozeki discusses suicide and bullying in Japan, the movement of currents in the Pacific Ocean—you’d think it would be too much but there is a solid, driving, suspenseful story that builds vivid pictures in your mind and fills you with wonder.

Ruth Ozeki reads the audiobook brilliantly. She has one of those barely accented North American voices that I could listen to for hours, which is just as well as it is a long book. It tells the story of a mysterious diary written by a troubled schoolgirl in Tokyo that is washed ashore on the Pacific North West coast of Canada, along with letters in Japanese and other objects including a Japanese aviator’s watch from WW2 and a brief journal in French. The objects, carefully sealed in a pink ‘Hello Kitty’ lunchbox and wrapped in polythene, is found by an American author, Ruth, living on a remote, sparsely populated island with her ecologist husband, Oliver. The diary is written in English on the blank pages of a carefully repurposed old copy of ‘À La Recherche du Temps Perdu’. Ruth and her husband speculate whether the package was lost as a result of the Tsunami in 2011, although from their knowledge of the currents and the ‘gyre’ it seems too soon.

She decides to read the diary at a pace that corresponds roughly with the pace at which it was written. Gradually, a connection seems to form between Ruth and Nau Yasutani. The girl is Japanese but was brought to the USA during the Dotcom bubble. Her father, a programmer, suddenly finds himself bankrupt when the bubble bursts so Nau is thrust back into Japanese school life at the vulnerable age of 14. The journal describes the awful ‘Ijime’ (extreme bullying) that is endemic in Japanese schools and Nau’s attempts to cope. She finds solace in the friendship of a prostitute but is ultimately calmed and given a new perspective when she is forced to spend her summer holidays with her grandmother, a 104 year old Buddhist nun in a remote Northern monastery.

Ozeki’s novel is a reflection on the nature of time and memory. There is even a discussion on Schrödinger’s cat paradox, quantum mechanics and the ‘Many Worlds’ theory but the tale is also full of magic and mythology. ‘A Tale For The Time Being’ is a magnificent achievement by a most remarkable woman. *****

Chris Shaw 28/12/2021

In order to Live – Yeonmi Park – A North Korean girl’s Journey to Freedom
Yeonmi Park was not dreaming of freedom when she escaped from North Korea. She didn't even know what it meant to be free. All she knew was that she was running for her life, that if she and her family stayed behind they would die - from starvation, or disease, or even execution.
This book is the story of her struggle to survive in the darkest, most repressive country on earth; her harrowing escape through China's underworld of smugglers and human traffickers; and then her escape from China across the Gobi desert to Mongolia, with only the stars to guide her way, and from there to South Korea and at last to freedom; and finally her emergence as a leading human rights activist - all before her 21st birthday.

Margaret Stanger 8.1.21

Wild Swans by Jung Chang
Through the story of three generations of women in her own family the grandmother given to the warlord as a concubine, the Communist mother and the daughter herself Jung Chang reveals the epic history of China's twentieth century.
I found it difficult to take in the scope at first, but it all changed with the descriptions of the authors own experiences. A coming of age story with a comprehensive history of China in the 20th and 21st century,the book tells hows the authors life affirming resilience explains a lot about China and its apparent contradictions.

Margaret Stanger 8.1.21

‘Swimming in the Monsoon Sea’ by Shyam Selvadurai, 2005

This is a coming of age novel set in Sri Lanka in 1980. The author draws on his own childhood experiences for many of the lovingly described details.

Amrith is a young teenager, brought up by his aunt and uncle since his parents died in a motorcycle accident when he was very young.

His life is privileged and after the British handed Ceylon back, his extended family, like many others, re-established many of the old customs whilst retaining the lifestyles of the colonisers. In culture and technology they have hardly moved on since the 1950s.

Amrith’s aunt and uncle treat him as a son.Their own, older daughters love him too but tease him for his seriousness. He does remember his mother and the intense relationship that they had, partly in response to his abusive alcoholic father. He also knows of the bitter feud between the two sides of the family.

When his despised uncle arrives in the town from Canada with his son, the family are reluctant to see them but agree for the the sake of the two boys spending the summer together. Despite the family feud, Amrith quickly develops an intense relationship with his brash cousin Niresh, two years his senior. He is deeply jealous of his sisters’ flirting and Niresh’s responses. Niresh is sophisticated enough to realise that his cousin has a crush on him and handles him sensitively.

This beautiful, quite romantic summer love story unfolds with lots of drama, passion and humour. The author draws out the contrasts between Western and Eastern culture sensitively and impartially. Niresh has to come to terms with his sexuality in a country where each of the different religions, including his own Christian family, condemn homosexuality. The novel has a satisfying conclusion.

After something of a drought, at last I’ve found a novel I enjoyed!

Chris Shaw 22.12.20

‘ADULTS’ by Emma Jane Unsworth, 2020

I listened to this, the audio version read by an excellent narrator, Chloe Massey. It is wickedly funny, with one-liners and put-downs that are apparently Unsworth’s forte but it is also well written and inventive. I’m not sure how the printed version looks but the impression is that the novel is written in a series of social media posts.

Jenny McLean is 35 and addicted to Instagram, Twitter etc. She is a columnist for a trendy online magazine; the office banter is hilarious. As the novel unfolds, voiced by Jenny, we discover that, due to unwise posts and falling numbers of ‘likes’, she is about to be ‘let go’ by the editor. Her lodgers are planning to move out en masse, fed up with being lampooned in Jenny’s column. Her boyfriend Art, a well-known photographer about town, and she are barely speaking to each other. Finally, in an hilarious scene where he catches her on her phone whilst they are having sex, Art decides Jenny and he must re-think their relationship. To cap it all, Jenny’s estranged mother turns up intending to stay and ‘re-bond’ with her daughter.

ADULTS is entertaining and serious, humorous and poignant. Perhaps if you don’t have a teenage granddaughter or arty friends to tempt you on to Instagram, you may not appreciate the subtlety and pitfalls of posting: the politics of ‘liking’ other people’s posts; of ‘unfollowing’ or the exact number of exclamation marks to use.

A novel of love, intimacy, womanhood and maturity—a cautionary tale for the generation obsessed with self-promotion. Delightful and redemptive.

Chris Shaw 1.11.20

‘Keeper’ by Jessica Moor, 2020

One of my problems, when confronted with the best writing and the best dramas on subjects like racism and domestic violence—and there is, naturally, a proliferation of this at the moment—is that I find them hard to stomach.

Reading the ‘Philosophy of Race’ by Naomi Zack and now ‘Keeper’, I am aware of how much I already know and understand through the news, plays, novels, documentaries and movies that I have seen over the last 50 years. There has been so much crime drama featuring violence towards women. ‘Thrillers’ in which are revealed the shocking truths about how, for one reason or another, men hurt women casually, clandestinely, psychologically, brutally where the emphasis is not so much on the experience of the women so much as the thrill of finding the killer.

I stopped reading (or rather listening) to ‘Keeper’ because I found it painful and because I know what has happened to Katie Straw. Why her body was found washed up on the banks of a fast-flowing river a mile and a half down from the town bridge where suicides have happened before. And why the residents of the women’s refuge where Katie lived and worked do not think it was suicide but murder.

Moore runs the novel in two parallel time streams, ‘then’ and ‘now’. Then, is when Katie, early thirties, having had a string of failed relationships, meets Jamie who she thinks might be ‘the one’. But my experience, seeing the tell-tale signs, is warning me that this is not love but control and I can sense the direction that this is heading. In the ‘now’, we follow the detective and his investigation, along with his callow fellow officer. Both a bit of a cliché: the inspector near retirement, hard-bitten but superficially sympathetic and used to dealing with abused women; the constable inexperienced and crass. We also learn about the lives of the women in the refuge. How each is different, different stories, some suffering racism as well as abuse. All revealing the subtle ways in which women can be controlled and how they appear to collude in their abuse.

This is why I had to stop. It might have been easier with a print copy. It is so well-written and so well read that I couldn’t bear to listen for more than a couple of chapters at a time. Of course, I may be entirely wrong about what has happened, but I don’t think that that is the point of the book. With a thriller, you want to keep going, you want to find out who the killer really is and why he did it. Even if Katie did commit suicide, even if Jamie was not the culprit, the gut-wrenching signs are there and for now, I have to look away.

Chris Shaw 16.11.20

‘The Vagrants’ by Yiyun Li, 2009 (audio edition 2011)

The inhabitants of Muddy River represent a microcosm of the appalling devastation and terror of Chines communism under Mao Zedong. The town, with its high-rise apartment blocks and factories is typical of the rapid expansion of industrialisation under the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. Shattered by the purges, slaughter and the great famines brought about by Mao’s centralised policies, the people cling to their primitive superstitions, sexist traditions and arranged marriages. Families have been split by alternating zeal and betrayal. Ignorance and illiteracy are common.

Li runs parallel and interlocking stories. Teacher Ghu and his wife, devastated by the imprisonment and and execution of their daughter. The beautiful wife of a prominent local official who is also a well-known local TV announcer, who becomes involved in the illegal protest against the execution. The strange and touching love story between a disabled 12 year old girl and a young man of 18, the town wastrel and braggart who becomes tender and caring in her presence.

The unfolding tragedy is told with compassion and touches of humour. The style is unsentimental and compelling.

The history of Chinese Communism seems even more complex and brutal than that of the Soviet Union, even more inappropriate to the vast population of different ethnic groups, consisting largely of peasant farmers; Mao Zedong even more irrational than Stalin.

The author doesn’t go into all that. She was born in 1972 and after completing a compulsory year of service in the People’s Liberation Army, gained a degree at Peking University in 1996. She began living in America in 2000. So she lived under Mao (briefly) and Deng Xiaoping.

Chris Shaw 26.11.20

'10 minutes 38 seconds in this strange world' by Elif Shafak

For Leila, each minute after her death recalls a sensuous memory: spiced goat stew, sacrificed by her father to celebrate the birth of a yearned-for son; bubbling vats of lemon and sugar to wax women's legs while men are at prayer; the cardamom coffee she shares with a handsome student in the brothel where she works. Each fading memory brings back the friends she made in her bittersweet life - friends who are now desperately trying to find her . . .

Margaret Stanger

'The Red haired Woman' by Orhan Pamuk, 2016

This novel by the Turkish Nobel prize winning author brings a modern twist to themes based on ancient folk tales from Turkey, Persia and Greece - principally the Oedipus story of Sophocles.

A young man, living with his parents on the outskirts of Istanbul in the late 20th century has ambitions to go to university and become and writer. His father, a pharmacist, is a left-wing revolutionary so Lem and his mother are often left alone and are finally abandoned.

They calculates that if he works at a nearby bookstore he may earn enough money to take him to University. In the end he accepts an offer from a master well-digger to go to a village some distance from Istanbul for the summer where he will earn much more. His mother, knowing that it is hard and dangerous work, forbids him to go down the well.

In the evening, to relax after work, Lem and Master Mahmout go into the village to drink tea at a café. It is there that he sees the ‘red-haired woman’, who notices him and seems as interested in looking at him as he is in her. Eventually after following the woman and the people she is with, whom he assumes to be her family, they turn and confront him. He is invited to come and watch their performance at the tent in the village. He realises that they are a theatre group rather than a family and manages to slip away one evening to see the show - that Master Mahmout has forbidden him to watch. Over the weeks, working in the baking sun and shifting barrow loads of rock and earth—loads that are really too much for him—Lem develops an almost father-son relationship with the master well-digger.

He is very moved by the theatre performance and captivated by the woman. Afterwards she and Lem go for a drink and she tells him about some of the folk-tales, particularly that of Rostan and his son Sohrab, which has some parallels with the Oedipus myth. Drunk on Raki, Lem and the red-haired woman sleep together, Lem blundering back to the well site in the early hours.

From here, what with the plot twists and turns and Lem’s obsession with learning more about ancient myths, I suppose I felt it all somewhat contrived. Nevertheless, almost without realising it, I was drawn in. The book gives a vivid picture of life in modern Turkey, with its rapid commercialisation and property boom along with the tension between the religious and the secular, the wealth and the poverty.

When the theatre moves on, Lem becomes reckless. The well is already extremely deep and there seems no prospect of finding water. The landowner, who was hoping to develop the land for factories stops paying them but says they can carry on. Exhausted, Lem is sending the bucket down when it slips off the hook and falls on to the well-digger. Panicking, Lem rushes into town to get help but cannot seem to find anyone. Eventually, after not finding help and with no way of going down the well, he packs his belongings and goes home on the train, imagining that Mahmout is dead.

All the characters are linked; all are significant. I don’t want to give away the ending but in the final few chapters we realise how much like a classic Greek tragedy the whole story is.

I’d like to read more of his books.

Chris Shaw

‘The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 2007-2010

Taleb was born in Lebanon into a highly educated family. He studied in Paris and America and now lives and works in America. Although he is now mostly an academic and researcher he made a fortune in the stock market, not by following the methods of ‘economists’ or ‘market analysts’ but by careful observation and his growing realisation that markets were much more influenced by rare but significant, unpredictable shifts and events than by average past performance.

He realised that these events, which could be either positive or negative had a far bigger effect on overall market performance than the normal ups and downs of the index. He christened these ‘Black Swan’ events (because until Europeans discovered Australia and New Zealand, everyone assumed that swans were always white. It was a discovery no one could have predicted.)

Taleb’s point is that the future is always unpredictable, except in trivial ways: that the big market crash of ’87, the tsunami that hit Southern Asia, the break-up of the Soviet Union, and so on, were all unpredicted and had a profound effect on people’s lives.

He is fiercely critical to the point of scorn of so-called economic forecasters and market analysts who win Noble Prizes for their theories, whose work is entirely worthless and their predictions useless. Taleb’s work is built on the work of a few scientists and philosophers who he admires for their empirical, sceptical approach such as Karl Popper, Daniel Kahnemann and Benoit Mandelbrot. He is disdainful of those he calls Platonists who insist that their models are how things are and how things should be, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He calls them disparagingly, ‘Gaussian’ for their insistence on invoking the Bell Curve of normal distribution. He says that they imagine we are living in ‘Mediocristan’ where past events can always be relied upon to predict the future, whereas in fact we are living in ‘Extremistan’, a largely chaotic world.

These people attempting to fit the world to pure mathematics are committing what Taleb calls the ‘Ludic Fallacy’, insisting that our chaotic world will fit into nice straight graphs or smooth curves. Taleb is excited by the mathematics of fractals, discovered by Mandelbrot, because they show that the minutest shifts in initial conditions can produce wild differences in outcome. It is exciting stuff‡ that opened up a new world of discovery but Taleb is careful not to overdo it and use it to try and model the future. What he does do, however, in the appendix to his book is to attempt some proposals for mitigating the effects of negative Black Swans and spotting and making use of the positive ones.

‡Did anyone, like me, use their first computer to plot fractal patterns?

Chris Shaw 3.4.2020

Back to Main Literature Page

‘My Name is Monster’, Katie Hale, 2019

A novel about a young woman who survives an armageddon. I perceive the theme to be how humans have lost touch with each other, with themselves and with the earth. It might also suggest a cleansing, a fresh start—a reboot that must include the most advanced technology combined with the power of the natural world. In a way, it is like all apocalypse stories, a struggle for survival with a glimmer of hope at the end. But it is not the same, no violence, no battle with zombies or killer rats, no shoot-em-ups.

Given the nickname Monster by her parents when she was a baby, with the sort of desperate humour that comes from sleepless nights with a fractious infant. As she grows older, she refuses to give up the name and it sticks. A badge of honour which she seems determined to live up to. Intelligent, introverted and antisocial, she rebuts all attempts to befriend her except for a younger boy who is in awe of her, and whom she tolerates as an obedient servant. She lives in a world of her own, taking things apart and fixing them. After a science degree she ends up working in a seed bank, a state of the art repository designed to preserve the world’s dwindling biodiversity. It is, in effect, a self-sustaining bunker, deep under the Arctic ice.

This, of course, is how she survives the nuclear bombs and biological weapons that bring a deadly plague, resistant to all vaccines. The science is vague; I like this, it doesn’t really matter for the story.

The description of her journey, a year later, from the Arctic base to the north coast of Scotland and her journey southwards, is tense and realistic. Her solitary nature, her survival instincts and her intelligence keep her alive as she avoids large towns and searches lonely farmhouses for canned and preserved food. At one point, she describes a city with a large shiny building that reminds me of The Sage Concert Hall in Gateshead. The place she finally settles, after a brief visit to her old childhood home, is a reasonably intact farm cottage on a hill overlooking an anonymous deserted city.

The language that the author uses is evocative and compelling. It is frank and pulls no punches; not sentimental but often beautiful.

On one of Monster’s foraging trips in the city she comes across a young girl, filthy, naked and feral, cowering in the corner of a deserted shop. She manages to coax her with food and takes her back to the farmhouse. As she teaches her to speak and live like a human, a relationship develops. She names the girl Monster and calls herself Mother. ‘Monster’, she explains means ‘survivor’ and ‘Mother’ means creator.

On one level, the story works because of some useful lucky breaks: the Arctic bunker; the locked storerooms at the back of food shops; the garden centre with its stock of seed ignored by looters, and so on. Then there’s the big shiny clinic powered entirely by solar energy that Mother raids for medicine—but which has a much more useful purpose for the young Monster.

But on another level it works because of the characters of the two women. One humourless, taciturn, inventive and dogged; the other bright, brave, hopeful, playful. And Monster has a buried secret hidden in strange dreams, memories she cannot reach and somehow connected with the ‘shiny woman’, a ‘soft woman’ and The Clinic. In the end, they are both survivors but it is the young Monster who is the creator.

There may be hope for humanity.

Chris Shaw, October 2020.

‘The Mars Room’ by Rachel Kushner

Romy Hall is in prison, serving two life sentences plus 6 years. Leaving behind her 7 year old son Jackson in the unreliable care of her mother, Romy recounts her early life and her life in prison. The audio version read by the author, in an almost deadpan voice, has a dreamlike and often nightmarish quality. This may be due partly to the fact I began the book as bedtime reading and often drifted off to sleep! Early on, I thought I may not be able to cope with it. Romy’s life is sordid, violent, cruel and unfair. Her job as a lap-dancer in the seedy ‘Mars Room’; the abusive relationships; her anger and despair, make uncomfortable listening. As I began to be drawn in by the simple and direct voice, the rich and evocative imagery and at times beautiful and poetic language, I realised that I was going to have to listen during the day—I was missing large sections!

The main drive of the novel is Romy’s acute observation. She misses nothing, everything is significant. She recounts the characters both in and out of jail and how they interact with her. They are often archetypal and unforgettable. I will need to buy a paper copy to keep track of their names.

Romy’s son Jackson—beautiful, bright and inquisitive—is torn away from her; she has no rights. When her mother dies she loses touch with him. Eventually, after several years she discovers that the American justice system no longer recognises her as the mother. Lawyers are useless unless you have money. The prison’s attitude is, “You made your choices”, they will not help.

The characters:
A crooked cop, a customer of the Mars Room—bribery, murders, rape, torture, theft—is finally caught when a victim manages to bring him to light. The prison system is supposed to protect him from the other prisoners, the precautions are laughable. He is beaten almost to death and emerges brain damaged from a coma.
The stalker who cannot believe that Vanessa the lap dancer, Romy, is not in love with him, that he is merely paying her to be interested in him, tracks down her home address. In terror, she beats him to death with an iron bar.
The transexual. Huge, not recognised as a man by the penal system, he must be kept in a female prison. The other prisoners respect him and treat him as a man. He befriends Romy and watches her back.

Nearly all the women, 3000 in Romy’s prison, are victims, however bad their crime. They did not make ‘bad choices’, their choices were zero: fight to survive; take shitty low-paid jobs; get exploited by drug dealers, drug addicted partners or the police. Public defenders are hopeless; underfunded, superficial and prejudiced. The penal system, vast and industrialised, is cruel and inhumane‡. Rehabilitation consists solely of dreary work in the prison workshops. The library contains nothing but tattered charity shop paperbacks. Prisoners have to hustle, do deals, take huge risks merely to survive. The guards are uneducated, corrupt and vicious. This is the reality. Commit a minor infringement of the draconian rules and find yourself in solitary confinement in a tiny cage for weeks, months on end.

The end of the novel is almost unbearably poignant. Stunning!

A candidate for my book of the year, ‘The Mars Room’ was shortlisted for the Booker price in 2018. Chris Shaw

‡Some of the appalling things that humans do to each other are often classed as ‘inhumane’ but the truth is that no other species subjects its fellow creatures to such violence, terror and misery as do humans.

'The Cyclist Conspiracy' by Svetislav Basara

I have been reading a book written by Serbian writer Svetislav Basara, called The Cyclist Conspiracy. It is without doubt the weirdest book I have ever read and it is very hard to actually describe it. So here goes. It is written as if it is the result of research and refers to manuscripts, letters, poems which purports to reveal this mysterious sect. The sect is called The Little Brothers of the Evangelical Bicylists of the Rose Cross. They meet in dreams, gain esoteric knowledge from comtemplation of the bicycle and seek to move in and out of history, manipulating events. In some cases the members are not aware they are part of the sect. They can communicate with the dead through dreams. They intervene in historical events such as the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and even influence a story of Sherlock Holmes. It intertwines with threads of waking and dreams involving the present, the past and the future. If you see a bicycle from above it looks like a cross which the sect claims represents God and death. The book is heavy on religion, Freud, politics. The nearest thing I can come up with is that it is sending up Religion, Masons, Society, Psychoanalysism and conspiracy theorists. Wow. The strange thing is I was compelled to read it to the end even though I was left turning myself inside out to understand it.

Sharon Holden 13.9.20

'Café Europa' by Slavenka Drakulić 1994-95, Abacus English edition 1996.

It is not a specific café, although there are several Europa Cafés in the former Communist Eastern European Countries. Western European countries and their wealth and sophistication were the envy of Eastern Europeans during Communist rule.

The book is a collection of essays, musings on people, events and attitudes by Drakulić who was born in Istria in 1949. She was comparatively lucky to be born a Croatian in the former Yugoslavia as, like her compatriots she enjoyed more freedom to travel and buy goods from abroad, during the more liberal regime under Tito. She also married a Swedish man and obtained dual citizenship.

The complexities of trying to keep body and soul together under Communism are well known from Russian literature; Drakulić manages to convey both the humour and tragedy of daily life, of smuggling goods like toilet paper, jeans and cigarettes, along with the guilt at having access to things that people in neighbouring countries could only dream about.

She recalls the anger and humiliation of crossing the border back into Croatia: the indignities to which returning citizens are subject, compared with the ease at being waved through without formalities when entering Sweden.

But the stories become darker as the book progresses. The feelings of helplessness at the events of the war and the complicity of the Croations in atrocities and betrayals. I’m going to have to read this again to pick up the nuances, which passed me by during the time this was happening. I need to read more of the history of Croatia to understand what lies behind this awful turmoil. One of the keys is the story, ’People From The Three Borders’. Istria is largely Croatian but also has an Italian part and a Serbian part. Many people play the system. They are ‘Istrian’ when they fill out the census forms, even though there is no such category listed. They refuse to be pinned down and some even have three passports. They can go shopping in whichever country particular foods are cheapest.

Theoretically, all this has changed in the last 25 years since the book was written, as Croatia is now in the EU. During the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Western Europe steadfastly refused to become involved. Croatians could not understand this, were they too not European now? Why were they ignoring the atrocities of Neofascists? I also did not realise that during WW2, when Croatia was occupied by the Nazis, Croatia set up a fascist government and rounded up Jews, Serbians, gypsies and dissidents into concentration and extermination camps. When Russia liberated Croatia, the government simply continued, adopting Marxism as its new creed and retaining Tito as president.

Chris Shaw 8.9.20

'The Cellist of Sarajevo' by Steven Galloway

This novel is set during the 1990s Siege of Sarajevo. It tells the story of three people trying to survive in a city rife with the extreme fear of desperate times, and of the sorrowing cellist who plays undaunted in their midst.

One day a shell lands in a bread line and kills twenty-two people as the cellist watches from a window in his flat. He vows to sit in the hollow where the mortar fell and play Albinoni’s Adagio once a day for each of the twenty-two victims. The Adagio had been re-created from a fragment after the only extant score was firebombed in the Dresden Music Library, but the fact that it had been rebuilt by a different composer into something new and worthwhile gives the cellist hope.

Meanwhile, Kenan steels himself for his weekly walk through the dangerous streets to collect water for his family on the other side of town, and Dragan, a man Kenan doesn’t know, tries to make his way towards the source of the free meal he knows is waiting. Both men are almost paralyzed with fear, uncertain when the next shot will land on the bridges or streets they must cross, unwilling to talk to their old friends of what life was once like before divisions were unleashed on their city. Then there is “Arrow,” the pseudonymous name of a gifted female sniper, who is asked to protect the cellist from a hidden shooter who is out to kill him as he plays his memorial to the victims.

Margaret Stanger 5.9.20

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‘Novel 11, Book 18’, by Dag Solstad, 2001

English translation by Sverre Lyngstad 2008

Dag Solstad is a well-known Norwegian writer, acclaimed intellectually but not, as far as I can tell, all that popular.

This is a very strange, introspective and somewhat depressing novel. Its theme seems to be one he has pursued before, certainly in the book, ’T Singer’, 1999.

At the point this story begins Bjorn Hansen has just turned 50 and he starts to look back. 18 years ago he left his wife and 2 year old son in Oslo to pursue his lover to a small out of the way town called Kongsberg. Eventually he also leaves his successful civil servant’s job and becomes Town Treasurer. He and his lover become the centre and focus of the local amateur dramatic group—she as its star actress, he as its promoter and staunch backstage worker.

Bjorn Hansen is obsessed with the meaning of his life and his sense of personal identity. He is constantly reexamining his relationships with other people. Eventually everything appears stale and meaningless, his lover having lost her charm. After 14 years together he leaves her and rents an apartment of his own.

During the 4 years prior to the opening of the story he devises a dangerous and life-changing plan. We are not told what this is but he seeks and eventually persuades his friend, a doctor, to help him. Then, out of the blue he is contacted by his son and agrees to let him stay whilst he studies at the university.

It is a tense and awkward arrangement especially since his son exhibits narcissistic behaviour which masks his loneliness and lack of friends. It seemed to me that the son might be autistic but Bjorn tries to get on with him despite constantly analysing and criticising him.

When the son has returned from Oslo after the Christmas holidays, Bjorn executes his plan which involves attending a trade delegation in Vilnius in Lithuania. The tension builds and when the details of the plan emerge I find it quite shocking and inexplicable. A bizarre turn of events that changes his life and relationships permanently.

It is about a man constantly striving for something and not achieving it. In a sense, an existentialist novel about the meaninglessness of life. I worked my way through it but it gave me the shivers!

A Journey to the End of the Russian Empire by Anton Chekov

RUSSIA - Alison White

I looked on the web for ideas of more modern Russian authors and the one that came up was Andrei Bely and the book mentioned was Petersburg now one of my daughters had given me this book and I had never read it so I thought I would try it. It is 500 pages long and I got to page 100 and realised we hadn't really got anywhere. These hundred pages were about a government official called Apollonovich and about him getting up in the morning and going to his office and a bit about his hapless son Nikolai. So, I stopped reading it. I don't know what happened as I haven't finished it but evidently the son Nikolai is caught up in revolutionary politics and is assigned the task of assassinating his father.

So, having spent almost a week trying to get to grips with it I then found a book byAnton Chekov - 'A Journey to the End of the Russian Empire'

†his is from a Penguin Series called Penguin Great Journeys. It is only 100 pages long and it tells the journey by Chekov leaving his comfortable and successful life in Moscow in 1890 to travel to the desolate far eastern island of Sakhalin. He describes his journey to Sakhalin through the Russian Empire across Siberia in a series of letters from which the first part of the book was taken. Sakhalin was used by the Russian government as a penal colony for the most dangerous prisoners.
The book ‘The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin’ was first published in 1893 and the second part of this book is extracted from this account.

A Journey to the End of the Russian Empire by Anton Chekov

Part 1:

The letters are to friends and family and describe various escapades on the journey in some ways it could have been written today except that he was travelling on land by horse-drawn carriages

The descriptions are very vivid and one can easily imagine the journey with all the little anecdotes mentioned.
The ship had run aground (P23), but in lucky chance there was a band on board, so there was an excellent party.
On board people can say what they want as no one to arrest you and nowhere to exile people.
The party was the high point: - lower points: - sharing a cabin with an opium smoking Chinese man, learns about Japanese prostitutes in Blagoveshchensk and witnesses various punishments on Sakhalin.
Crossing Amur was like Switzerland. Saw gold prospecting.
The descriptions are such that is could be a contemporary travelogue. Chekov was a very accomplished short story writer
P32 English who control China and building strongholds everywhere - found this interesting

Part 2

Chapter 1 He sailed from Siberia across the Tarta Straight to the mouth of the Duca where the Alexandrovsk command post is situated. The officer in charge of the soldiers said that he had no right visit the penal settlement as he was not a government official.  Crossing the straight Chekov could see the island was on fire. Much of the island is covered in forest and these were on fire and there was a lot of smoke. The island had a number of railway lines for transporting the provisions to the penal colonies which were distributed throughout the island 

Chapter 2 The Prison Settlements of Northern Sakhalin
The population of the island consists of convicts and the government employees looking after them and then exiles and those who have completed their sentences and followers of the convicts.
The settlements consist of homesteads with co-owners or half owners and few women and a few legally married families there are free women who follow their husbands to the colony
Most of the entire population of the island seem to play cards and they played Faro and they play for winnings such as the government Rations, their smoked fish and their clothing.  P. 92
Chekov went on a trip with a general and the commandant of the Tymovsk district and they visited the north part of the island. They were doing an inventory and checking that everything was in order and being run in the correct way. The journey was fairly hazardous and quite a bit had to be undertaken on foot in muddy countryside, staying in out of the way places.

Chapter 3 describes the Gilyak people. They live in yurts and wonder around northern Sakhalin they are dwindling in number as they migrate to the mainland. They are neither Mongols nor Tongass but belong to some unknown race which may once have been powerful and ruled all of Asia. They are a strong stocky build and short of stature. They have a summer yurt and a winter yurt. The yurts are preferable to the huts the convicts live in.

Chapter 4: The Morality of Sakhalin The convicts are not treated well and they are really slaves. However, they are lying, cunning, cowardice, meanness, informing, robbery, every kind of secret vice such is the arsenal of these slave like people and they employ these tactics to get out of some jobs or to get a slice of bread. One day they stole a live ram off a ship and the barge had not left the ship but the ram could not be found.
He reported on the treatment of convicts – harsh, not in line with current legislation. Prisoners and those who inflict punishment become hardened. Description of flogging and execution.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and then researched into Chekov’s life, which is also fascinating.
In 1884, Chekhov qualified as a physician, which he considered his principal profession though he made little money from it and treated the poor free of charge.
In 1884 and 1885, Chekhov found himself coughing blood, and in 1886 the attacks worsened, but he would not admit his tuberculosis to his family or his friends. He continued writing for weekly periodicals, earning enough money to move the family into progressively better accommodations.
Early in 1886 he was invited to write for one of the most popular papers in St. Petersburg, Novoye Vremya (New Times), owned and edited by the millionaire magnate Alexey Suvorin, who paid a rate per line double Leykin's and allowed Chekhov three times the space. Suvorin was to become a lifelong friend, perhaps Chekhov's closest.
In 1887, exhausted from overwork and ill health, Chekhov took a trip to Ukraine, which reawakened him to the beauty of the steppe.
In autumn 1887, a theatre manager named Korsh commissioned Chekhov to write a play, the result being Ivanov, written in a fortnight and produced that November.[45] Though Chekhov found the experience "sickening" and painted a comic portrait of the chaotic production in a letter to his brother Alexander, the play was a hit and was praised, to Chekhov's bemusement, as a work of originality.[46] Although Chekhov did not fully realise it at the time, Chekhov's plays, such as The Seagull (written in 1895), Uncle Vanya (written in 1897), The Three Sisters (written in 1900), and The Cherry Orchard (written in 1903) served as a revolutionary backbone to what is common sense to the medium of acting to this day: an effort to recreate and express the "realism" of how people truly act and speak with each other and translating.

Alison White

‘The Strawberry Girl’, by Lisa Stromme, 2016

The Strawberry Girl is set in 1893, in a small fishing town on the shores of the Oslo Fjord at the Southern tip of Norway.

This is not a year chosen at random. It is a year in which Edvard Munch could have rented a house and studio in Åsgårdstrand, a seaside resort popular in summer with the well to do of Oslo, or Christiania, as it was known then. Munch did in fact buy the cottage in 1898 and spent summers there painting, often with other artists and ‘bohemians’ as he did in the story. The Strawberry Girl, Johanne Lien, is an invented character but may have been a real girl that the author, in notes, says was based on the ‘Girl With Currants’ by Hans Heyerdahl, a popular realist painter who also spent summers in the town. Other characters who appear in the story are invented too but the visiting Ihlen family including the three daughters, actually existed and play an important part in the plot.

In a lush sensuous novel, narrated by Johanna, the author sets up the contrast between the staid, deeply conventional townsfolk and the wild, bohemian and ‘wicked’ Munch and his friends. One of the Ihlen daughters has previously had an affair with Munch which the family imagines has been hushed up. However the locals are even further outraged when Johanna is spotted in Munch’s garden with another sister, Tulik. Whilst Tulik falls obsessively in love with Munch, Johanne absorbs the colours and emotions of the paintings and incorporates the ideas in her own work.

It doesn’t end well! Stromme has invented the characters of the real participants as well as the fictional ones, to create a moving sensual landscape of shifting light and colour, also using Munch’s actual paintings as key moments in the plot. It is a long audio book, over 11 hours, but I loved every minute of it.

Lisa Stromme is British but has spent the last 20 years in Norway.

Chris Shaw

'A Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol'

Originally published in 1836, the play was revised for an 1842 edition. Based upon an anecdote allegedly recounted to Gogol by Pushkin, the play is a comedy of errors, satirising human greed, stupidity, and the extensive political corruption of Imperial Russia. It gave me in insight into the context of the Russian Revolution and explained a lot, so it was worth the struggle with Russian names and patronymics.

Margaret Stanger

'A Gentleman in Moscow  by Amor Towles'

This is a fun, clever, and surprisingly upbeat look at Russian history through the eyes of one man. At the beginning of the book, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to spend his life under house arrest in Moscow's Metropole Hotel. The ending is true to the character of Count Rostov who retained his love and connection with his native country through all the years of his house arrest in the Hotel Metropole. Notwithstanding his determination to stage manage Sofia's defection it is not surprising that he did not select a life abroad for himself. There were many nods to Russian writers, especially Tolstoy. A book about Russia rather than by a Russian author, it shows some of the post 1917 social history, and together with 'A Government Inspector', I can see where George Orwell is coming from with Animal Farm and 1984.

Margaret Stanger

‘The First Circle’ by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, this edition 1988 Collins Harvill.

(Translated by Hayward, Harari and Glenny)

‘The First Circle’ refer to Dante’s ‘Inferno’, where the First Circle of Hell is basically where the good and virtuous go, who cannot go straight to ‘The Good Place’ because they have not been exposed to Christian teaching. Through instruction and striving they may be released.

In Solzhenitsyn’s story he gives the label to a special kind of prison designed as a technical/scientific establishment. The kind of prisoners who end up here are sent because of their skills, knowledge or training, to work on state projects. For example a whole ragbag of men are working on a scrambler telephone ordered by Stalin. The prisoners are overseen by warders and security staff who are supposed to have similar skills but invariably don’t.

The Soviet system that developed under Stalin was probably the most brutally stupid and illogical regime ever devised. Marx’s materialist analysis of history as basically a class struggle, and his advocacy of revolution in which the workers took over the means of production was a Utopian dream. Nevertheless, by the time of the first Russian Revolution international socialism was well under way. However, under Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the dream became a nightmare and under Stalin, terrifying. Some historians have surmised that Stalin’s paranoia was due to his alcoholic father and broken family. It is said that the only person he ever trusted was Adolf Hitler. He was also upset and angered by the West’s failure to acknowledge the Russian people’s enormous effort and sacrifice in winning the war.

The result was that everyone was suspicious of everyone else, everyone was afraid of losing their job and even in The First Circle there was a network of spies and informers. Add to this the fact that deadlines become more and more unrealistic as only the prisoners themselves were prepared to admit the slow progress they are making with inferior materials and tools.

It is a warm, poignant and often amusing story, showing the humanity and comradeship of people even under oppression. There is a huge cast of characters and, although the main action of the novel takes place only over 3 days, we hear all the back stories of the prisoners and how they unfold in great detail, giving a powerful evocation of the Gulag and the system of terror that affects every man, woman and child in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn shows us how each person strives to find his own salvation, clinging to life and hope in this monstrous edifice.

Chris Shaw 29.6.20

‘The First Circle’, by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn - Publication Research

I was intrigued to find that in my 1988 Collins Harvill edition of Solzhenitsyn’s novel the copyright resides, not with the author himself, but with the first English publishers Harper and Row in 1968. I subsequently discovered that Harper and Row’s translator, Thomas P Whitney, used the shorter self-censored manuscript smuggled out of Russia by Solzhenitsyn’s underground contacts. Another publication from around that time was by translated by Olga and Henry Carlisle, presumably from the same source. Collins, who acquired the Harvill Press in the 1950s was not happy with these translations and used Michael Guybon (a pseudonym of the trio Max Hayward, Manya Harari and Michael Glenny, incidentally the father of Micha Glenny, the BBC Russia correspondent!) to produce a 1969 edition. It is clear that my 1988 edition was also the shorter self-censored version, published again by Collins Harvill, using the same Hayward, Harari and Glenny translation. Now the plot thickens!

Some of this is from Wikipedia and Google but has been partially confirmed by Dawn Sinclair, an archivist at Harper Collins whom I contacted.

After the author’s death in 2008, an edition of the ‘In The First Circle’ published by Harper Perennial in 2009, is advertised as, ‘The first uncensored edition’ and contained the original 96 chapters as opposed to the previous 87. This time the translation was by Harry T Willetts, an Oxford Scholar, who died in 2005! Alexander Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Noble Prize for literature in 1970, but in 1974 he was formally exiled from the Soviet Union and went to live in America. Further versions of the 87 chapter version were published from 1971 and by Fontana press in 1974. The complete 96 chapter version (with some later revisions) was published in Russian by YMCA Press in 1978, and has been published in Russia as part of Solzhenitsyn's complete works. Excerpts from the full 96 chapter version were published in English by The New Yorker, and in The Solzhenitsyn Reader. An English translation of the full version was published by Harper Perennial in October 2009, entitled ‘In The First Circle’ rather than The First Circle.

However, I have still not found out why it took until after Solzhentisyn’s death to publish the full 96 chapter version in English. The story of the YMCA press and its relationship to Russian Literature, and with the author of The Gulag Archipelago in particular, is fascinating in itself and maybe the answer lies there.

Thanks to Wikipedia and Harper Collins publishers.

Chris Shaw 28.6.20

‘The Suitcase’ by Sergei Dovlatov, 1986

Dovlatov was not widely published or read in Russia until after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unable to publish in the