I’ve been having a long-standing (too damn long!) problem finding novels that engage me. I can’t rely on the prize winners. For example, in the past five or so years I’ve started many books that have won prestigious awards and have not gotten far before deciding that they weren’t worth my continuing. I wander the stacks of the two libraries available to me and find a wasteland.

The end result is that I feel abandoned by fiction, something which has sustained me daily since I was twelve.

What to do?

I haven’t reread books that are included in the Most Meaningful Books list at this site. One reason is that I don’t want to be disappointed. If a book meant something to me when I was thirteen, or twenty-two, or thirty-six (etc.), shouldn’t I honor the taste of the person I was, the one who found it rewarding? Lastly, I realize that I was easier on books in the past. But a sourpuss decimation? No, that doesn’t appeal to me.

Still . . . I’m desperate for something good to read.

Which is why I turned to The Unbearable Bassington by Saki (H. H. Munro). I probably, as a guess, first read it sometime in my late twenties. How would it hold up?

It held up exceedingly well.

I’ll continue to delve into those old books (I own them all: I buy any book I find worthy of keeping in my library). But I’ll only turn to those I read prior to the time when I began writing reviews. (My first post was in 2008.) 

And I’ll write brief reviews of them (even if I have to be negative). 

I’ll designate these as “Re-reads.”

Re-reads

The Unbearable Bassington – Saki (H. H. Munro)

First, the prose. Smoothly elegant, unique, inventive. Many sentences employ an amusing or surprising twist. This could be tiresome — if it wasn’t embedded in the situation. Take this early example, describing Francesca Bassington: “Francesca herself, if pressed in an unguarded moment to describe her soul, would probably have described her drawing-room.” This sentence serves a purpose – it gives us a look, in a skewed way, at a central character’s personality. Her son, Comus, is unbearable because he devotes himself to his pleasures. While Francesca has money worries (she’s in danger of losing her precious house and its drawing room, along with her position in London society) he shows not the slightest inclination to seek gainful employment. Francesca’s only hope for him is that he marry a rich woman – and one is a prospect. But Comus doesn’t do what is needed to win Elaine’s hand – he’s too selfish, self-centered. The results are a tragedy for all three involved. The book, so light-handed for so long, becomes a tragedy. I consider this to be an unappreciated masterpiece.

The Cat’s Pajamas – Peter DeVries

What appealed to me about this book? It’s wildness, it’s absurdity? A man commits a faux pas on the first page and tries to make up for it; thus an inexorable descent begins. This professor of creative writing, happily married, winds up living in a shack with an idiot boy and an alcoholic dog and making a meager living selling bottles of fresh air door-to-door. It’s all weird, improbable. I never understood what was driving Hank Tattersall to act in a self-destructive way. Though, in losing all social respectability, he thinks of himself as happy, which may be part of his general self delusion. Anyway, the ending is so memorable that I started the book knowing what the last scene would be – I remembered how horrible it was. Yet it’s handled blithely (which, somehow, makes it worse). I think DeVries was engaging in blithe cruelty.

Other Voices, Other Rooms – Truman Capote

I was in my teens when I read this, so there were things about it that were strange – and fascinating. It was probably my first exposure to the Southern Gothic genre, with its cast of highly bizarre characters. Plus, the pervasive element of homosexuality would be new to me. I may also have been impressed by the extended flights of lyric prose. The last quality was less to my liking this time around; Capote was better when he was in a grounded mode. He was in that mode when writing about a young Black woman, Zoo (short for Missouri). She was the character I felt closest to, and her fate moved me. I also liked Joel, the thirteen-year-old main character, and I believed that his dreamworld experiences at The Landing, deep in the backwoods of Mississippi, would change his life. For a novel written by someone in his mid-twenties, this is a remarkable work. I recalled my younger self not understanding the ending; on this reading I still didn’t. Who is the figure in the window, the one Joel goes to? Randolph?

(End of this session of re-reads)

The Chronicles of Clovis - Saki

I can imagine H. H. Munro writing one of these stories before heading off to the club. They’re mildly diverting – the prose is good, sometimes even elegant – but there’s little substance. Saki’s indulgence in wickedness and cruelty (though not of the distasteful variety) isn’t my cup of tea. If you want to read Saki’s one masterpiece, get your hands on The Unbearable Bassington.

Aiding and Abetting - Muriel Spark

Unfocused – the novel hasn’t much structure – but I went with the flow. Spark’s characters are interesting; in her eighties she still has a sharp eye for human foibles and she presents them in an economical prose (no extraneous words). Though she didn’t have much of a story to tell, she was a writer, so she wrote this book. I like her writing, her way of seeing things, so I read and enjoyed it.

The Home and the World - Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali)

This novel, by a Nobel Prize winner, comes from a different sensibility, one I couldn’t relate to. First I became impatient, then critical. The dialogue is artificial – carefully worked out philosophical pontificating – and the woman whose affections two men are vying for is vacuous. Her highly-moral husband is a Bengali noble, but he does nothing with his money to relieve the suffering around him. In his view (and Tagore’s?) the poor are meant to suffer; that’s their preordained lot in life. He’s competing with a man who embraces amorality. The only thing I found insightful is the husband’s deciding that, by placing his wife at the center of his universe, he gave her the power to make him miserable; he understands (at least intellectually) that the world is larger than her. But there was so much in this book that I couldn’t sympathize with that I put it aside with relief.