Pocket Penguins: whee, seven more

(In which the Babu posts short reviews of the Penguin 70s, whenever he can remember, which is not often, and for no reason at all except that they're sitting in a stack on his desk. Previous posts here and here.)

Anais Nin: Artists and Models

Reading these excerpts from Delta of Venus returned me to another age, a time when we looked up the Encyclopaedia Britannica and not Our Bodies, Ourselves, for answers to questions of urgent import about human anatomy, when the word “fuck” was always rendered with three asterisks, f***, and still had the power to shock, when we actually read Lady Chatterley’s Lover for the dirty bits. Today, when Fleshbot helpfully assuages our porn fatigue and Ali Smith can write about the anodyne way in which schoolgirls increasingly resemble skinflick stars, you don’t read Delta of Venus as erotica. Instead, you read these two sections for a glimpse of Montparnasse and the untidy exuberance of artist’s studios, and the gulf, even then, between image and reality.

“What was passing through my head all the time were the stories of Montparnasse life told to me by the sculptor, and now I felt that I was entering this realm. My first disappointment was seeing that the studio was quite poor and bare, the two couches without pillows, the lighting crude, with none of the trappings I imagined necessary for a party. Bottles were on the floor, along with glasses and chipped cups. A ladder led to a balcony where Brown kept his paintings. A thin curtain concealed the washstand and a little gas stove. At the front of the room was an erotic painting of a woman being possessed by two men…”



Anthony Beevor: Christmas at Stalingrad

“There can be little doubt about the genuine and spontaneous generosity of that Christmas,” writes Anthony Beevor. In December 1942, the men of the German 6th Army were surrounded on the frozen steppe, dying of starvation, beset by epidemics carried by lice, vulnerable to special propaganda broadcasts that juxtaposed “sound tricks” with “deathly tango music” and statistics about one German dying every seven seconds on the Eastern Front. Coloured Christmas decorations hung in the trenches where so many men were to die so wastefully; Beevor documented the whole thing in Stalingrad, but this small vignette remains one of the most moving sections in the book.

Gustave Flaubert: The Desert and the Dancing Girls

“There is one new element which I hadn’t expected to see, and which is tremendous here, and that is the grotesque,” Flaubert wrote to a friend. He had already described the desert to his mother and made notes about the shaving practices of dancing girls for himself. “All the old comic business of the cudgeled slave, of the coarse trafficker in women, of the thieving merchant—it’s all very fresh here, very genuine and charming.” Just a year or two short of thirty, he enjoyed the desert, but enjoyed the fleshpots of Cairo rather more, when he could find dancing girls rather than the boys that were thrust upon him. And no traveller could fail to understand this lament: “Reflection: the Egyptian temples bore me profoundly…. Oh necessity! To do what you are supposed to do; to be always, according to the circumstances (and despite the aversion of the moment), what a young man, or a tourist, or an artist, or a son, or a citizen, etc. is supposed to be!”

Anne Frank: The Secret Annexe

By 10th November 1942, Anne Frank and her family had already been a year in hiding; on 4 August 1944, they were discovered, arrested and taken off to the camps, where Anne died. This set of extracts covers roughly a year in the life of the family, from the Prospectus and Guide to the Annexe (Price: free, Diet: low-fat), to the inevitable quarrels among those cooped up, to Anne’s dry humour in the face of food shortages, alarms and excursions. Perhaps it’s just me, but reading even a year’s worth of excerpts was dissatisfying; it felt like breaking in on Anne’s story after it had started and leaving before the diary reached its tragic last pages.

James Kelman: Where I Was

The characters in this set of sketches could have escaped from Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London via Joyce’s Dubliners; I have to admit I’m not a huge Kelman fan, but he works better in this short format than in longer bursts. “What has happened to all my dreams is what I would like to know. Presently I am a physical wreck. If by chance I scratch my head while strolling showers of dandruff reel onto the paved walkway, also hairs of varying length. Tooth decay. I am feart to look into a mirror.”


Hari Kunzru: Noise

Several of the short stories here have been up on Kunzru’s website for a while, so if you’re a hardcore online reader, this collection might be disappointing. To those who know him only from The Impressionist, this should define his interests far more clearly: in ‘Bodywork’, a man takes DIY to a new level as the line between machine and human blurs; in ‘Deus ex Machina’, Kunzru speculates on where the angels might be lurking, and finds them in silicon and software; elsewhere, he offers instructions for the Godmachine—"RUN GOD.EXE, COSMO$tring…"

Simon Schama: The Bastille Falls

I always thought Tale of Two Cities and Dumas overdid the melodrama bit on the French Revolution until someone gave me Schama’s Citizens as a birthday present. “Theater had moved from its customary space onto the street. There, it was in deadly earnest and moved immediately to impose its serious drama in the world of mere divertissement….” On the other hand, I approved of Schama’s eye for the pleasing detail. “The Bastille had an address. It was identified as No 232, rue Saint-Antoine, as if it were some overgrown lodging house…”