Month: June 2021

Kindred – Rebecca Wragg Sykes

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Subtitled ‘Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art’ this book gives a comprehensive overview of not just what we know about Neanderthals but also how we got to this level of knowledge where such a book covering those topics and many more could be written. A superb piece of research that has deservedly been one of the science highlights of the last year, it only came out in the summer of last year and has yet to appear in paperback but my copy is already the seventh impression of the hardback which suggests excellent sales. The real surprise, to me at least, is just how much our knowledge of Neanderthals has advanced in the last two decades due to much better archaeological techniques which more accurately map the various strata of a dig and the positioning of thousands of objects but also from the DNA analysis that is now possible.

Although aimed at the interested amateur Sykes makes some assumptions regarding the knowledge of the reader in the terminology she uses. For example ‘analysing the calculus’ is not explained for well over a hundred pages from when it is first used. When it is defined it turns out to mean studying the teeth, or more specifically the residues built up on the teeth of the fossil remains rather than the obviously wrong, but entertaining until proved otherwise, that Neanderthals had somehow grasped differential mathematics. The complexity of various rock knapping techniques and how this helps define groups of Neanderthals who must therefore have interacted with each other is very well explained although I would have liked more diagrams to illustrate this to make the differences clearer. The last time I read a book on this subject was definitely over two decades ago so a vast amount of information in this book was new to me and as it is 380 pages long there is a huge quantity to take in.

It is very well written, and whilst the necessary vocabulary did sometimes have me checking on Google to make sure I understood this was a relatively rare occurrence as for the most part terms are explained as they are needed, with the obvious exception of calculus, however a small glossary at the back along with the detailed index would have been useful. Sykes can’t resist the occasional pun either such as ‘harvest the data’ when referring to gathering evidence of plant eating and this lightens the tone of what could have been in a lesser writers hands quite a dry study making it very readable and engaging.

The opening chapter deals with the slow growth of knowledge about Neanderthals from when they were first discovered just over 160 years ago and then through the book we are introduced to the 99 sites that remains have been discovered at right across not only Europe, which was their heartland but the ones in the near and far east which I had never heard about, there is a useful map on the front end papers which shows this spread. As you would expect from such an all encompassing subtitle Sykes attempts to not just document the artefacts found but also place them into context of the living, breathing people that used them. Just how would such a chipped rock be used? Were they making personal adornments? What can the spread of hearths (areas where a fire was lit rather than necessarily anything physically built) within a cave complex tell us about the size of the population using the shelter or the timescales that a place was used? How did they co-exist not just with each other within clan groups but with other clans and even Homo Sapiens when they appeared on the scene moving into Europe from their African homelands hundreds of thousands of years later? All of this and more is covered, it is definitely a book that will repay rereading in a few months to fully take in the sheer mass of information.

According to her introduction Sykes completed the book in June 2020 and hints at several, as yet unpublished, studies that she has clearly had access to meaning that this truly is as up to date as it was possible to be. But with the indicated speed of advances, especially in DNA analysis, either a revised and updated version or even a second volume must be a possibility in a few years time. Even the fact that she completed the book during lock down for the coronavirus pandemic becomes significant, we still don’t know why Neanderthals disappeared, was there perhaps a contagion brought by Homo Sapiens that further weakened the existing population, struggling as it was with climatic changes 40 thousand years ago as the continent swung from glaciation to warmer temperatures and back again. Of course they never truly went away, DNA analysis proves this, modern humans, at least outside those of African descent, have a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA and knowing this the story of this ‘lost’ people gains even more relevance today.

The one criticism that I do have is the unnecessary fanciful opening sections to each chapter in either prose or verse, lasting between a half and a full page of text, they add nothing to the rest of the work but fortunately can be easily skipped as they are in italic. Clearly influenced by Jean Auel and her very good Earth’s Children series of novels set in the time of the Neanderthals, I started off reading these chapter preambles but after chapter five just left them out.

Three Letters from The Andes – Patrick Leigh Fermor

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In 1971 Patrick Leigh Fermor, already by then a respected travel writer, but still six years before he published his best known work ‘A Time of Gifts’, went with five friends to the Andes in Peru. This book consists of three long letters to his wife although he never actually posted the third one as he didn’t finish it until he was on his way home. The expedition was part of a trip organised by his fellow members of the Andean Society in London using privately chartered aircraft to get to and from Peru from London and Fermor’s friends were intent on exploring and scaling the peaks of a relatively unknown part of the Andes mountain range. If all this sounds expensive then it probably was but Fermor and his colleagues could certainly afford it, most of the party were highly experienced climbers:

  • Robin Fedden – Leader of this expedition, Deputy Director-General of Historic Buildings for The National Trust, a writer and diplomat
  • Renee Fedden – Robin’s wife and co leader of the expedition
  • Carl Natar – Ex world ski champion and London manager of famous jewellers Cartier for three decades
  • Andre Choremi – Lawyer and social anthropologist

Along with them were a couple of non climbers

  • Andrew Cavendish – 11th Duke of Devonshire and a keen amateur botanist looking for rare plants to grow at his stately home Chatsworth House in Derbyshire
  • Patrick Fermor – travel writer, just along to spend six weeks with his friends and explore the area with them.

The letters were not intended for publication, and it took twenty years before they were, after what Fermor describes as a general tidy up but not much. That these were originally just letters leads to the main criticism levelled at the book in that it is not as polished as his other works and it feels more like an old boys outing with irrelevant chit chat coming to the fore. Well yes, these are letters to his wife who knew most, if not all, the other people involved and recording the conversations between them is entirely right in that context. I quite like the chattiness of the style and I raced through the book, reading it in just two sessions, as I found it quite difficult to put down once I had started reading. It is full of beautiful descriptive passages as he tries to convey the beauty of the surroundings. To illustrate this I’m just going to open the book at random and quote whatever I find.

The mountains draw back of either side of an airy lift and fall of savannah. As our caravan picked its way over the edge and headed downhill, orange-flowered organ-cactus and myrtle and tamarisk rose up and the air began to smell of spice. There was a blazing sky of very pale blue.

From the second letter

You could almost be there, in just three short sentences Fermor has captured his environs perfectly and as I said this is literally a random sample, not a passage I had picked out in advance, opening the book anywhere will show his talent to take the reader with him which would be displayed fully in his masterpiece of travel writing, ‘A Time for Gifts’. After the climbing expedition the friends head off to Lake Titicaca where they end up in a terrible hotel and the sections covering their always exasperating dealings with the manager and the chef who appears to be incapable of even boiling an egg successfully are very funny. A sudden announcement that there is actually hot water for a change will have the group dive for the showers only for the water to turn icy cold just as they were starting to enjoy finally getting clean. You have to wonder if the manager was incompetent or simply didn’t care about the people staying there. It was only when Andrew in frustration at yet another rock hard egg for breakfast threw it across the dining room did conditions start to improve.

As usual with Fermor the book is thoroughly entertaining and I definitely recommend it.

Little Tales of Misogyny – Patricia Highsmith

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After a huge book last week, Dune at 556 pages, it’s time for something a lot shorter and amazingly seventeen of Patricia Highsmith’s short stories fit into this little book of just 90 pages. Although aware of her name I have to admit that I’d never read anything by her before picking up this volume printed as part of the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of Penguin Books in 1995.

Well for such a short book the death rate was incredibly high, the main question you face when you start each short story is who is going to die and how? That Highsmith manages to keep this to herself until usually the last few lines is a tribute to her storytelling ability and the variety of the situations she places her characters in. What I must point out is that the title is somewhat misleading as both men and women come out badly throughout the book and you wouldn’t want to spend any social time with any of them. The first story has this as it’s opening line

A young man asked a father for his daughter’s hand and received it, in a box – her left hand.

The Hand by Patricia Highsmith

Having had that idea a lesser writer would have made the arrival of the hand the punchline to the tale, but no, Highsmith opens with it and then tells the story of what happened next. The book is full of twists, you can rarely guess how a story will turn out, the longest one, at ten pages, is a case in point. ‘The Breeder’ starts out as a simple tale of a newly married young couple who want children but are having problems conceiving; that it turns into a darkly comic tale and a descent into madness could not be anticipated from the homely beginning. Indeed some form of madness or at least a compulsive mania is the basis to several of the plots and Highsmith is clearly a master of the short story genre and some of these are very short. ‘The Hand’ is just two and a half pages long as is ‘The Coquette’ but both manage to tell a full story, you don’t even notice how short they are, there is just so much going on.

This taster of Highsmith has made me want to read more. Along with numerous short stories she wrote twenty two novels, the first of which, Strangers on a Train, was the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1951 film although the adaptation strays significantly from the book. She also wrote the much better known novel ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’ and its four sequels which continue to follow the exploits of serial killer Tom Ripley, the first three of which have also been made into films.

Dune – Frank Herbert

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Where to begin writing about this strange, amazing and above all weighty science fiction classic, my copy is 556 pages excluding the appendices, it was also the joint winner of the 1966 Hugo award and the first ever winner of the Nebular Award for Best Novel in the same year, these two awards are considered the pinnacle of Science Fiction. The breadth of Herbert’s achievement in writing this complex masterpiece is so impressive and I knew I needed to read it before the new films finally come out, after all this copy has been sitting on my shelves for a decade now so this would be the push I needed to open it at last and what a way for a book to start.

So many questions are raised right at the beginning and some, like the identity of the Princess Irulan and her significance, are not answered until almost the very end of the novel, despite extracts from her various works appearing throughout the book. These extracts provided convenient stopping points whilst reading as despite its length there are only three chapters and the sheer number of characters and the complexity of their interactions mean that you really need to stop and assimilate what you have read far more often than that.

Arrakis is a desert planet, hence its other name of Dune, and it is populated by the Fremen, a people who are supremely adapted to the conditions both by natural adaption and technology such as their clothes that preserve and recycle all moisture from their bodies. There are many dangers to the desert besides the heat though, the desert of Dune is populated by giant sandworms capable of swallowing whole vehicles and even aircraft that trespass into their domain. It is also the only source of melange, better known as spice, which is a drug which extends life and expands mental powers especially amongst those who have been trained to exploit it such as the pilots of starships, who need it to foresee dangers, and the Bene Gesserit, but more of them later. This drug is so coveted amongst the Great Houses that rule the interplanetary systems that control of Arrakis is seen as one of the great prizes and as the novel starts the House of Atreides is set to take over from the House of Harkonnen as fief rulers under the Emperor although it is also clear that this is in someway a trap. The Duke Leto Atreides arrives on Arrakis with his Bene Gesserit concubine Lady Jessica and son Paul along with his retinue and a well equipped military right at the start of the book and the sense of danger is clear but the source of the danger is not. The various Houses are clearly based of the power structure in medieval Europe with their own armies and rule over their domains although subject to the overall power of the Emperor, right I sort of understand the structure here, a solid enough base in history to take a story set far in the future and then you hit the Bene Gesserit.

The Bene Gesserit form a sisterhood that because of their powers are much sought after as advisers and consorts to the powerful planetary rulers, who little realise the control that these women have gained over the whole empire over the millennia and that their true allegiance is to the sisterhood. Only females can survive the rituals involved in attaining full awareness as a Reverend Mother but they have been searching, and selective breeding, for a male that would gain the ultimate power of time perception and mental control over themselves and others for centuries. This quasi-religious, and political grouping adds another layer and complexity to the story. The other group that you follow through the book are the Fremen who live away from the protected settlement where off worlders can exist out in the desert. These are clearly based on the Bedouin and some words and concepts from from the Muslim faith are used in association with them, specifically jihad, or holy war, which here refers to their fight back against the controlling Houses imposed upon them. It may seem that I am providing a lot of spoilers but everything mentioned above is all laid out within the first few pages of the book and the story develops from there, it really is a well grounded world that Herbert creates and sets his characters off into.

My copy is from the Gollancz 50th Anniversary set from 2011 which also included Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes, The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, Eric by Terry Pratchett, The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, Hyperion by Dan Simmons, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells and The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. For their 50th anniversary, Gollancz put the call out for readers to vote on what they considered to be the top ten books to come out of the publishing company in the past 50 years. When the results were in, Gollancz announced the winners and published them in iconic retro covers reminiscent of the classic covers that first drew me to more adult science fiction. I discovered science fiction well before I hit my teens and worked my way through the child and what would now be called the young adult sections at my local library pretty rapidly but upstairs, above the children’s section of the library in the adult science fiction area I found whole shelves of hardback books all bound in yellow covers with no pictures on the cover just text in a bold standard font and they called to me…

These were the books that marked a transition from works aimed at young readers to those for adults and although I never read Dune at the time, even for a precocious young teenager this book was daunting, this was where I first came across the title and now I’ve finally read it. It’s only taken just over forty years to get there but it was well worth the wait as I doubt I would have got as much out of the book if I had tackled it in the mid 1970’s when I first picked it up and then put it back on the library shelf. If you haven’t read it, don’t take as long to get round to it as I did, now I just have to wait for the much delayed first film from Denis Villeneuve and hope that this adaptation has finally managed to capture the breadth and depth of the original novel.

The Dutch Riveter : Edition 9 – Edited by West Camel

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I picked this up from my local bookshop the other week and have been thoroughly entertained by this selection from modern Dutch writing and amazingly it’s free. This is volume 9 and was launched on the 17th March 2021 via an online event from the British Library. I’d never heard of The Riveter until Megan, the bookshop owner, suggested I might like to read it as she had had some copies dropped off at the shop a few days ago.

The Riveter is a free magazine devoted to riveting European literature in English. The idea is to make international writing popular and accessible to readers everywhere and to celebrate excellent translation and great books from the rest of Europe.

The Riveter was launched in 2017 by the European Literature Network. Professionally edited and published by a small dedicated team, it attracts support from a wide range of publishers, authors, translators, critics, academics – and readers. It has achieved acclaim with its special issues on Polish, Russian, Nordic, Baltic, Swiss, Queer, German, Romanian and Dutch literature in English.

From the website of the publisher https://www.eurolitnetwork.com/the-riveter/

It is mainly available online, follow the link in the citation above, but apparently print copies of the Dutch and Romanian versions are readily available in the UK and as I have greatly enjoyed this very professionally produced little volume, 120 pages, I will definitely be looking out for more as I prefer to read an actual book rather than on a screen. I’ll just pick out a few highlights for me:

Someone Who Means It, by Maartje Wortel. Translated by Sarah Welling and Margie Franzen. This short story, which was first printed in 2015, is appearing for the first time in English translation. It’s eleven pages long so represents almost ten percent of the total book but it’s worth the dominance of space it takes up. It’s a story of love and loss, jealousy and passion beautifully told and definitely makes me want to read more by Maartje.

Herman Kock gets one of the subsections, with an extract from his latest book Finse Dagen (Finnish Days) and a review of the most recent one to be fully translated into English, The Ditch. I quite enjoyed the three page extract from Finnish Days and was pretty convinced I wanted to get a copy of The Ditch whilst reading Max Easterman’s largely positive two page review right up until the excoriating final paragraph

Sadly, as the story progresses, Herman Koch doesn’t manage to meld these various strands into a convincing whole: they just don’t hang together. The analytical insight he brings to Robert Walter’s jealousy is dissipated in the final third of the book. The old prejudices about Sylvia’s unnamed country are laid bare, but in the end, the resolution of the story, in which the significance of the ‘ditch’ becomes clear, doesn’t work for me: it is a dying fall, a whimper, which left me wondering: why?

Well that’s one book that needn’t make it to my to be read pile then.

On the other hand Dutch poetry has a huge amount going for it and is well represented here with a two page introduction, twelve pages of poems and a two page review of a poetry collection. Poetry has to be the hardest style of literature to translate for not only does the translator have to manage the words but the flow of the words has to be right. The choice of poems is well done with a good mix of serious and lighthearted works with for me two stand outs from each of those categories. The excellent ‘My Skin’ by Dean Bowen is crying out to be read aloud, this is performance poetry written down and you can’t help reading it out loud to appreciate the rhythm of the words. on the other hand ‘Pitying the Reader’ by Menno Wigman will make any dedicated reader chuckle as we have all been there. I’ll just include the start of the poem here so you can see what I mean.

A book? From cover to cover? I lack the strength.
Even poetry – just thinking about it –
exhausts me now. I’ve overdosed on poems,
stare blindly at the pages of my books.
For many months I’ve had a reader’s block,

I’ve grown allergic to the alphabet.

The articles by translators on their job and the problems and joys of translating were fascinating, there is so much crammed into this slim volume but now I need more, I will have to see if can get other volumes in the series.

The one criticism I have of this otherwise excellent publication is the choice of a grey font on a grey background for the majority of the pages, this is clearly done for aesthetic reasons rather than for the practical as it makes reading more than a few pages at a time very tiring.

The Flemish section which has a salmon pink background is not much better either.

I’m astigmatic so have enough problems distinguishing between letters without the heavily reduced contrast that this choice by an unthinking design team has come up with. It’s not enough to put me off reading but it is a problem and they really should drop the background shades to improve readability.