Month: June 2024

Until August – Gabriel García Márquez

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In December 2019 I reviewed Gabriel García Márquez’s last collection of short stories ‘Strange Pilgrims‘. I love his work so was pleased to see that in March this year, on the 97th anniversary of his birth, his last novel was finally published in English, ten years after his death. According to the preface written by his children Márquez was not happy with what he had written and wanted it destroyed. Instead they simply put the manuscript on one side and almost ten years later read it again and decided that it was probable that the dementia he was suffering from, and which undoubtedly prevented him completing the novel, clouded his judgement as to the quality of the work.

At just 110 pages it is really more of a novella rather than a novel, especially when compared to his other far more weighty works, however I do agree with Rodrigo and Gonzalo that the book is definitely worth publishing even in this unfinished state. Originally planned as a set of five short (roughly 150 pages each) novels all of which would tell the story of Ana Magdalene Bach’s experiences during her annual visit to an unnamed island where her mother is buried. Instead we get six linked short stories all set around the 16th August, the anniversary of her mother’s death, where she travels to the island without her husband or children to tidy up and lay flowers on the grave.

We join Ana, at the start of the book, on her way to the grave having just got off the ferry, and this is clearly not the first time she has made the pilgrimage as she heads straight for a familiar taxi driver who by routine takes her to the flower stall where there is a pre-prepared bouquet of gladioli ready to be collected and then straight on to the cemetery returning later to the somewhat dilapidated hotel where she regularly stays the night before returning to the mainland the next day. But this is not to be the usual routine as she sips her gin in the bar after her evening meal she spots an intriguing stranger and invites him to join her. After a few more drinks she invites him to join her in her room and they make love. The next year on the ferry over to the island she is already looking forward to her night of passion with a stranger and by the time she is again sipping her gin is searching for the man she will choose, for this has already been added to her routine. The six visits detailed in the six chapters are sometimes successful in her hunt and sometimes not but the development of Ana and her relationship with her husband on her return to the mainland are fascinating as she becomes more and more convinced that he also has lovers and despite her own infidelity gets increasingly angry about it each year.

As well as the novella we get a translation of the original editor’s note from the Spanish edition written by Cristóbal Pera who had also edited Márquez’s autobiography. This is fascinating as it goes into the development of the novel, through the five main drafts along with a digital version maintained by his personal secretary Mónica Alonso and gives a glimpse as to how Márquez worked. The final published version is an amalgam of the fifth draft, heavily pen amended by Márquez, and the digital version which retained some of the earlier variants of the text, There are also four pages of the fifth draft manuscript showing hand written alterations both by Márquez and Alonso as she would read the pages to him and he would suggest changes as she read.

I’ll guarantee you won’t expect the highly original ending, I certainly didn’t, yet it perfectly rounded out Ana’s story. A final note of brilliance from the man described as “the greatest Colombian of all time” at the time of his death by the then president of Columbia, Juan Manuel Santos.

Modern Battle – Major Paul W Thompson (WWII Penguin versions)

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Inspired by the eightieth anniversary of the D-Day landings which was marked earlier this month I thought I’d look back on a book covering the start of the war. This is not a review of Modern Battle by Major Paul W Thompson, although it is a surprisingly interesting book which studies actual engagements between German and Allied troops in the early years of World War II so I will talk about it later in this blog. Rather I am looking at the various editions I have of the book and what these tell us about the war. Starting with The Forces Book Club edition published in October 1942, which is the second most difficult of the four versions to find as it as not sold to the public but rather only as packs supplied under subscription to military units, as described below on the inside front cover of this book. This explains why my copy has “C” Mess handwritten on the cover, sadly there is no further indication as to which battalion the mess (a place where military staff would eat and socialise) was associated with. Several of the other books I have from The Forces Book Club are ink stamped with the battalion or ship which had subscribed.

The rear cover gives a list of the first twenty books to make up, what was intended to be a substantial library for isolated units who otherwise would have little to read. The project however was a failure, partly down to the poor information regarding the existence of The Forces Book Club disseminated by the Ministry of Defence and partly due to the overly worthy choice of titles. The mystery and crime editions such as ‘Panic Party’ or ‘The Murders in Praed Street’ would undoubtably have been voraciously read but I can’t imagine Thomas Sharp’s volume on ‘Town Planning’ would have been as popular. Penguin did produce the 120 books needed to fulfil original subscriptions taken out, but in far lower numbers than expected and a lot of the books were subsequently rebound, initially as books to go to prisoner of war camps in Germany and later in the ‘normal’ covers these books would have had for general sale to the public.

The POW versions have the normal front cover but on the inside of this there is a replacement of the description of The Forces Book Club with some information regarding The Prisoner of War Book Service. Again the overall cost is three pounds for 120 books but this time even the more esoteric titles would probably have been read due to serious shortage of other reading material in the camps. All the remaining FBC titles appear to have been rebound as POW editions but they are all incredibly rare, I have a couple that, whilst popular as reading for the forces would definitely not been acceptable to the Germans i.e. ‘The Escaping Club’ and ‘The Tunnellers of Holzminden’ both of which deal with escapes from POW camps in the First World War and would therefore not pass the censors which probably explains why they have survived. I suspect that the company doing the rebinding simply did all the books without consideration as to the material they contained.

Books that didn’t make it out as FBC or POW editions were potentially rebound again as the main production run, so it is relatively common to find books that inside say they were printed for the Forces Book Club but in the ‘normal’ covers, rather than the one shown at the top of this blog. Speaking of which the first UK edition of the book in the Penguin Special cover from July 1942 can be seen below. All of the editions described so far have identical text inside with a foreword by Tom Wintringham, who had already written a couple of books published by Penguin including ‘English Captain’ and ‘New Ways of War’.

But we now come to a variant text as the book was also printed as a Penguin Special in America in association with The Infantry Journal, a company that already had distribution within the USA military and this has a new introduction by the editors of The Infantry Journal giving some background for their readership. This book was also published in July 1942, so just a few months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and the direct involvement of USA in the Second World War in December 1941. The original hardback first edition was published by W W Norton’s and Co. of New York earlier during 1941. A brief quote from the introduction to this Penguin American edition.

Modern Battle is based on a variety of source materials mainly from the professional military journals. Some of the accounts come from interviews with actual participants in the engagements described. Much of the background material is German, since the Nazi methods of warfare are those that have been most successful, and those that we need to know best as we work to find methods still better.

The copy I have is the third US edition from November 1942 by which time Paul Thompson had been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. In the introduction there is an acknowledgement that the numerous included maps are drawn by Captain William H Brown of the US Army, who had also apparently been promoted, as in the July editions he is given as a Warrant Officer for the U.S. Coast Artillery Corps.

Now to the actual book. As alluded to above Thompson had access to German sources, presumably because America was not a combatant in WWII at the time he wrote the book, and these enable him to provide a comprehensive review of the various actions beyond anything available to a UK author. Of particular interest is the account of the aerial attack on Crete in May 1941 which is covered in the final chapter, which has a lot of information from German sources explaining how they went about the invasion which took just eleven days to complete despite the island being around 160 miles long. These alternative sources are evident throughout the book whether it be the German 10th army in Poland or the 1st Panzer division advancing on Aachen in 1940 and it makes the book a fascinating read as I have rarely come across information from outside Allied write ups.

Full Circle – Luis Sepúlveda

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Part biography part travelogue this is an interesting book in that it consists of notes that were taken at various times but which didn’t make it into a book, and Sepúlveda didn’t really know what to do with for a long time.

These notes, which I can’t think what to call, lay about on a shelf somewhere gathering dust. From time to time, looking for old photos or documents, I would come across them, and I confess that I read them with a mixture of tenderness and pride, because in these scribbled, or clumsily typed pages I had made an attempt to come to terms with two themes of capital importance, aptly defined by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar: understanding what it means to be human what it means to be an artist.

The book starts with memories of being a boy being taken round town by his grandfather, Sepúlveda was born in 1949 so this would be the mid to late 1950’s in Chile, being loaded up with soft drinks and ice-cream until he was desperate to empty his bladder and then taken to whatever church his grandfather had picked as that weeks target and made to urinate on the church door. This would of course be met with approbation by the priest of the church but his grandfather would defend his right to pee where he needed to and would get satisfaction from the insult to the church thus engendered. Eventually at the age of eleven he simply refused to do his grandfathers bidding and insisted on going to a proper toilet. Expecting to be punished for refusing to so his grandfathers bidding he is relieved, in more ways than one, to simply be taken to a bar and after finishing is given a book to read (one of the classics of social realism – Nikolay Ostrovsky’s How the Steel was Tempered) and made to promise to go on a journey inspired by the book and also to his grandfather’s birthplace of Martos in Spain.

After the comic start it was quite a shock to read the next chapter which deals with his time as a political prisoner in Chile as inspired by Ostrovsky he had joined the Young Communists so under the right wing dictatorship of General Pinochet he was regarded as a dangerous radical. The descriptions of the appalling conditions and the allusions to the electrical torture endured including the doctor who could tell how much electricity had been imposed when the victims were returned to the prison and could therefore judge what treatment each prisoner needed to recover are graphic yet needed to be told and I can see why Sepúlveda couldn’t think of what to do with his notes about these three years of his life.

After this the book becomes more of the travel book implied by it’s title with trips out of Chile and into various other South American countries with greater or lesser success in getting to his aimed for destination and the people he met on the way. Including a trip to Patagonia when he was finally allowed back into his home country after years of exile which was originally intended to have been with the British writer and explorer Bruce Chatwin, who had sadly died young and before Sepúlveda could go to Patagonia. This is one of the times the notes had actually been the basis of a book ‘Patagonia Express’ first published in 1995 in Spanish and then in 2004 in English translation. After reading this book I feel the need to get hold of this work and see what it ultimately became. There is a lot more travel writing beyond this trip in the book and I greatly enjoyed following Sepúlveda around the continent.

The penultimate chapter takes Sepúlveda to Spain and a fulfilment of a promise to his grandfather right at the start to visit Martos where he starts searching for anything his grandfather had told him about the place especially a drinking establishment called Hunter’s Bar. He goes to the pub in the central square to make enquiries but the landlord doesn’t recognise the name however older patrons point out that the bar he is in was known decades ago as Hunter’s Bar so he had inadvertently discovered where he was looking for within minutes of arrival. This then leads to him telling the tales as to why he was there only for the patrons to take him en masse to the local church to consult the priest for birth records. There they find not only his grandfather but also his grandfather’s brother who is still alive in the town. Taken to the man’s house he eventually overcomes his nervousness and we go full circle as he introduces himself to his great uncle, Don Angel.

It’s a good read, difficult at times with the description of his time in prison but uplifting so many times after this dark period and I’m glad I’ve read it. It is another of the short lived Lonely Planet Journeys series which as I’ve explained before I bought a lot of when it was clear the series was being discontinued and am only now sitting down to read.

The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler

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Rightly regarded as one of the finest writers of prose in crime fiction Raymond Chandler was admired by other writers as diverse as W H Auden and Evelyn Waugh. It is his descriptive passages that mark him out and make reading Chandler’s works so much fun even if sometimes his completion of plot lines just isn’t there. In this, his first novel, we never do find out who killed the chauffeur but it doesn’t really matter as the rest of the story is compelling and there are plenty of other crimes that do get fully sorted out. The Big Sleep is a remarkably accomplished work for a first novel, but by the time he wrote it in 1939 he had had short stories published many times over the previous six years, this is also the first appearance of his most famous character Philip Marlowe who appears in the first person so we see everything from his perspective. An example of Chandler’s descriptive writing is shown below, taken from a paperback copy of the novel I also have as I didn’t want to possibly damage the spine of the lovely leather bound edition I was reading.

Chandler was clearly influenced by Dashiell Hammett and his hard-boiled detectives such as Sam Spade in ‘The Maltese Falcon’ . The ‘hard-boiled’ genre is a very specific category of crime fiction featuring a sole detective fighting organised crime, usually in the US prohibition era and whilst this novel isn’t set in prohibition times, definitely not based on the amount of whiskey Marlowe gets through in this book alone, these is definitely organised crime in the shape of casino owner Eddie Mars and his main hit-man Canino. The plot is complex, so I can forgive Chandler not sorting out the chauffeur’s murder, with lots of characters sometimes working together but often double crossing one another. But we start with the elderly General Sternwood, who appears to have only a short time left to live, setting Marlowe on a case to find out about a blackmailer and stop him. Sternwood has two wayward daughters who keep appearing across Marlowe’s tracks in unexpected ways and the final denouement involving the two women was a complete surprise to me. I’m not going to go into any more of the plot which rapidly heads off in all sorts of directions and makes the book one of the most enjoyable I’ve read for a long time as I simply didn’t know what was going to happen next.

In 2005 ‘The Big Sleep’ was included in Time Magazine’s top 100 novels (the list isn’t ranked) and it also came 96th in Le Monde’s 100 books of the century compiled in 1999.

The edition that I read is from a set of six Penguin Classics designed in 2008 by Bill Amberg, the London based leather work studio, each book comes in a sturdy box with a belly band indicating which book is inside. The book itself is fully bound in a soft brown leather with a hole punched right through the cover and all the pages in the top left corner where a leather book mark is attached with the title and author embossed in it. The only thing marking the cover itself is the Penguin Books logo at the base of the spine. It is also incredibly difficult to photograph accurately. The leather cover overlaps the pages by a significant amount making it a yapp binding where over time and repeated reading the leather will fold over to totally encase the book. Each book was published in a limited edition of 1000 and priced at £50 per volume.