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This is a fun thread. I've been on a Scottish literature kick for much of the past year, and some of the most interesting books I've read recently have been the work of James Robertson. Two books in particular: The Testament Of Gideon Mack and And The Land Lay Still. The former is heavily influenced by James Hogg's 19th century novel Private Confessions and Memoirs of a Justified Sinner (which is also very much worth reading); it's essentially about a Church of Scotland minister who doesn't believe in God but things happen to him and he becomes convinced that he met the Devil. The book takes the form of his 'testament' - where he tells of his childhood and early life and then the events leading up to meeting the Devil (and what transpired afterwards) - framed by explanatory notes from a fictional editor (which is essentially the structure that Confessions had back in the 1830s - Hogg's book feels quite ahead of its time to read it now). It explores issues of belief/non-belief, reliability of the narrator (and how we can judge the sanity of a person), the role of faith in modern society, etc, all wrapped up in a very readable package. It immediately became one of my favourite books, and this was only strengthened when I went back to read Hogg and other books influenced by Confessions. And The Land Lay Still is a much more complex book and doesn't have the same throughline but it's nonetheless very compelling - it essentially tells a story of the shaping of modern Scotland by interweaving the lives of several disparate characters (who have sometimes tangential connections which only become clear as the book goes on). The characters are from several generations and the book jumps around chronologically, telling its story over a period of some 70 years; it covers things like the emergence of Scottish nationalist politics and the transformation of the Scottish left, the cultural and linguistic changes in the country, and the societal shifts that came with the death of industry and the sexual revolution and the oil boom in the 1970s. The personal stories told around these grand-sweep events and processes are diverse and fascinating - there's a particularly good thread involving 'The Original Mister Bond', a washed-up MI6 agent whose career was ignominious and uneventful and has left him a self-loathing mess in his impoverished retirement. The novel is also partially a paean to the power and importance of storytelling, and while some of it can be quite bleak it's nonetheless uplifting on the whole. Robertson's writing flows beautifully and he has a great ear for dialogue (the Scots bits are quite reminiscent of James Kelman or Irvine Welsh). Highly recommended, especially as I don't expect his stuff is widely-known outside Scotland.
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Jun 20, 2014 01:43
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Non-genre fiction is just like genre fiction in that quality varies a lot - just because a book isn't genre fiction doesn't automatically make it good. On top of that, personal taste obviously comes into it. I personally can't get on with Julian Barnes' books at all and regard him as very overrated but that's partly just my own taste in books, I think. Also it probably did him no favours to read The Sense Of An Ending straight off the back of bingeing on Jeffrey Eugenides' books, as it seemed like a pretty stark step down in quality.
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Jun 20, 2014 18:57
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k-uno posted:It is pretty sad how few women have been mentioned so far, so I'll throw in recommendations for Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace. The Secret History is even better than The Goldfinch (which was also pretty great), as it's no small feat to take a novel ostensibly about a weird ancient Greek study group at a small liberal arts college in Vermont and spin it into an insane murder/suspense/conspiracy thriller that's paced and plotted like any of Hitchcock's best films; seriously, it's a literary work as entertaining and suspenseful as watching North by Northwest for the first time. Alias Grace is taken from a historical incident in 19th century Toronto where a woman was tried for murdering a man she was serving and his housekeeper. She was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in jail, while her alleged lover (who was tried along with her, and may have been her kidnapper) was put to death, but the details of the case against her are bizarre and the novel is focused on her life and fundamental questions about her sanity and whether or not she was actually guilty. It's somewhat slow moving at first but if you take the time to really get drawn into it the book has endless layers of ambiguity and depth, where every chapter adds a new detail that makes you rethink everything that came before it. The Secret History is one of my favourite books although I haven't read anything else by Tartt. The university atmosphere is so vivid and very recognisable - even though the university I went to was nothing like that, there's a universality of student life to it, and the tragic aspect of the story is wonderful. I really like the Atwood I've read so far too, but that's just been Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, and Year of the Flood so far. I haven't tried her less sci-fi stuff yet; I should get on some of that once I've cleared my current backlog. For other female authors who haven't been mentioned yet, Ali Smith is fantastic. Both her novels and short stories are worth reading - she has a great grasp of understated human relationships playing out on the page with an economy of language and a lot of wit. The Accidental is a good starting point, or There But For The. Also AL Kennedy, of whose work I've only read some short stories so far but they're incredible. I saw her read out one of her stories at a literary festival recently and she had the entire audience in fits of laughter - she does stand-up comedy, apparently, or used to, and she certainly has the stage presence for it based on that reading. The most mundane story about an unsatisfactory first date (told in the second person, which is definitely out of the ordinary) turned out to be a hilarious (and poignant) bit of writing.
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Jun 22, 2014 01:55
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Rand Fan 420 posted:good point, it's on my list! I haven't read it yet but it's on the kindle store and project gutenberg for free cuz it's so old if anyone else is interested. I posted about this and Gideon Mack earlier in the thread. Confessions is old and a bit stilted language-wise but in terms of ideas and concept it feels ahead of its time, even if the specific ideas of predestination and the presbyterian Elect aren't very relevant these days. John Charity Spring fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Aug 7, 2014 |
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Aug 7, 2014 23:34
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Seldom Posts posted:Confessions is also one of the first unreliable narrator novels, and a direct influence on Gideon Mack and (I'm told) other Scottish literature. I would go so far as to say it's still entirely relevant and should be a bigger part of the western canon. Oh it's still relevant in those terms, I meant specifically the religious stuff it's satirising. And yeah it had a massive influence on a lot of Scottish literature that continues to be written to this day (from Jekyll & Hyde to Alice Thompson's Burnt Island, just to pick out two novels from opposite ends of its period of influence).
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Aug 8, 2014 15:14
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