Random Thoughts

I apparently picked this up at a sale in 2021. I quite enjoy Duras’ books, but I’ve only read a handful. I think I’ve seen most of her hit movies, though.

This book is quite short, and you have to admire the lengths they’ve gone to to make this into something that can be sold as “a book” — French flaps, sturdy paper, small pages, large margins.

Anyway, this is a collection of texts that Duras wrote for Libération in the summer of 1980. Her method seems to be to look at what happened the last week, and then write about that en passant, in a way that doesn’t make much sense to somebody that doesn’t know what she’s talking about. And then she mixes it with (I’m guessing) what she’s seeing out the windows, as her house is apparently by the beach, so there’s people running around, and there’s this boy, David, who tells her about a shark and stuff.

It’s nifty! A really enjoyable read.

I particularly liked the bit where she calls, er, directory assistance I guess it’s called? in the middle of the night to talk about Gdansk, because she wanted to talk to somebody about Gdansk. I can just picture it — I’ve listened to a few interviews with her…

Sommeren 80 (1980) by Marguerite Duras (buy used, 3.51 on Goodreads)

I was feeling both under the weather and down in the dumps, so I reached for a Wodehouse book.

And this one, from 1935, is top notch. This ticks along like extremely complicated clockwork in an almost hypnotic manner. There’s three (3) romances that have to come true, and there’s also a pearl necklace to be smuggled. Naturally Wodehouse goes through all permutations possible for various catastrophes, and it’s all very, very amusing.

It may also be Wodehouse’s longest novel? I’m not sure, but at 360 pages, it’s up there, at least. And I’m not surprised at all that Wodehouse cut it down for US release, because it’s perhaps, er, more than is advised for this kind of thing. It’s not boring for a single moment, but at the same time, you can’t help thinking “well, OK, OK” at the nineteenth plot twist/complication.

But you can’t really blame Wodehouse for not limiting himself when he’s got a good thing going.

The Luck of the Bodkins (1935) by P. G. Wodehouse (buy used, 4.06 on Goodreads)

Today was a perfect day for an old mystery novel.

And as usual with Barnard, half of the book is about stuff that happens before The Crime, and then we get half a book of sleuthing. The problem with this kind of structure is that you have to have sufficiently interesting characters to pull it off, but Barnard is pretty good at that.

This is not his best work, though. I mean, it’s fine.

The Bad Samaritan (1995) by Robert Barnard (buy used, 3.61 on Goodreads)

I frequently read several books in parallel — usually different types of books. Like, a musician autobiography, a short story collection and a novel — or in this case, I’ve been reading a book about the history of the “quality paperback” market in Norway.

And it took me two and a half years to get through this one. Not because it’s boring, but because it’s been strapped into the reading apparatus on the kitchen table, and I’ve been reading it while eating breakfast and the like. So a page or two per day, basically. And this is a brick of a book.

So — this book is mostly about two book series published by one publisher, Gyldendal. These series were launched in the mid 60s and were (to some extent) modelled after Penguin and Pelican books: That is, cheap paperbacks that had serious contents. And this is of special interest to me, because I’ve been kinda obsessed about the fiction series, the Lantern books, that I even did a web site featuring those books. (Best viewed in Chrome with sturdy hardware acceleration.)

Love these designs.

See? Lots of good books.

Anyway, it’s amazing that you can write nigh on five hundred pages on this subject (and not bore the reader), but Øverås is successful: It’s a really interesting history, and he manages to avoid problems books like this sometimes have. It’s basically a celebration of a publishing initiative, and the temptation is to start to exhort the reader to understand how awesome and important these geniuses of authors are, etc etc. Instead he’s very grounded and looks at the interesting stuff, which is: How were these books chosen for publication? How many did they print? Did they sell? Who let the designers run amok in this way and create actually good-looking covers?

And the answers are interesting, but also allows the author to create a kind of tragic story: Because at the start, the “quality pocket book” thing worked extremely well, and basically everybody in Norway in the 60s bought bushels of these books. And then they stopped.

Yes, science fiction was included, too.

And then the 80s arrived, and the new editor in chief (who said endearing things like “I’m in favour of ugly books full of typos”) reined in the less-than-business focused editors, and started publishing horribly, horribly ugly books like those above… and then the editor in charge of fiction killed himself.

Fakkelen er tent! (2021) by Tor Eystein Øverås (4.5 on Goodreads)