I find that it helps to place a pile of all the books you intend to read on the dining table, provided you do not use it (or all of it) as a dining table. There were two towers of books, about two feet high, on my table the first week of January. The constant reminder of how much I had to read made me read faster. Today there is only one tower, and many of its components are recent gifts from friends. When I told them that I planned an assault on the major works of Russian literature this year, they presented me with recent translations of Chekhov and Dostoevsky that for some reason or other they had not gotten round to reading. By passing the books on to me, they had sought to expunge their guilt. Another friend had a fit of housecleaning, emptied his bookshelves, and stacked their contents on the floor for distribution to friends and interested parties. He bequeathed a number of science-fiction books to me, but I have not actually seen them. Sorting and organizing the volumes is exhausting work; as far as I know, his library is still spread out on the floor.
One cannot speak of Russian Lit without mentioning that mother of all doorstops, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It is in the middle of the tower, between Pashazade by Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo. I tell people that I am in training to climb Mount Tolstoy. My arms must become stronger before I dare lift that volume, plus I need to build up my stamina. Urging me on to this feat is my purchase some months ago of the five-disc, monumental production of War and Peace by Sergei Bondarchuk. It has no English subtitles. My options are to watch it with French subtitles and miss 98 percent of what’s going on, or to read the book, become familiar with the plot and characters, and then watch the movie. After all, film is a visual medium.
I started my year with Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a very odd and beautiful book set in Stalinist Russia. In it, the devil arrives in Moscow with his henchmen, including a very large talking cat, and wreaks widespread havoc. A magician presents the members of his audience with expensive new clothes. The clothes vanish later that evening, sending hundreds of naked people scurrying for cover on the streets. A witness who was present at the arraignment of Jesus Christ before Pontius Pilate recalls the details of that day. People disappear and reappear in distant provinces. The heroine in search of her missing lover flies across the city on a broom. My year of books was off to a roaring start.
In keeping with my Russian theme, I read Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart. Tsypkin’s book imagines a trip that Dostoevsky and his young wife Anna took to that resort town. Dostoevsky was addicted to gambling: each day he would go to the casino, lose all his money, then crawl home to Anna and beg her to pawn her clothes so he could gamble some more. Then he would win, redeem the pawned items, and promptly fall back into the hole. Dostoevsky wrote a short novel (yes, such a thing exists) called The Gambler, which draws on this real-life experience. Shteyngart’s novel follows an inept 25-year-old Russian immigrant in New York who falls in with the Russian mob and ends up in an Eastern European city that sounds like Prague. It’s funny and frantic, and has very little to do with debutantes.
Alan Furst’s The Foreign Correspondent, the latest in his series of World War II spy thrillers, was a disappointment. It felt like an inferior rehash of Dark Star, in which the hero was also a journalist fighting the fascists. Double Fault by Lionel Shriver was a refreshing surprise: a novel about a relationship that was as tough and uncompromising as its protagonists. It helped that the lovers were professional tennis players who could not help competing with each other. I had to read Captain Alatriste, the first of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s swashbucklers set in the 17th century, after I saw the Spanish film adaptation starring Viggo Mortensen. Be warned that if you open Alatriste, you will not put it down until you’ve reached the end.
I’d been meaning to read I, Claudius by Robert Graves, and my fascination with the HBO series gave me the perfect excuse. The novel has one of the most appalling and compelling characters I’ve ever read, and now I have to look up the history of Rome to see if Livia was as Graves described her. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis has been described as the funniest book ever written  I don’t think so, my vote in that category still goes to P.G. Wodehouse  but it is hilariously nasty.
Reading an interview with Ian McEwan reminded me that I had a copy of Black Dogs somewhere. It’s brilliant  a novel of ideas that springs from the story of a ruined marriage. I’ve just finished Luis Buñuel’s My Last Sigh, probably the most charming memoir ever written by a film director (with the help of his screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carriere). He recounts his medieval upbringing in Spain, his friendships with Federico Garcia Lorca, Salvador Dali, Andre Breton, his activities in the Spanish Civil War, his recipe for the dry martini, and the making of his films Viridiana, Belle du Jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and others. Reading his book is like sitting in a bar and having many, many drinks with the man. Now I have to watch all his movies.
But first, back to the tower.
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