The Reading List

 One goes on a bit of a spree and builds up a pile of books in waiting and then a few weeks later they've nearly all gone again. I might not feel like immediately launching into the heavy detail of Richard Ellman's Joyce and so that can be held over.

I was more than usually taken with Saturday's episode of Maigret, Pytor the Latvian, the one in which Torrence is murdered. Apparently the first one that Simenon wrote but the fifth to be published except there is little chronological sense to the Maigret novels and Torrence appeared in plenty more. 

Perhaps Simenon was the C20th's answer to Balzac, writing over 400 novels that is about three times as many as Balzac but they are usually one third of the length. And they still found time to have busy, busy lives. So I've not only ordered Pyotr from the library but a Simenon biography. And while writing this an e-mail arrived to say that the biography is ready to collect so I went and collected it.

That raises the question of whether to re-read The Way Out of Berkeley Square by Rosemary Tonks next which had been the plan. I can feel an essay coming on which is part of the 'earned surplus' of reading where reading is that without which one can feel adrift and in need of something else to do when it isn't always obvious what that should be. But at least I am in credit.

The first line of Way Out of Berkeley Square is,

'I'm thirty, and I'm stuck'.

Like a lot of what seem to be good ideas, Arabella's first line generates the idea in all its glory and all one has to do is assemble the piece like an MFI wardrobe. A bit easier than that, let's hope.

Being 'stuck', paralysis, in need of an escape route, ennui and all such synonyms relates also to Rosemary's poems and brings to mind Dubliners, Portrait and parallels between themes in Rosemary's and Joyce's highly autobiographical work and contrasts between how they dealt with it in their lives. It could be enough to compare and contrast the two of them, a strategy that can be relied on to provide an essay's worth of points to be made. But not too much effort has to be put into casting around among other favourite authors to extend it further and, while wondering if that is what makes them favourite authors, survey the theme across wider literary perspectives.

In no particular order, at present, there's Hamlet paralysed into inaction; there are Hardy's characters unable to avoid the fates that their circumstances and determinism deal out to them and there are Beckett's characters stuck in their own absurdity. Sean O'Brien's post-Larkin, post-Thatcher ennui provides recurrent tableaux of alienatation in need of elsewhere. I might have to forego the rich seam of Larkin on the subject for fear of using him too often but I think Sartre, maybe Salinger, I dare say Eliot if need be can play their parts and I really must make out some sort of plan before all this bounteous enthusiasm for dereliction passes.  

One asks for nothing more than something to be involved in. And that, really, is the whole point.