What we talk about when we talk about books is usually good books, those we have enjoyed and are implicitly recommending. What I write about here, in my devil-may-care way, are the books I've been reading recently which are nearly always books I've chosen to read and bought and so, having chosen them in the expectation of enjoying them, it is to be hoped that I did and I usually do so I mostly have good things to say about them.

But one can't be right all the time. Occasionally something's not what one thought it would be. Having set Gogol's stories aside a while ago when more important material turned up, it was in due course time to try Dead Souls. It's been on some sort of long list for decades. But it wasn't worth the wait. Not for me.

I read it. It didn't do me any harm and it didn't even drag but it didn't do much for me. It's picaresque, which is an old-fasioned thing to be, perhaps, and allegedly funny but I didn't really laugh at all. I think I saw most of the point of it and Gogol is good at capturing characters, of which he creates many but, unlike Candide which is hilarious and still highly relevant with its take on human failings and the likes of our current Prime Minister to consider in its context, it was more and more of the same, it seemed to me, except to say that if and when I don't appreciate a book it is quite possibly me that's failing.

It finished mercifully 60 pages early with the notice that,

Here Gogol's text comes to an end.

The final version was completed by another author, Zacharchenko, and the editor/translator here, Isabel F. Hapgood couldn't find a Russian edition to translate from and so used a French translation, as if translation wasn't a dubious enough business in the first place.

I have no doubt that the [French] translation is very bad, it always is when filtered through the French

 

but she provides it for those who like their stories complete. Well, with Mozart's Requiem maybe I do but I was ready to move on from this and was past caring. But that seemed to me the most interesting thing about the book, being ever sceptical about how close to the original language a translation can get and seeing this further distorted and admittedly badly distorted. 

It was thus a great pleasure to move on to John Burnside's stories in Something Like Happy ahead of a volume of his memoirs, A.N. Wilson on Dante or the next Balzac. Much more like it, that slipped down like champagne and barely lasted a day. Burnside's facility with poetry is replicated in his fiction without necessarily being identifiably by the same author. I don't think you'd guess if you didn't know. 

It's a bad thing we do when we like to categorize people as one thing as opposed to another but we do, or we seem to in England at least. We seem to think of poets, novelists or dramatists and anything they did outside of their allocated field as somehow extra-curricula, like Sylvia Plath's, Douglas Dunn's or Sean O'Brien's fiction maybe. But surely they meant it just as much. Fiction writing can be time-consuming work. Larkin thought he was a novelist before finding more success with poems but had 'writer' put on his gravestone, wisely. Poetry has always seemed like the soft option to me and so unless one wants to emphasize the poetry or that's all one did, 'writer' is what we ought to want to be and what John Burnside surely is. There's a lot more available to be had. He will be challenging my chronic shelf space crisis as time goes by.

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It's been a happy week on the turf regaining some lost ground after a summer hiatus, most gloriously with Mishriff in the big race at York. There is no better feeling than everything that you figured being played out in front of you and restoring some lost profit. That Mishriff is quite possibly the best horse in the world, over 10 furlongs, that there wasn't much of a case for the opposition, that he was very confidently ridden and won by 6 lengths at a generous SP of 9/4 were all the ingredients one needs to be reminded that sport can still be a satisfying thing.

We look forward to the Autumn and the return of the more involving game of jumping over obstacles on the way round.

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But just how much of our lives is formulaic, set out for us to avoid the distress of anything unexpected and provide the required comfort. Nearrly all of it, I'd suggest.

Even the ever-inventive, garrulous wit of Danny Baker was fitted into a fixed radio show that was the same every week before his one last, big mistake. Tony Blackburn's 60's and Johnnie Walker's 70's shows on R2 are both eased into pre-set templates. Most of the records they play are cosily familiar and that's how we like it.

But interviews are made up of the same habitual set pieces, too. I'm much more Times Radio than R4 or 5 these days. Interviews have the interviewee beginning the first answer with, 'So,'; some of them don't realize they fill in with 'you know' throughout, which makes me start to bet on how many 'you knows' there'll be before the interviewer speaks again.

A recent innovation, that has caught on immediately and spread like a new virus, comparable only with the 'Look' and 'Listen' introduced by Australian cricketers some years ago, is the congratulatory, 'that's a very good question'.

Suddenly they all do it, beautifully, if vacuously, combining ingratiation with the interviewer with the suggestion that even though it's a good question, they can still answer it. 

The interview comes to a premature halt when they lose the line. Technology is never quite perfected and so we may no longer have 1970's R1 deejays struggling with 7 inch singles that stick or jump we now have digital phone lines that get tired, become intermittent, possibly make the voice sound like Victoria Beckham being put through a voice coder before we are robbed of the summing up.

Orr maybe they do it deliberately once they've heard enough.

I've had it installed here....