Win some, lose some

 Most of the time I'm perfectly happy with the books I decide to read. Maybe it matters less if they're from the library but if you get it wrong, you've still wasted your time whereas if you buy them, however cheaply, you've also wasted your money.

A first little session with Ronald Firbank's Valmouth wasn't promising. It seemed like buying a horse on the advice of a wide boy and getting it on the gallops only to wonder why. Maybe it's not the best Firbank book, maybe it will improve but maybe a contrarian like James Kirkup is not one whose tips one should trust.

However, Nikolai Leskov is another C19th Russian to add to that impressive cast of writers well worth having. Katerina Lvovna is a bit like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, of course like Lady Macbeth, and dangerous but she'd be no Eustacia Vye, if these entrancing ladies could emerge from the page to appear before us. One has to be grateful in the end that they stay on the page.

But Leskov, only famous for the story behind the Shostakovich opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, surely deserves to have more still available in translation and in print than he seems to have, which might be only one other book of stories.

Of course, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev but maybe not Gogol for me. Leskov is a writer as well as a story teller and so far there is a wildness trapped in the mundane and the routine that looks like being a central theme. As such, one can see how Shostakovich, such an inventive composer so full of musical ideas, found in Lady Macbeth such rich material when continuing to work under Stalin.

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It's only tenuously related to the news about Salman Rushdie but it is about 'freedom of expression' v. what anybody is going to do about it. 

34 years after the publication of The Satanic Verses, the issue hasn't gone away. And we find that, hidden deep in old news, the translators of it into Norwegian and Italian survived attacks on their lives but the Japanese translator didn't.

 I read Midnight's Children, The Moor's Last Sigh and a book of short stories. Salman is a flamboyant writer, pyrotechnic and, for what it's worth, 'Magic Realist', but I was never convinced. My involvement with Salman in the 1990's was much more because I looked like him. It wasn't me that said so, it was strangers who passed comment in public more than once or twice. One could almost make a Hitchcock film out of somebody who likes to think he's a writer but looks a bit like a writer that some fanatics want to kill and so wonders if he really wants to be a writer at all.

I was in the front bar of a pub in Gosport early doors where I had arranged to meet my mate, for example. The only other people in were a table of half a dozen readily identifiable as Royal Navy. One of them, not maliciously, said, loud enough for me to hear,

No, I don't think Salman Rushdie drinks in this pub.

What I should have said was, No, mate, you're right, it's me. Until you lot came in I thought this pub at 6.30 was the best place I could think of to hide.

 

It is intimidating, though, I'll give them that. Every line you write, every word you use, you have to watch yourself. And even if I'm confident it's not objectionable now, I can't know that it won't be the next time somebody else finds reason to be offended.