Vulgar Things by Lee Rourke is a book about a man who goes to Canvey Island, then Southend, to sort out the affairs of his uncle who has recently died. That’s as much plot as you need. I don’t want to give away the plot. Plus, while it is a good plot, and the story matters, Vulgar Things is about a whole lot more. At least how I read it, anyway. Read the rest of this entry »
In Woody Allen’s Manhattan the protagonist Issac Davis talks into a tape recorder, listing what he believes makes life worth living. It is a key scene and a clever device. The list gives us an insight into Davis’ personality, his motivations, his desires:
“Why is life worth living? It’s a very good question. There are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Like what…okay…For me, I would say… what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing…and Willie Mays…and the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony…and Louis Armstrong, recording of Potato Head Blues…Swedish movies, naturally… Sentimental Education by Flaubert…Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra…those incredible Apples and Pears by Cezanne…the crabs at Sam Wo’s…Tracy’s face…” Read the rest of this entry »
Regular readers may recall the recent carnage at my workplace. Well, it appears now that I too am a marked man. I would love to elaborate, but I would no doubt end up breaking all manner of confidentiality protocols or whatever. Suffice to say, I now have even more material for my Great Office Novel (zero words and counting!). I have decided that it probably best to plan ahead for a possible Imposed Vacation … Read the rest of this entry »
Do you remember book tokens? Well, I was very lucky to get quite a few of them for my birthday. They now seem to resemble credit cards more than paper vouchers, but they still are the most wonderful present. I love buying books, and having tokens for that very purpose helps allay any guilt that I should be spending my money on something more practical. After all, I have plenty of books at home waiting to be read. Book tokens give me the best excuse possible to buy more books. Read the rest of this entry »
After this blog’s one moment of international fame, I thought I’d make a brief return to the work of your friend and mine, Ernest Hemingway.
So, to bring you up to speed on my Hemingway adventure, on the advice of this parish’s Steven Harris, I picked up the complete short stories late last year in one of those beautiful Everyman hardback volumes, using my Borders vouchers just before the place went belly-up. Then, for Christmas, as part of an array of writing-inspired gifts, my wonderful Significant Other gave me Ernest Hemingway on writing, a brilliant little book compiling many of Hemingway’s thoughts on writing and the life of the writer. So…I’ve been keeping up.
Last week I popped into one of those strange discount bookshops, that sometimes have some incredible bargains and other times have nothing but hopeless junk. This time, I got lucky. I picked up the slim The Old Man and the Sea, the story that won Hemingway a Nobel Prize for Literature.
My verdict? Well, I loved it. It is one of those stories that will stay with me a long time, hopefully forever.
And I used the word ‘story’ rather than ‘book’ quite deliberately.
Here we have a real tale, a fable even. Here we have an old man, a young boy, a fish and little else. Everything is honed down and necessary, like a good story should be. In its 100 or so pages there is no room for flowery prose, or padding. And while it is set in contemporary times, the 1950s, it feels like the kind of story passed from generation to generation, as old as the act of fishing itself.
The one concession to the modern-day is baseball. Oh yes, there’s another reason why I loved reading this, apart from Hemingway’s prose and its brevity (I do love a good short book to rip through). The Old Man’s mind often wanders to baseball, and in particular the great Joe DiMaggio, wondering how the Yankees’ great centre fielder would deal with the Old Man’s situation, being the son of a fisherman himself.
So, concise, timeless and it namechecks baseball. It’s as if this was written for me. Don’t you just love getting that feeling from a book?
I haven’t read a whole lot around the book yet, but it is clear that this is a book that divides opinion. There seems to have been a fair bit of criticism in terms of its symbolism, and if it veers too far from the writer’s famed realism.
I’ll just let the man himself reply:
“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. … I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things”.
