Books of 2006

The Guardian is running its usual end of the year Books Quiz. Give it a go, you have 21 to beat. And my wrong answers were on Kingsley Amis pinching girls' bums, something about Harry Potter and something about sleb autobiogs. None of which has anything to do with books, obviously, rotters, chiz chiz.

Bought but unread

In response to a question from ing posted IN THE WRONG PLACE I've listed all my Bought But Unread books here. I only mention it in case there are readers of TTOO who don't read Sour Grapes. Now if only people would keep their comments in the right blog, I wouldn't have to keep chopping and changing and stuff. Work with me here, people.

Niffy Swift

Following the post below, I was steered (by a newsgroup post) in the direction of a wonderful 1732 poem by Jonathan Swift, The Lady's Dressing Room, a prize exhibit in the natural history of bodily odours. A young man gains access to his sweetheart's bedroom, and what he sees there -- and in particular what he smells there -- leads to a dampening of his ardour. I have to quote one passage, which may make the poem the most nauseating thing you'll read this year:

As Mutton Cutlets, Prime of Meat,
Which tho' with Art you salt and beat,
As Laws of Cookery require,
And toast them at the clearest Fire;
If from adown the hopful Chops
The Fat upon a Cinder drops,
To stinking Smoak it turns the Flame
Pois'ning the Flesh from whence it came;
And up exhales a greasy Stench,
For which you curse the careless Wench;
So Things, which must not be exprest,
When plumpt into the reeking Chest;
Send up an excremental Smell
To taint the Parts from whence they fell.
The Pettycoats and Gown perfume,
Which waft a Stink round every Room.

In other words, if you can stand to have it served up again in other words, the act of evacuation is no such thing, because the foul airs thus released will waft up your skirt and follow you around all day.

Swift, eh? What an old romantic.

That page, by the way, is one of many maintained by Jack Lynch, a professor at Rutgers and a specialist in 18th century literature. His home page has many fascinating links, on Dr. Johnson, 18th century e-books and stuff on forgery and deception. Good place for a snuffle round.

And speaking of snuffling: keep those smelly history reports coming in!

Stocking fillers

Since there's still at least one, possibly two, shopping days left until Christmas, and given that some people seem not to have all their presents bought and wrapped, here's a suggestion:

The Very Short Introduction series of paperbacks produced by the Oxford University Press have that irreproachable OUP cachet, of course, which is an assurance that even though you're getting a pre-digested bolus of information with the bones all filleted out, it's certain to be good stuff, nutritious and wholesome, if not exactly tasty.

It's been a long time since anyone could be expected to know everything -- Robert Hooke or Thomas Young was the last, depending on who you believe -- but that's no excuse for knowing nothing. Also, I'm a big fan of Trollope, which means I need something else to carry with me for reading on the bus or in the Post Office queue, so slim volumes are dear to me and me lumbago.

The list, as you'll see from the link, is extensive, and I suppose you could measure the state of your intellectual curiosity by the ones you'd leave lying, assuming you're not already an expert in all those areas. I've so far bombed through Islam, The French Revolution and The Elements: one subject I do know something about, bracketed by two I don't. That's the Before.

And the After? As you might expect, I know a great deal more about Islam and the elements than I did before, and with authors of the calibre of Malise Ruthven and Philip Ball I have no reason to think I've been fed rubbish. I don't feel myself inspired by either, though, sadly. Maybe there just isn't time in the space of 160 pages to awaken an enduring interest in a subject. Maybe it's just me, though I do feel I went into it open to being turned on, if you will.

The problem becomes clearer with the French Revolution as subject. I'd put that on a par with the Periodic Table for scope, breadth, panorama, influence. You can't fit it all in. Sure, name-checks go to all the great figures: Roberspierre, Danton, Marat, as well as Burke, Carlyle and Dickens. You would never be able to tell, from this showing, why one was bigger than anyone else, or in what way.

So these are less books in the conventional sense, more like primers. Consider these the executive summary to the full report. The author of the volume on the French Revolution twice makes a snide remark about Simon Schama's Citizens -- Simon Bolivar only gets one mention -- and you can forgive him his pique. Schama had all that space (948 pp) to fill and wasted it. William Doyle gets 135 including index. He does a good job, and he does leave you wanting more. But what a nightmare the edit must have been.

Coming up next: The Koran, Intelligence (two more things I know nothing about) and The Renaissance (some knowledge, mostly forgotten). If I've anything to observe, I'll call back.

One point to make about the series as a whole: OUP need desperately to put in place some special point-of-sale display where these books can be stacked as a series, as Penguin did most recently with its Penguin 70s. From what I've seen (two Brussels English bookshops, both doing it) there's a tendency to put individual volumes in the section they seem to belong in. This is a mistake: this is the sort of book you'd happily pick up out of curiosity and buy never having had the slightest intention to buy a book on, say, Habermas. If you need to be in the right section already to find it, the chances are a VSI is not what you're looking for. All those curiosity sales will vanish, and nobody will ever find out who Habermas was, or is, or what. I could easily see me finishing up with an extensive selection of these books, but only if I can find them first.

VSIs have a £6.99 price ticket in the UK, $9.95 in the US. Not a lot for what you get. I of course pay more. Don't ask me why.

London particular

Great blog I just stumbled on, by a retired teacher in Tasmania, whose passion is Victorian history. Another example of the many ways blogs can be used. You got your angst-ridden journals, your commonplace books, your Op-Ed sections, your photo-albums, and something like this, which is simply a space for short essays of indeterminate length on subjects of interest.

The first post I read was a nicely evocative one on fog in Victorian London, which reminded me of the opening of Bleak House. Someone really ought to write a history of human smells through the ages. We don't ever hear much about it, smell being the most fugitive of senses, but I venture that if any of us went back in time, to any era at all before about the 1950s, the first and most enduring impression we'd get is the way things smelled differently. And not in a good way.

Here's what Claire Tomalin writes, of a previous era, in her biography of Samuel Pepys:

Londoners spat black. Wall hangings, pictures and clothes turned yellow and brown like leaves in autumn, and winter undervests, sewn on for the season against the cold, were the colour of mud by the time spring arrived. Hair was expected to look after itself; John Evelyn made a special note in his diary in August 1653 that he was going to experiment with an 'annual hair wash'. But every house, every family enjoyed its own smell, to which father, mother, children, apprentices, maids and pets all contributed, a rich brew of hair, bodies, sweat and other emissions, bedclothes, cooking, whatever food was lying about, whatever dirty linen had been piled up for the monthly wash, whatever chamber pots were waiting to be emptied into yard or street. Home meant the familiar reek everyone breathed. The smell of the house might strike a new maid as alien, but she would quickly become part of the atmosphere herself. *

You do wonder what exactly she means there by "enjoyed".

I'm just old enough to remember fog as it used to be, in Glasgow, before the Clean Air Act cleaned the, erm, air. It's a long time ago, and I was very young, but I'm clear that the fog then was of quite a different quality than anything going by that name nowadays.

On the matter of smells, on the other hand, I have the most vivid memory of the smell of what I was told were the tanks of a distillery in the north of the city which filled the air with the most gut-wrenching stink once a week, and which I associate with visits to my mother's sister who lived in that area. On one occasion the smell was so bad I was physically ill -- and I'm not a fragile flower, I assure you. My childhood memories are otherwise infused with the heady aroma of a farm (we lived on the very edge of the city): a boyhood of cowshit and rotting turnips. Not tea-cakes and tisane, granted, but it all comes rushing back still.

* hyperlink added

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

The patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad in Palace Walk by the late Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz is the master of all he surveys. He terrorises his family of three boys and two girls, and his wife Amina, who wakes at midnight every evening to prepare for his home-coming from carousing. He's a respected and prominent merchant. He's adored by his circle of friends for his wit. And he has loose women falling at his feet.

But the truth, as we might expect, cannot be as appearances would suggest. And sure enough Ahmad's dominion is undermined at every turn, by his wife, by his daughters Khadija and Aisha, named after the two principal wives of the Prophet, by his sons Yasin, Fahmy and Kamal. Even by his daughters' suitors, who fail to respect his ideas on marriage order. And in the end by his country, which causes him to be humiliated as a man, and to lose one of the things most precious to him.

Let the part represent the whole: Palace Walk is set at the end of the First World War, and Cairo is swarming with Australian troops and with the occupying British, who have declared Egypt a protectorate in response to the country's nominal support for the Ottoman empire in the War. The feeling of national humiliation boiled over into riots against the exile of prominent nationalists who had been elected to the national assembly, leading in 1922 to Britain's declaration of Egyptian independence.

The novel, the first part of a trilogy that is Mahfouz's most celebrated work in the West, ends at the time of the rioting, when the feeling of humiliation is still raw. Ahmad is bullied (and effectively unmanned in his own eyes) by the British. His eldest son Yasin, his father's double in matters of ego and his taste for women, is likewise humiliated by the occupier. His youngest son Kamal is adopted by a garrison of British soldiers as a sort of performing mascot. Only his middle son Fahmy, bookish and idealistic, has the courage to stand up despite great personal risk. And he is made to pay a heavy price.

Manliness is everything to al-Sayyid Ahmad, and its requirements condition his every move. He is a prince among men in male company, because that is what is required. But he is a petty tyrant at home, beating his wife (we are told), swearing at his sons as he ridicules them. He exercises iron control over his wife and daughters, although they all individually escape in significant ways. He is hard-headed in business, drinks copiously in the wine-shops, eats his fill before anyone else is served, and juggles mistresses before the admiring eyes of his friends.

Egypt in 1918 seems to be a man's world. But as the book makes clear, the dominance of men like Ahmad is coming to an end, if it isn't already an illusion. As the two daughters marry and move away, we know that the ropes that bound them are slackening -- they marry brothers who are far too spoiled and lazy ever to be concerned about values or standards. And as it happens, the generation they belong to did in fact become more emancipated, which led directly to a backlash not so much in Egypt as elsewhere in the Muslim world. The Muslim Brotherhood, a radical fundamentalist sect, was founded in Egypt in 1928, ten years after the events of the novel, by Hassan al-Banna. The movement felt society had lost touch with Islam as a result of corrupting Western influences, among them the emancipation of women, such as it was. The wearing of the veil, some have argued, is a compromise to the increasing tendency of women to go outside the home. The word hijab, used to denote one form of such a veil, also means modesty or seclusion, similar to the idea of purdah. In Palace Walk, al-Sayyid Ahmad's wife and daughters simply do not leave the home, and can only look outside from behind the protective barrier of the lattice-work screens on the balcony, known as mashrabiya (see photo here).

Obviously, in such circumstances, to wear a veil would be superfluous. So the widespread use of the veil can only have come later, when women moved out of the home. This view sees the chador and all the many variants as a sort of portable hajib. But the move towards more Western ways of dressing was also a by-product of colonialism and occupation, which Arabists and Islamists countered by the adoption of more "authentic" forms of dress, some of which were about as authentic as a medieval ceremony invented by the Victorians. In the book, Ahmad wears a fez, a headgear that had originally been imposed by the Ottoman imperialists in an attempt to stamp out local group allegiance. The veil as we know it, on the other hand, was introduced as a rejection of colonialism by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s.

This may seem to be a long way from the story of al-Sayyid Ahmad and his family told in Palace Walk, but it wouldn't of course have been a digression for Mahfouz's audience reading at the time of the novel's first publication in 1956 (not long after al-Banna was killed by the government, and Muslim Brothers tried to assassinate Nasser). The background will have been familiar to his readers in the Arab world throughout his writing life, as he secured the place of the novel (not a native form) almost single-handed. He could never have imagined that issues such as the right of women to wear a veil over their face would become so gripping to Westerners that we would spend days debating the comments of one British minister on the matter.

It's impossible for a Westerner, I would say, to read a book like this in this day and age without contemplating these issues -- without mining Mahfouz's prose for indications of his own position on the various arguments. Is Amina a doormat? Is there nothing in it for her? Is Ahmad nothing but a macho bastard? Are we wrong obstinately to view this remote culture through our own Western eyes? Can it really be the case that they have got it all wrong, and we have it all right?

You read a book like this with such questions echoing in your mind. This would never have been a run-of-the-mill family saga -- the Carringtons in jellabas and yashmaks -- simply because of the depth of Mahfouz's psychological insight, the meticulous construction of his characters -- I finished this book weeks ago and the characters still feel fresh in my mind, and I still feel tragically affected by the ending -- and the beauty of his prose, which I have to assume has been faithfully rendered by William Maynard Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny, his translators. If you'll allow me a florid image, his narrative is like the laying one on top of the other of many many onion-skin-thin layers of pastry, no single one of which seems to have any substance, until almost imperceptibly he creates a mille-feuilles that's at the same time so light you don't even realise you're eating it, and so rich that you could never manage two.

Palace Walk is published in Great Britain by Black Swan, and in the US by Anchor Books (who have a stunning selection of his works in English).

Naguib Mahfouz, who was stabbed in the neck in 1994 after his expressions of support for Salman Rushdie, died in August this year. He was 94. Read a short bio here. And an obituary from The Guardian here and from The Agonist here.