Reality Check: My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write. Thomas Bernhard, he of the impenetrable yet addictive literary sludge was actually a really funny guy. Laugh out loud, double over, try to catch your breath funny. Not that you would have known it from his novels. Dreary, depressing, sure. But not funny. Turns out it was all a ruse. In this short collection of reflections, Bernhard tells us what he really thought of the various prizes he won. Needless to say, he doesn't hold back and I suspect that pretty much every institution that saw fit to give him an award later came to regret it. Some might brand Bernhard a sore winner, but for me it was refreshing to see a person whose misanthropy could transcend his ego.

There are those, I suppose, who collect accolades
Though others prefer that they went to their graves
Integrity shining not once selling out
Here Bernhard makes quite clear what he was about
Dark and obsessive in print, when loquacious
He's spiteful, sardonic and wholly ungracious!

And yes, i realise I was supposed to read the new Chinua Achebe book for this challenge, but after the great disappointment of the Gunter Grass I felt it was okay to cheat a little and do the old bait and switch. Yet again Bernhard saves the day!

Reality Check: Life by Keith Richards

If Patti Smith's book verged on poetic high art, Keith Richards has cranked out its gutter-dwelling, drug-addled little cousin. Which isn't to say that Life isn't also high art, though of a very different kind. It all makes me feel even more inadequate as I continue to lump you with these annoying rhymes. I just don't know how Dr. Seuss lived with himself...

Oh, well, stuff this in your hat:

From somewhere beneath a dark heroin haze
Ol' Keef takes a look back on halcyon days
It's brutal and honest and dripping with swagger
And his sympathy lies with the devil, that's Jagger
Though hefty this book left me scratching my head
After all he's consumed how the hell's he not dead?

Reality Check: The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi

I grew up on true crime books. The Stranger Beside Me, Hunting The Devil, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer. I just couldn't get enough. So obsessed was I that my parents were called into school a number of times so that my teachers could voice their concerns. Most notable was dear Mrs. Begley, who found expressions of extreme violence in my creative writing output. She famously told my mum that "he writes very well, but couldn't he just once write about flowers and hills?" So next story I wrote for her class (hilariously named Writing For Young Authors - the class, not the story!) had someone murdered on a hill and their body sprinkled with flowers.

When it came to putting together the list of books I would attempt for the December Challenge I figured it would be a good opportunity for me to check out what's making it big in the genre these days. Preston and Spezi's investigation into the Monster of Florence serial killings (which, if you like literary trivia, were the inspiration for Thomas Harris's final Hannibal Lecter book) had been getting some serious raves so I thought I'd give it a go.

Pull up your green eggs and ham, folks. Here's what I thought:

Somewhere near Florence in picturesque hills
There lurks a monster who viciously kills
To this day unsolved by detectives inept
These journos turned up on the list of suspects
Point as they might to Sardinian trails
Frustrated, it ends with them chasing their tails

Reality Check: Regions of the Great Heresy by Jerzy Ficowski

He might only have had the chance to crank out two short story collections before being brutally murdered as an act of revenge against his Nazi protector, but Bruno Schulz is one of the towering figures of mid-20th European century literature. I became obsessed with him after seeing a Theatre de Complicite production of Street of Crocodiles and quickly hunted down the two slim volumes, devouring them with a sense of sheer wonder. Surreal, harrowing and completely other-worldly, they are amongst the greatest story cycles ever to be published. In this biographical meditation, Ficowski goes a long way to demystify the enigma that has sprouted from Schulz's unmarked grave.

Or, as Dr. Seuss would put it:

For the pilgrims who flock to the great Kafka's grave
There's another, unmarked and ignored I'm afraid
A disciple now digs and tries to resurrect
To give voice, and give ink and to piece back the flesh
Indignant he holds high his art to the end
A shot in the arm for one shot in the head

Reality Check: The Box by Gunter Grass

I was pretty excited to get my hands on the latest instalment of Gunter Grass's memoirs, even more so because I had heard that this volume was stylistically more interesting, perhaps even with a fictional flourish. Alas, halfway through this short (especially short given the heftiness of Peeling The Onion) curiosity of a book, I was struck by a Solzhenitsyn-inspired Eureka moment. I actually don't really like Gunter Grass. Sure, I waxed lyrical in the past about The Tin Drum but, at the end of the day, he is kind of boring. Sorry Professor Graewe (my fantastic German Literature lecturer of yore), I want to like your hero but I just can't. And not because of his past, I don't really care about that. It's just that his turgid meanderings put me to sleep. I get it, Mr. Grass. You screwed around, had eight kids and wrote books of which you are rather proud. But this added nothing to your canon. When all is said and done, The Box will be a minor footnote, if it even makes it that far.

So without further adieu, here is The Box as rhyming verse.

I've come to believe the Nobel is a curse
For all of its winners grow gradually worse
After great revelations of Wafen SS
Grass comes in again and wants us to assess
Through the lens of his camera, an old fashioned box
This life in eight pieces is slight and a flop

Reality Check: The Possessed by Elif Batuman

It was a simple Cartesian equation. I like Russian literature. Elif Batuman has written a book about "Russian Books and the People Who Read Them". Ergo, I will like this book. And I did. Sort of. Sucked in by a pretty cute premise, I found myself drifting as I waded ever deeper in to its pages. I think this started as a collection of essays, published separately, in various lit rags. That would make sense. This book works if approached in bite-sized chunks. As a whole, I'm less convinced. Anyway, here's the review in three couplets of rhyming verse. Apologies for the extra syllable in the last line. I needed it to get in the godawful Russian literary pun. As I said at the start of this month, I've never claimed to be a poet!

There's something that's rather peculiar you see
About readers of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
Conspiracy theorists and paranoid freaks
How they do Babel on these Chekhovian geeks
It's a glimpse into worlds of high lit and first loves
She's Possessed but I wasn't, when Pushkin came to shove

Reality Check: Just Kids by Patti Smith

Ok, so I have to say this straight out. However bad I was at haiku or limerick, I am truly appalling at rhyming couplets. But as you know all too well by now, I never let my dignity get in the way of fulfilling a promise, so here is the first instalment of my December reading/poetry challenge. Thankfully, I started with a book that I truly loved. Not knowing all that much about Patti Smith or Robert Mapplethorpe, but growing up in awe of the New York cultural scene of the 60's and 70's, I was mesmerised to read about it straight from the horse's mouth (sorry, pathetic pun...). So here you have it, my terrible rhyming couplet review of Patti Smith's wonderful Just Kids.

Many a hymn has been sung to New York
But none of its Lower East Saint Mapplethorpe
From squats to the halls of the Chelsea Hotel
Of great falls and rises the high priestess tells
A tale sometimes tender and other times sordid
Vale to Puck, once rent boy now applauded!

Reality Check: The December Challenge

Forgive me Fyodor, for I have sinned. When I made my new year's resolution to write a literary blog I intended from the outset to quirk it up with absurd challenges that took me out of my reading comfort zone into new, mostly humorous, territory. I started off quite well but, alas, the best of intentions have fallen by the wayside, victim to my penchant for self-indulgence. I wanted to read books I liked. Shoot me.

It's now December and I figure I have but one last chance for redemption. I must tackle the thing I dislike reading more than anything else (except perhaps the crap I had to read for February's Books I Swore I'd Never Read challenge). Yes, in a last ditch attempt to save me from having to admit defeat come December 31, and consequently forcing myself to repeat this whole shebang again next year, I intend to spend a month reading non-fiction. To be fair, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I have built up a respectable pile of mildly interesting looking tomes of truth over the past few years. The fact I get to finally open them, and knock them all over in one month, makes the whole task seem almost bearable.

I know I might be accused of bandwagon-jumping, but I'm starting off with Patti Smith's National Book Award winning memoir, Just Kids and will follow it with Elif Batuman's examination of Russian bibliophiles (that is, people who love and obsess over Russian literature, not just anyone from Russia who can read), Possessed. I figure, with those two, I at least have a connection, spurious as it may be: early punk rock and wanky literature are two of my great areas of interest. Next up I'm going to hit something I've meant to read for years, Jerzy Ficowski's biography of and meditation on the criminally under-appreciated Polish writer Bruno Schulz, Regions of The Great Heresy. If the name doesn't ring a bell, wait for Jonathan Safran Foer's next book. I suspect you will find yourself chasing down copies of his two amazing story collections, Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, before you can say Drohobycz. I'll also give my high school obsession with true crime another run with The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi. Comic relief shall be provided by Keith Richards and his anti-Jagger bitchfest, Life. And, finally, I'll round out the month with two memoirs by great authors, Gunter Grass and Chinua Achebe.

Now I know what you're thinking. This all sounds a bit too easy for the very last challenge of the year. Don't worry, spanner, meet works. I am going to attempt to review them all in six line verses of rhyming couplets. I don't even really know what that means. Oh, well, I guess it could have been worse. There was always the chance I'd be lumped with haiku again.