Reading Journal: 16th & 17th March 2010

I hope you will all forgive me for not posting a Reading Journal entry yesterday. I wanted to concentrate all my efforts on finishing Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart (Constable & Robinson). Also, with no reading scheduled for Wednesday aside from Mukherjee’s novel, I thought I’d leave it until today so that I could sum up all of my reading over the past couple of days in one single post.

So beginning with Tuesday – my day for Chekhov – and there was a slight change to the plans. I had scheduled myself to read the next two stories in line from the usual place I grab my Chekhov stories from – James Rusk’s wonderful Chekhovian repository, but I’d disabled myself from the Internet before downloading them on to my Reader *blush*. So I decided rather than go through the rigmarole of rebooting my Mac etc., that this would probably be a good time to read a couple of Chekhov stories translated from someone other than my dearest Constance Garnett.

So the stories that I decided on were to be found in an excellent collection that’s lingered on my shelves for a while now, Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov (Bantam Books) translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The two I chose were Vanka (a tale about a young homesick boy living away from home at Christmas time), and Sleepy (a story about a young ill-treated girl who is suffering from the effects of sleep deprivation).

As I’ve posted afterthoughts on both of these stories already (Vanka, Sleepy) I’m not going to say an awful lot about either. However I will comment on how I found it, to be reading a different translation for a change. Well, if I’m being honest then I’ve got to say that although I found the Pevear & Volokhonsky translations to be very readable, and absolutely flawless, I didn’t enjoy them as much as the Garnett translations. This surprised me. Pevear & Volokhonsky are meant to be the best in the business (and I’m sure they are). And what’s more I thought I would enjoy getting away from the often awkward translations of Garnett. But the fact is, I didn’t enjoy it that much at all. There’s something more honest, more rustic, more to the era with the Garnett translations, and, I’ve got to say, I really missed connecting with them. I’ll read a couple more Pevear & Volokhonsky translations next week, just to see if I still feel the same way, bu based on this week’s experience Garnett is just as precious to me as she ever was.

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well, I started to read the third story in Christopher Golden’s Zombie: An Anthology of the Undead (Piatkus) – Copper by Stephen R. Bissette – but sadly I ended up abandoning it after three attempts, because I just couldn’t get myself into it. It’s not often that I’ll point-blank abandon anything, but the way in which the prose for this story is presented – always in the form of very brief and snappy sentences – proved to be a real problem for me, and I couldn’t really gel with it. I did try fellow reader I really did. But in the end I just couldn’t get through it. A real disappointment, given that I found the first two stories so enjoyable. It wouldn’t be fair to give a final rating for this story, so I won’t.

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And so I come to the book that’s tied down most of my reading time over these past couple of days, Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart. I’ve now finished the novel and will post my afterthoughts in due course. But in the meantime what should I say about it? Well, what keeps coming into my head is the quote from Ali Smith on the novel’s cover, who not only says that A Life Apart is ‘incisive and poetic’ but also that it has ‘great breadth, heart and courage’. I think in that quote Smith nails it on the head. Incisive the novel certainly is – Mukherjee is incredibly astute with his observations – and he is able to relate those observations with such poetic resonance that one often feels the need to outwardly gasp before stopping to contemplate what one has just read. The novel’s breadth is obvious – it spans time periods and continental boundaries, and explores a number of moral issues. This is where ‘courage’ probably comes in, because quite honestly this novel is explicit in its exploration – particularly with regards to homosexuality – making it both a courageous novel for a debut novelist to tackle, and for the reader to read (trust me, it’s not one for easily offended). That’s really all I can say about A Life Apart for now, until I can get my thoughts more fully together. Look out for my official afterthoughts in the next day or two.

‘Reading Journal’ provides an unedited, on-the-fly record of the bookish highlights in Rob’s reading day.