RAGNAROK by A S BYATT

In the dining room, between the Iris Murdoch and the Margaret Drabble, was the collection of A.S. Byatt.  By eleven, I had free reign of the books in the house, but these three authors were always off limits, as "I wouldn't get anything out of them yet."  At seventeen I was still considered too young, or perhaps naïve would be a better word, and thus they languished on the book shelves as the last bastion of 'adult' books.  This is my first.

Owing to a slightly bohemian religious upbringing, I was intimately aware of the Norse myths from a young age.  Ragnarok could be described as a simple retelling, framed by the thoughts of a young, thin child in the second world war, but that sounds like a slight.  It is not meant to be.  Byatt has drawn out the most beautiful and violent of the stories, stripped them bare of the romantic veil cast over them by 19th century artists, and left them raw and angry and born of the hostile landscape of Iceland.

Ragnarok is in prose, but begs to be spoken rhythmically like a poem.  Nothing could be more fitting for the myths drawn from the Eddur, yet the effect is subtle.  Lists are employed to give both a grandeur to the scale of the world, and a magnified view of what the thin child finds interesting.  They read breathlessly, litanies divorced from the Church but tied in to the English sense of cultural Christianity felt by any person with a sense of history.

The end is inevitable, and if one is aware of the myths, the method of the end is known.  However, none of this stops Ragnarok - both the book and the final chapter - from giving a strong, empty feeling of being at, "The black undifferentiated sky, at the end of things."

Ragnarok, Canongate, 2011

MY LIFE AND HARD TIMES by JAMES THURBER

Thurber is always a pleasure.  In his drawings and even more so in his prose, this myopic, irascible Ohioan invites the reader to enter the impossibly comic world of his seemingly endless relatives - an invitation which, for me at least, is impossible to refuse.

My Life and Hard Times is Thurber at his best.  Consider the story of 'The Day the Dam Broke' leading all the inhabitants of Columbus, Ohio to "Go east! Go east!"  Everyone ran with the single exception of Thurber's grandfather who was convinced those fleeing had broken from the ranks defending the city against Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry and therefore, himself, stood firm until knocked unconscious and dragged away by his family.  A wonderful tale made better by the fact the Dam had not, in fact, broken.

Other stories such as 'The Night the Bed Fell' and 'The Night the Ghost Got In' are treasures but by far the best in this wonderful collection, first published in 1933, is 'More Alarms at Night', a combination of two events which led Thurber's father, described as a "tall, mildly nervous, peaceable gentleman," to entertain the thought that "all of his sons were crazy or on the verge of going crazy."

To extract this story is to diminish it, but I'll try anyway.  In the first half, Thurber's brother wakes his father up at three in the morning with the words, "Buck, your time has come" (Thurber's father was in fact called Charles).  This leads to a confrontation with mother on the stairs who is certain her husband was merely having a bad dream. 

Six months later, when all but father had forgotten this incident, Thurber who had been driven to distraction trying and failing to remember the name of the New Jersey city, Perth Amboy, wakes his father with the plea to:

"'...  name some towns in New Jersey quick!'  It must have been around three in the morning.  Father got up, keeping the bed between him and me, and started to pull his trousers on. 'Don't bother about dressing,' I said.  'Just name some towns in New Jersey.'  While he hastily pulled on his clothes - I remember he left his socks off and put shoes on his bare feet - father began to name, in a shaky voice, various New Jersey cities.  I can still see him reaching for his coat without taking his eyes off me.  'Newark,' he said, 'Jersey City, Atlantic City, Elizabeth, Paterson, Passaic, Trenton, Jersey City, Trenton, Paterson -.'  'It has two names', I snapped.  'Elizabeth and Paterson,' he said.  'No, no!' I told him, irritably.  'This is one town with one name but there are two words in it, like helter-skelter.'  'Helter-skelter,' said my father, moving slowly toward the bedroom door and smiling in a faint strained way which I understand now - but didn't then - was meant to humour me. " ...

My Life and Hard Times, 135pp, Penguin 1948.

JAMILIA by CHINGIZ AITMATOV

Jamilia is at its core a conventional love story but its setting in the steppe of Kyrgyzstan during WWII turns this tale of wounded silent boy meets married girl who brings him out of himself into something exceptional. 

Narrated by Seit, Jamilia's kichine bala, in other words the younger brother of her husband, the book describes the complex agragrian household of two closely related families where the older sons or jigits have all gone to fight the Germans.  The war comes closer first as the limping Daniyar makes an appearance and then as Jamilia, Seit and Daniyar are daily required to deliver war-effort wheat to the railhead.

It is this series of journeys by horse through the steppe that form the backbone of the story for it is here that Daniyar starts to sing, Jamilia to fall in love and Seit to become an artist.

As Daniyar starts to sing one evening:  "I was stunned. The steppe seemed to burst into bloom, heaving a sigh and drawing aside the veil of darkness, and I saw two lovers in its vast expanse.  They did not seem to notice me, it was as if I was not there.  I was walking along and watching as they, oblivious to the world, swayed together in tune with the song. ... Once more I was overcome by that indescribable excitement which Daniyar's singing always aroused in me.  All of a sudden I knew clearly what I wanted: I wanted to draw them."

A truly beautiful book.

Jamilia, 96pp, Telegram 2007 - translated by James Riordan.  SR

INTRODUCTION

The story, perhaps legend, behind Allen Lane setting up Penguin books is that looking through the offerings from a 'bookseller' at a railway station in the mid-30s, he could find nothing he wanted to read.  While this experience remains true for many of us today who do nothing about it, Sir Allen decided to produce a line of cheap, portable paperbacks with the results we all know.

This blog is not particularly about Penguin, nor is it per se about cheap books, but a bit about portability.  The team working on this blog - and we hope you'll join us - is united by the view that many books are too long, many books are far too long (Vikram Seth's, A Suitable Boy being a good example), that the massive 'holiday books' beloved of some publishers are an anathema and that any good or great author should, at least from time to time, be able to marshal his or her thoughts to produce a short novel, memoir or indeed history, of quality and sensitivity, of importance and durability, of literary merit and general appeal.

We do not attempt exactly to define a 'short book' except perhaps to say what it is not.  It is not a short story nor even, that contradiction in terms, a long short story ... but it might be a novella; it is not an essay nor is it (usually) one of a collection of tales that are commonly bound together (although it might be fair to exempt Conrad's three stories that make up 'Twixt Land and Sea in the Penguin Modern Classics edition - since these are excellent). It is not, in short (sorry), something that takes a long time to read even though once read it should stick in the mind for many a long day.

The aim of the blog is to list and comment on short books adding more as the weeks pass  Of course we aim to debate and dispute the particular qualities of each before (between ourselves) and after (across the Internet) it is posted here.  That said, there's a bigger and simpler purpose: we want to discover or recollect books that are, succinctly, short and deep and at the same time relatively easy to acquire in hard copy.

Why?  Because it'll be fun and stimulating.  We hope you agree.  Please post any suggestions for books to be included to: Theblogforshortbooks@gmail.com.