Claudine At School by Colette

Colette's dense, descriptive prose is perfect for anyone who suffers, like me, from painful abstraction; by this I mean the sensation of being divorced from your body, of having not noticed your surroundings for days and days. Claudine At School is her first novel; the clumsiness of the transitions from scene to scene, the enthusiasm with which things are recounted without regard for pace, is well suited to the story of the bossy young girl from whose diary this book is supposedly taken.

In her later books, Colette's stated openly her metaphysic - that there should be no abstraction between the person and reality; perception should be as immediate as possible. The only abstraction she allowed was a unitary one; there is one language of love, manifested through each individual; there is one animal, manifested in each individual animal; and so on. This idea almost worked; it's no wonder she's such a great prose stylist when you consider that the implication of her hatred for abstractions is that there are no hierarchies and no place for sentiment - so a murder is described with the same detail and specificity as a flower bud, and so on. I found, with some disappointment, as I read Colette, that she didn't always maintain this 'equality of perception'; in 'Claudine and Annie', the narrator's MORAL contempt for a girl who becomes a prostitute is patent, and ruins the effect of this prose beyond morals, or rather, this prose whose morality is love for being.
- Maryann

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Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz

ISBN 0-8021-5159-0

Gombrowicz's books are densely written, but almost never lapse into being anything you've read before - which is not true of other knotty writers like Nabokov.

'On we plodded. Earth. Ruts. The road was vile. Gleams from shiny pebbles, the air shimmering and buzzing with heat, everything black with sunlight.'

Gombrowicz achieves a kind of unpredictable realism through the accretion of detail. For example, he writes a thought, then revises it, then revises that thought again (as per Gogol, the first example of this style I'm aware of):

'Was somebody trying to make fools of us? Was it a practical joke? Or was the object to communicate a message? Stuff and nonsense, the whole thing was absurd. The sheer absurdity of it was a double edged weapon; Fuchs and I were using one edge and acting in a fashion that was by no means absurd . . .'
- Maryann

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The Thin Man by Dashiel Hammett

I sometimes find the prose of detective novels difficult to follow, because of the rigid insistence on not manifesting emotion which extends to not being descriptive, just in case one inadvertently betrays an opinion. This sparsity sometimes makes the book read like a script, and scripts are usually more difficult to follow than novels. There is a pathos to Hammett's novels, a suggestion that they’re the skeleton for something else, something 'literary,' but then there's also the pleasant freedom from the pressure to maintain style. I’m not sure whether I’m committing the intentional fallacy; I think my admiration was compounded by his having been married to Lillian Hellman, and that he was a kind, literary type of man. The Thin Man seemed slighter than his other novels because it didn’t include the climax which turns around a dream, like the dream of the key in The Glass Key or the possible murder by the hero whilst in a drugged sleep, the two examples that persist in memory.
- Maryann

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"Rommel?" "Gunner Who?" A Confrontation in the Desert, by Spike Milligan.

I read Spike Milligan about once a year; based on my own experience, I'd advise you not to bother reading his more recent books - Lady Chatterly's Lover, Wuthering Heights etc - because they're so racist they'll depress you (not to mention sexist, of course.) I can just imagine him saying that the women's movement has no sense of humour having written that! Actually do read those books if you feel like it, they're of lukewarm merit - but I'm just warning you that they're not funny enough to warrant the really un-funny racist parts. A favourite phrase from his war time books is 'Well, it's not as bad as having a bucket of blood filled with knives and forks thrown over your head!' No, none of his books are that bad. But his wartime autobiographies are humble, compassionate AND funny - probably because they're about people he really met, so he didn't need to fall back on stereotypes. Anyway here's a passage I like as an example:

"As far as she was concerned it was over. Not for me. Brought up on silent films with a romantic Irish father who told me I was descended from the Kings of Connaught, I played out the scene of the rejected lover. Sitting on a bench in Ladywell Recreation Ground, with a quarter of jelly babies, I would slump in the corner of the benches in a series of 'scorned attitudes' hoping she would come looking for me, like James Cagney in Shanghai Lil. I would do anything up to twenty-seven dejected poses a night, before the Park Keeper threw me out. What I needed was consolation. All my mother gave me was Weetbix. Playing local dances, I would buy ginger ale, disguise it in a whisky glass hoping she would see me taking gulps in between trumpet solos, pretending I was drunk. I was now Robert Taylor. I would play sobbing trumpet choruses until even the Jews would shout 'Stop! Enough is enough.' I would wait at night on the opposite side to her house, with my Marks and Spencer's mackintosh (5s 3d in a sale) coat collar up, making sure when she came home with the new boyfriend, I would be standing under the gas lamp, smoking a cigarette. When they arrived, I would throw down the cigarette, stamp on it, place my hands in my pockets then walk away whistling Bing Crosby's 'The Thrill is Gone.' I did that every night of December. I got pneumonia. Just what I wanted! I wrote and told her I was dying! She sent me a get well card. I thought, one evening I would throw myself from the bandstand and crash at the feet of her and her partner. Before I could, she moved her dancing habitat elsewhere. On the night I planned it, I sat sweating. Finally I had to go to the Gents and remove the padding stuffed up the front of my shirt to take the shock of the fall. She met someone with a car, I used to give chase, shouting threats. After a year of this I'd had the shoes resoled fifty times, chased the car 1073 miles, lost hope and had calves like Nurayev, but, I imagined, like Camille, she would return one winter's night to die in my arms at 50 Riseldine Road, Brockley Rise, S.E.26. I'd offer her Champagne (Ovaltine), she would ask me to play 'Honeysuckle Rose' on my trumpet and then die. It didn't happen."
- Maryann

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