Good books are hard to find , and when you want to lay your hands on the best works its best to look at options online.For this year, the most incredible and undeniable works have been in the section of the Ionesconean school , the treatise of the absurd.
The most bracing read was The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1940 (Cambridge), a portrait of the Dubliner as a young European with a hard gemlike gift for language, learning and mockery.If satire, farce and sarcasm had to be a tutelage of the elite, then these would come beat from the pangs and rage of the superfluous yet innately deep rooted understanding voice of Britain. The dry humor is stifflingly particular of escaping loopholes, but quite likely , not the sub-standard époque intellect of the American tune as in “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee.The co-ordinates are amiss in American literature , much as they echo loud in the exuberantly English fluidity of thought and concept. Irish writing has dark humor explicit in nonchalant ongoing life as it is, where in American bouts and fetish the somber charms unfold as of an unborn child.
Beckett’s genius exercises itself most exuberantly in the correspondence with Thomas MacGreevy, another Irish poet more at home in Paris, his senior but his soulmate. Constantly Beckett is veering between certainty about his need to write and doubt about the results, all expressed in prose that is undoubting, delighted and demanding.
Which might be one way of describing John Banville’s The Infinities (Picador), a novel (if that is the word for a work that flaunts its Ovidian art so mischievously) where the gods are not so much ex machina as in flagrante and where this author once again surprises by a fine excess. The gradients are necessary in history , math and in Literature.Bound as it is with philosophie of the milieu, true work of art is a compository outcome of individuality and learnedness. There is a deep lineage in the Scottish to delve into the profusely ineffects, bulging them into propounds of theory that is obsolete, and nostalgic.True factualness comes from the artist when he is evocatively separate from his experience and educational prejudices.
Surprise abounds also in Paul Durcan’s Life Is a Dream (Harvill Secker), the poet’s selection from his variously heartbreaking, hilarious, Hibernia-baiting work done between 1967 and 2007. Durcan’s copious bitter-sweet clowning is a way of telling the truth slant, but William Golding’s 5,000-page journal seems to have told it direct, and as such was a valuable source for John Carey’s compelling, revealing and very readable William Golding: The man who wrote “Lord of the Flies” (Faber). This is “official” biography but nothing seems to have been off the record.
To read Allan Massie’s review of William Golding: The who wrote “Lord of the Flies”, click here. “The Fly” is also another pertinent short story, where a housefly is brutally drowned into a pool of ink, masochistic sadism , where a father has been fervently devoted to his desk and job rather than to the demise of a special son.
János Kis’s Politics as a Moral Problem (Central European University Press) is a superb study of the problem of dirty hands in politics, particularly democratic politics – the moral dilemmas that politicians face in achieving, maintaining, and exercising power.
