Four Books

After the imbroglio of the last week it was, with relief ,that I took flight to Faversham for some catharsis,specifically book buying and topping up of the pipe shag. Beforehand, I took the opportunity of playing some avant garde jazz on the music system, since cousin had to go to Sittingbourne. I picked out an Eddie Prevost Quartet CD “Continuum +” (Matchless) to listen and rediscover the plangent melange of sound created from studio and live recordings. The epiphenomenal cacophony of abstract sounds delineated the frustrations of the past week succinctly.

Bought four paperbacks today -

“Nova “ Samuel R. Delany (Gollancz)

The balance of galactic power in the 31st century revolves around Illyrion, the most precious energy source in the universe. The varied and exotic crew who sign up with Captain Lorq van Ray know their mission is dangerous, and they soon learn that they are involved in a deadly race with the charismatic but vicious leader of an opposing space federation. But they have no idea of Lorq's secret obsession: to gather Illyrion at source by flying through the very heart of an imploding star.




“Young Stalin” Simon Sebag Montefiore (Phoenix) , purchased for a mere 25p

Stalin remains one of the creators of our world - like Hitler, the personification of evil. Yet Stalin hid his past and remains mysterious. This enthralling biography that reads like a thriller finally unveils the secret but extraordinary journey of the Georgian cobbler's son who became the Red Tsar. What forms such a merciless psychopath and consummate politician? Was he illegitimate? Did he owe everything to his mother - was she whore or saint? Was he a Tsarist agent or Lenin's chief gangster? Was he to blame for his wife's premature death? If he really missed the 1917 Revolution, how did he emerge so powerful? Born in poverty, exceptional in his studies, this charismatic but dangerous boy was hailed as a romantic poet, trained as a priest, but found his mission as fanatical revolutionary. The secret world of Joseph Conrad-style terrorism was Stalin's natural habitat, where he charmed his future courtiers, made the enemies he later liquidated, and abandoned his many mistresses and children. Montefiore shows how the murderous paranoia and gangsterism of the criminal underworld, combined with pitiless ideology, taught Stalin how to triumph in the Kremlin




“Madam Bovary” Gustave Falubert (Penguin Classics)

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi'.






“Up The Walls Of The World” James Tiptree Jr. (Pan Books)

I had read this science fiction novel back in the late seventies. Years later I was delighted to find that I was correct in my assumption then that the author was a woman. "You have got to be kidding" I thought, reading the author biography on the dust jacket. It could only have been written by a woman - no man could possibly have perceived any world from that perceptive. I found the threads of psychic humans picking up the desperate telepathic cries for help of flying aliens great fun especially as the offspring of said aliens were raised by the males of the species - child-rearing being much to important to the race for it to be left to females. I ask you, what man in 1978 would have come up with that concept?

This is a pacey read and a great deal more optimistic than many of Tiptree's short stories. It has all the pizazz of her writing before she was outed as Alice Sheldon after which a certain fire seemed to have gone out. Perhaps the anonymity of the alias together with the buzz from the fact that this "guy" was so highly praised in the SF world were energising factors in her creative life. At least the derogatory attitudes then aimed at women writers in the genre were further dismantled by the discovery of her real identity. Too much egg on too many faces to retract.

This novel which has never been easy to find (I've never seen it in a bookshop till today) is well worth a read, it's a milestone if not a classic. Praise must go to Past Sentence for having a copy.




Reading science fiction again seems to be a recent idee fixe of mine, having just finished reading “A Scanner Darkly” by Philip K Dick as well as having an omnibus of short stories by the same author.

I also have started reading another Le Carre novel from the library "Call of The Dead" featuring the author's alter ego George Smiley.