Lament

1. For a while now the charter known as Sawyer no. 582, number 15 in my edition, King Eadwig granting about a hundred hides at Chalke in Wiltshire to Wilton Abbey, with extensive bounds perhaps "clarified" by the nunnery itself later, has seemed to me like an enormous ancient crocodile covered with old battle scars sunning himself on a riverbank, occasionally snatching at a goat or even a small child. I have already produced eleven pages of Old English place-name elements, references to nineteenth-century parish boundaries, and Ordnance Survey grid references, and it's not finished. The last one, no. 14, for two completely unidentifiable hides of land in odd places, was more like some sort of hard-to-remove skin rash, perhaps caused by subcutaneous mites. The battle between me and the charters is a bit like Merlin's fight with the witch in the cartoon of The Sword and the Stone. I think I'll win in the end. Perhaps I am a disease that the charters caught.

2. People do go on about the bad effects of google books, the way pages don't come out right, things get misfiled, and you should hear the French on the way that the project assumes all wisdom is to be found in English... it's become a bit of a truism. This afternoon, thinking that I had found something to help me deal with the tithe maps of Wilton, I clicked on the link to the appropriate chapter of a book whose contents page came out fine, and instead got something about early commentaries on something called the Su wen, in particular those by Wang Bing. "Wang Bing's demonology did not preclude him from voicing commentaries on the Su wen that appear rather attractive even from the modern scientific hindsight of today." Then it quotes and comments thus: " "Huang Di: Is the earth supported? Qi Bo: The Grand Qi supports it." This is, of course, a perfectly adequate statement even from the viewpoint of modern science." Am I better off for encountering this? I don't know. I like that the modern author feels the need to justify his or her work to "modern science". There are many obvious parallels there -- I just can't be bothered to draw them. The catalogue of English tithe maps goes on my list of things to look at in a real non-virtual library.

3. I haven't book-blogged for ages and ages, so I won't be able to remember what I've read. I think that last time I wrote I was extolling the easy narrative values of the classics. Almost immediately I came across one of the downsides, because I encountered two remarkably racist books in a row. I can't remember what the first one was but the second was Melville's Benito Cereno. I'm sure modern literary scholars read it as slyly ironic, but I think it's just the sort of patronising prejudice which makes you want to cry and smash something when you find it applied to you. I read Manzoni's The Betrothed, I Promessi Sposi as Daniel Day Lewis would lisp, because it's a local book and is apparently very important for Italians. It turned out to be much more readable than I was expecting, and even to have that sort of dry Scandinavian humour that I associate with the sagas, the films of Ingmar Bergman, and Prof. Page over the port at combination. On the hen-pecked alchemy afficionado Don Ferrante: "More than once he had modestly observed that essence, universals, the soul of the world and the nature of things were not such simple matters as one might suppose."
I can't even look at my shelves to remind me of what I've read because I've left books in places and also given them away. Fiona took five, but the only one of those I can remember is Charlotte Mendelson's When We Were Bad, which was funny. Is it just me or has there been an upsurge in Jewish lesbian literature recently? Iain Banks' The Steep Approach to Garbadale was very Iain Banks, quite good but with a complex family history, a man haunted by his teenage sexual experiences, just a hint of geek. It's most like The Crow Road of his previous ones, but The Crow Road is the better. Tobias Wolff's Old School came with a high recommendation and I was a bit disappointed; however well-written it might be, the subject matter is just dull and embarrassing -- basically posh boys at a posh boys' school in America try to write fiction and are secretly ashamed of being Jewish. Fiona declined to take it away on the grounds that when she opened it at random she read "That evening I started a new poem". Parot's The Chatelet Apprentice was sufficiently good, though it is one of those books where people start being impressed by the hero and you think, what? what did he do? because it just doesn't seem that clever. In Venice I read Calvino's Invisible Cities, which I think is now my favourite of his jointly with Cosmicomics; and Szerb's Journey by Moonlight, which starts in Venice in the odd little backstreets by night. It was good, like all his stuff. I think The Pendragon Legend is my favourite, though. Also there I read Jan Morris' Venetian Bestiary, which seemed a bit over-whimsical to me. And she says that Venice is full of cats everywhere but I didn't see one, not like in Istanbul where they were lurking on every wall and through every doorway, and I fell in love with the long grey and yellow one at the Archaeological Museum who climbed onto my shoulder and used it to survey the park. The City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish starts off with a strange air of reluctance, and reading the thanks you get the impression that his editor might have had to chain him to a radiator to make him finish it, but it quickly becomes fascinating. It's basically about the Oxyrhynchus papyri. I liked the mention of a book which takes auguries from sudden involuntary twitches. Lionel Shriver's The Post-Birthday World is quite good but her attempt to render a convincing Cockney character is so wrong as to inject an air of magic realism into the whole thing -- it gives the snooker player an other-worldly air which is certainly unintentional. My copy had that awful PS thing at the end for book groups, which I wish they would stop doing. For once, though, it was vaguely interesting. The book is about a woman who has to decide whether or not to kiss the afore-mentioned cockernee, and then it splits Sliding-Doors style into two separate narratives depending on what she did. Ms Shriver said in the interview that the book asks us who we would choose out of the two men. My immediate reaction was neither, of course, because they're both terrible self-obsessed bores. The heroine is apparently a "post-feminist" in her need for a man more than anything else in her life; an alternative label would be "creepy idiot". I may not be the most balanced person in the world but I'm sometimes amazed at the neuroses other people come up with.
Victor Pelevin's The Sacred Book of Werewolf is great, and may become some sort of cult success, i.e. maybe it's what all the kids are reading. (Are you, kids? I'd like to know.) It's about a fox-like creature living in Moscow as a hooker, the only respectable way for a fox to earn her bread. "I don't need anything from human beings except love and money", she says. Given all those novels over the last couple of millennia which have claimed to be real documents when they're not and occasionally fool people (like the diary of Louis XIV which recently took some biographer in, and the diary of Mrs Pepys (scroll down this Graun page) which still trips people up sometimes -- have they not heard of the phrase too good to be true?), I quite liked that it starts with a prologue declaring that the whole thing is a shameless forgery filled with half-baked orientalist nonsense, and that for decency's sake they have had to change the original title from "So Fucking What?". Which would be a good name for a novel. Read it, it's unusual. I ended up jotting down several quotes from it but I won't burden you with them here, except that I liked the fox's fascination with "Stephen Hawking's horror stories". A quote from the Independent on the back described Pelevin as the "Zen Buddhist Will Self of the former Evil Empire". If I were describing him like that I think I'd say that there's also a bit of Tibor Fischer, some Jeanette Winterson and a hint of Chuck Palahniuk. Go Pelevin!
Darkmans by Nicola Barker is likewise very good. It manages to combine being a forward-driving narrative with being original and a bit strange. I might go and read everything that she's written now. It reminds me of Mantel's Beyond Black, only not as throat-slittingly depressing. I also read The Jungle Book, which is amiable enough. It's wierd reading Kipling; he has this intense sympathy with India, especially with its many traditions and its wild places, but coupled with an absolute certainty that the white man can make it all alright. The Last Ride by Thomas Eidson is about a time when the Wild West was still full of vast spaces and utterly brutal. It's about a very old man who tries to track a girl kidnapped by Apaches. Definitely worth reading, even if, like me, you don't really like westerns. I think I'll remember his name for when I'm in the mood for that sort of book. And this evening I started Jed Mercurio's Ascent. I am very sorry people who really liked it, but I am officially giving up on page 54 because it is marrow-drainingly dull.