Recently TK Maxx has had a great selection of books available below list price. (Including several different editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which felt a bit odd.) Over the last couple of months I've bought some older fiction that caught my eye. I'm going to review them in chronological order, starting with the oldest.
Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
I'd never read any Hemingway, and this might not have been the best novel to start with. However, it sounded interesting from the blurb on the back. The basic premise is that a bunch of dissolute American ex-pats living in Paris in the mid-1920s decide to go to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls and the bullfight there in the fiesta.
It's not all bullfights and drinking. Along the way some characters go fishing. There's a deep love for angling in the writing, almost as much as there is fascination for bullfighting. Within the group of tourists there is a woman who is the object of attention for several men, including the narrator, who is carrying a war injury. It's never spelled out but the inference is his wound prevents him from functioning sexually.
And that's about it. The various infatuated men either get with the woman or don't. The narrator seems detached from all their drama. The Spanish and French characters are just background or mainly there to be patronised. There's some antisemitism and a one character discusses a black boxer he admires using the N word to describe him.
And fair enough, the book was published in 1927 so what else would be expected. It's an outsider's viewpoint with an ingrained superiority and yet a hollow sense that the people they are so superior to actually have more authenticity. The main characters flit through and observe, are amused by what they see, and then flit off and in the process are utterly meaningless. The fiesta would happen with or without them.
Overall it hasn't inspired me to actively seek out any more Hemingway. It had its moments. (If you like fishing, I think you'd like that chunk of the story!) But I wasn't sorry to finish reading it.
Coming Up For Air - George Orwell
From the mid-20s to a novel published in 1939 and full of semi-prophetic foreboding about the looming war between Britain and Germany. There's a weighty inevitability to the coming conflict that is reflected throughout this novel - but it's what will come after that really terrifies the protagonist, an era of secret police and endless propaganda.
When I read On 1984 by DJ Taylor, which was a book about how Orwell wrote that book, this novel and Homage to Catalonia were mentioned as feeding into the key ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Having read both books now, I see what Taylor meant. There's a lot here about the way memories preserve things that have been otherwise obliterated by progress and how the world was going to change.
The book is set in four parts. In part 1, George, the 45 year-old protagonist is unsettled in his life as an insurance salesman, married with kids and trapped in suburbia. In part 2, he recounts his life growing up in a little Oxfordshire village, his experience in the First World War and his subsequent career in sales, made possible by the social upheavals caused by the war. In part 3, the hatches a plan to use some money that his wife doesn't know about to fund a trip back to the village he grew up in. And in part 4 he makes the trip which ultimately ends up in disappointment and realising that you can never truly go back.
There is quite a bit of humour in the book, particularly George's life story. There are several vignettes that capture some true-to-life experiences and observations of people. We stray into some unprogressive views when George the protagonist (and possibly George the author) shares some negative opinions about women, although in fairness several male characters come in for a verbal bruising as well.
Orwell is good at describing archetypal characters, like men living on faded glories, the genuinely wealthy, the penny-pinching middle-class who don't have funds to match their status, the tory-voting suburban families desperately working to pay their mortgages, and the hard-working, perpetually screwed-over poor. He has particular fun mocking the earnest young men who are various shades of communist and argue fine points of political dogma as if any of it matters. George (and probably George as well) are older and wiser than that and recognise it's all futile.
Despite that negative cast to the story, and the depressing conclusions drawn by the protagonist as his trip doesn't work out as he naively expected, I enjoyed reading this. I find Orwell a very readable author. His character's inner monologue is engaging, and while George the protagonist makes no claim to be a hero or a good person he is extraordinarily sympathetic. I might not have felt that if I had read the book when I was younger, but now I'm in my 40s and slightly horrified how long ago my school and university days are now, I get where he is coming from.
The Stepford Wives - Ira Levin
And so this trio of reviews jumps forward to the 1970s. This is a very short book, with incredibly lean prose. A lot is left to the imagination with one sentence or a short paragraph summing up key events that move the story forward.
I knew the basic outline of this story without ever having read it or seen any of the film adaptations. The main character is Joanna Eberhard, who moves with her husband, Walter, and children to the seemingly idyllic community of Stepford. She soon notices there is something odd and docile about most of the other women in the town and the few free spirits she encounters seem to be creepily changed somehow after a few months living there.
The basic gist is that the men of the town have a secret society and have found a way to turn their partners into "perfect" housewives. Joanna realises she needs to escape from Stepford to avoid a similar fate and the story takes a tense turn as she flees. That section was very well written and I had to keep reading to find out whether she made it out or not.
The edition I read had an introduction by Chuck Pahlahniuk, the author of Fight Club and several other novels. I read the intro after I had read the book - to avoid spoilers. (That proved to be a good choice!) Chuck thinks The Stepford Wives is a warning of a backlash against feminism and that Levin is just illustrating a more fundamental truth - men will just find a different way of putting women in boxes. It's an interesting take and shows that even a comparatively short novel can have depth and layers to it.
I recognised the titles of most of Levin's other novels and would like to read more of his work, which I think is the highest credit a reader can give. The Stepford Wives really captivated me and I've found myself thinking about it several times after I finished the book.
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