Reading Adventures on the Train. . .

While travelling around the U.K. on my various day trips, I've never been without a book in my bag to while away the less picturesque parts and the endless platform waiting.   I think train reading should always be fun, heavily plot-driven and if it also has its fair share of rail content, then all the better for this train-lit connoisseur.

I picked up a copy of Maurice Dekobra's The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, translated by Neal Wainwright at Daunts Books, one of my favourite bookstores in London.  It's part of Melville House's terrific Neversink Library - another series of rediscovered classics and translated literature that I'm gradually making my way through (I've already reviewed The Train and The President by Georges Simenon and After Midnight by Irmgard Keun - all fantastic reads).  This novel, originally published in 1927, bills itself as one of "the biggest bestsellers of all time, and one of the first and most influential spy novels of the twentieth century".  I enjoyed this  book very much but not necessarily for the blurb description which drew me to it in the first place.  A "delightful romp" it certainly is, but not so much about spying as it is about, well, quite simply sex, though not at all of a gratuitous or pornographic nature. The plot is a bit flimsy;  our hero, Prince Gerard Séliman, secretary to the beautiful and sexy Lady Diana Wynham, the "madonna" of the title, sets off to Russia to ensure the financial validity of some oil wells left to Diana by her late husband and her last chance to escape financial ruin.  In order to get the Russian communist government to allow foreign investment, Diana has had to seduce Varichkine, the Soviet representative in Berlin, who wants her to become his wife in return for his influence.  Looming large is the indomitable Irina Mouravieff, high up in the Soviet command and Varichkine's mistress who is out for revenge (she would be perfect as a Bond villian) who is following Gerard's every move with potentially deadly results.  What dominates this novel though, are the strong women surrounding Gerard (including Klara, a German spy, and his estranged wife Griselda who suspects him of a dalliance with her stepdaughter), who matter-of-factly use their sexual attraction very strategically to the bemusement and barely concealed delight of Gerard.  The atmosphere including risque German nightclubs and even a Russian prison, is also conducive to sexual politics where the naked body (or humiliation of it) becomes a tool for both political and social power. Even Lady Diana shocks society by doing a striptease, ostensibly for charity, but with her own ulterior motives. It all provides quite the frisson to the backdrop of what is basically an adventure story with some dazzling (and very witty) dialogue and some very unusual and liberating depictions of the "New Woman" of the 1920s.  My one disappointment - there wasn't as much action on the trains as the title might have suggested, but I still enjoyed the journey.

It still shocks me that despite the fact that many of Michael Innes' books are still in print (published by the admirable House of Stratus), you'd be hard pressed to find any titles in a bookstore - independent or chain - or more than one or two in a library, and trust me, I've been looking.  I think he's one of Britain's best mystery writers and his books never fail to entertain with their wit and cynicism.  Appleby and the Ospreys is one of his later works, written in 1986, but with its small village setting embedded with inevitable class consciousness, the reader could be excused for thinking they've stumbled on a classic crime novel from the 1930s or 40s.  Sir John Appleby has officially retired but still likes to "run into mysteries accidentally on purpose." And like most series sleuths, people readily comply by ending up dead in his vicinity.  In this case, the victim is Lord Osprey, owner of a valuable collection of coins, whose dead body is found shortly after the Applebys have visited his mansion.  This is a fun take (spoof would be too undignified), on the typical English country house murder with all of the usual elements at play: a body found in the library, a group of house guests, many with a suitable motive, who are uncannily calm about events, red herrings and of course, the all-knowing and all-seeing butler.  I just never get tired of reading Innes and readily scour used bookstores for old Penguin editions of his books.

Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret novels are another guilty pleasure, but I also enjoy his psychological romans dur and have several taunting me on my NYRB Classics bookshelf. Sadly, despite its tantalising title, I found Act of Passion, translated by Louise Varèse rather dispiriting. The novel is told in the form of a letter written by convicted killer Charles Alavoine to his examining magistrate.  It begins: "I should like one man, just one, to understand me. And I would like that man to be you."  What follows is the story of his life and the events leading up to his crime.  Alavoine is similar to many of Simenon's characters - a loner, bored with his bourgeois respectable life and an unfulfilling marriage, and seeking to escape his own inadequacies with darker adventures mostly of a sexual nature.  But unlike say, Marcel in the aforementioned The Train, whose bid for personal freedom has far greater moral, historical and dangerous implications, Alavoine's indifferent egotism quickly gets annoying and the "love" that motivates his crime never entirely convinces. I have no problems with a thoroughly unlikeable protagonist but this one quickly bored me. It won't stop me though from eventually making my way through all the NYRB Classic Simenons; he's such a good writer that I can easily excuse a lesser offering.

On Track With Another Neversink. . .

I'm taking a wee break from the novellas to return to another of my Melville passions - their fantastic Neversink Library which aims to bring back lost classics, many of them in translation. I so completely trust their editorial acumen that I'm determined to read them all. The series kicked off earlier this year with Irmgard Keun's wonderful After Midnight, reviewed here, and now I've read Georges Simenon's equally atmospheric The Train, translated by Robert Baldick.

I could not put this little gem down; Simenon is just so good at narrative voice. The Germans have invaded Belgium and are advancing on Northern France. Marcel Feron, a married man with a small daughter and another child on the way, lives very simply with his wife in a small French town, fixing radios and raising chickens. He says he is perfectly happy. But as the Nazis advance, the people in the town start packing up to try and catch one of the last trains leaving the area. Marcel suddenly decides to join them, not so much out of concern for his family's safety, but through a nagging premonition that this is his opportunity to encounter Fate:

I wasn't responsible anymore. Perhaps that's the word, perhaps that's what I was trying to explain just now. Only the day before, it had been up to me to manage my life and that of my family, to earn a living, to arrange for things to happen in the way things have to happen.
But not now. I had lost my roots. I was no longer Marcel Feron, radio engineer in a newish district of Fumay, not far from the Meuse, but one man among millions whom superior forces were going to toss about at will. . . From now on, decisions were no longer any concern of mine. Instead of my own palpitations, I was beginning to feel a sort of general palpitation. I wasn't living at my tempo anymore, but at the tempo of the radio, of the street, of the town which was waking up much faster than usual.

At the station, the men are separated into different carriages from the women and children, and Marcel completely loses track of his family when his freight car is uncoupled during the night. Strangely calm and nonplussed, he continues his long rail journey, forming a relationship with Anna, a mysterious young woman, reticent about her past, who climbs into the train without any luggage. The story follows their affair as they travel towards a refugee camp in the south of France, and these portions reminded me very much of the similar chaos described in Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française. Marcel is narrating this episode from a period many years in the future. His voice has a calm wistfulness about it but his detachment is his undoing. This is very much a tale of lost opportunity, both for happiness and a self-redeeming and self-esteeming decency. Here, Fate is not going to trump personality and cowardice. The ending was just superb. I will be thinking about this book for quite a while.

Two Very Different World War II Novels. . .

I've just read a great pairing of two very interesting novels, completely different in style, but both written by Germans, both containing short narratives compressed into just a few days, and each ostensibly - but not exclusively - about the Second World War, with one set just before, and one taking place during its end. I've previously read and enjoyed two novels by Irmgard Keun: The Artificial Silk Girl (reviewed here) and Child of All Nations. So I was thrilled to see that the inaugural book in Melville House's exciting new imprint, The Neversink Library, was Keun's 1937 novel After Midnight, translated by Anthea Bell.
After Midnight is far more political than the other two novels. It's the late 1930s and Sanna is a young woman living in Frankfurt with her older stepbrother Algin, a writer who has had some previous fame with one of his novels having been turned into a movie, but whose work has drawn the ire of the Nazis. Sanna who admits she is uneducated and ignorant of the world, is trying to enjoy an ordinary life, gossiping about men with her friends, hanging out in bars drinking, and helping Algin's wife Liska plan a party. But inevitably politics dangerously intrudes, most obviously in the appearance of Hitler himself, as the city makes preparations for his visit. Her best friend Gerti is in love with a man who is half-Jewish. Liska is in love with Heini, a writer who openly and cynically criticizes the new regime. They have Jewish friends who are trying to escape the country. Like Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone, this is a world full of the paranoia of not being able to trust your neighbour, grudges turning into denunciations, and the fear, and isolating loneliness of trying to live up to principles in a crazy world. It's a place where wives go out to buy lots of alcohol for their husbands, hoping to entice them to drink at home instead of in a bar where one loose, intoxicated word could lead to an arrest. But Keun has a lighter touch than Fallada; her female narrators are always young, naive and vulnerable but with a cynical toughness at their core and an ability to apply the hypocrises of daily life to the larger historical events. Sanna is learning as much about the pain and complexities of love as she is about politics and she states her discoveries - such as her thoughts about Gerti's predicament - very directly, if somewhat innocently:

It's hard enough to know your way around all the rules the authorities lay down for business - business as we all know, can be very trickily organized - and now we have to know the rules of love too. It isn't easy, it really isn't. Before you know it, you may find yourself castrated or in prison, which is not pleasant. Love is supposed to be all right, and German women are supposed to have children, but before you can do that some sort of process involving feelings is called for. And the law says no mistakes must be made in the process. I suppose the safest thing is not to love anyone at all. For as long as that's allowed.

The novel depicts a couple of days in Sanna's life as she interacts with various self-absorbed characters who later appear as guests at the party, while trying to wrestle with her own feelings of love and pity for a cousin who has turned up unexpectedly. There is so much wonderful imagery, dialogue and disillusionment packed into this novel's brief slice of Weimar life, along with a poignant commentary on the plight of German writers during this time, struggling with their conscience to make a living in an atmosphere of censorship. As Heini remarks: "A writer who is afraid is no true writer." I really loved this novel; it was both gutsy and poetic. I'm sure there's a PhD thesis out there on the role of parties as precursor to death or disaster in 20th century literature - think Mrs. Dalloway or Joyce's "The Dead" - and while I wouldn't quite put Keun in that tight circle of masterpieces, I do think she's owed a spot on the guest list.

Heinrich Böll’s 1949 novel The Train Was on Time, translated by Leila Vennewitz, is also published by Melville House as part of their Essential Heinrich Böll series. This was his first novel, and the first writing of his that I've read. It follows a few days in the life of Andreas, a twenty-four year old German soldier, as he travels by train towards the Eastern Front, during the last year of the war. He becomes convinced that he will die shortly - this coming Sunday - and it will be somewhere en route between Lvov and Cernauti. He becomes obsessed with the word "soon"; a rhythmic mantra that both soothes and drives him crazy as the train carries on:

Soon. Soon. Soon. Soon. When is Soon? What a terrible word: Soon. Soon can mean in one second, Soon can mean in one year. Soon is a terrible word. This Soon compresses the future, shrinks it, offers no certainty, no certainty whatever, it stands for absolute uncertainty. Soon is nothing and Soon is a lot. Soon is everything. Soon is death. . .

The reader could replace "soon" with "war" or even "this novel" and you would have the thematic gist of this story. Certain of his predicament, Andreas engages in both the ordinary - eating, drinking, playing cards with two fellow soldiers in the corridor of the train - and the philosophical. He thinks back to a pair of enigmatic female eyes he briefly saw as he was wounded. He thinks about his chaplain friend Paul and tries to pray, not only for all the people he has hurt or insulted in the past, but also the millions of Jews who have been murdered by the Nazis. His last night is spent in the company of a Polish prostitute and spy, in one last attempt to grasp some meaning out of life, to find some human connection of commonality and empathy, and perhaps to even contemplate escaping his fate. This was a novel with far more claustrophobic interiority and existential, almost nightmarish angst than Keun's, but no less urgent in its tale of inevitable despair and the yearning for life's beauty and humanity.