An African In Greenland, Tété-Michel Kpomassie

An unusual (for me) foray into non-fiction with this rather unique ethnographic travelogue. I caught reference to it in a brief magazine report on BBC News 24 a few months ago, but an intriguing enough one to pick up the book.

In outline, a boy in Africa discovers Greenland and its native Inuit in a book, then spends several years steadily travelling through Africa and then Europe before finally taking the final leg to Greenland by sea. It sounds like a work of magical realism, but it's actually a richly detailed description of this journey, and of the author's subsequent time in various Greenland towns on the Labrador Sea coast.

And what detail! Kpomassie has an excellent eye, and a real gift in the telling. Whether it's the range of reactions to his colour and imposing size, the unique Greenlandic living and cultural practices, the extensive friendships he forms, his adventures on the sea or on the ice, or his gruelling (for a vegetarian) descriptions of local cuisine, it's all told with engaging flair. It helps that Kpomassie makes friends easily, bringing him into contact with a range of fascinating (and occasionally alarming) characters. His ability to rock up in a new city, town or fishing village, and then find himself digs with locals at (seemingly) the drop of a hat is really quite something. And his unique heritage and winning ways with local women certainly made me wonder if he made a longer-term mark on the Greenlandic gene pool!

Where the book sags a bit is in its episodic nature and its absence of a strong narrative journey - inevitable given it's a travelogue of a real actual journey. But the tale it tells is so good, the situations, the people, and the society so unique, that the book easily carries you with it. Well worth checking out.

Finally, Kpomassie's journey having taken place in the 1960s, it's also sobering to reflect on the climatic and cultural changes that the intervening decades have wrought.

Forged Apology

Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Lee Israel

Now, as its cover notes, "A Major Motion Picture", this slim memoir serves as an excellent - and delightfully acid - complement to the fine work of Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant.

For those unfamiliar with the tale, it's a memoir by the biographer Lee Israel of her foray into the forgery of celebrity correspondence. At a low financial ebb after a disastrously rushed biography of Estée Lauder, Israel almost accidentally blunders into this secondary career. Initially through the selling of embellished letters, she ultimately creates them wholesale, for writers including Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker (after whom the book draws its title). With some attention to detail, including period typewriters plus solid impersonation, as well as the insertion of wicked details, her work becomes a money-spinner within the dubious world of celebrity memorabilia. Inevitably, after the rise comes the fall, but not before a highly enjoyable reveal of the tricks of the trade. Israel is absolutely unrepentant in her telling, which makes for a gleeful read, though one that lightly glosses over the straightened circumstances that led her to crime in the first place.

Viewers of the film might be a little annoyed to discover its changes to certain details of Israel's story (most obviously around a feline character), but I think it stands up well despite these minor tweaks. And I'd simply never have read and enjoyed this delicious takedown of the lucrative celebrity memorabilia market / minor meditation on "getting into character" if I hadn't seen the excellent film adaptation first.

Not Batman

Safe to say, this is a pretty unusual entry both for this blog and in the pantheon of graphic novels.

Logicomix, written by two Greek academics, Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou (plus two graphic artists), is a strange and original exploration of logic and its history in the first half of the 20th century (apparently the "logicist period"). The novel is fractured across three distinct strands: a long, and periodically interrupted, present-day discussion between the authors about logic; a lecture delivered in the USA by the logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell at the outbreak of World War II; and a biographical narrative of Russell's life, both professional and personal, that in part forms the subject of this lecture. While this sounds rather complex, it provides a framework for introducing and exploring the nature of logic, its promise of providing a unifying foundation for science and rationality, and its ultimate limitations. While Russell is not responsible for logic's greatest leaps (which, in fact, dash his hopes), his faith in its power and his efforts to promote it make him a key midwife to its evolution, as well as an appropriate choice for narrator. As the novel unfolds, the early gains by the likes of Russell, his collaborator, Alfred North Whitehead, and the members of the Vienna Circle (among others) give way to the wrecking ball of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Kurt Gödel's damning incompleteness theorems.

You've got to take your hat off to the authors of this volume. It brings a whole load of serious, serious thought to a medium where, traditionally, the deepest thought is that perhaps, just perhaps, Batman has ambiguous morality.^[1] And it does so while still being a pretty easy read, and one that uses cross-linking narrative strands and trendy post-modern self-referencing to dodge potentially dry, stodgy point-making. Personally, I didn't learn an awful lot that I wasn't already (partially) aware of, but I don't think I'm the ideal audience. While the authors hail from academia, they're keen that such an important subject is communicated as widely as possible. And I think they'll generally be pretty successful given this novel.

Where the novel doesn't quite succeed is in making Russell serve as his own biographer from his 1939 lecture. This seemed unnecessary to me, since the (somewhat post-modern) discussion between the authors could have quite happily served the same job. And the portentousness of the timing is never quite realised or justified. I can only assume that beginning the novel with a direct reference to WWII is somehow supposed to either shed light on our own time, or to someone conjure a compare-and-contrast between rationality and senseless violence. Or something. If I'd been the authors, I'd definitely have either ditched this strand or been a lot more explicit about what its relevance was. Oh, and I might have soft-pedalled on the Greek Tragedy sections as well.

But, all that said, a pretty unique and engaging stab at something new. Consider my hat doffed.

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[1] I'm saying this like I'm some sort of expert on graphic novels. I'm not - I've only read a handful in total, and while I like to think that I've chosen well and that they weren't brain-dead, they do include Aliens vs. Predator.

Blurred

A bit of a break with traditional reading patterns this time: a biography - indeed, an autobiography. For reasons I can't entirely pin down, I've never been interested in reading anything beyond fiction or popular treatments of science, etc. Although I've enjoyed the occasional biographical asides in the latter, and the veiled hint that the former are partially biography, I've not felt the need to read formal biography. Unsurprisingly then, I'm only coming to it now because of a birthday present from C. Knowing of my great love for the UK band Blur, she bought me the autobiography of its bassist, Alex James.

That said, I suspect it's not the most typical of introductions to the literary genre for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's written (rather than ghostwritten) by someone with an atypical job relative to most public figures who come to my attention, namely one in popular music. Secondly, although the subject is an artist, the book contains practically nothing about his art. This came as something of a surprise, and I suspect some readers might feel a bit cheated to find the book's pages bereft of anything about their favourite music beyond vague, passing remarks.

This latter point certainly undercut my expectations for this book. I'd expected, probably hoped, to find out interesting points about particular songs and albums, but the book stays well away from this sort of dissection. To the extent that it's at times difficult to work out when the author is talking about since he doesn't even use his band's discography for temporal stratigraphy.

Instead, the book is a rambling overview of James' childhood and his life during the Blur years, that finishes up with him settling down with a wife (and, inexplicably, a pig farm). He skips the music to focus instead on the everyday, and increasingly less-everyday, aspects of his rock star life. Large quantities of drugs are consumed, wall-to-wall sexual adventures are passingly alluded to, but the book does find time to fill in some unexpected details.

These include a walk-on part for the artist Damien Hirst who, contrary to my expectations, comes off as a talented and entertaining friend to James. Also, James waxes lyrical about his infatuation with astronomy, which ultimately led to the (ultimately) unsuccessful Beagle 2 mission to Mars. And, along the way, James becomes a qualified pilot, and gets quite poetic about his flying around Europe and Africa.

So, though it has a near-total lack of any backstory or discussion of Blur's hits, the book does make for an interesting read. But it's safe to say that James is not the most natural or fluid of writers. His prose frequently reads like conversation, with a repetitive patter that works in speech but less in print. And he has something of a bad habit of being overenthusiastic about everything. The reader is breathlessly introduced to some arbitrary subject (flying, touring, cheese shops) that is then described as James' favourite and the best-ever. Although it would have distorted his style, I did often think that James' editor could have stepped in and earned their keep more (or perhaps they did!).

One uneasy aspect to the book is James' treatment of his long-term girlfriend, Justine. She never really features much in the book, despite playing an ostensibly significant part for a long stretch (although this could be said about most of James' friends and family). Furthermore, although constantly apologetic towards her in his writing, James really didn't treat her very well during his ride with Blur. As success kicks in, tours quickly become an opportunity for (multiple) infidelity, and though James appears regretful about this, he still strung her along for a considerable period of time. And while it's difficult to be sure given the book's rather fluid chronology, it reads like she left him because of his lack of commitment, only for him to commit to his current wife in pretty short order.

Anyway, overall it's an interesting peek into contemporary rock star life, one that does contain a few nice surprises, but I can't say that it's won me over to biography as a form. It's doubtless far from the best introduction, but I'm still not particularly convinced that I want to take such a specific interest in the detail of the lives of others. I'm going to stick to novels.