How do you cope with a really disappointing book?

When I picked up The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, I was sure I was on to a winner. Russian novelist? Brilliant. Magic Realism? Check my bookshelf – it’s stuffed with it. The devil appearing as an undercover character? Love it. Talking cat – don’t even need to say it. So on opening my battered copy, I was excited. 

A hundred pages in – I couldn’t care less. So I stopped reading it. I can’t explain to you why – maybe the cultural nuances failed to translate for me, maybe there were too many subversive Russian male poets called Nikolayevich – but I couldn’t summon any enthusiasm for it.

Actually coming to a point of not wanting to finish a book has happened to me many, many times before – I do have an English degree after all, and my lecturers seemed to have a particular enthusiasm for Joseph Conrad – but abandoning a book that seemed like it would be amazing is a terrible feeling. I’ve found myself in a grip of self-doubt: what if it’s me, not the book? Is it my own ignorance and philistine brain that’s holding me back from loving this book? THERE’S A CAT WHO POURS HIMSELF VODKA - there is literally nothing on this earth that makes me more excited than that prospect.

This doesn’t often happen with me. When I think I’m going to like a book, having a rough idea of what it’s all about, I usually do. Things I think I’ll hate, I usually do – case in point, Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye – if you’re an angry young man who likes smacking people around and don’t much like women, knock yourself out. I entered into Bukowski's grimy world fully aware that it would not agree with me. But this? Awful.

So I’m feeling bruised and sore. It feels like being rejected by a boy at a school disco. Damn you Mikhail!

Have you experienced this? Am I blowing this out of proportion, or do you feel bad when you give up on a book that promised so much, and failed to deliver for you? 

Congratulations Hilary Mantel!

This week, Hilary won the Booker Prize for the second instalment in her Tudor trilogy Bring Up the Bodies, a mere 3 years after winning for Wolf Hall.  She joins the novelists Peter Carey, and one of my scared-cow favourite writers, J.M. Coetzee as the only three writers to win the Booker twice; and if you really love to fact-crunch, she's the first female novelist to do so, and the first writer to win for a sequel. What an amazing achievement - many congratulations to her.

Are you pleased to see Bring Up the Bodies lauded? Are you disappointed that your favourite novel missed out? Are you as relieved as I am that you are not her, and you don't face the gargantuan task of writing the third in the trilogy? It's like being born into a family of a Nobel prize winners.

Zadie Smith's NW: Classic Modernism for the 21st Century

Almost 90 years ago, T.S. Eliot reviewed James Joyce's newest novel Ulysses with a huge amount of praise for its experimental style, noting that it's challenging structure acted as “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” For those of you unsure of the exact impetus of the movement that came to be known as Modernism (which is all of us - even, I suspect, people who hold Phd's on the subject, as it is so determinedly slippery and elusive), a rough approximation is that its practitioners wrote as a backlash to what came before: challenging representation at a time, following the First World War, that the world was reeling from a global conflict so totally devastating and insidious, that all felt that the world had fundamentally changed for the worse. A classic, and to my mind insurmountable piece of work reflecting this was Eliot's own poem 'The Wasteland': possibly the bleakest piece of poetry engaging with the state of the world ever written. 

Another face of Modernism, which I feel Zadie Smith allies herself more closely to in NW came in the form of writers such as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and E.M. Forster, whose main projects focused on the representation of the psyche; more self-aware and seemingly fragmented than before. In NW, she probes the psyches of interconnected NW residents, exploring the transition from adolescence to terrifying adult life with its pressures and complexity. What I really liked about NW, as in Zadie's previous novels, were the pithy aphorisms about life lived in the 21st century. Where it's different to her previous works is the determined change of register between narratives: for philosophy graduate Leah, the narrative is meandering, ponderous, measured: for sharp yet confused lawyer turned urbane yummy-mummy Natalie, her observations are organised into note-form - titled and brief, to help compile the case later. The allusions may be to our everyday; the slightly stereotypical characters drawn from cultural currency, but the form and the spirit is purely, classically Modernist. She's observing the world through the same prism as the Bloomsbury set; which could be an unbearable and alienating exercise, but, come on, it's Zadie. It's good. And a lot more fun that Mrs Dalloway. 

Exhibition Review: Shakespeare - Staging the World at the British Museum

Last weekend I went to the Staging the World Exhibition at the British Museum, which is running until the 25th November. It may be sacrilege to say it, but for me, the Bard is a little hit and miss. I love his sparky comedies like Much Ado, Twelfth Night, his synthesis of the supernatural in Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream, his measurements of what it is to be human in King Lear and Othello. I bloody loathe Romeo and Juliet. I can't get behind the frankly boring History plays.

As such, I expected to emerge from this exhibition with mixed feelings because of the subject, and I did: and additionally I found the exhibition a bit of a mess. The exhibition incorporated two elements to its experience. Firstly, there were relics which were tenuously related to Shakespeare, and Elizabethan and Jacobean society; and their links to the wider world. Secondly, the stronger element in my mind, an interactive counterpart provided by the RSC: projections and recordings of actors performing snippets of 'relevant' soliloquies, speeches and dialogue. A memorable example for me was the brilliant opening scene of Macbeth performed by the witches providing an aural background to a room exploring King James' crusade against witchcraft in Britain.

The overall idea of the exhibition was to explore how Shakespeare gave voice to the increasingly globalised society of the turn of the 1600's. I didn't particularly care for it: it gave me very little sense of his writing, and didn't particularly provide me with new insights into that time.

If you're interested in coins, by all means, throw yourself into this exhibition with enthusiasm. If you're a rapid Shakespeare fan, likewise. For anyone unsure like me, or with any interest in insightful historical documentation, avoid. I'd love to have been in the room when the poor curators were briefed on this. 'Do we have to?' 'I feel like this has been done.' 'Oh well. Let's scour some UK museums for some Jacobean coins.' 'Errrrggghhh. Ok.'