Measuring the World - Daniel Kehlmann

Last night (27/06/2007) we (Tim, Tim, Chris, John and Ian) discussed "Measuring the World". 6/10 was our combined score with no one giving it much less or much more. Given the hyperbole on the cover we were all a little disappointed. Overall we were confused as to it's meaning or direction although we enjoyed it's characterisation and some of the tales. We wondered if something was lost in translation and found the lack of quotation marks confusing and annoying. It was a little too fanciful (spaceship up the amazon) but maybe we are missing the joke/point aimed at German classism and it's failure to understand or measure humanity itself.

Roger who could not attend however liked it :-

Sorry I couldn't make it last night, but I thought I'd add my brief comments
on the book. Too much hype on the back cover, and a slow start seemingly
fulfilling the stereotype about one-dimensional German writing. However, as
it went on, the book got better, as did the humour. The relationship between
Bonpard and Humboldt was particularly good - especially when climbing the
mountain, and Gauss also becomes a much more interesting character as the
book progressed. So, I ended up really enjoying it, and it made me look the
characters up on the internet, so I learned something aswell.

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart

Read the following poem, which is the source of the title of Achebe's novel:

William Butler Yeats: "The Second Coming" (1921)

Yeats was attracted to the spiritual and occult world and fashioned for himself an elaborate mythology to explain human experience. "The Second Coming," written after the catastrophe of World War I and with communism and fascism rising, is a compelling glimpse of an inhuman world about to be born. Yeats believed that history in part moved in two thousand-year cycles. The Christian era, which followed that of the ancient world, was about to give way to an ominous period represented by the rough, pitiless beast in the poem.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre (1)
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming (2) is at hand;
The Second Coming!
Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi (3)
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries (4) of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Notes:
(1) Spiral, making the figure of a cone.
(2) Second Coming refers to the promised return of Christ on Doomsday, the end of the world; but in Revelation 13 Doomsday is also marked by the appearance of a monstrous beast.
(3) Spirit of the World.
(4) 2,000 years; the creature has been held back since the birth of Christ. Yeats imagines that the great heritage of Western European civilization is collapsing, and that the world will be swept by a tide of savagery from the "uncivilized" portions of the globe. As you read this novel, try to understand how Achebe's work is in part an answer to this poem.

A Landing on the Sun ... 5/10

Michael Frayn's book received mixed reviews from the 6 members of the WNDC who attended last night's book meeting.

Out of 10 if I remember :-
Simon 5
Chris 6
Tim G 6
Dr Tim 4
John 2.5
Andrew 5

I made my point about lacking any empathy with Civil servant lives (see comments on Michael Frayn has a big brain) others struggled with the philosophy and could not really believe the scenario of the tapes and "happy" married man going off on one as he did. Simon has a crack in his doorstep that now makes him very depressed. Cleverly constructed but in the end poorly executed. Simon recommended Spies as being similar in construction but much better executed and I recommend Headlong in a similar vein.

Next Month's book is definitely Arthur and George and John will pick up six copies in Waterstones 3 for 1 deal to be distributed to five takers on the night and one extra, so give him a shout if you have not picked it up already.

Arthur & George By Julian Barnes

Born in Leicester, England, in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of two books of stories, two collections of essays, a translation of Alphonse Daudet’s In the Land of Pain, and nine previous novels. Barnes has also published four crime novels under the pseudonym of Dan Kavanagh.

In France, he is the only writer to have won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 2004 he became a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In England his honors include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He has also received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He lives in London.

His most recent novel is Arthur & George (available in paperback from Vintage).

About the book :-

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Arthur & George is the story of two men who grow up worlds and miles apart in late 19th century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Catholic Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, George a Birmingham solicitor, is happy in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.

With a mixture of intense research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings into sharp focus not just this long-forgotten case but the inner workings of the two men and the wider psychology of the age. Arthur & George is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes. It is a novel about low crime and high spirituality; guilt and innocence; identity, nationality and race; and thwarted passion. Arthur & George explores what we think, what we believe, and what we know.

Extract from the book

His blog

Michael Frayn has a big brain

In his new book The Human Touch Michael Frayn this month's author of "A landing on the sun" according to the Times shows just how clever he is.