All Sorts Of Progress

We're on this trip as part of a tour group, the first time we've ever done anything like this, and it's working out really well in all sorts of ways. One of these ways has been in relation to the fact that even though we've been kept busy moving from place to place every day, I've managed to get quite a bit of reading done. It's helped that I bought along three books that have proved easy reads, in the sense of each being a pleasure at every level.

Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors is packed with quirkily wonderful stuff. A great read, I reckon, for young aspiring writers simply because of the sheer delight in narratives of all sorts that Gaiman conveys. Good as he is he doesn't mind being a bit clumsy here and there, as if the really important thing is enjoying the tale without over-worrying about the telling. In contrast, there's little that's clumsy about Orhan Pamuk, as any fan would know. The White Castle was the perfect choice for this trip simply on account of its brevity. There's a lot of weight to the longer novels, such that I'm reluctant to read them at anything other than a measured pace - and I didn't exactly rush through this novella. But since The White Castle is a novella with a reasonably direct, seemingly transparent narrative, it slipped down nicely over just a couple of days. Highly recommended for anyone starting out on the Turkish master.

And now I'm moving into the final sequences of Adichie's Purple Hibiscus. Incredibly this was a debut novel. It is just so utterly assured, and in Kambili's Papa has one of the great monsters of fiction, the greatness lying in the fact that you are made to understand the man even if you don't want to. In fact, Kambili herself is a wonderfully subtle creation: both extremely sensitive to others yet curiously, believably dense.

I've also done pretty well in terms of reading most of the issue of the NYRB I bought with me. This means I've had to buy a couple of things on the road (we're now in Madrid) to keep me going until we conclude this little escapade, about which more anon, as they say.