Sommarboken

I began reading Sommarboken (The Summer Book) by Tove Jansson in the original Swedish on my Kobo but found it quite hard going, and missed some of the enchantment that I could feel was present in the language. So I got an English copy, the translation by Thomas Teal, and reading the two versions together was a wonderful experience. It's become an annual ritual for many Swedes (and Swedish-speaking Finns) to read the book at the beginning of every summer, and I can see myself doing that too. 

The story of Sophia and her grandmother (farmor) is simple but wise. Point-of-view is beautifully handled, as we see things through a child’s eyes and then an adult’s; sometimes Sophia is the child and sometimes the Grandmother is. Summers pass by on their little island in the Finnish archipelago. The themes are the passing and return of the seasons, aging, endings and beginnings, memory, what is left at the end, the fragility of nature, the fragility of people... all the important things.

Ali Smith – whose recommendation in The Guardian set me off – has a blurb on the back cover of Teal’s translation that captures it perfectly:

[Jansson’s] writing is all magical deception, her sentences simple and loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth.

The character of Sophia is based on Jansson's niece of the same name, and I found a video of the real Sophia talking about the 50th anniversary edition. I love the accent of Swedish-speaking Finns. My old Stockholmare friend Fredrik used to admit that Swedish-Finns spoke the nicest Swedish and listening to this I think I'll have to get an audiobook version of Sommarboken.

Billy Bragg in Montreal: activism reactivated!

Louis and I went to see the bould Billy Bragg at Club Soda. A new experience for Louis, this was my third time to see the Bard of Barking. There was Dallas in 1993'ish where the audience interaction was a bit challenging (some good ol boys didn't appreciate being lectured to about Vietnam); then Dublin in 2004'ish which was a joyous meeting of minds.

On this summer evening in Montreal Billy was in great form with his original stripped-down sound: just himself with his guitars with a keyboardist. The old songs sounded so good. A Lover Sings was a highlight, and so too The Milkman of Human Kindness - I sang along at the top of my voice and couldn't believe that there were others in Montreal who knew the words!

I told Louis it would be political with a capital P, but I think he was surprised when we all had our fists in the air singing There's Power in a Union! But he was fully onboard for A New England. 

What a great night!

De Profundis

When I was in Paris in April I took a guided tour of Père-Lachaise cemetery, so of course I visited the imposing resting place of Oscar Wilde.

Our tour guide quoted Oscar, "je n'ai rien d'autre à déclarer que mon génie", which baffled some people on the tour who only came for Jim Morrison.

I hadn't thought about Wilde for many a year, though I'm very familiar with most of his work: Salomé, An Ideal Husband, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and especially The Importance of Being Earnest which I studied for my Leaving Cert and can still quote at length. The one work I'd never engaged with was De Profundis, the long letter he wrote in prison.

A few days later I visited the Pantheon, just out of general interest as I'd never been. There was an exhibition there about the life of Robert Badinter, the French politician who removed the death penalty from the French penal code and decriminalised homosexuality. I learned that Badinter was a fan of Wilde, and that he wrote a play based on De Profundis, decrying the injustice of Wilde's imprisonment. 

Back home, I caught up with my favourite literary podcast Backlisted, re-running one of their old episodes. Stephen Fry joined Andy Miller and John Mitchinson to discuss...De Profundis. It was a brilliant discussion. Fry can sometimes get on my wick with his incessant hamming up, but here he was erudite and even humble as he discussed Wilde, his literary hero.

It was clear what I had to do next. Andy recommended the audio book of De Profundis, read by Simon Russell Beale, and I thoroughly enjoyed it and wondered at its insightfulness. Like this:

People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going.  They can’t know.  In one sense of the word it is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge.  But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom.  The final mystery is oneself.  When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself.  Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?  

Sadly, Wilde's insights didn't lead him to any kind of salvation, but his pathetic destitution in Paris doesn't take anything away from the truths he told through his art.

When I was in Dublin a few weeks later I paid my respects at his statue in Merrion Square, a few footsteps from the house where he was born.

Writers of Montparnasse

Martine and I spent a lovely afternoon in Montparnasse cemetery a few weeks ago, visiting the graves of writers.

Short stories
Tall grave

Guy de Maupassant was a renowned short story writer . I first came across him thanks to George Saunders, who did a close reading and breakdown of the story Boule de Suif in his story club, and concluded that learning from Maupassant is a must for any short story writer. His grave is imposing and covered with flowering shrubs.

One of these names has faded...

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre are buried together, in a grave that is covered anew every day in tributes...to Simone. Sartre's name has faded on the headstone. When they were both alive it was he who was more celebrated, but she and her work have aged better.

Self-effacing Sam

The grave of Samuel Beckett and Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil is modest and low to the ground, and the inscriptions are already fading after less than forty years. This all seems rather appropriate for Beckett's personality. I picked up a new copy of Waiting for Godot at Shakespeare & Company and was reminded how vibrant and full of life his writing still is.

Never forget...

Alfred Dreyfus wasn't a writer, but he inspired Émile Zola to write his famous letter J'accuse. I made a brief visit to Montmartre cemetery and saw Zola's grave but didn't take a photo. However, I did place a pebble on Dreyfus' grave in Montparnasse and was happy to see that many others had done the same. 

2025 Readings

In 2025 I read twenty-two books of fiction, six of creative non-fiction, and three new-to-me poetry collections. I read many other things too, in literary magazines and on SubStack for example, but I committed a significant amount of time to each of these thirty-one books.

Fiction

Asimov, Isaac: I, Robot

Barbeau-Lavalette, Anaïs: La femme qui fuit (en français)

Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451

Carson, Jan: Quickly, While They Still Have Horses

Cusk, Rachel: Coventry (my 2nd reading)

Cusk, Rachel: Parade

DeLillo, Don: The Silence

Egan, Jennifer: A Visit from the Goon Squad

Erskine, Wendy: The Benefactors

Flanagan, Richard: Question 7

Gallant, Mavis: Montreal Stories

Harding, Paul: Tinkers

Holloway, Patrick: The Language of Remembering

Lalami, Laila: The Dream Hotel

McCormack, Mike: Getting it in the Head

Ní Chuinn, Liadan: Every One Still Here

O’Neill, Heather: Valentine in Montreal

O’Neill, Joseph: Godwin

Ryan, Donal: heart, be at peace

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft: Frankenstein

Thien, Madeleine: The Book of Records

Tolstoy, Leo: The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Non-fiction

Arendt, Hannah: Eichmann in Jerusalem

Bouchard, Serge: Caribou Hunter / Récits de Mathieu Mestokosho, chasseur innu (In English et en français)

Cron, Lisa: Wired for Story

Gallant, Mavis: Montreal Standard Time

O’Connor, Sinéad: Rememberings

Stonebridge, Lyndsey: We are Free to Change the World

Poetry Collections

Collins, Billy: Aimless Love

MacNeice, Louis: Autumn Journal

Muldoon, Paul: Selected Poems

There are a few connecting threads: Hannah Arendt's life and work for example (the books by Thien, Stonebridge, and Arendt herself), my interest in evolving views of AI and consciousness (Asimov, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), and my exploration of the possibilities of the short story (Carson, Gallant, and Ní Chuinn).

In previous years it's been difficult to pick a single favourite read of the year, but I have no such problems this year. Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is far and away the best thing I've read in a long time. It's an extraordinary book, a combination of fiction, biography, and non-fiction, that delves deep into Flanagan's family history while sweeping across the arc of the 20th century. I loved his Booker-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Flanagan has explained how his father's experience as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese was one of its inspirations for that. In Question 7 his father's experience is once again a starting point, as his father was released when Japan surrendered, an event that could conceivably have its origins in the love affair between Rebecca West and H. G. Wells...

Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan project there is no lever at 8.15am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them.

I'd rate Question 7 as highly as the best work by W. G. Sebald, which is the highest praise I can offer. This review in The Guardian came to the same conclusion.

• 2024 Readings
• 2023 Readings
• 2022 Readings