First Two Books of 2022 finished 2nd January 2022

So, not quite one a day, but two in two days isn't bad! This is the first:

I have in the past found Nabakov difficult.

 At college in 1976, I had the misfortune to be rooming in a shared house with a colossal bore who wanted to go on and on endlessly about "Lolita" and the brilliance of the character "Humbert Humbert". I dismissed all ideas of reading that book, because even 45 years ago it was clear to me that it concerned criminal child pornography.

Later on in life, I thought I'd give the memoir "Speak Memory" a go, hoping to learn more about what it was like to live through the Russian Revolution. Somehow, this failed to hit the spot. The only detail I retain is the train journey, attempted escape. The wealthy Nabokov family, cosseted in first class warmth and padded carriages, were astounded when thuggish revolutionaries urinated down the chimneys into the elite compartments from the roof.

Recently I took to reading the "New Yorker" online, which contains a short story in every weekly publication. One of the best of all the stories I have read in the last year was an excerpt from "Pnin" (it's actually chapter 6). This enchanted me, and I recognized at last the brilliance of the writing, so I decided to read the whole book.

You do need a dictionary. Why use the word "calvity" when the perfectly good word "baldness" exists, and baldly states the condition without nuance or subtext.

You do need patience. It's not a rollicking page turner.

However, I did laugh out loud on at least three occasions (almost unheard of for a 68 year old with jaded palate for humour).

There is subtlety and there is irony, and there is a very straightforward critique of the more ridiculous aspects of American college education (some of which we now see here in the UK). There is pathos, and the backstory of poor Pnin (far more evocative of the emigre experience than "Speak Memory") is filtered with delicacy during the course of the book through the lens of his current experiences.

Timofey Pnin is a truly unique creation, a bumbling yet endearing intellectual. Rejected by his cruel wife Liza, dismissed as unimportant by the more ambitious academics who seek to oust him from his untenured position, he evokes a long lost past. Through his experiences the author depicts an America which welcomed all its sad waifs and refugees (unlike the America of today). This aspect of the book (unimagined when it was written) has a pathos all of its own.

I give it four stars because there is something unsatisfying about the shadowy "narrator" who first poses as a friend of Pnin's, but is later exposed as someone Pnin cannot stand to be with or near, but this is never explained. Even this is revolutionary, however - the so-called "unreliable narrator" has become an extremely fashionable trope in contemporary English-language fiction in the last five or so years.

Finally, it is a short book, only 168 pages in the Penguin Classics paperback edition, so easily despatched.

The second book I finished today is even shorter, and much easier to read.

I've read books in which the pandemic appears right at the end, ("The Black Dress" by Deborah Moggach) or during the latter part of the book ("Summer" by Ali Smith), and this is the first I've read set entirely right in the thick of it. It is set in the Peak District during the second lockdown of 2020, foreshadowing the locked down Christmas of 2020, and referencing back to the first lockdown.

It's eery to see set down on the page the restrictions, the laws and fines, the confinement to home, the washing of shopping and hands, the loneliness and isolation. I now look back from the perspective of the post vaccination year of 2021 (the first vaccinations were in January 2021, after the book ends). It's so easy to forget what it was actually like, after getting used to the relative freedoms conferred by the summer of 2021 and the booster jabs which have encouraged many to get out more. It seems incredible what we actually put up with. This novel will become important social history. I would expect it to appear on school reading lists in the future.

The author has uncannily inserted herself into the minds of three key characters, representing three demographics - the well-off aged who can afford their comfort but are vulnerable, the frustrated and poor middle aged who lose their salary and their freedom (which matters more), and the young, who are doubtful, confused, fearful, angry but ultimately need the guidance of their elders.

The plot, which concerns a quarantine breaker out walking on the fell, is a neat analogy for those who court the virus by mixing with others, cost the state a lot of money, have to be cared for and are cared for.

Humanity and the mixed perils of being human. A very swift read, and a very worthwhile one.
Why only four stars? I feel the definitive pandemic novel has yet to be written and will be much longer and more philosophical than this one.