I've been busy and/or travelling so lost track of the thread for a while, but I have done some reading on long train journeys.
45 Blaming - Elizabeth Taylor
This was the final novel by Elizabeth Taylor (author of Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, and Angel), published after her death in 1976; when she wrote it she already knew she was dying of cancer, which makes the novel's themes of death and survivor-guilt very understandable.
Middle-aged Amy and her artist husband are on a mediterranean cruise to help him recover from a serious illness, but he dies suddenly in Turkey; another passenger, an American writer called Martha, provides un-asked-for assistance and accompanies Amy back to the UK. Their awkward relationship, of obligation rather than friendship, is at the core of the plot. The book feels surprisingly dated in terms of the middle class lifestyle it portrays, but the characters are timeless, as are the themes. It is all very restrained and English, with so much left unsaid. One to suit fans of Barbara Pym and similar.
46 Bonjour Tristesse - Francoise Sagan
Another modern classic I was embarrassed not to have read. Teenage girl and her widowed father spend the summer in the south of France, with romantic entanglements and psychological manipulation by the daughter leading to tragedy and belated wisdom. A very French sort of coming-of-age novel, beautifully written by an author who was only 18 at the time.
47 Happy - Derren Brown
Basically, applied stoic philosophy for beginners, as interpreted by Derren Brown, the illusionist and professional sceptic, presented as a kind of self-help book, with snippets from his own life to illustrate various points. An easy introduction to some stoic ideas, but I found some of the more personal digressions a bit irritating, and if you actually want to read about the philosophy, there are doubtless much better books.
48 Travellers in the Third Reich - Julia Boyd
Well-researched book based on letters and reports from mainly British and American tourists, students, diplomats and journalists who visited or lived in Germany in the 1930s, examining how they saw (or failed to see) the rise of Hitler and the Nazi movement, and the increasing oppression and violence against the Jewish population. She asks why people went (and kept on returning, in many cases), and looks at how people tended to come back with their preconceptions confirmed, whether good or bad.
Quite a sobering read, if you wonder (with the benefit of hindsight) how people could not see what was coming, or indeed what was already happening, and why they did not do everything they could to stop it. The book got a little repetitive in parts - why did tourists keep coming back? for the beer, the scenery, the good hotels and the friendly people, mainly - but it was very readable.
49 Night Letters - Robert Dessaix
An Australian book, published in the mid-1990s, and which has been sitting unread on my shelves through several international moves. I now wonder why on earth I did not read it sooner, as it is excellent.
A man who has been diagnosed with a terminal disease (it becomes increasingly clear that it is HIV, which in the early 90s was still seen as an automatic death sentence) takes off to Europe and takes random trains, ending up in Venice, where he writes letters to an unnamed friend/partner about the places he has been, people he has encountered and stories he has heard, with musings on how his own impending mortality has affected his approach to travel and life. There are footnotes, ostensibly by an editor of the letters, who adds details to and picks fault with some of the literary/geographical/historical references in the letters (of which there are many, from Dante to Patricia Highsmith), in a slightly post-modern/unreliable narrator sort of way.
This is a hard book to pin down - it is billed as fiction, but could be read as travel writing, and is obviously semi-autobiographical in many elements (the author is a gay Australian writer who is HIV positive), with lots of factual stuff and philosophising thrown in. It plays with your perceptions, so as I was reading I had to make myself not assume that anything that seemed to be factual actually was, without double-checking. Thought-provoking and brilliantly written, in any case.
