In America (2002)

One Man, One murder by Jakob Arjouni (Melville International Crime 1991)

They had fled. They had travelled halfway around the world with two suitcases. They had filled out applications, they had been rejected, they had applied again and had been rejected again, they had sought shelter in barns or shared a room with nine others. They had gone into hiding and lived without papers, and now they wanted to get at least these forged ones. Out of the void they had conjured up three thousand marks - they had tried everything just to be able to say, one day: tomorrow I'll sleep late, or I'll save up for a video recorder, I should be able to get one next year, or this weekend I'll get so smashed I'll crawl home, and if a cop shows up, I'll just stand up and pull out my wallet. But they never had a chance. Those who were rejected would remain so: the refugee "in whose native culture torture is a common and transitional method of interrogation:" the refugee "who, if he had not become politically active, need not have feared reprisals - and who was fully conscious of the risks of his activity;" and the "economic asylum seeker" who is labelled a parasite in the world of German supermarkets, as if hunger and poverty were a kind of "human right" for three quarters of the planet's population. He or she was merely the ghost of the "at our expense" notion, never mind the fact that we lived for centuries at his expense, and that he is trying to go where "our" pedestrian malls, "our" air force and "our" opera houses have been built - at his expense. He is a "parasite", never mind that coffee, rubber heels, and metal ores do not grow in the forests of Bavaria.

Brecht's Mistress by Jacques-Pierre Amette (The New Press 2003)

There was a welcoming speech in the hotel salon. As they thanked him for being there, Brecht drowsed and his mind wandered; he was thinking of a very ancient German folk-tale that he'd read at school in Augsburg and later remembered during his stay in California. A serving girl had noticed a familiar spirit sitting near her by the hearth; she'd made room for him and chatted to him during the long winter nights. One day, the serving girl asked Little Heinz (the name she had given the spirit) to show himself under his real identity. But Little Heinz refused. Finally, as she persisted, he agreed and told the serving girl to go down into the cellar, where he promised to show himself. The serving girl took a torch, went down into the vault and there, in an open barrel, she saw a dead child floating in its own blood. Many years before, the serving girl had secretly given birth to a child; she had slit its throat and hidden it in a barrel.

Helene Weigel tapped Brecht on the shoulder to bring him out of his torpor - or rather, his meditation. He sat up straight, put on a brave face and reflected that Berlin was a barrel of blood, that Germany, ever since his teens, at the height of the First World War, had also been a barrel of blood and that he was the spirit of Little Heinz.

There had been bloodshed in the streets of Munich, and modern Germany had been swamped in the rivers of blood that flowed through the old Germanic folk tales. He had come back into the cellar and what he now wanted was, with his modest reasonableness, to pull the child out, educate it, and wash away with cold water the blood that still lay on the cellar flagstones. Goethe had down the same with his Faust, Heine with his On Germany; but the stain was now bigger than ever; Mother Germany was half-drowned in it.

That Star Trek post the blog has always needed

Hat tip - or head nod? - to 'Krink' over at Urban 75.

Mixing Footie and Orwell

I didn't think my opinion of Joey Barton could get any higher after that quote about England's 2006 World Cup prima donnas - and the funny quip at Lampard's expense back in '07 - but he's gone and topped it in the past few days by quoting Orwell on his Twitter page:

It's not so implausible when you think about it: Barton's been at Newcastle Utd now for just over four years, and I'm sure during the course of that time he's been a regular reader of the North East's premier SPGBer blog, 'Class Warfare', which just happens to have Orwell's self-same quote on its masthead.

I hope the rumours are right, and that Barton does sign for Arsenal. Wenger's teams have lacked that midfield enforcer with a touch of footballing class since Grimaldi left . . . and SPGB's Enfield & Haringey Branch would welcome the infusion of fresh funds to the Branch collections.

Of course, this isn't the first time that an Orwell and Footie have been in the mix. Most people with a passing familiarity with Orwell will know that famous quote of his that football " . . . is war minus the shooting.” but it's only in recent seasons that Orwell scholars have discovered that Orwell's quote was specifically referring to those teams managed by Alex McLeish.

Memo to self

Must update the Booksiveread2011 label - and the other one - on the blog sooner rather than later. It's getting ridiculous.

In mitigation, I have had my reasons for this particular tardiness.

I'd hate for the geeks, dweebs and enormously successful nerds hanging out at Mountain View, California to think that this car crash of a novel was the last thing I'd read.

If it had been, it could have laid claim to being the most important novel I'd ever read . . . the novel that stopped me from reading novels ever again.

Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse (W.W. Norton & Company 1959)

The breakfast ceremony at Hillcrest had never been my idea of fun. I had made one disastrous attempt to break the monotony of it, entering the room one day with my eyes shut and my arms outstretched like a sleep-walker, announcing in a shaky, echo-chamber voice: 'Ay York-shire breakfast scene. Ay polished table, one leaf out, covahed diagonally by ay white tablecloth, damask, with grrreen stripe bordah. Sauce-stain to the right, blackberry stain to the centre. Kellogg's corn flakes, Pyrex dishes, plate of fried bread. Around the table, the following personnel: fathah, mothah, grandmothah, one vacant place.' None of this had gone down well. I entered discreetly now, almost shiftily, taking in with a dull eye the old man's pint mug disfigured by a crack that was no longer mistaken for a hair, and the radio warming up for Yesterday in Parliament. It was a choice example of the hygienic family circle, but to me it had taken on the glazed familiarity of some old print such as When Did You Last See Your Father. I was greeted by the usual breathing noises.

'You decided to get up, then,' my mother said, slipping easily into the second series of conversations of the day. My stock replies were 'Yes,' 'No, I'm still in bed' and a snarled 'What does it look like?' according to mood. Today I chose 'Yes' and sat down to my boiled egg, stone cold as threatened. This made it a quarter to nine.