The Trial (0 of 3)
Gormenghast, Weird Girls & Kafka's Other Trial
Dear classics readers,
Today we start reading The Trial by Franz Kafka. (More below.)
It’s been a year since Read the Classics launched: this time last September we read Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther on its 250th anniversary. It’s been an incredible year – I’ve loved meeting so many of you through Substack and I’ve loved reading our twelve brilliant books.
To mark the start of our second year, this is the first outing for a new Read the Classics format. From now on I’ll be sending a single weekly email that combines recommendations, round-ups and read-alongs. In this bulletin, you will find:
Gormenghast at 75 & birthday wishes for Tolstoy;
New classics titles, including Weird Girls and the new John Murray Classics;
And we kick off our September read-along of The Trial with a little about Kafka’s Other Trial by Elias Canetti.
Gormenghast at 75
This September marks 75 years since Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake was first published in London by Eyre and Spottiswoode.
Peake was a painter and illustrator, commissioned to record the devastation of Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War. (One of the locations he drew was the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.) In 1946 he moved with his family to Sark in the Channel Islands, where he wrote novels, poetry, children’s books and plays. In 1957, the failure of his play The Wit to Woo accelerated his already deteriorating health, and in the 1960s he was overtaken by dementia, for which he was treated unsuccessfully with electroconvulsive therapy. He died in 1968 at the age of fifty-seven.
Peake is best remembered for his books set in the fantastical world of Gormenghast Castle, a sprawling, crumbling, cobwebbed Gothic kingdom of locked towers and dark halls.
The novels Titus Groan (1946) and Gormenghast (1950) form a perfect diptych, a narrative that opens with the birth of Titus, son and heir to Lord Sepulchrave, 76th Earl of Groan, and follows Titus’s early years as well as the ambitious, murderous ascent of young Steerpike, who transforms himself from kitchen boy to all-powerful master of ritual. C. S. Lewis called these novels ‘actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before’.
‘Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe,’ said Robertson Davies, ‘and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It is a very, very great work . . . a classic of our age.’
Peake wrote a novella set in the same world, Boy in Darkness (1956); a further Gormenghast novel, Titus Alone (1959); and his widow, Maeve Gilmore, completed the unfinished manuscript of Titus Awakes, which was published posthumously in 2010. None of these is as essential as the first two, however.
It is remarkable to think that Gormenghast is 75 years old – and that Titus Groan will be 80 next year – especially because they predate more famous classic fantasy series, such as The Chronicles of Narnia (the first volume of which, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published in October 1950, a month after Gormenghast) and The Lord of Rings, first published between July 1954 and October 1955.
Happy Birthday Tolstoy
Another anniversary this week – those of us reading Anna Karenina this year should raise a glass of vodka – or champagne – on Tuesday 9th September to mark the birthday of Leo Tolstoy. He would have been 197 years old. Za zdorovye!
(As we’ve mentioned before, Russia didn’t join the rest of the world in using the Gregorian calendar until 1918, after Tolstoy’s death, so Tolstoy would have considered himself an August baby – his birthday fell on August 28th his whole life.)
What’s new this week?
Several new classics editions were published yesterday, including the first Little Black Classics title since The Constitution of the United States in April 2017.
Below we have hustlers, sex workers, vampires, vagrants, murderers and talking cats.
Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter (1966)
When small-time teenage criminal Jack Levitt becomes friends with Billy Lancing, a young Black pool hustler, neither imagines they will meet again years later in St Quentin Prison – or that only one of them will make it out. But what does freedom really mean if you can’t escape the hand life has always dealt you? Don Carpenter’s shocking, poignant novel is a story of crime, punishment and trying to make sense of it all; of being down, but never quite out.
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 368 pages | introduced by Stuart Evers
[US] NYRB Classics | 336 pages | introduced by George Pelecanos
Vilhelm’s Room by Tove Ditlevsen (1975)
The ripples from a breakup radiate outwards from the room where a married couple once loved each other, and a bizarre Lonely Hearts advert sets off a train of tragicomic events that lead to an inevitable conclusion. Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel – published a year before her suicide in 1976 – is a masterful conclusion to a great work of writing: a blackly funny and devastating tour-de-force that pulses with life even as it journeys towards death.
[UK] Penguin Classics | 160 pages | newly translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell
Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season by John Gregory Dunne (1974)
Panicked by his own mortality, despondent over his many failings as a writer and a man, Dunne leaves his wife and their three-year old child for the solitude of a crummy apartment off the Vegas Strip. There he plans to write an account of the city as he finds it; the book he ends up writing is “a fiction which recalls time both real and imagined.” The remarkable central characters are Artha, a student at cosmetology college by day, a sex worker by night; Buster Mano, a private detective whose specialty is tracking down errant husbands; and Jackie Kasey, a lounge comic who opens for Elvis at $10,000 a night and wonders why he is still only a “semi-name.” Pimps, bail bondsmen, parking-lot moguls, used-car tycoons, ex-jockeys, and women who look as if they had “spent a lifetime meeting guys in Vegas or Miami Beach or Louisville for the Derby”: these are the people who wander through the lives of Artha, Buster, and Jackie—and, for a dark season, the life of the narrator.
[UK / US] McNally Editions | 304 pages | new foreword by Stephanie Danler
Grave of the Fireflies by Akiyuki Nosaka (1967)
In the dying days of the War, Seita and Setsuko must fend for themselves. Firebombs have obliterated their home in Kobe, leaving them searching for shelter and scrambling to survive in the depths of the countryside. But, as their suffering becomes a constant companion, so do the lights of the fireflies – shining from the bomber planes, and the insects glowing by the lake at night.
[UK] Penguin Classics | 80 pages | newly translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
The Vampyre by John Polidori (1819)
Danger lurks in the dead of night. Written during the infamous gathering that also produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, John Polidori’s short story ‘The Vampyre’ travels across countries, twists and turns through treacherous forests, and reveals the perils of staying out after dark. It is accompanied here by two other classic tales of the vampire genre, by Karl Adolf von Waschmann and Bram Stroker.
[UK] Little Black Classics | 128 pages
I Am A Cat by Natsume Soseki (1905-6)
Once a stray kitten, I Am a Cat’s narrator finds himself adopted by a local scholar and thrown headfirst into the absurd upper middle-class world of Meiji-era Japan. Now a noble but somewhat world-weary observer, he has ample opportunity to dissect the strange ways and convoluted conversations of the human race.
[UK] Vintage Classics | 208 pages | newly translated by Nick Bradley
Secrets in the Snow and Other Christmas Crime Stories
When snow falls and darkness comes early, it’s the perfect setting for murder and intrigue. And when family and friends gather in country houses for jolly festivities, they’re certainly not expecting guests and priceless jewellery to go missing. But it’s fertile ground for classic crime writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers who, amongst others, are showcased in this nail-biting collection.
[UK / US] Macmillan Collectors Library | 344 pages | edited by Matthew Booth
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
Weird Girls
Also out yesterday was a new series from Vintage Classics called ‘Weird Girls’: nine novels by pioneering female authors ‘that will take you to the depraved, delectable depths of weird fiction’.
Here is the full list:
Black Magic by Marjorie Bowen
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez
Autofiction by Hitomi Kanehara
Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa
Apple and Knife by Intan Paramaditha
Most of these are reissues of previous Vintage titles, with the exception of Black Magic by Marjorie Bowen, ‘the remarkable rediscovered tale of a gender-nonconforming rebel’:
Black Magic by Marjorie Bowen (1909)
In a quiet medieval city, alone in his shadowy chambers, Dirk Renswoude worships the devil. Then the wind brings the young scholar Theirry to his door. Could this beautiful man share his dark obsession? Under a hushed midnight sky, the pair swear themselves to the black arts, and to one another. Yet Dirk shies away at the slightest touch. He will not discuss his past. As the duo hex their way across moonlit woodlands and learned cities, it becomes clear that Dirk will stop at nothing to live the life he desires, while concealing one precious secret.
[UK] Vintage Classics | 368 pages
[US] E-Artnow | 204 pages
John Murray Classics
Also, I am a few weeks late in welcoming a new classics series to our bookshelves. John Murray, founded in 1768 and today a division of Hachette UK, launched its first series of classics on 14 August this year with a batch of ten colourful and diverse titles, which sport an impressive roster of introducers.
Here is the full list:
Adventures of a Young Naturalist by David Attenborough – foreword by Dara McAnulty
Emma by Jane Austen – foreword by Gill Hornby
Beside the Ocean of Time by George Mackay Brown – foreword by Amy Liptrot
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano – foreword by David Olusoga
Black England by Gretchen Gerzina – foreword by Zadie Smith
Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala – foreword by Katie Kitamura
The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney – foreword by Kevin Barry
Peacemakers by Margaret MacMillan – foreword by Max Hastings
Elmet by Fiona Mozley – foreword by Donal Ryan
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf – foreword by Merlin Sheldrake
The editor looking after the list is Abigail Scruby, who has written an excellent Bookseller article about launching this new classics series (including a small contribution from me).
The Trial (0 of 3)
‘Somebody must have made a false accusation against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.’
Today we start reading Franz Kafka’s The Trial, one hundred years after it was first published in 1925. Der Prozess is Kafka’s most brilliant novel, his creepingly claustrophobic fable of deadly bureaucracy and the impotence of the individual faced by an implacable system. All the details of our read-along are here.
Alongside The Trial, I am also planning to read the book-length essay Kafka’s Other Trial by the Nobel Prize-winning Bulgarian author, Elias Canetti. The Times Literary Supplement described it as ‘perhaps the most revealing essay on Kafka ever published’.
Canetti was born in Bulgaria, the son of Spanish Jewish parents. He was educated all around Europe, in Manchester, Lausanne, Zurich, Frankfurt and finally Vienna, where he witnessed the July Revolt in 1927 and saw the Palace of Justice ablaze. This incident inspired perhaps his best known novel, Auto da Fé (1935). He and his wife fled the Anschluss in 1938 and divided the rest of their lives between London and Zurich. Canetti won the Nobel Prize in 1981.
In Kafka’s Other Trial (1969), Canetti uses Kafka’s letters to his fiancée Felice Bauer to extrapolate a biographical reading of The Trial.
The letters were first published in 1967 and Canetti describes reading them for the first time:
I found these letters more gripping and absorbing than any literary work I have read for years past. . . . I can only say that these letters have penetrated me like an actual life, and that they are now so enigmatic and familiar to me that it seems they have have been mental possessions of mine from the moment when I first began to accommodate human beings entirely in my mind, in order to arrive, time and again, at a fresh understanding of them.
Canetti’s essay is in two halves. In the first he discusses Kafka’s relationship with Felice and in the second he applies his reading of the letters to The Trial. He writes that:
Two decisive events in Kafka’s life – events which he of all people would have wanted to keep especially private – had taken place in a way that was embarrassingly public: the official engagement in the Bauer family home on 1 June, and, six weeks later, on 12 July 1914, the ‘tribunal’ at the Akanische Hof, which led to the breaking of the engagement. It can be shown that the emotional substance of both events entered directly into The Trial, which Kafka began to write in August.
I will be sharing Canetti’s insights as we read The Trial!
I look forward to discussing the first four chapters, from ‘Arrest – Conversation with Frau Grubach – Then Fräulein Bürstner’ to ‘B.’s Friend’, next Friday 12th.
Here are links to our previous The Trial posts:
The Schedule (11 August)
Franz Kafka (25 August)
And finally a reminder that our weekly read-along discussions of The Trial will be available to paid subscribers only. More details here.
If you would like to join this monthly read-along, but can’t afford a paid subscription, please just let me know and I’ll gift you a complimentary subscription.
Buy a copy of any of the books above through Bookshop.org (UK) or Bookshop.org (US) and Read the Classics will earn a commission from your purchase. Thank you in advance for your support!
The Gormenghast books are some of my absolute favourites. It was interesting to see them placed in their context of time. I hadn't realised that they were published before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Lord of the Rings. Fascinating. I wonder why they are less well known than those behemoths of literature. Any ideas on that, Henry?
Titus Groan is 80 next year? If that's next year's year-long read count me in...