The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (0 of 2), The Old Curiosity Shop (14 of 18) & Dubliners

Yokohama, Yuma and Birmingham

Dear classics reader,

In this week’s ocean-going cargo vessel you will find:

• The launch of our two-week read-along of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima;

• The announcement of our December read-along;

• Birthday wishes to Albert Camus;

• The week’s new classics, including a new translation of The Cat by George Simenon;

• A preview of coming attractions;

• Our fourteenth instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop – in which we touch on the unemployed;

• And a report from our discussion of Beloved at the Hatchards Classics Book Club.

This newsletter may be too long for your email inbox. If so, click ‘View entire message’ at the bottom to see the full newsletter – or visit Substack.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (0 of 2)

‘Sleep well, dear.’ Noboru’s mother closed his bedroom door and locked it.

Today we start reading Yukio Mishima’s darkly erotic novella, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Prepare for a twisted stroll through the human psyche. All the details of our read-along can be found here.

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Mishima’s tale is set in the port city of Yokohama near Tokyo.

Written in 1963, its contemporary setting reflects an increasingly Westernised lifestyle and the international commodities available in a city with global maritime connections.

Before we start reading, I thought you might like to see some postcards of Yokohama from the 1960s, which give a sense of the time and place:

Yamashita Park, Yokohama, c. 1960

A closer view of Yamashita Park, including the fountain in which Ryuji washes

A couple walking in Yamashita Park with the Central Pier in the background

The entrance to the Central Pier

The Central Pier

M. S. Hikawa Maru, once an ocean liner, later used as a cargo vessel before being converted into a Museum Ship in 1961 and still in Yokohama today

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I look forward to discussing Part One of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea – ‘Summer’ – next Friday 14th November.

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Here are links to our previous The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea posts:

• The Schedule (17 October)

• Yukio Mishima (31 October)

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These weekly read-along discussions of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea will be available to paid subscribers only. More details here.

If you – or anyone you know – would like to join this or future read-alongs, but can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll send a gift subscription.

December’s read-along – Dubliners

I’m also delighted to be announcing our read-along for December. Please join me next month to read James Joyce’s exquisite story collection, Dubliners.

Dubliners is ‘truly exhilarating’, says the Irish Times, ‘a vivid, detailed and breathtaking portrait of a city and its citizens.’

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What is it?

Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories, in which middle-class Dubliners experience moments of epiphany or ‘sudden spiritual transformation’, as Joyce put it.

‘I always write about Dublin,’ said Joyce, ‘because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world.’

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Why are we reading it?

Joyce is perhaps best known for his three novels that employ increasingly abstruse wordplay – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – but his great talent is nowhere more accessible than Dubliners (1914), his first major work.

We’re reading it in December, because the last, longest and perhaps greatest of the stories is ‘The Dead’, which is set at Christmastime, at a Twelfth Night party. We will be reading ‘The Dead’ over Christmas and discussing it a few days before Twelfth Night.

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Which edition should I read?

Joyce is out of copyright, so there are many editions of Dubliners available – you can also read it for free online. There are some textual variations between editions, but they are mostly minor.

If you do want to read the same edition as me, I will be reading the Oxford World’s Classics edition, which is available in both the UK and the USA. It was edited in 2000 by the Joycean scholar Jeri Johnson.

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How will we read it?

Dubliners has 170 pages (in my edition) and contains fifteen stories.

I suggest we read it over four weeks (with a week off for Christmas):

• We’ll start reading on Friday 28th November.

• On Friday 5th December we’ll discuss ‘The Sisters’, ‘An Encounter’, ‘Araby’, ‘Eveline’, ‘After the Races’ & ‘Two Gallants’;

• On Friday 12th December we’ll discuss ‘The Boarding House’, ‘A Little Cloud’, ‘Counterparts’, ‘Clay’ & ‘A Painful Case’;

• On Friday 19th December we’ll discuss ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, ‘A Mother’ & ‘Grace’;

• And on Friday 2nd January we’ll discuss ‘The Dead’.

Then, if you’re near London, you’d be very welcome to book a ticket for our discussion of Dubliners at the Hatchards Classics Book Club on Thursday 8th January.

We meet downstairs at Hatchards (187 Piccadilly) on the first Thursday of every month at 6.30pm – tickets cost £5 with a free Hatchards Reward Card and include a glass (or two) of wine. These book club events are not live-streamed, but afterwards I post a report of our discussion here on Substack.

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Our weekly read-along discussions of Dubliners will be for paid subscribers only. More details here.

If you – or anyone you know – would like to join this or future read-alongs, but can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll send a gift subscription.

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If you buy a copy of Dubliners through Bookshop.org (UK) or Bookshop.org (US), Read the Classics will earn a commission from your purchase. Thank you in advance for your support!

Happy Birthday Albert Camus

In other news, today was Albert Camus’s birthday. He would have been 112 today. You could mark the occasion by picking up his masterpiece, The Outsider – the classic existentialist novel.

The Outsider by Albert Camus (1942)

In The Outsider, Camus explores the alienation of an individual who refuses to conform to social norms. Meursault, his anti-hero, will not lie. When his mother dies, he refuses to show his emotions simply to satisfy the expectations of others. And when he commits a random act of violence on a sun-drenched beach near Algiers, his lack of remorse compounds his guilt in the eyes of society and the law. Yet he is as much a victim as a criminal.

[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 128 pages | translated by Sandra Smith
[US] Vintage | 144 pages | translated by Matthew Ward

Albert Camus (1913-1960)

The year after Camus was born in French Algeria, his father died in the First World War. As a teenager, Camus played football and organised an avant-garde dramatic group. He also developed tuberculosis, which dogged him throughout his life.

He moved to Paris during the Second World War, where he worked on the newspaper Paris-Soir and befriended the existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He also joined the French Resistance and edited its underground newspaper Combat.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 and a few years later he was killed in a car accident at the age of 46 with his publisher Michel Gallimard behind the wheel.

‘Camus could never cease to be one of the principal forces in our cultural domain,’ wrote Sartre, ‘nor to represent, in his own way, the history of France and of this century.’

What’s new this week?

There was an abundant crop of reissued classics yesterday, covering a wide range of subjects from cryogenics to home invasions, shoot-outs to dead cats.

Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen (1969)

Bruno, a young magazine editor, seems to live a charmed life, until he discovers a growth on his neck - the first sign of incurable cancer. But his doctor offers him a unique opportunity: Bruno can choose to be ‘frozen down’ until medical science has found a cure for his condition. He makes his decision, just after meeting and falling in love with an enigmatic ballet dancer. Decades later, he wakes up to find himself cured, but the world is now a very different place. Freezing technology is now ubiquitous, the pleasures of life have been subtly drained and society has started to fracture. Bruno must decide what he really wants from his life and whether it’s worth the cost.

[UK / US] Faber Editions | 192 pages | translated by Joan Tate | introduced by Sophie Mackintosh

On Tangled Paths by Theodor Fontane (1888)

Lene is an orphaned seamstress; Botho is a nobleman and an officer in one of the Prussian army’s most glittering regiments. But whatever their differences of class and education, their hearts are equal to each other. Over the course of a summer in 1870s Berlin, they enjoy a clear-eyed, tender love affair, in spite of the judgements and warnings of those around them. The end comes all too soon, and Botho marries a wealthy cousin. When, years later, Lene too has an opportunity to marry, her ex-lover must choose between holding on to regret or letting go of the past - along with the possibility of getting Lene herself back.

[UK / US] Pushkin Press Classics | 208 pages | translated by Peter James Bowman

A State of Siege by Janet Frame (1966)

After the death of her invalid mother, Malfred Signal, a retired New Zealand art teacher, leaves her birthplace in the south for a beach cottage on a sub-tropical island in the north. Freed from endless lessons on still life and the dominating presence of her family, she hopes at last to be alone with nature and the ‘room two inches behind the eyes’. But the solitude she has sought mocks her with echoes of her past, when, one stormy night, an intruder pounds ceaselessly and inexplicably on her door. Propulsive yet poignant, A State of Siege is a mesmerizing exploration of the artistic process, of selfhood and loneliness, and of death and its counterpart: the need to survive, to live.

[UK] Fitzcarraldo Classics #11 | 256 pages
[US] George Braziller | 246 pages

Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin

Words Are My Matter is a selection of Ursula K. Le Guin’s best writing on literature, articulating with precision and passion her belief in the social and political value of storytelling - especially in hard times. In doing so, and with her characteristic spirit, Le Guin offers both a glimmer of hope and a set of operating instructions for a life lived with meaning.

[UK] Canongate Canons | 336 pages
[US] Harper Perennial | 336 pages

The Cat by Georges Simenon (1967)

Amidst the din of their Parisian neighbourhood, Émile and Marguerite live in total silence. After a hasty marriage in their sixties, their uneasy peace was shattered when Émile’s beloved cat mysteriously disappeared and was later found dead. Branding his wife the culprit, Émile’s retaliation against Marguerite’s cherished parrot sparked a silent battle of wills. Now they live parallel lives, communicating only through spiteful notes, mocking glances and mute accusations. As their suspicion and resentment mount, this bitter game of psychological warfare becomes a twisted necessity, binding them together in a relentless cycle of torment from which there can only be one escape.

[UK] Penguin Classics | 160 pages | translated by Ros Schwartz

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Yesterday saw the publication of the first Penguin Westerns – a sister series to the successful Penguin Crime & Espionage series, this time swapping the Penguin green crime livery for a midwest desert yellow.

The first three titles are all by Elmore Leonard: Hombre & Three-Ten to Yuma, Last Stand at Saber River and Valdez Is Coming.

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And yesterday also saw the release of four more Laurie Colwin reissues from Weidenfeld and Nicolson. W&N’s reissues – last November – of Another Marvelous Thing, Family Happiness and Happy All the Time have been a success, so four more Colwins have now joined them on the bookshelves: A Big Storm Knocked it Over, The Lone Pilgrim, Passion and Affect and Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object.

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The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.

Coming Attractions

If you would like a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, you can take a peak here.

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Over the course of 2026, we will be reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from January to December. This read-along will be available for free for all subscribers. More details to follow soon – including a discussion of the various different English translations in a weeks’ time.

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If you’re looking for a the perfect Christmas present, look no further than the Hatchards Classic Book Club annual book subscription. You (or a friend) could receive all the books we read each month here on Read the Classics, beautifully gift-wrapped and delivered to your door, anywhere in the world, as well as a year’s complimentary subscription to Read the Classics, so you can also choose to read along with us, if you wish. To find out more, follow this link or email Hatchards directly: subscriptions@hatchards.co.uk

The Old Curiosity Shop (14 of 18)

We’ve read another four issues of Dickens’s Master Humphrey’s Clock – our next instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop. Here are my impressions:

Let me know yours!

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In four weeks’ time, on 5 December, we’ll discuss Chapters 48-55.

These chapters were published in weekly issues of Master Humphrey’s Clock as follows:

No.32 (7 November) Chapters 48-49
No.33 (14 November) Chapters 50-51
No.34 (21 November) Chapters 52-53
No.35 (28 November) Chapters 54-55

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One of the most memorable sections we’ve read so far is Nell’s journey through the Black Country beyond Birmingham:

a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow; where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring; where nothing green could live but on the surface of the stagnant pools, which here and there lay idly sweltering by the black roadside.

Dickens describes a hellscape of horror, smoke and darkness, populated by ragged, half-naked women and children and wild, demonic labourers.

Coalbrookdale by Night (1801) by Philip James de Loutherbourg

There’s one brief line within this long list of horrors, which might easily get lost amidst the description, if Hablot Knight Browne hadn’t chosen to illustrate it:

. . . when bands of unemployed labourers paraded in the roads, or clustered by torchlight around their leaders, who told them in stern language of their wrongs, and urged them on to frightful cries and threats; when maddened men, armed with sword and firebrand, spurning the tears and prayers of women who would restrain them, rushed forth on errands of terror and destruction, to work no ruin half so surely as their own . . .

A Procession of Unemployed by Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz)

The note in my edition observes that The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) ‘belongs to a period of recession, high unemployment and unrest’. The Chartist riots in Birmingham, for example, had taken place just a year or so earlier, in July 1839.

But The Old Curiosity Shop is set earlier in the nineteenth century, in the mid-1820s, so the recession that Dickens is describing is the mass unemployment that followed the Napoleonic Wars.

The attendant unrest and political agitation led infamously to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, where a peaceful demonstration seeking parliamentary reform was brutally suppressed by soldiers on horseback, at St. Peter’s Fields in Manchester.

As the Victorian Web says:

Dickens’s characterization of the agitation as an armed insurrection seems ungenerous and reactionary. Dickens is vague about where and when the disturbance occurs, and he certainly does not set the scene that Nell witnesses in the northern industrial city of Manchester or its suburbs. Dickens’s mob does not articulate concerns about parliamentary reform, and indeed does not express concern about any particular issues requiring redress. During the period 1812-22, such English industrial areas probably suffered more, economically, socially and politically, than during the French Wars.

You can read their whole piece here.

I wonder whether Hablot Knight Browne chose to illustrate this scene partly in order to add his own political gloss on Dickens’s description. To my eyes, the Phiz illustration does not depict ‘maddened men’ rushing on ‘errands of terror’ – if anything they strike rather noble, heroic poses. Could Browne even be glorifying the revolutionary spirit, as Delacroix had done ten years earlier in Liberty Leading the People?

Liberty Leading the People (1830) by Eugène Delacroix

Perhaps Phiz was tacitly correcting or softening Dickens’s reactionary description of unrest in the Black Country. It’s certainly a theme to which Dickens felt the need to return: with the Gordon Riots in London in Barnaby Rudge (1841) and the grim vision of Coketown, based on Preston, in Hard Times (1854).

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I look forward to reading the next eight chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop and discussing them in a month’s time, on Friday 5 December.

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Here are links to our previous Old Curiosity Shop posts:

• The Schedule (14 March 2025)

• Charles Dickens (28 March)

• 0. Forster’s Life of Dickens (4 April)

• 1. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.1 – and Gog and Magog (11 April)

• 2. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.2 – and G. K. Chesterton (18 April)

• 3. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.3 – and Edgar Allan Poe (25 April)

• 4. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.4 – and the Old Curiosity Shop (2 May)

• 5. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.5 – and Mr. Pickwick (9 May)

• 6. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.6 – and St. Dunstan-in-the-West (16 May)

• 7. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.7 – and Jack Bamber’s Tale (23 May)

• 8. Chapters 3-5 – and Mr. Weller’s Watch (6 June)

• 9. Chapters 6-8 – and Master Humphrey, from His Clock-Side in the Chimney Corner (20 June)

• 10. Chapters 9-16 – and Punch and Judy (18 July)

• 11. Chapters 17-24 – and Old Giants and Dwarfs (15 August)

• 12. Chapters 25-32 – and Jarley’s Wax-Work (12 September)

• 13. Chapters 33-39 – and Sampson and Sally Brass (10 October)

Beloved Book Club

And finally, last night we had an excellent discussion of Beloved at the Hatchards Classics Book Club. Here is my report:

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And here are links to all our Beloved posts:

• The Schedule (12 September)

• Toni Morrison (26 September)

• 0. Margaret Garner (3 October)

• 1. Part One, Chapters 1-8 – and Jane Smiley (10 October)

• 2. Part One, Chapters 9-18 – and the Four Horsemen (17 October)

• 3. Part Two, Chapters 1-5 – and jazz writing (24 October)

• 4. Part Two, Chapters 6-7 & Part Three, Chapters 1-3 – and a bench by the road (31 October)

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If you would like to come to our next book club discussion, you’d be very welcome! We will be discussing The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea on Thursday 4th December.

We meet downstairs at Hatchards (187 Piccadilly, London) on the first Thursday of every month at 6.30pm – tickets cost £5 with a free Hatchards Reward Card and include a glass (or two) of wine.

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