The Diary of a Nobody (2005)

By George and Weedon Grossmith
Well I have to say this book didn’t quite live up to Evelyn Waugh’s testimonial on the back cover: “The funniest book in the world”. Mind you, Waugh did write Brideshead Revisited, so he wasn’t exactly a laugh-a-minute kind of guy. Maybe he had lower standards when it came to humour than the rest of us. In fact, were Waugh still about today, I’d write him a terse but witty note and ask him to refund my purchase money. Not that it was a terrible book or anything, it was well-written, and somewhat amusing, but in a Mr Bean kind of way, or like the boss in “The Office”, in which the humour comes from people being made to look foolish – only in a much milder form.

The hero of the book, Mr Charles Pooter, is an ordinary and unassuming man and a well-drawn character, just not a particularly interesting one. He writes in the introduction as follows: I fail to see – because I do not happen to be a “Somebody” – why my diary should not be interesting. This book proves that interesting diary entries are entirely independent of the status of the diarist, fictional or not.

The book was originally published in Punch magazine, in serial form, and might have worked better this way – familiar friends, who’s modest adventures you could enjoy each week; not required to be astonishing or confounding. Interesting aside: both of the authors worked with Gilbert and Sullivan, of “The Pirates of Penzance” fame. There are no babies swapped at birth in this story though. One good thing, Pooter’s son is called Lupin, possibly a good name for a future son of mine, if my husband will stand for it – it might end up being the name for the cat.

Rating: 5 out of 10
A bit dull, really – probably only for extreme turn-of-the-century literature fans.

The Nanny Diaries (2004)

By Nicola Kraus & Emma McLaughlin
This book really wasn’t very good, but still somehow I kept reading. Nanny, our heroine, is employed by Mr and Mrs X, to look after their son Grayer. Mrs X, in particular, is so unbearably awful that you keep turning the pages in hopes that she will be socially humiliated, made to realise what an awful parent and worthless human being she is and then consequently die of shame.

Unfortunately this never happens. Nanny continues to work for the X’s, carrying out all of their unreasonable demands and never once fighting back. When she is sacked at the end of the novel she doesn’t even leave a few prawns hidden around the apartment for good measure. She does leave them a recorded message on the Nannycam they have installed in the apartment, but it wasn’t anywhere near as vitriolic as I would have liked.

I think what was most disturbing about this book, despite the authors’ protestations of fictional status, was that I am sure every incident in this book is based on fact, and that such shocking people really do exist. I just wanted to shake everybody – the X’s for obvious reasons, and Nanny for continuing to work for them.

Rating: 3 out of 10

Bluebeard (2004)

By Kurt Vonnegut
I’ve read one other book by Vonnegut, “Slaughterhouse 5”, which would definitely get a spot on my list of 100 best books of all time, so I had high expectations of Bluebeard. I was initially disappointed. One of the reasons why, I think, was the style of the writing.

The book is the autobiography/diary of Rabo Karabekian, a (fictional) artist of Armenian origin who became part of the American Abstract Expressionist art movement. (Incidentally all his works were destroyed due to a strange chemical reaction between his paint brand of choice, Sateen Dura-Lux, and the canvas, which resulted in all the paint falling off – one for the conservators out there!). He has been encouraged to write his story by a visitor to his house, Circe Berman, herself an immensely popular author who writes under the name of Polly Madison and who is a very bossy person. Karabekian, not a writer, writes in an unsophisticated way – for example, Rabo uses far too many exclamation marks! And he uses italics way too much! This made the book seem a bit unsophisticated too. Boy, what a snob I am.

By the end of the book, though, I was convinced it was very clever of Vonnegut to do this, because it helps draw the character of Karabekian so well – he’s just a guy trying to live his life, and who doesn’t have too many tickets on himself (not anymore, anyway). We learn of Karabekian’s early apprenticeship to a painter (Dan Gregory, a fairly nasty piece of work), his time in World War II (where he lost an eye) and his subsequent marriages, all the while on a kind of quest to become a painter with passion – a lack of passion being his essential problem in life; as an art teacher once said of him, “why should I teach him the language of painting, since there seems to be absolutely nothing which he is desperate to talk about?”

Though Bluebeard does not reach the heights of Slaughterhouse 5, it was in the end an immensely satisfying book. Vonnegut has a unique ability to show how unbearable life all is, without making it unbearable, if you know what I mean.

Rating: 8 out of 10