One Fat Englishman (2004)

By Kingsley Amis
The fat Pom of the title is possibly the most convincingly odious and repugnant character ever written. It is not even possible to enjoy disliking him, as with so many other nasty literary characters. He’s fat, he sweats a lot, he lusts after married women a lot, he has an anger management issue, he likes to play at emotional blackmail, he has a British superiority complex, he doesn’t seem to even really like women, except for a bit of recreational activity - he’s just generally foul.

This book is all about his attempts to get it on with Helene, the wife of an associate of his. Roger Micheldene (the said fat Pom) is a publisher, and in America on business. While he tries to pressure Helene into having sex with him (eww), he tries it on with a couple of other women he meets for good measure, while having arguments with a young American author called Macher, despising everyone around him (especially Helene’s son, Arthur) and generally behaving like a total asshole.

While the quality of the writing was undoubtedly good, I found it hard to keep reading. I wondered who it was meant to appeal to – other fat Englishmen? It seemed to me that the author also despised Mr Micheldene quite thoroughly, and wondered what made him want to write about such a person. Was he writing about himself in some way, thus purging himself? (Kingsley was a Pom, and I think a bit on the fat side; OK tenuous link I admit). Perhaps he was trying to cure the world of the notion that all fat Englishmen are jolly old fellows. If so, he succeeded. This book is clever, but I found it impossible to enjoy.

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