Critics' choices for Christmas
Bergonzi, Bernard
Bernard Bergonzi Bernard Bergonzi, recently retired from the University of Warwick, writes from England. One of the books I most enjoyed in the past year is Sir Frank Kermode's Not Entitled: A...
...Before he returned to the States he took the trip round Britain that he describes in this book...
...This is a working-class family saga, set in the ancient city of York, though well away from its tourist attractions...
...Bryson is a superb comic writer who sees the funny side of everything that happens to him, even if it wasn't all that funny at the time...
...the time weaves back and forth from the late nineteenth century to the present day...
...he is now retired from teaching, but still actively writing...
...Kermode writes entertainingly of human oddity and knavery, with a keen sense of the ludicrous, and equally well about the sea, which could be as threatening as the absent enemy and which he learned to treat with respect...
...After his secluded, literally insular childhood, he studied at Liverpool University and then went into the Royal Navy during the Second World War...
...Eventually there were millions of American military men on British soil, where they prepared for the 1944 invasion of the Continent...
...A more light-hearted account of Anglo-American cultural exchange is Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island (Morrow, $25,240 pp...
...He never had to face the enemy and spent much of the war stationed on a larger and bleaker island, Iceland...
...But the bleakness and boredom of life there were enlivened by his fellow seamen and officers, whom he presents as a memorably bizarre collection, particularly the commanding officer, who devoted the resources of the ship to furthering his black-market activities...
...Eventually, though, he decided to return to America with his family to edit fiction at the New Yorker...
...he also covered quite a bit of ground on foot...
...He was born on the Isle of Man, so grew up feeling not quite an Englishman...
...In his seventies he has revealed an unsuspected gift for comic writing, though it is combined with a gentle, pervasive melancholy...
...I know only too well what he is on about, and am grateful for his good humor...
...One of the books I most enjoyed in the past year is Sir Frank Kermode's Not Entitled: A Memoir (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, $23, 272 pp...
...He made a perverse, perhaps desperate decision to do all his traveling by public transport (if there was any- sometimes he had to abandon his hope of getting to a place to which there were no buses or trains...
...During the war years when Kermode was a seaman, I was a schoolboy in England, and I well remember the presence of American soldiers and airmen, who wore crisp and unfamiliar uniforms, chewed gum, and were brash and self-confident, at least on the surface...
...which was at the top of the British paperback best-seller list for months...
...Bryson is an American writer who loves England, lived there for many years, and has a British wife...
...This book is both a scrupulous work of academic research, thoroughly documented, and a rich, readable study of human relations at a time of crisis and disruption...
...however somber the material, Atkinson displays an attractive and delicate touch...
...Kermode is a distinguished critic and literary scholar who has been a professor at the universities of London, Cambridge, and Columbia...
...He still managed to get round a lot of England, with a foray to the North of Scotland...
...He describes the academic and literary personalities of his day with a cool but not contemptuous eye...
...They were having a festival of litter when I arrived...
...In later years Kermode achieved fame and distinction, but finds something slightly absurd in the hype...
...She shows that the traditional realistic novel, so often dismissed by literary theorists, still has plenty of life in it.ife in it...
...Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets [potato chips], empty cigarette boxes, and carrier-bags to the otherwise bland and neglected landscape...
...Martin's, $22.95,384 pp...
...He begins one chapter, "I took a train to Liverpool...
...British males complained that the Americans were "over-paid, over-sexed, and over here" (the women were less critical), to which the Americans retorted that the British were "under-paid, under-sexed, and under Eisenhower...
...Sometimes he stayed in fairly decent hotels, but more often he put up in humble bed-and-breakfasts...
...Finally, I want to mention an outstanding first novel, Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum (St...
...The history of their stay and of their complex interactions with the population-especially the interactions that resulted in numerous British GI war brides-has been brilliantly recounted by David Reynolds in Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain 1942-44 (HarperCollins [London], £ 25,588 pp...
...The novel is formally sophisticated, but tremendously alive-variously sad, comic, angry...
...This must be one of the funniest books of the decade...
...Having lived a long time in Britain, he knows how things work and is not put off by the merely unfamiliar, but preserves enough of an outsider's eye to register the absurd, the inexplicable, and the occasionally infuriating aspects of British life, and to joke about them and his reactions...
Vol. 123 • December 1996 • No. 21
