36. Quentin Crisp - The Naked Civil Servant

"All this at last I dimly saw, but an autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing. We think we write definitively of those parts of our nature that are dead and therefore beyond change, but that which writes is still changing - still in doubt. Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to a mountain of self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry...." (Crisp 222)

By reading the last paragraph of Quentin Crisp's autobiography you can sense what the general feeling of The Naked Civil Servant is. It's utterly depressing. Crisp had to endure a lot of hardships during his life, because he is an eccentric homosexual in London before and during the second World War. Apparently, this accompanies bullying by the general public and even violence by the police.

This book isn't actually eye opening. I don't know what Crisp intended to accomplish by writing it. I assume that he just wanted to tell someone his story, but as he says himself:

"Of course the most obvious explanation for my total lack of success was that I was a bad writer." (Crisp 187)

There is no uplifting emotion throughout this book. It is written with so much sadness, even though the author does not, I feel, give me enough details to actually show this emotion. He even brushes the harassment by the police off as if it is nothing. I understand that he has been detached from every emotion in his life, simply because his life would have been even harder to bare, but if you want to write a book about you life you have to open up. And Crisp failed to do so.

35. Gabriel García Márquez - Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Gabriel García Márquez has finally done it. He has finally managed to thoroughly impress me! Even though Chronicle of a Death Foretold is not a long book, it is a very powerful one. I read it in two days and now it wasn't only for the lack of time, but also because I couldn't put it down. 

This book is written by a nameless person, who is a good friend of the man who gets killed in a small town. The book chronicles the events leading up towards Santiago Nasar's death. The event that sets is all off is the marriage between Angela Vicario and Bayardo San Roman. When Bayardo finds out his wife isn't a virgin he abandons her and she tells her two brothers it was Santiago who was her first. Bear in mind that it never becomes clear in the novel if it was actually him. What does become clear is that everyone of the small town in the space of a few hours finds out about the brothers' plan to murder him, but him. The entire book is leading up to that horrible event through the eyes of his good friend who recounts the story through the eyes of the crowd, years after the tragedy. 

This is the first book by Márquez where I found quotations that thoroughly moved me:

"But most of those who could have done something to prevent the crime and still didn't do it consoled themselves with the pretext that affairs of honor are sacred monopolies with access only for those who are part of the drama" (Márquez 98)

And the fact that in Santiago's case the phrase "Fatality makes us invisible" (Márquez 114) is very suitable, because he walks through the city without hiding and everyone ignores him, even though they know of his predicament. But the most impressive quote of all is the one at the end of the novel, where the crowd has become aware of the fact that the Vicario brothers aren't actually the only ones that killed Santiago:

"They didn't hear the shouts of the whole town, frightened by its own crime." (Márquez 120)

34. Dava Sobel - Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

Now that I have read one book with a long title I might as well continue the trend. This time by another author. Dava Sobel has written a biography about John Harrison, "a self-taught Yorkshire clockmaker, who battled the establishment in his quest to make the perfect timekeeper and scoop the spoils". The blurb on the cover of Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time is actually completely self explanatory. So is the title.

The book basically tells us the story of the discovery of a watch that enables sailors to understand longitude at sea back in the 1700s. It's an explanation of the whole discovery and the history of navigation. John Harrison spent his whole life designing this device and Sobel tries with her book to make us appreciate and remember him, because it is easy to forget the scientist when we take an invention for granted.

33. Gabriel García Márquez - The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time

What's in a name. This is something that Romeo & Juliet have wondered in Shakespeare's famous novel. In this case. The whole meaning of the book is basically in the title. I've ploughed through another one of Gabriel García Márquez' books. This week a biography officially and hilariously called The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time.

This book is only a hundred pages long and the title therefore really does explain it all. A Colombian sailor is left shipwrecked on a little raft in the middle of the sea between Colombia and the US for ten days. Where he survives on nothing. He later tells Márquez, who used to be a newspaper journalist, the full story and he wrote newspaper articles about it. 

For the first time I enjoyed reading one of Márquez' novels. Maybe because this is the first time he isn't telling a story he invented himself. It's interestingly told and it doesn't get boring  like his other books(how can it when it only spans a hundred pages, is what you would think but then please reread my review of No One Writes to the Colonel). The title by the way, is a sarcastic remark by Márquez who is annoyed by the fact that this story will probably only be read by people because of his own famous name as he states in the preface: 

"I have not reread this story in fifteen years. It seems worthy of publication, but I have never understood the usefulness of publishing it. I find it depressing that the publishers are not so much interested in the merit of the story as in the name of the author, which, much to my sorrow, is also that of a fashionable writer. If it is now published in the form of a book, that is because I agreed without thinking about it very much, and I am not a man to go back on his word." (Márquez ix)

For me, however, it is the other way around. As you know I'm not a fan of the author's stories but in this case I'm very interested in his subject's story. I see this as a win-win situation for both me and Márquez.