Backlisted - The Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler

Episode Date: June 10, 2019

Alan Isler's debut novel The Prince of West End Avenue (1994) is the subject of this episode of Backlisted. Joining Andy and John to discuss it are novelist William Sutcliffe and playwright and bibliomemoirist Samantha Ellis. Other books talked about in this episode: Fireflies by Luis Sagasti and Love & Trouble: A Mid-Life Reckoning by Claire Dederer.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)5'37 - Love and Trouble by Claire Dederer13'44 - Fireflies by Luis Sagasti18'30 - The Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Fitness end July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. And Marcus Bridgescott came back to me later in the day and said, that's the most brilliant thing I've read about reading ever. I said, well, I won't tell Andy, but yeah, thank you for the feedback. Oh, that's nice, though. So I genuinely want to say thanks very much to everybody for being so nice about the piece that I wrote for Boundless, about why I read so much.

You can find it on the Boundless website, but also listeners to this podcast who read it and gave me such amazing feedback. That piece was an absolute pig to write. It was so hard to get right. And just before it was published, I nearly, again, this is true, I nearly contacted Katie at Boundless and said, please don't put it out because I think it doesn't work.

I didn't get it right. Can you delay it for a week? And then I thought, oh, no, just get it over with. Get it over with. So thank you, everyone. That is writing, isn't it? It's always that, don't you think? Yeah.

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side, in Goldstein's Dairy Restaurant, holding a corner with the other old folk, waiting for the blintzes and apple fritters with sour cream the place is famous for. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And joining us today are William Sutcliffe. Hello, William. Hello.

William Sutcliffe is the author of 12 novels, including the international bestseller Are You Experienced? and The Wall, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. William has written for adults, young adults and children, and his books have been translated into 28 languages. His 2008 novel, Whatever Makes You Happy, strap yourselves in, everybody, has just been filmed by Netflix, starring Patricia Arquette and Angela Bassett, and will be released on August 2nd under the title Otherhood.

No big deal, right? It's exciting. It's been 10 years on, off, on, off, but now it's on. Wow. His latest novel, The Gifted, The Talented and Me, published by bloomsbury was described by the times as dangerously funny and by the guardian as

refreshingly hilarious also joining us today welcome back samantha ellis so samantha ellis uh was one of the original guests on very early episodes of batlisted about the brilliant novel lolly willows by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Thanks for coming back. Thanks for having me back. It was a seminal episode, that Sylvia Townsend Warner episode. It was kind of the beginning of what now people blithely refer to me as that's a kind of backlisted book.

But I do think Lolly Willows was was I mean I certainly found it revelatory. Samantha writes books plays and films her sparkling 2016 play How to Date a Feminist has been produced in Poland and Mexico with more productions coming

up including there are currently four productions running simultaneously in Germany. I don't know why. I'm very happy. That's brilliant. And her reading memoir, How to Be a Heroine,

which came out of an argument with her best friend over which literary heroine she liked best, Jane Eyre or Cathy Earnshaw, was published by Chateau in 2014. And her latest book, Take Courage Anne Bronte and the Art of Life, which I talked about on here. You're the only man not related

to me or married to me who's read it. I'd take that as a challenge. I've bought a copy, I have it at home. Well, men don't know what they're missing in so many areas of life. And in the case of Take Courage, we certainly don't know what they're missing. I really love that book. It's a brilliant book. Samantha also worked as a script editor and writer on the two Paddington movies. I did.

Somebody pointed out to me the other day that I hadn't noticed, but the slightly uncomfortable coupling of Jeremy Thorpe and Norman, whatever he's called, in a very English scandal. It's the same two actors, Hugh Grant and... Paddington and Mr Brown. It is, it is. I'll leave it out there. My favourite tweet of the last year is Paddington related. And it was when Paddington 2 came out,

somebody tweeted, just come out of a screening of Paddington 2. The best bit was when an audience member was so caught up in it, they shouted out, run Paddington, you cunt. an audience member was so caught up in it, they shouted out, run Paddington, you cunt. I don't know if that will make it into the finished edit. It will, will it?

Wait, okay. One of my favourite words. Paddington is a great word. I've got a book for you. Okay, good. No, it's not out yet, but I'll give you the sampler. It's Curious History of Sex by Kate Lister. There's a whole chapter called A Nasty Name for a Nasty Thing.

And there's a hashtag, Team Cunt, apparently. This episode is firing off in all directions already. Well, anyway, the book that William and Samantha are here to talk to us about today is The Prince of West End Avenue, the first novel by Alan Eisler, originally published by independent US publishers Bridgeworks Publishing in 1994. It went on to win the National Jewish Book Award, the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize,

and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. But enough already with the introductions. Andy, what have you been reading? Okay, so I'm going to talk about a book called Love and Trouble by Claire Deidre. Claire Deidre is an American writer, and I first became aware of her work a couple of years ago. She had a piece in the Paris Review, which was an essay about her mixed feelings,

and the phrase mixed feelings is right, an essay about her mixed feelings. And the phrase mixed feelings is right about, um, male filmmakers whose work she loved, but whose behavior was growing increasingly problematic and how one situates the divide between the work and the person who makes the work. And so I picked up love and Trouble after reading that essay. That essay is online. And if you haven't read it, it's really worth going to have a look at. But I hadn't

been able to get around to reading Love and Trouble because of all the other things that we have to read on Backlisted. But as a treat to myself a couple of weeks ago, thought well I'll read it and it absolutely blew me away it's subtitled in the UK memoirs of a former wild girl in the states where it was published two years ago it has a different subtitle and to my mind a much better though perhaps less commercial subtitle in the states this book is called love and Trouble, A Midlife Reckoning. And I think this is the best book that I have read in my current troubled midlife state about midlife. And I don't want to say too much that hasn't been written by Claire Deidre. And I've got the clock against me. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to read one bit,

say a little bit about the book and then read another book. And the thing I'm about to read is my favourite thing that I've read certainly this year and possibly this is the best paragraph that I've read this year and probably for longer than last year. I'm not building up too much, am I? Okay, here we go. So Claire Deidre is in a car and she's in a car with a more successful male writer. How quickly it became real country here. The dark spaces between streetlights grew longer and longer. I leaned my head back, a passenger. I asked him

idly if he knew the Iggy Pop song, The Passenger, one of my very favourites. I am the passenger, and I ride and I ride, it goes. The passivity of riding and never driving, a fantasy of mine. At home, I always insisted on driving. After all, I knew the way. But I realised all of a sudden that I loved this. I loved being the passenger. I loved having the story writer drive me bossily through the night. I ignored the fact that at home I was so bossy that I wouldn't even let my husband drive. I wouldn't let him let me be the passenger. I couldn't do that at home for some reason. But here among the southern green hills, I loved giving up control. I loved the stars in the countryish darkness.

What? replied the writer. No, Iggy Pop. He's pretty bad, right? Sigh. These were my people now that I was a writer. People who didn't understand anything. I mean, they understood perfectly the thing I cared most about, books, but basically they were more on level elsewhere. Now, listeners, that sentiment is so true that no one had ever dared write it down before, right? I can only speak speak for myself I've waited decades for any writer to acknowledge the truth of that fact that if you like music a bit a lot of the time you're

hanging out with people who don't perhaps have the same insane unattractive commitment to it as perhaps you do but so Claire Deidre she won me over on page 34 of this book, and she had me basically captive for the rest of the book. So the book is about midlife. It's about getting older. It's about sex. It's about friendship. It's about Roman Polanski. And she wanders around these issues, noting things down. The structure is opaque, but is held together by her eye, by her ability to observe in a quite intense way. So the prose, the intensity of the phrase, it reminded me of Eve Babbitt's. It's a totally different attitude, a totally different epoch, but it is a willingness to both acknowledge pain and difficulty and to allow yourself to look bad to the reader

and to make yourself look great to the reader and be funny about all those things. And I really loved how she doesn't draw heavy conclusions. She inhabits the subject for 200 pages and then she withdraws and leaves you to decide what you want to make of it. So I absolutely love this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I'm going to read one of the very short bit from the end of that same chapter. If you don't like this, this isn't the book for you. She's at a literary festival. My host was a young man who ran a literary series.

He was a lovely guy, single-handedly bringing all kinds of authors to Tulsa. And what's more, getting Tulsans to come and see the authors. You can get authors to go anywhere, to the ends of the earth, to Tulsa and what's more getting Tulsans to come and see the authors. You can get authors to go anywhere to the ends of the earth to Tulsa even it's getting their audience to leave the house that's difficult. We were eating burritos and gossiping when he looked at me sadly. I almost didn't even read your book he said meaning my yoga memoir. I nodded, immediately understanding. For all his virtues, he was, after all, a guy. He went on. When it came in the mail, I opened the package and I was like, lady book. He pantomimed, chucking my book over his shoulder into some imaginary pile of unreadable crap. Well, what did I expect? I wrote a book about being a housewife and a mum. As if that

weren't enough, my book was a mother-daughter memoir. As if that weren't enough, it dealt with the theme of women's lib. And then I wrapped the whole thing up in yoga, like a scallop wrapped in bacon. Sometimes I regretted having written such a very female book. After all, I didn't feel like a lady. I felt more like a 17-year-old boy, horny, sleepy, confused. In fact, I rather wished I were a boy or a man. And why not? The good things come to boys. Male authors don't have to explain why their themes, war or baseball or anal sex if you're James Salter, are important. When female organisers of literary series get a book on a boy topic, they don't throw it over their shoulder with a disparaging guy book.

Or if they do, they certainly don't mention it to the author later over burritos. I said something soothing and understanding. I'm a lady after all, and of course I wanted him to like me and we drank another beer. I went back to my room and lay on my bed watching New Girl episodes on my iPad. Lady, lady, lady. I turned off my iPad and shut my eyes. The story writer was so present it was almost as though he was sitting on top of me like a very literate, slightly rumpled incubus. He wouldn't get off either. All the darkness, all the dirty feelings I've been having, all the longing, all the teen passion, all the loneliness now had somewhere to live inside the dumb disruption of a kiss.

And I didn't have to be responsible for it. I was a passenger. have to be responsible for it. I was a passenger. So, John, follow that. What have you been reading? Well, it's not a competition, Andy, but I've been reading a really interesting book translated from the Spanish by an Argentinian writer called Luis Sagasti, who is published by Charco Press, really cool, good independent publisher based in Edinburgh. And it's a book that attempts to explain everything, the origins of the world, the history of storytelling, but does it in incredibly light and I think rather brilliant way. It's very, it's a structure I guess is to tell lots of very interesting and apparently unconnected stories and then pulls them together.

It starts with a sort of vision of the world. It reminds me rather of that great book by Carlo Ginzburg about the cheese and the worms, where the world is seen as a, this 16th century miller who sees the worm as a ball of cheese with worms in it that are angels. He sees the world as a ball of wool wool which you can never get to the end of and wool and storytelling and stars and fireflies it's called fireflies because the fireflies are kind of are words but they're also they're also moments in history they're also

stars in the sky that are active looking up and seeing the stars in the sky so with my kind of qi hat on and lots of interesting and wonderful stories in the book there's the story of joseph boys the artist and how he was shot down and discovered and saved by uh tartar um tribes people who covered him in felt and animal fat and he went on to make a whole art career out of animal fat the there's an amazingly moving story about the man who discovers that he shot down antoine de son exupé and i'm the man who killed the little prince and we discover that he self-medicates by going into his room at night and draws endless pictures of lambs so there's as i say that that he finds incredibly brilliant ways there's the there's conspiracy theories about you know paul mccartney and the the beatles there. It's got a little bit of everything in it.

There's a brilliant passage I'm just going to read that I like about Wittgenstein that gives you maybe a feeling for the style of the book. It's not a novel in the traditional sense, but it is a kind of sequence of eight philosophical tales. It's exactly the kind of thing that translated presses, I think, should be bringing into English. They do it better than we do. Before and after the war, Wittgenstein sought out solitude and cold, which are different forms of slowness, in order to think better. Iceland,

Norway on two occasions, a monastery. The limits of Europe are the limits of language. And then he travels to the beginnings of language. He takes up teaching at rural primary schools in Austria. Wittgenstein is a tormented homosexual. Before the war, he falls in love with an English student called David Pinsent. His love is silent. They live like kings in Iceland. Ludwig has not yet renounced his family's wealth. The war awaits them both upon their return from Reykjavik. In 1918, Pinsent dies in an accident in a military plane. Wittgenstein is struck dumb by the news. He dedicates the Tractatus to him and thinks about suicide. In Norway, where he retreats to think, he has the Kant-like habit of leaving his cabin to walk every afternoon. Everything tends to be slower in the cold until it reaches the most crystalline stillness, which is why people walk faster. The breath that freezes as soon as it

leaves his mouth, the raw material with which the tongue forms words or whatever remains of language, remnants surrounded by noise. And this thing whereof we cannot speak, Ludwig, is this little mouth ghost that surrounds our words in the cold? In Norway? In Iceland? In the trenches? He resembles Seraphitus, the character from Balzac's bizarre novel who lives in northern Norway and is neither man nor woman, like the shamans who travel to the heaven of the hares in a trance. In the extreme cold, words emerge stuttering. They pile up in the mouth and are expelled one by one, guillotined by the teeth.

Words with a kind of dyslexia that goes unnoticed, like seedless grapes, like fireflies in the midday sun. There you go. Hey, where did you hear about that book um i was looking i was looking about i was just looking at uh independent publishers lists um and i was sitting in new york uh and they were a they're a publisher that were about to present books and i just it leapt out at me just because i like the title it's translated brilliantly i I think, by Fionn Petsch. He's a writer. This is his best known. It's known as Bellas Artes in Spanish, but it's translated

as Fireflies. But it's great. It seems to me to be a great translation. Okay, it's time now for an advert. Two freshly cracked eggs any way you like them. Three strips of naturally smoked bacon and a side of toast. Only $6 at A&W's in Ontario. Experience A&W's classic breakfast on now. Dine-in only until 11 a.m. Wherever you're going, you better believe American Express will be right there with you. Heading for adventure? We'll help you breeze through security.

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how pleased i was to revisit this book uh i think john felt the same way i didn't i'd never read it i was where you remember i was aware it was one of those books that came out of nowhere and was got loads of Books of the Year mentions and terrific reviews. And then I must confess I sort of wondered whether he'd written other ones, which he has, but not as many as you might think. It was published in 1994 originally, wasn't it?

And the book was a big deal when it was published, The Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Eyres. It won awards and was widely reviewed and presumably sold pretty well and what i think is so interesting about doing this book on backlisted is i think i had assumed that people would know about it but when i did some digging i realized that you know even if you're a keen reader of novels and you're 30 years old or younger you don't know this book. This book's vanished. There's no discussion of it on the internet after about 1998.

And it's fascinating. Even a book within our memory as readers and booksellers and whatever can vanish so quickly. And Alan Eisler himself, he died in 2010. So you remember it presumably. so quickly. Yeah. And Alan Isler himself, he died in 2010. Yeah. So you remember it presumably. Do you remember it, William, at the time? Yeah.

I mean, I read it shortly after it came out, just because in the little North London Jewish milieu of my upbringing, everybody was reading it, it seemed, at that time. It seemed like an enormous thing. And I read it and just loved it. And it was not just the fact that everybody I know reading it. For me as a writer, it was also a really important book, I think.

It came out just when I was probably writing my first, maybe my second book. And I've always felt as a writer, I've always felt very influenced by much more by American literature than English literature. And also American Jewish literature has been a big influence on me. And this book just felt like a guiding star for me, actually. As a writer, I felt like it does everything that I want a book to do. And, you know, only in my wildest dreams.

And tell us what those things are. Well, okay. All right, I'll go straight in. You're going straight in with the difficult questions. No, no, no. Because if people who don't know the book, what is it about the book that has the combination? What is the recipe that you find inspiring?

Well, the shortest way of putting it, I suppose, is I love books which are funny and serious. And that sounds simple. Yeah, almost impossible to do. But there's not a lot of people that do it. And usually when you find a book that's trying to do it, the funny isn't funny or the serious isn't serious. And this is one of those really few books where the funny is probably funny and the serious is probably serious.

There's some really great comedy in this book. But when you get down, it's got this really interesting spiral structure and when you get down to the dramatic heart of the book my god it kicks you in the stomach which is in the last 10 well we hold that because i want to talk about that i've got questions about the structure of the book and i have experts here who are going to be able to guide me through it so we'll come back to that yeah sam when did you first read this book because i know you've reread it for the podcast yes so i used to probably about six or seven years after it came out i worked in the sadly now closed joseph's bookstore in temple fortune in north london

and we sold copy after copy after copy of this book and people would come in and ask for it for their book club and whatever and i i had not read it so one day i picked up a copy in this book and people come in and ask for it for their book club and whatever and I I had not read it so one day I picked up a copy in the shop I just started reading it in the shop and um I did not do much book selling that day and I was a really terrible bookseller I should just say now so I was I did read but um anyway I just sat there and read it and people were coming okay yeah all right fine yeah whatever give them the cash buy and i'm just really fascinated with this book and i took it home and carried on reading it was just you know it does kind of suck you in doesn't it even though and i think a lot of comic novels don't suck you in actually a lot of comic novels

you can kind of read a couple pages have a laugh and then put down but because it's kind of motoring i'm not gonna i'm not gonna get into the ending but but it's kind of motoring, I'm not going to get into the ending, but it's motoring towards this darkness, I suppose, and this sort of tragic undertow is always there, that actually you can't just kind of go have a laugh and put it down. So I'm going to read the blurb. It's a 15-second blurb, and then William's going to read the beginning of the book

so people can get the flavour of where we are and what's happening. So apart from the quotes on the back, the blurb on this edition says… Vintage edition, yeah. Yeah. In the Emma Lazarus retirement home in Uptown Manhattan, the Jewish inmates embark on a chaotic, bitchy production of Hamlet. That's the blurb. There it is.

To be honest, that's not a bad one. It's all you need. It's not inaccurate. She's drawn out this, followed by loads of great people saying it's a masterpiece. I think they're counting on that, the publishers are. We are going to return to some of these people. William, why don't you give us the beginning of the book?

Okay, here goes. This is how it starts. The last few weeks have not been easy for me. After an absence of 60 years, Magda Damrosch has re-entered my life and my system is in turmoil. I cannot sleep and I'm troubled by constipation. How ironic that the release of the psychological mechanism should be accompanied by stoppages in the physical. And of course, there are the headaches, two points of pain that gather behind the temples and converge at the base of the skull. No cause for alarm, however, I shall not die at the Emma Lazarus for want of a laxative and an aspirin. Not for nothing does Benno Hamburger call our little home the Enema Lazarus. This witticism is still making the rounds. No doubt about it, he is a specialist in coprological humour,

a man of unbounded cloacal enthusiasms. But what sort of a way is this to begin, for heaven's sake? Even to talk of such things? I'm ashamed of myself. First, I should tell you who I am. My name is Otto Korner. Dropping the umlaut over the O was my first concession to America. Yesterday, September 13th, 1978, I celebrated my 83rd birthday at the aforementioned Emma Lazarus, a retirement home on West End Avenue

in Manhattan. Eventually, you'll find me just south of Mineola, Long Island, where I will be taking up permanent subterranean residence. Quite a few of my friends are already buried there. Only last week, Adolf Sinsheimer led the motorcade. He was to have been her hamlet. Yes, we have a little theatrical society here. Nothing to boast of, I suppose, by the severe standards of Broadway, but good enough. art, or more accurately anti-art, in brief, Dada. I want to set the historical record straight. For 60 years I have been harbouring the truth, a private possession. Whether out of greed or modesty I cannot say, but Magda Damrosch has reappeared, and now the truth must out. It groans for expression. If, as a result, my part on the world stage appears inflated so be it i might as well tell you that i have been cast as the ghost in hamlet there's an irony in that if one can but sniff it out we produce only the classics at the emma lazarus of course you have to make allowances

last year for example our juliet was 83 and our Romeo 78. But if you used your imagination, it was a smash hit. True, on opening night when Romeo killed Tybalt, it was Romeo who fell down and had to be carried down a stretcher from the stage. Look for him now in Mineola. That was great. Can I just say the Mineola thing is genius because there is an argument that rumbles through the whole book about one of the actresses playing Ophelia,

the woman playing Ophelia, does not want the line about Christian burial because she has a non-Jewish daughter-in-law who's going to deny her the Jewish funeral of her dreams. And she doesn't want to be referring to her own non-Jewish burial. So she insists that the line about being buried in Mineola and there's this battle over can you do this to Shakespeare? Can you just put Mineola in the middle?

Is Mineola remotely in Denmark? No. But they sort of carry on. It's brilliant. We should say as well that the book was published in the mid-90s, but we have a couple of clips of Alan Isler. I apologise in advance.

He's a slightly hissy, but they're rare too. So it took 10 years. The book was written in the 70s and 80s, and then it took 10 years to find a publisher. Really? I didn't know that. It was a small publisher, really small publisher. And he says...

Wasn't he in his 60s when it was published? Yes. He says it basically circulated't even 60 when it was published. Yes. He says it basically circulated as Samizdat for 10 years. I never knew that. You read the opening, my first thought was, if you were a publisher or an editor, you'd read that and after two pages you'd think, I'm in. Yeah.

Because it's so authoritative. He just does it brilliantly. And he taught literature for 30 years, I believe, before he published his first novel. it's so literate it's so spot on from the word go i think just as a writer you look at those first two pages yeah it got picked up by penguin didn't it i think that was that was what made the difference uh yes i'm told that all the time it was an advanced age. But it is also true that the book was actually written and completed 12 years before that, when I was a young man of 47. A kid. Why didn't you have it published? have been happy to have it. The publishers themselves were reluctant. They sent me the manuscript, or they sent the agent I had, they sent the manuscript back, full of high

praise, but this was not the sort of thing that would sell books. You Just consider you've got a hero who's over 80. The scene is an old age home. The residents are putting on a classical play. I mean, how is that going to go over in Peoria? So, yes, so he says basically that the book circulated in manuscripts amongst friends and they gave it to other friends and eventually it made its way over to this independent publisher. Bridgeworks. I agree with you.

You start reading the book and you feel, well, everything's here. Everything's where it needs to be. The confidence of it is really spectacular. It doesn't put a foot wrong i don't think at all you know you're from that first page you're hooked and it's the the pleasure of reading it is just it's it's i mean it's and as as you say william it does that thing that is so rare it is genuinely funny but it is also on numbers of occasions you know that there are a couple of solar plexus moments when you it lurches into something that's much darker and more difficult.

And the way he sets up the final revelation at the end, I think, is brilliantly done. And you can tell from the first page that he absolutely knows what he's doing. I think as an example of first-person narration, I think it's an absolutely sublime example of that. I mean, this bit is first-person present tense, which is so easy to get wrong, so hard to do right. first person narration i think it's an absolutely sublime example of that i mean it's first person this bit it's first person present tense which is so easy to get wrong so hard to do right and i

think what's fantastic about this and you can see it straight away is that i think when first person narrative works as a device is when the the narrator is telling you a story but they're not telling you the story they think they're telling you. And you see that there straight away. You get a very strong sense that he thinks he's telling you about this really important production of Hamlet and his role in Dadaism. But the joke is on him. Obviously, the authorial voice in a first-person novel

is completely absent. It's not there, but it's between the lines in this, all the way through that kind of ironic distance between the author poking fun at the narrator is there from the very start he doesn't he's telling it's the book the whole book seems to me about him telling the story he doesn't want to tell he thinks he's telling you one thing but because he's traumatized he's a holocaust survivor he's got this other story that he tells against his wishes. And it's so beautifully done that he can't not tell it. He drops hints that he's a Holocaust survivor through the book.

But it's not until the number on the wrist is mentioned, which is quite close to the end of the book, that he activates that. You've got this sort of gathering sense of dread that there is something, you know, there's a big chunk of his life. And the way he mentions, you know, he's been married twice before. Both wives were cremated, one by her own choice, which you just go, oh, there's something, you know, and then it just doesn't, nothing gets said about nothing.

It doesn't get followed up for pages and pages and you're wondering and wondering. You know, it's really devastating. It's dropped in so lightly. I think different reasons are picking up on it at different points. Yeah. But I felt like it was there. Also.

There from the get-go and you're waiting, waiting to find out the same. Because you know not just that he's a survivor and also not just that his loved ones aren't. Aren't, yeah. You also know that the circumstances of it in some way he's a survivor and also not just that his loved ones aren't you also know that the circumstances of it in some way he's guilty and he's done something that he's ashamed of it's hard to not talk about the structure and it circles back and back and it builds it's not to the very end that you find out also what i'll say is in the tradition of uh

dissecting the frog to see how it works, you end up with a dead frog. This is a difficult book to talk about because as soon as you start pulling out the elements to study them separately, you are, of course, doing what he doesn't do in the book so brilliantly, the thing that you, William, were talking about. This kind of novel works on balance. One paragraph too many in either direction and the whole thing starts to teeter and fall. You know, if it's too larky for too long, that doesn't work.

But then if it gets too intense, for me, one of the things that's so brilliant about the book is the balance that he has to strike between the narrator's unwillingness to tell you the thing he doesn't want to tell you and the demands of the narrative pushing that information towards the reader. Right? of the narrative pushing that information towards the reader, right? So that there's a dance going on for the whole book about you knowing something is coming, but it doesn't come until really late. But it's doubly clever or even trebly clever because the apparent narrative of the book, which is the working on the production of Hamlet, which is what you come back to, the progress of that, the difficult progress of that. It's not straightforward.

But the whole structure of the book also kind of reflects the structure of Hamlet, the play. You know, there's a kind of that going towards the darkness at the end of Hamlet and the revelations at the end of Hamlet and all's ill about my heart, which, you know, that kind of the... So I'm... I think you could teach structure, fictional structure from this book. I mean, I think if you were a creative writing student,

you could learn, which makes it even more ironic that publishers, those fools, yet again, you know, are caught with their pants down, not spotting a masterpiece when it sits in front of them. But you know what else you're saying about the structure of Hamlet? What's real genius about it is on the one hand, yes, it reflects the structure of Hamlet, but on the other, at the same time, what it does, it turns Hamlet inside out.

Yeah. In that what Hamlet is, is a tragedy with a sort of comedy inside it. You've got the story about him and the play. The epigraph comes from Hamlet talking to the players and the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern subplot, which as Tom Stoppard demonstrated, you take two steps to the left, look at a tragedy from a different angle and it's a comedy. A comedy, yeah.

And in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they're dead. So what you have in Hamlet, if you accept that that's a tragedy with a comedy hidden inside it, this is a comedy with a tragedy hidden inside it and that he thinks he's telling a comedy about a production of hamlet the tragedy but inside it all is this holocaust story that comes back in his the family and the the hamlet references go all the way through they're on the first page of things he's got a headache it says two points of pain going to the base of my skull and like all good books they kind of drop crumbs for you on the first reading that you can only pick up on your way back on a second reading pamlet the skull he

gets cast as the grave digger the famous scene with the skull in which obviously it's hamlet digging up the skull of the jester who used to entertain him as a child tragedy comedy all together and the two points of pain obviously is a reference to entertain him as a child, tragedy, comedy, all together. And the two points of pain, obviously, is a reference to the people he's grieving for. We won't say more about exactly what. So the detail, the detail is right there, everything. You say the narrator's great, but you can tell the other thing, I think,

that he obviously loves is the Mozart opera. There's a beautiful passage, I think, about his, I sort of feel he's burying his own aesthetic into this paragraph. is the Mozart opera. There's a beautiful passage I think about. I sort of feel he's burying his own aesthetic into this paragraph. To what may we attribute the grandeur of the marriage of Figaro? To genius, of course, and to the happy conflux in time and place of two such sensibilities. But to say so much is to explain without explaining. What precisely did genius and conflux achieve?

Into the familiar form of opera buffa and the earlier plot stuff, for you Andy, of Commedia dell'arte, with its lords who made sexual advances toward girls of humbler stations, these two amorous klutzes, Mozart and De Ponte, injected the serum of recognisable human experience and emotion. The comic material is subordinated to sharply realized characters, defined in part by de Ponte and in part by

individual tone and richness of Mozart's music. Here is the unexpected irony, the unfathomable paradox. To achieve grandeur, art must descend to the level of palpitating humanity. Obversely, to achieve grandeur, palpitating humanity must ascend to the level of art. It's pretty good. Also, can I say, as a playwright, he's so good at theatre. There's so many bits. There's a bit where he's become the director and he walks into the room and the chair, the director's chair,

someone's sitting in it, and he knows it's a test. You know, he knows they're going to be wondering about his authority and he goes over decisively and sits in another chair and someone says, the chair the director sits in is the director's chair. I just feel like I've been in that rehearsal room. And then there's a whole, he discovers the notes from the previous director who's sadly in Mineola.

One of the things, what are we going to do about the sword fights? You know, they're all like 100 years old. Maybe we could have it in silhouette with some, you know, young actors or some people from a local fencing club doing it in silhouette. He just goes, brilliant. Anyway, I've just got, sorry, a little section.

I wasn't even going to read this, but I just remembered this. So his friend Bloom is playing Claudius. Claudius is, to my understanding, fully human. Bloom's acting style, I would guess, is that of the Yiddish theatre in its most primitive days. He struts about or stands on stage, gnashing his teeth and twirling his moustache a day.

I lashed him with Hamlet's advice to the players, suit the action to the word, the word to the action. I should do it again? Again. Have you heard the argument, is there no offence in it? Int. Is there no offence? Int.

Is there no offence? Int. Okay, now? You're sawing the air, for pity's sake. You almost slapped Lottie in the face. Oi, vey mere, is there no offence? Int. Offence is the emphatic word,

not int. How many times, Bloom? How many times? A little patience corner, the man is doing his best. Thank you. When it's time to break, I will know it. I've got to go to the little girl's room, whined Ladavidovits. You wouldn't want I should disgrace myself in front of everyone. Me too, said Vitkoa. The little girls rooms at Hamburg, you know what I mean, Benno, said Vitkoa. I've got to go real bad. I threw up my hands. It's just the sort of the madness of the rehearsal room and the sort of the bitchiness. You know, I mean, as well as everyone coming together to make a beautiful thing, which does happen, there's also this kind of, you know, everyone's sort of trying to get one over on someone else,

everyone's trying to get to the right chair, and he gets all of that. It's beautiful. And Goldstein's restaurant where they all go and have these fabulous sandwiches that are all named after... Barbara Streisand. We'll come back to the delicatessen. Just as a reminder that people are listening to Backlisted,

this novel was enthusiastically reviewed by Anita Brookner. And I was so happy to discover that. I went into the basement of the London Library because the review isn't available online and it's not been republished since it was first printed in the Spectator. Unbelievable. So I'm just going to read a little bit of Anita Bruckner's review and then get our guest's reaction to it.

It starts, Since new talent invariably comes garlanded with pre-publication encomia, the potential reader is advised to adopt an attitude of caution. That's the opening line! Fans, Alan Eisler's novel, first published in America, has been compared with the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow. Cynthia Ozik has added her commendation. Can it possibly live up to such praise? It can. It does. The comparisons are not odious, but they are very slightly wide of the

mark. Singer is a mystic, Bellow an intellectual ruminant. Eisler is a sharp-witted novelist who knows how to beguile his readers and also how to lay traps for them. And then I'm just going to read her final paragraph because it's so wonderfully Bruckner-ish. This is an excellent novel, not merely because every sentence is alive, but because the reader might be persuaded that what is on offer is a mere comedy of manners. In fact, Isa is several steps ahead of that reader on all counts, and it is his craft that one finally salutes. All that is known of the author is that he is English by birth, that he moved to America when he was 18 years old, that he has taught at Queen's College in New York, that he is 60 years old and that this is his first novel. The good news is that he is working on

another. His remarkable debut is a cause for congratulation not only for the author but for the small American press which originally published him and for Jonathan Cape for buying the book and bringing it out in trade paperback. All in all a distinguished and creditable enterprise and a reminder that big money is not necessarily a guide to the production of excellent work here here it's interesting it snuck under the wire i think as a review she's saying that she likes it and that it's good but it does seem a bit mealy-mouthed to me it seems to me it's not enough from the first line it's really mad it seems to me like she's missing the point in a way i think the book is i think the book is above all of that i think it's i think there's a tendency actually the first novel to say isn't this great what will

they do next and sadly he really didn't actually do much no he did publish other novels and i have tried and i love this book and i've tried his other books and they're similar but so much not nearly as good that I don't want them to spoil the memory of this one. I haven't really finished his other books. They haven't done it for me, but this is enough. You know, it's a first novel.

It doesn't have to be the start of a career. He was an old man. This single one book is enough in a way that, you know, to kill a mockingbird is enough. Yeah. Yeah. The graduate is enough.

There's no shame in being a one hit wonder. This is a stone coldcold masterpiece and he did it on his own and that's enough for me i like brookner's the specific thing i like in that review apart from the very uh the correctness of the language which is of course the thing that i love about her work is the idea that you take it as a comedy at your own risk. We're going to hear another review later in the programme which isn't as positive but makes a similar point. That is the balance between the comedy and

the tragedy effective now will you said at the top you felt it was i agree with that i think i think the balance works yeah but i'd like to ask um sam about the whether it works right to the end of the book. So the structure, we keep coming to talking about the structure. Does the structure work or is it rushed at the end? I think the structure works. I don't feel it's a rush at the end. It's a sort of sucker punch, but it kind of needs to be. I felt a bit uncomfortable, and he is compared to Bellows,

compared to Ross. There's something in the way he writes about women. I think a lot of the time the men are absurd but the women are grotesque i mean they're all in this old people's home and they're all obsessed with shagging each other and shagging their young physical therapist brilliant about about that yes but i slightly feel the women are slightly more the bust of the jokes than the men and i mean that made me feel a little bit like there was slightly too much comedy and i wanted to get to where it was going I could feel it was going somewhere and I think that was what made me a little bit impatient sometimes I mean it's very I have to say it's hilarious I'm not I laughed out loud a lot but that was a little problem for me I think

it's interesting to say that because I think he writes a review of his own book hidden in the middle of the book that i spotted where just right near the beginning he's got there's a one of the women in the book is called grab shite lottie grab shite and it says lottie grab shite was sporting for rehearsals a new pin in silver filigree a mask of comedy superimposed on a mask of tragedy a botched design that from the slightest distance looks like a grinning skull and i think i think that's him acknowledging it saying this is what this book is are you ready for it and it is it's a almost deliberately botched he's saying here's tragedy and comedy and i'm going to put them together in a way that's going to make you feel

really uncomfortable i suppose i think that the men are given a little more humanity than the women. And that doesn't stop me enjoying the book, but it made me want to get beyond some of the humour to get to where I felt it was going. I thought the sexual stuff in the book was very well done, except for the problem that you said. I mean, after there's a grotesque description of the second wife, the contessa, and it's quite hard to move that from your head

when you're dealing with her, although he does his best to sort of say she was incredibly generous and leaves him everything. Yes, it's slightly sour. They're going on their honeymoon and he assumes there's not going to be any action and she's all sort of assuming there is well if i was getting married on my honeymoon i you know that is a fair assumption he's good he's good on the weight the waning of the male libido and there's lots of there's lots of very good stuff in that and very unbellow unrothianian, I think. I think it may be one of two places it's too ripe.

It's very moving, I think. It's incredibly poignant and moving. I think there's another Hamlet connection here, which is interesting. If you say that Hamlet is a tragedy of inaction, it's about a paralysed man who can't do it. I think in some ways this is a comedy of inaction, the subject being sex.

This is about how he's 83 years old and i'm not sure he gets laid in the entire book it's about the failure of his sexual relationships and it's about his early uh his early deflowering at the hands of the the uncomplicated mini the uncomplicated waitress in but it's all about it's all about what he can't do and what's brilliant about it in a sort of hamlety way is it's in the two narratives, in the two timeframes of the contemporary time frame, it's played for laughs. And in the past time frame, obviously being a Jew in 1930s, it's played for tragedy. And in exactly the same way that in Hamlet you have the deaths. The deaths of Hamlet and Gertrude and Ophelia are tragic.

And the death of Rosencrantz and Gunstone is a joke. So you can play the same thing for laughs or tragedy. Hamlet and Gertrude and Ophelia are tragic. And the death of Rosencrantz and Gunstone is a joke. So you can play the same thing for laughs for tragedy. And his inaction, his inability to act, that's what makes it so emotionally devastating, I think. He makes it into a brilliant farce. And then exactly the same trait in his character is tragic. I'd like to read another excerpt from a positive review. And what I think is interesting about this is the reviewer could almost be talking about a different book.

And this is by Rachel Cusk in 1995. And she ended her review by saying, The Prince of West End Avenue is an elegant, moving and well-raised book. And an exceptionally and enviably good first novel. There is a great deal to be said for producing a first novel in middle age rather than youth. Many of the qualities, composure, poise, erudition, experience, so frequently absent from first novels, are brought to Eisler's writing. so frequently absent from first novels, are brought to Eisler's writing, while the self-delight, the over-consciousness of language,

the mechanisms of fiction, not yet skillfully concealed, remain. Now, I think it's fascinating that Rachel Karsk, I think I'm right in saying in her review, she doesn't mention the humour of it at all. That she's not interested in the humour as a reviewer that its qualities are are are to be found elsewhere I'm not saying she's right or wrong yeah but I think what's interesting is the way the book can be interpreted it doesn't have to be interpreted as a comedy of manners yes in the way that Bruton suggests exactly interpreted, yeah. It can be interpreted as something much darker than the off. And I think also one thing about him being an older writer and an older narrator looking back on his life

is that there's a tenderness and also a sense of his own, we talked about guilt a little bit, a sense of his own guilt when he talks about his past as a young man, that if it was a young man writing about a young man in the midst of it all there might be more self-justification more bluster more blood you know there's none of that he he knows he knows he didn't behave well I suppose and it's a long time to think about it in various ways you know and including towards his first wife that sort of the story of their marriage

is is is going to haunt me and haunt me when i first read it and it's going to now haunt me again it's it's it's very very powerful it's very devastating and his survival strategy is interesting i think as well which also gives you another insight into how the book is structured that ability to go back into a specific day, at a specific time, and reconstruct all the details. So when the book was published, we talked about the book was successful in the year it was published. I want to play another clip now by Alan Isler talking about what the effect had been.

He had been, if not retired, on the verge of retirement when the book was published and became a success. Well, how do you feel now that you've, well, become so important and famous overnight? You know, the way you phrase that question makes it very difficult to answer. Churchill once said of Clement Attlee that Attlee

was a modest man with much to be modest about I am a modest man with much it's hard for me to say how it feels well you can't deny that you've become famous.

Your book has been translated into many languages. Yes, I can't deny it. I don't really believe it. I must say I'm very pleased by it, naturally. It has far, far exceeded any expectations I ever had. far, far exceeded any expectations I ever had. I began with the humble desire simply to be published. You know, it's icing on the cake.

I think that's very interesting in the light of what Rachel Cusk says about a debut as an older writer. Because what I found very interesting as a reader, reading this in my 20s, reading it again in my 30s, and reading it just now again in my late 40s, like all the best books, it's a different book as you age and change as a reader and one of the things i noticed on this reading as an older person is there's so much event so much brilliant plot so much comedy so many fascinating things about history in it there's a whole thing going underneath that's easy to not notice which is I think there's something fascinating about lived experience as a slightly older person that I only noticed on this reading, actually,

the way there's this present tense narrative and a past tense narrative. And the way those two things fit together, there's something absolutely fascinating about that, about lived experience as a slightly older person. You live your life in the present tense. You don't know what's going to happen five minutes from now and in a way that narrative is sort of comic and you're confused in it and yet at the same time you're constantly reliving your past your past keeps on coming back to you and you relive your own past in the past tense in a sense

and there's something there about life regardless of the plot of any of the specifics of that there's some essence there about what it feels like to be alive and to be a bit older and have just lived experience, and only an older writer could have pulled that off. He's also, he's 83, isn't he? And he's actually, he's lived through history, and one thing I really like is that, so he's met Tristan Zara, who he describes kind of having this cowbell and sort of intoning

these sort of dreadful kind of nonsense things yeah ghastly ghastly things but he also um he's met Lenin in Zurich and there's this great moment where he sort of meets Lenin he sort of tells him all about how he's sort of dreadfully in love with this woman he can't who doesn't care about him he can't find her he doesn't know where she is. And he's lost her. And Lenin basically says, look, there is important work in the world for a young man like you. And take my advice. And he goes, go over there. It's like the Cabaret Voltaire.

Find yourself a pretty girl. And then you can do some important work. And he goes. He's annoyed. He's annoyed. You know, why should I do this? And he goes. It's an insult, like a slap in the face. And and he goes and that's where he meets the girl again and he goes do i suppose

that lenin was in zurich solely to point out to me the cabaret voltaire of course not he was to serve the greater purpose on the world's historical stage but how can i doubt that at that moment our separate purposes were interlinked find Find yourself a pretty girl, said Lennon, not knowing the purpose. And I, not knowing the purpose, entered the cabaret Voltaire. It's just this brilliant thing. It's like, because he's lived that long, history has coincided and collided with his life in lots of ways. And if you have a narrator who's 20, you don't know that.

You don't know that the person you told your bad love life to is going to be Lennon. You don't know who you don't know that the person you told your love the bad love life to it's going to be lennon you don't know who they're going to be what is the what is the purpose i don't know this is a hard question to answer of counterpointing the production of hamlet in the present with the dada very specific scene of the production of the Dada cabaret in the past. You know, I was trying to see if there was something happening with the narrator's attitude towards art, actually. What is sustaining him in his relationship with art? He's naming Dada as something ph phony but what is he getting from

shakespeare i think anything well i think what he's finding phony about dada is that at a moment of world crisis they're sort of talking nonsense and delighting in it being nonsense and he finds that irksome and annoying and boring, you know. And what I think he likes about Hamlet is that at a time of not world crisis, you know, when they're all in this luxury old people's home with this sort of dairy restaurant around the corner where they have their cheese fritters

and everything, it gives meaning to where they are. And also the narrator knows Hamlet inside out. I think that Hamlet's different from the Dada thing, though. I think it relates to what you were saying before about purpose. There's another bit later in the book where he keeps talking about purpose. What's my purpose?

What's my purpose? And I think you mustn't forget, and again, it also relates to what I think you were saying about the female characters in the book. I think you must never forget that he's a first-person anti-hero as a narrator, and the author is, at a lot of points in this book, taking the piss out of the character, I think. And I think that all this talk, I could be wrong, I think all this talk about purpose is actually Alanis,

they're laughing at this guy and the joke is he constantly thinks his life has meaning and purpose and he's always on the periphery of things and he's always trying to inflate his own importance and thinking he's important. Which is Hamlet. Yeah, but... The character of Hamlet. The character of Hamlet is self-important and deluded. But in terms of purpose, the joke is that his life is without,

he's constantly seeking purpose in his life and it's the classic sort of shrug of Jewish humour because the joke is on him because, in a sense, his whole life has been a failure. The whole central event of his life is this other thing when he should have done more to save his family and he didn't and he's regretted that all his life and this is why the character is constantly trying to find some sense of purpose what's the meaning what's the purpose and in the subtext all the way through the author is saying the joke of your life mate is that

you messed up and the and there was no purpose and we're all scrabbling around for meaning here he can't he can't even solve the cross you know he can't even solve the clues the charades that are left to try and point you know when he loses he has the the theft of the real letter which is his most prized position he can't solve that without his friends so it's like he has real difficulty on the understanding i think the dada thing too when he he puts the the mannequin on the stage that's very play within a play he's doing it in a way that hamlet is doing it to humiliate ophelia he's doing it to him to humiliate magda but of course it totally backfires because it kind of it's the thing that ends up shocking the Zurich audience

much more than anything else. Also this novel, and we've talked about certain aspects of it, we've talked about the Jewishness of it, but also it fits into a very particular sub-genre, which is novels set in retirement homes. I made a little list here because I think it's interesting. Paradise Lodge by Nina Stivey. House Mother Normal.

We've read that. By Boris Johnson. God help me. B.S. Johnson. War Crimes of the Heart by Liz Jensen. That's a terrific book. Ending Up by Kingsley Amis. Read that.

Sun City by Torve Janssen, which is terrific. I haven't read that. They sort of republished that one. It's one of the only ones they haven't republished. And Adam Biles, who was our guest on Backlisted when we did the Huismans episode at Shakespeare & Co in Paris. Adam Biles' novel Feeding Time is set in an old people's home. But there's a kind of temptation, I think,

Settling in an old people's home. But there's a kind of temptation, I think, with retirement home comedies to make them savage. Certainly B.S. Johnson is one of the most savage novels you'll ever read. What I like about The Prince of West End Avenue, I think, William, is related to something you were saying, is the sense that life is perilous, perilously near to the end. Yeah.

A member of the play will drop dead. A tiny accident. Or you will end up in sickbay when you least expect it. And you might not come out of sickbay. But I think this is a very Jewish humour thing, of teetering on the edge of the abyss i mean you know they sort of the classic joke about sort of every jewish festival what's about they killed us we survived let's eat you know that is the classic you know passover rosh hashan you can

you know go through the whole thing and you know there is that like scene that runs through sort of jewish humor that you know we've only just survived. We might not survive again. We've got to make some jokes in the meantime. Otherwise, what are we doing? And I think what this novel is really about is survivor guilt. So that's what it comes down to. And again, one of these things that I only picked up on a subsequent reading of the book, there's a line that just flashes by, and I only noticed it this time round,

where he's describing somebody somebody writes him from tel aviv in 1952 trying to track down the zurich gang and um lets him know that magda damrosch has died in auschwitz which isn't this isn't his wife this is the that's other character and then in a flash he says and he was trying to get in touch with me because he was trying to find other survivors from the period and and i didn't reply because i didn't consider myself to be one and and it's in the middle of a paragraph it's a subplot it's not even in the end of a sentence like i just said it's somewhere in the middle of a sentence and it flashes by and then on this reading i suddenly thought yeah that that that's what it's about he doesn't

consider himself to be a survivor his family died he feels responsible and he can never get over it and it and it haunts him for the rest of his life and in that sense he's a walking dead man that's a ghost he's a ghost is the great play about guilt and not knowing what to do with the guilt that you carry also i think that is the key to the structure. The reason why that revelation comes near the end and is not lingered on is because it's almost like saying to the reader, here it is. Yeah. This is it. What difference does it make?

Not much. You know it. I've told you it. I live with it. What does me telling you it difference make to me not much yes there's no catharsis there's no like oh it's all okay because because they can't be yeah and i think that's what's really powerful i mean that's what the ending does leave you with is you there is no answer and i am there's the same, you know. The readiness is all. It's the same thing.

You know, there isn't a, we don't get it all wrapped up in a boat and that isn't how. Art is a way of dealing with, you know, the fact that he finds some, it may not be catharsis, but the production of the play is a way of dealing with it. Exactly, because you say there's no catharsis. In a way, there isn't, but it's called the Emma Lazarus home. When he finally gets to this point of memory, last memory,

he literally falls down in a faint and then he gets up and he goes and performs the play. So in a sense, there's no catharsis. You never get over that, but you do have to carry on and live your life. And for him, that's what it is. So it's not a catharsis. He discovers the I of Hamlet, I, Hamlet, Prince of Demer. I would like to thank William and Sam for bringing this book in

because I'll tell you why. Because the life of the book reflects what the book is about, that the book was born, died, and deserves to be born again. And I really hope this is one of the book reflects what the book is about, that the book was born, died, and deserves to be born again. And I really hope this is one of the books I've most enjoyed rediscovering through the podcast, and I really hope listeners feel sufficiently enthused to go out there and buy it and read it. Absolute pure pleasure, fiction of a story brilliantly told, I think. So anyway, that's all we have time for, folks.

Thanks to William and Samantha for wit and insight, to our producer, Nicky Birch, for top sound skills, Unto Unbound, for offering us this regular birth in their residential home for the over-read. You can't. You're saying I read too much. You can download all 94 of our shows, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, backlisted.fm,

and you can contact us on Twitter, Facebook and Boundless. And before you do that, well, you could leave us a review on iTunes, but as iTunes will be obsolete soon, perhaps, I don't know, just send us a postcard or something. Anyway, thanks very much. Thank you for being there. there all things being equal we'll be back in a fortnight you can choose to listen to backlisted with or without adverts if you prefer to listen to it without adverts you can join us on our patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted where you also get bonus content of two episodes of lock listed the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks