Maatstaf. Jaargang 33

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Boek van de maand

Angela Carter, Honeybuzzard

Found this paperback, her first novel, on the Hague fleamarket for fl. 3. Its original title, Shadow dance, was nicer, but the paperback publisher no doubt thought it would sell better if named after the book's villain, a beautiful amoral man called ‘Honeybuzzard’, a name never heard on land or sea and a typical example of sixties baroque. Although Carter's similes go off like little fireworks all over every page, the book as a whole is weak and forced pointless. The passages about a run-down antique shop and the grubby atmosphere of antique-dealing in sixties London are the only places where the book comes to life, perhaps because here the author is not inventing freaky characters but describing something real, something about which she actually cared.

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Soraya Esfandiary ex-Pahlevi, Nu zeg ik alles

Found this in a junk-shop for one guilder; the rather prim confessions of a rather ordinary society woman with a rather conventional mind. Full of clichés, and reticent concerning the only things worth knowing about. The horoscope cast on the occasion of Soraya's marriage to the Shah of Persia was highly favorable (which shows what such horoscopes are worth), but if there is such a thing as Karma, then Soraya's must have been rotten. For one youthful error (the marriage lasted from her 18th to her 26th year), her life was ruined, for she was thereafter déclassée. Most bad books have at least one striking passage, and here it is a description of the Shah's limousine driving through villages in the hinterland, whereupon the local populatin would rush out to cut the throats of their domestic animals in his honor. Driving through lanes of terrified animals whose blood would spatter the car as it passed used to upset Soraya, for she was fond of animals and took along a whole menagerie on various state visits (her animals had a separate plane). Despite plenty of intrigue, the court life of Teheran must have been the dullest in recorded history, as the courtiers trekked from palace to palace for endless bridge-games. As for the Shah, despite Soraya's kind words, he emerges as a secretive, rather paranoid figure, and a moral coward too. He never told anyone to their face that they were being dropped - not even Soraya, there were none of the tearful farewells one might have expected. While abroad she was suddenly told that she had been divorced, and after that she never saw the Shah again.

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Gore Vidal, Homage to Daniel Shays, collected essays

I picked up this book in van Gennep's modern antiquariaat for only fl. 6,50. Vidal is a great essayist who thinks he is a novelist and who will persist in writing second-rate novels. Sometimes they are freaky, like Myra Breckenridge or Duluth, or else they are books of the middlebrowbestseller type, written in a naturalist style that Vidal himself claims to despise. (Julian is an exception to this rule, however.) But Vidal as an essayist is one of the most independent minds now functioning; also it's a delight to read someone who takes for granted that you understand all his allusions. In one of the essays in this book, he evaluates television correctly as a return of the mass public to an older art-form, the drama. Just as photography freed painting from the yoke of realism so should television free the novel from naturalism. There is a lovely essay on the Tarzan books, whose dream-like quality, that Vidal so

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appreciates, was marvelously captured in the recent film Greystoke. The high point of the book is the essay on the nouveau roman. The sore tooth to which Vidal keeps returning is of course the failure of society to accept the homosexual as a human being like any other. The great earmark of Vidal is his tragic love for the United States, something like that of a sorrowful parent who decided not to spare the rod.

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