Reading the 80s - 1982

As far as I can remember the only books from 1982 I read at the time were both science fiction: the movie tie in for ET and Douglas Hill's Young Legionary, which I felt wasn't up to the standard of the books it prequeled. Mind you prequels weren't a thing then, so it may just have been my irritation at the whole concept. Of course there must have been children's books (I was nine) and even a child would have had to walk around with earplugs in and blinkers on not to at least be aware of Jeffrey Archer, Shirley Conran, Stephen King and V for Vendetta, but I was a little too young yet. 

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, published in Portuguese in 1982, would have been so utterly off my radar and so far out of my range as to exist on another plane of reality . 

Published posthumously (Pessoa died in 1935) the book consists of fragments - diary entries of a character called Bernardo Soares who seems poised somewhere between fictional creation and Pessoa's own self: philosophical, introspective, mildly nihilistic, occasionally contradictory, convinced that the world of the mind is more important than the real world (or perhaps trying to convince himself of that) these diary entries follow no order, detail very little of day to day life -  and it's never clear why Soares feels compelled to write these snippets, how important he really believes them. 

The other thing about the work being written in almost entirely undated fragments is that the grouping of them is obviously fairly arbitrary. Pessoa never got the chance to edit and organise into a coherent whole, and perhaps never meant them to be published as a coherent whole at all. They would almost make more sense as a box of cards, which the reader could shuffle to read in any order they chose. 

It's a melancholy book, as I read it. A Book of Disquiet, in fact. 

My other 1982 book was The Man from St Petersburg by Ken Follett. A thriller set before the first world war, with Winston Churchill as a young man (thankfully appearing only sporadically, as I find picturing Churchill as a young man near impossible) and Germany arming themselves. Britain must ally with Russia before the storm breaks, and The Earl of Walden is detailed to persuade Aleks Orlov, an old friend, to sign the treaty. 

The Man from St Petersburg is Feliks, who follows Aleks to London to kill him and hopefully save thousands of Russian lives - after all what do the peasants owe the nobility that they should die in a war to support their British cousins? 

Outlining the plot like this makes it sound very dramatic and implausible and typically thrilleresque, and I admit there are coincidences and I spotted at least one twist before time, but it really, really doesn't matter. It's all written so well - every single character has a character. Feliks believes himself to have no fear, no feelings, and yet you can see how he got that way and that perhaps it isn't true. He's just numb. The Earl of Walden is a little stuffy but generous, his wife has been painted into a corner not of her own making, and even minor characters like Feliks' Irish landlady shine on the page (for example when he goes to get a cooking bowl to make nitroglycerin and she asks him if he's baking a cake, advises him not to blow them up, and strategically makes sure she's out for the day).  

It also raises the question, very pertinent in 1982, of who actually is the bad guy, or if maybe no-ones is and it's really just a matter of taking sides. 

The next year for this challenge is of course 1983, and my current plan is to reread Pratchett and Calvin Trillin and for the first time read Alice Walker's In Our Mother's Gardens, but now that shops are opening I also hope to incorporate more of a random element. Something that's made the challenge particularly difficult this time around is that I haven't been able to browse and pick up things that just happen to be published in a particular year, of which there are many, many more than appear in the Wikipedia and Goodreads lists top 200 or whatever, and so it's not really widening out my understanding of the time.  

Either way I should be back with those reviews on the 10th June.