An unquestionably different upbringing

Two days to go before A Buyer's Market opens for business, and it looks like half our number may have fallen at the first, which would be a sadness. Still time to catch up though, particularly given how easy the first volume was to read and how much fun it was. I have a train journey on Wednesday, plus a weekend chez mes parentals, so I expect to have Vol 2 done and dusted before I go to Korea next Tuesday.

In the meantime I've been reading two books. The first is Murakami's latest short stories. Yes, still trying to finish it from holiday. I've been frustrated by this, as I feel I often am by longer collections of short stories - >6 by one author and they suddenly all begin to sound the same... certainly the case here. I also can't make up my mind about whether the stories themselves are mystical and profound modern day fairy stories, or just slightly weird but ultimately vacuous nonsense. I've found it helps by tackling them one at a time on the bus in the morning, rather than trying to read a chunk in one go - by taking my time, I'm enjoying them more.

I'm also reading Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom, which is a chunky volume and not conducive to commuter reading. Interestingly, by tackling this in parallel with Powell I seem to have dovetailed the appropriate stages of Nelson's upbringing with Jenkins', making for interesting, amateurish and entirely superfluous comparisons... so here we go:

1. The Trust is an obvious starting point, with Nelson having been left certain items by his father (notably a revolver) but having been adopted by the local tribal chief, his father's one-time employer, and thus coming into an inheritance, as well as having early brushes with society. The setting, however, of the Transkei bushveld in NM's case and London in Jenkins' case is a clear difference. In fact NM doesn't even hit the big city (Jo'burg) until Chapter 8, aged 24, and is overwhelmed by it.

2. Both, however, attend the pre-eminent public school in the area (although co-ed in NM's case), and Mr Mandela does describe his higher education college, renowned in the area and indeed across all of South Africa, as being to him "Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale all rolled into one".

3. Both appear to be equally clueless with members of the fairer sex, yet have a companion who is far more accomplished in this area. I suspect this would apply to most teenage/early 20s boys though.

4. On the subject of companions though, both would appear to be keeping questionable company up to this stage - liable to lead them astray at some point. Nelson's hanging out with communists at the moment though, which are clearly far more dangerous than Messrs Templer and Stringham, though I'm not yet sure what to make of Kenneth Widmerpool.

Sadly however, this interesting synchronisation is unlikely to succeed much further as an experiment in comparative literature. I'll probably bash through the rest of ALWTF in and on the way to/from Korea. Besides, we already know how Nelson turns out anyway... only time will tell whether Jenkins evolves into a black freedom fighter. I suspect he won't.