Month: July 2007

S/Z?

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Thank you very much, lovely people at Hesperus Press, for sending me a pile of books the other day. You are nice folk. I’ve seen a few other people review The Calligrapher’s Night by Ghata, and Wings by Mikhail Kuzmin, so I decided to go for Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac. As usual, imagine the accent.

Hesperus’ copy, pictured, has both ‘Sarrasine’ and ‘A Passion in the Desert’. The latter is a short story; ‘Sarrasine’ is one of those short-novella-long-short-story things which only seem to happen in Europe, and hasn’t been given a proper name in English yet. It is a framed account of a sculptor, Sarrasine, and his infatuation with La Zambinella. With surprising consequences. Sounds a little lurid, doesn’t it, but of course it isn’t – Balzac’s narrative is thick, rich prose which one can sink into and admire, without being put off. The descriptions are delicious, especially the first page, which depicts an extravagant crowd at a party.

‘… The raised voices of the gamblers at every unexpected throw, and the ringing sound of the pieces of gold, blended with the music and with the murmur of conversations. The crowd, which had been intoxicated by everything the world had to offer in the way of seductions, was stupefied by the perfumed vapour and general drunkenness that was affecting their crazed imaginations.’

Better than ‘went to a party; everyone was wasted’, isn’t it?

At the risk of belying my moniker at the bottom of this entry, let me quote Kate Pullinger’s Foreword: ‘The theorist Roland Barthes’ book S/Z is entirely devoted to a detailed semiotic examintaion of Sarrasine. I first came across the story not through Barthes (however much I’d love to claim the contrary)…” Well, Kate, I’m one step ahead of you – whilst ploughing through my first year module ‘Text, Context, Intertext’ (TCI to its friends), I read Barthes lengthy, wordy and largely incomprehensible book. In doing so, I ought probably have read ‘Sarrasine’, which is quoted in its entirety, in little chunks – but I started skipping these in the end. In a toss up between Barthes and Balzac, I know who I’d choose – though one of Barthes’ terms is nice, and very useful. It’s ‘the casuistry of discourse’ – when the text is trying to limit what it tells you, without lying. Think detective novel – the book can’t say “And Mr. Peterson killed Miss Knight with a dagger in the study” if the unveiling of Mr. Peterson is the denouement – but it also can’t say “Mr. Peterson was on a train to Moscos when Miss Knight was stabbed”, unless he has a complex system of pulleys. The ‘casuistry of discourse’ is in play when the novel writes “Miss Knight was killed”. Not lying; not giving the game away. Haven’t you always wanted a term for that?

Barthes entitled his book S/Z because Sarrasine would normally be Sarrazine, or something like that, and this is all to do with castration (pretty much everything is to do with castration for Barthes) – but I think S/Z is a very useful model for a transatlantic audience such as I have… as this little sketch demonstrates…

7 Books You Will Have Heard About And Have Probably Read (Most Of)

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Never let it be said that I am out of touch with the populus. In a year where I’ve read more Middle English than your average preteen, I’ve also just finished a book nearly all of ’em will have read. Yup, having reached page 766, have completed my third read of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The film’s coming out soon, and I wanted to refresh my memory…

In the early days, when JK Rowling was producing one of the series a year, Harry Potter was the same age as me. I’ve had the opportunity to overtake him now, but even so, I wasn’t there from the outset. The first time our paths crossed was when I helped out on the school’s Carnegie Prize Panel (which didn’t have any effect on the actual procedure, but was rather fun) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter III) was one of the choices. This was when Harry was big, but not huge. And I was hooked – part of me wanted to loath the book, but… no, I was hooked. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has read any of the series, and still dislikes it.

So what is it about JKR’s writing? Well, if I knew that, I’d probably be a millionaire by now. But we did have a lecture on Harry Potter at Oxford once, in the first week that I was at university, and the lecturer pointed out that JKR rarely used descriptive language, or anything which veered from the action-action-action. This, said Dr. Purkiss (herself, with her son Michael, an author under the pseudonym Tobias Druitt), was either incredibly clever writing, or incredibly bad writing. True, take any chunk of prose and Virginia Woolf it ain’t – but Rowling’s ability to make you read on is unparalleled. Who would have thought children would willingly read 700+ pages? And I read it over a single weekend, so that I wouldn’t have the ending spoilt by friends at school on Monday. Perhaps I’m not the best example of someone who needed persuasion to read, but you get the idea.

So. Where do my musings point? Nowhere, to be honest, except to demonstrate myself not quite the literary snob I might seem, and to hope lots of others hold up their hands in solidarity. No reason why one can’t enjoy Woolf and wizards; Shakespeare and Sirius Black; Austen and Aurors… you get the picture. Speaking of pictures, there must be a thousand sketches I could have done to accompany a post on Harry Potter. But I’m tired… so I’ve copied this one, which is hopefully the way things are heading for the next generation. Fingers crossed.

50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About

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Thank you for all your comments yesterday, much appreciated! We’re still all very chuffed here – oh, and do keep contributing your name to the BAFAB draw until the end of the week. Will probably do the draw on Sunday.

It’s been quite a while since I added another book to the ’50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About’, which are listed down the left-hand column of this page – so today I’m going to add the eleventh. This one was a cert from the offset.

Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman. This was the first book I ever bought new on impulse. That sounds like I have admirable restraint in book purchasing, but I think you know me well enough to despute that allegation – rather, my impulse-purchases are almost always secondhand books. But this one I couldn’t leave on the shelf.

The book is quite small, in length and height – a pocket book, if you will. The subtitle is ‘Confessions of a Common Reader’, and anyone who has manoeuvred themselves to a website with the words ‘Stuck’, ‘in’, ‘a’, and ‘Book’ in the title will be entranced. In bitesize chapters, just perfect for one-a-night-before-bed, Fadiman explores the foibles and activites of the book obsessed. You’ll recognise the lot.

My favourite section is ‘Never Do That To A Book’:

‘When I was elevn and my brother was thirteen, our parents took us to Europe. At the Hotel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen, as he had done virtually every night of his literate life, Kim left a book facedown on the bedside table. The next afternoon, he returned to find the book closed, a piece of paper inserted to mark the page, and the following note, signed by the chambermaid, resting on its cover:

SIR, YOU MUST NEVER DO THAT TO A BOOK’

Don’t know about you, but I’m cheering on the chambermaid. The chapter divides readers into ‘Courtly Lovers’ and ‘Carnal Lovers’; the latter are happy to use their books as table-wedges, tennis rackets or surf-boards, the former wouldn’t let a biro within ten metres. I’m definitely Courtly… how about you?

Ex Libris is a witty, warm collection of essay-anecdotes, a perfect gift for something bookish, but equally a perfect gift to yourself. Find out about The Odd Shelf, Literary Gluttony, and the Joy of Sesquipedalians, and scream in recognition at every page.

Winners all round

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A couple of exciting things today to share with you. The first is that BAFAB has come to Stuck-in-a-Book. I entered the blogging world just after the previous BAFAB week, not by design of course, and so this is my first. For those not familiar with the concept, Buy A Friend A Book does exactly what it says on the tin – just leave a comment on this entry, and one lucky entrant will be posted a book. Haven’t decided which one yet, but I’ll try and make sure that it’s one you’ll enjoy. Also haven’t decided upon the selection procedure (our cat Bundle sadly died a year ago, otherwise she’d have happily played the role at which dovegreyreader’s cats excel)… but you’re job is just to comment; leave the rest to me.

And the other news… my exam results came in a day earlier than anticipated… turns out I’m the Carbon Copy this time, as I followed my brother into getting a first! Very delighted and quite surprised, but the true heroes are unsung. And here they are…


By the way, any congratulatory messages will be taken as entrants to BAFAB… sneaky, huh?!

Making Humans

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I don’t read Science Fiction, but I think it’s true to say that a lot of it is about making humans. Or creating beings as near as possible to humans – whether robots, or anthropomorphised objects and animals, and so forth. Even games companies are intent on making dolls as much like humans as possible. Don’t they realise that literature is several steps ahead?

I’ve just finished reading Claire Tomalin’s Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, which has been languishing on my shelves for a few years. Having blogged about short stories the other day, I thought I’d go back and read about the woman behind some of my favourites – and while doing it, I started pondering the whole sphere of biographies. They’re a strange commodity, aren’t they? A writer is given three hundred pages to package up an entire life… what a feat. And what a liberty. Tomalin can be on safe ground when listing the dates of publications, names of relatives etc. etc., but then you get something like this:
“Although Katherine and Murry often presented their relationship as the most important element in both their lives – and it did absorb a huge amount of their energy – there is a sense in which neither sought true understanding of the other. For each of them, the other became a symbolic figure very early on: she the good, suffering, spontaneous genius, he the ideally beautiful scholar-lover without whom neither life nor death could be properly contemplated.”
Sorry, a bit of a long quotation there, potentially breaking all sorts of copyright laws. It was reading this section that made me think “hold up, what?” Tomalin is a very good, sensible writer, on the whole, but strident sentences like this one seem so difficult to justify. How do we know? Even with letters and diaries and the memories of friends, this sort of confessional psychoanalysis could only ring remotely true if it were in the mouth of Mansfield or Murray. And yet it is routine for biographies to depict relationships and mindsets in detail which must be subjective and conjectural.

I don’t have a problem with this sort of biography-writing – there doesn’t seem to be any other sort – but it did make me think, and I thought I’d share my ponderings, and see what people think. With scientists trying to make life, are biographers doing it better, or simply wishing they were?

And onto Tomalin’s Katherine Mansfield, more specifically. As I said, Tomalin is a very competent writer – but I felt the book was quite hollow, in the end. Not in the sense of vacuous, but that Mansfield continually avoided the spotlight. I finished the book without really getting to grips with Mansfield’s personality, though the opinions of all around her were quite vivid, and the biography is perfectly readable. She didn’t seem particularly pleasant, which was sad, but… even so, the big gap in the biography was often the subject herself. Mansfield remained elusive. Which kind of negates everything I wrote above… but surely not Tomalin’s aim?

One final note. You might remember my wish to get the ‘right’ postcard bookmark for each book – for this one, I chose Edward Hopper’s ‘Hotel Room’ (1931)