1990s

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

StuckinaBook All , 25 Comments

Well, I finished The Poisonwood Bible (1998) with a couple of hours to spare before book group… and, having worked out what I think about it, I am ready to write my review.  It’s quite difficult to formulate my thoughts on this novel, because these thoughts do not all lean in the same direction.  Reviews feel like they should be unified, and that’s rather tricky when I have both positive and negative responses to a book.  So… bear with me.  I’ll bear with you bearing with me.  Hopefully by the end of the page we’ll understand one another, no?

First things first, The Poisonwood Bible ought to be about 200 pages shorter.  I don’t mean that careful and judicious editing throughout is needed, to compress the narrative (although this wouldn’t be a bad idea) – I mean that it should have ended on p.427.  There are 616 pages in the edition I read (rather more than the supposed 350 page upper-limit of book group choices) and there shouldn’t be.  I am astonished that any editor let Kingsolver keep going for those final 189 pages.  It was self-indulgent and unnecessary.  But, now I’ve got that off my chest, I can return to the review proper.  It gets more positive soon, promise.
The Poisonwood Bible follows the Price family from 1959 to the 1990s – Nathan is a Baptist minister from Georgia (the US state, not the country), and has brought his wife Orleanna and daughters Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May to the Congo.  They are there as missionaries, but all is not going to go entirely to plan… to say the least.  This is the basic premise of Kingsolver’s novel – and from such a simple idea, she weaves a long and complex novel.  Complex in terms of emotions, interactions, and gradual self-discovery, that is.  Not a lot really happens.  (Another reason why The Poisonwood Bible is difficult to write about.  Honestly, Barb!)
Five voices make up the narrative, each in the first person.  Orleanna Price speaks briefly at the beginning of each section  – which are named after Biblical (and Apocryphal) books – Genesis, The Revelation, The Judges, Bel and the Serpent, Exodus.  She speaks wearily, always in retrospect, and keeps her cards close to her chest.  Doubtless this is partly so plot points aren’t revealed too early, and her melancholy ambiguity includes one momentous hint which kept me gripped and guessing for hundreds of pages.
But it is the four daughters who are the mainstay of the novel.  The narrative is passed between them, and Kingsolver constructs their four voices brilliantly, distinctly, and consistently.  Her fellow American novelist, Marilynne Robinson, hugely impressed me with Gilead because of her ability to ‘capture’ a voice – and while Kingsolver has a rather different slant on a minister, she certainly writes beautifully for his daughters.  Since they are so thoroughly depicted, it’s difficult to summarise their characters – but, broadly speaking, I’ll try.
Rachel is the eldest, a white-blonde ingenue whose Malapropisms (‘never the train shall meet’) and simple, unimaginative nature are initially endearing, but eventually rather concerning.  She never loses the all-American slang expressions she brings with her to Congo, and I rather liked her indefatigable sassiness, even if it is accompanied with a lack of cultural awareness.  
Leah and Adah are twins – Leah desperately seeks the approval of her father, and carries with her the guilt that, in the womb, she ’caused’ Adah’s disability.  Adah limps badly, and almost never speaks.  She also has a fascination with seeing things backgrounds, and especially palindromes.  Silent to others, her narration reveals her cynicism and bitterness, but also her humour.
Ruth May, finally, is the youngest – and the simplest.  Not in terms of intelligence, but in the simple, contented way she adapts to her surroundings, making friends amongst the neighbours, and doing her best to understand her father’s teaching in their new environment.
For Kingsolver is not subtle about the clash of cultures.  Here, the welcome party for the Prices is interrupted by Nathan:
“Reverend and Mrs. Price and your children!” cried the younger man in the yellow shirt.  “You are welcome to our feast.  Today we have killed a goat to celebrate your coming.  Soon your bellies will be full with our fufu pili-pili.”At that, why, the half-naked women behind him just burst out clapping and cheering, as if they could no longer confine their enthusiasm for a dead goat.[…]”Nakedness,” Father repeated, “and darkness of the soul!  For we shall destroy this place where the loud clamour of the sinners is waxen great before the face of the Lord!” No one sang or cheered anymore.  Whether or not they understood the meaning of ‘loud clamour,’ they didn’t dare be making one now.  They did not even breathe, or so it seemed.  Father can get a good deal across with just his tone of voice, believe you me. 
This is, firstly, a great example of Kingsolver’s exceptional ability to convey individuals’ voices through minor verbal tics.  Perhaps it isn’t clear from just this excerpt, but only Rachel’s narrative would have that ‘why’ in the second paragraph; only Rachel would finish ‘believe you me’.  If Adah’s sections have the most obvious stylistic identifications, the others are subtly tied to their narratives too.  That is the greatest strength of The Poisonwood Bible, and the strength that encourages me to read more by Barbara Kingsolver – the ability to create a character’s voice.

Which makes it all the more frustrating that, in Nathan Price, she has done nothing of the kind.  The women of The Poisonwood Bible are drawn so well, so cleverly.  And, in the midst of them all, is Nathan.  He never comes alive, he is scarcely more than a Bad Man Who Does Bad Things.  His motivations aren’t addressed, he has no depth whatsoever – it is a shambolic waste of an opportunity.  I don’t think it’s simply my Christianity (and the fact that I know a lovely, hard-working, deeply loving missionary in D.R. Congo) that makes me feel this – others at book group certainly agreed.  Nathan is angry, selfish, insensitive, violent… it was when he started hitting his children that my eyes rolled so much that I felt a little dizzy. Doubtless there are other novels where one meets ogres – Barbara Comyns’ The Vet’s Daughter, for example, or any novel by Dickens – but in those books they are in the midst of the surreal and exaggerated.  Nathan Price is not, and, though all his attributes are individually believable, as a composite, without any redeeming features, they are not.  It is such a pity that Kingsolver allowed herself this laziness.  Had she made Nathan a character, rather than a two-dimensional face of Wicked Colonialism, The Poisonwood Bible would have been more interesting.  Then again, perhaps she just wanted Nathan as a catalyst to explore the reactions of the female characters?  That’s the most charitable conclusion I can draw.

As I said before, very little happens.  We see the daughters try to adjust to their situation – their interactions with neighbours, who are variously kind or antagonistic and endlessly curious – and the gradually altering politics of Congo.  Pages and pages go by without anything particularly occurring, but they are somehow engaging.  Ruth May introduces ‘Mother May I’ to local infants; Rachel’s hair is a spectacle to all; Adah is presumed eaten by a lion (but is not); Leah grows more and more interested in the teacher Anatole… mostly Kingsolver attempts the miracle of winding a narrative through emotions and thoughts without hanging them on events – and she succeeds.  It is beautiful writing.  It is also nigh-on impossible to review.  There is one odd thing… usually I jot down resonant or stand-out quotations whilst I read, or excerpts I think will help structure a blog post.  For The Poisonwood Bible, I wrote down nothing.  Kingsolver’s writing is all even and constant – it all weaves into one.

But, as I noted at the top, something very weird happens.  The Prices’ time in the Congo comes to an abrupt, tragic end.  And then, p.427, they leave.  After that it is as though it were another novel.   We follow the various daughters at occasional intervals for another couple of decades.  It is tedious and politically heavy-handed.  The points Kingsolver had previously shown through her story are now told through dialogue.  Show, don’t tell, Barb.  All the unsubtlety in her portrayal of Nathan sweeps across the others.  I still can’t believe that a novel can peter out quite like this one did.

So, there you are.  A confusing review, I daresay, but also a confusing read.  At its best, The Poisonwood Bible is phenomenally good.  Barbara Kingsolver is obviously an exceptionally talented writer.  The Bean Trees, which I read years ago, is also testament to this.  But at its best, The Poisonwood Bible is lazy, clumsy, unsubtle and poorly edited.  Overall I will say that Kingsolver’s talents outweigh her occasional mismanagement of them, but it is always a shame when a novel could have been great (and, to be fair, a lot of people do consider it great) but, to my mind, failed to reach its potential.

All Quiet on the Orient Express

StuckinaBook All , 7 Comments

Fellow bloggers, I’m sure you know this feeling – you read a book, enjoyed it, put it on one side to write about… and by the time you get to writing about it, almost all the details have left your head. Right? That’s not a very inspiring opening to a blog review, but it will set your expectations at the right level as I start to talk about All Quiet on the Orient Express (1999) by Magnus Mills, which I read, ahem, last November.

About a year ago I wrote a review of Magnus Mills’ The Maintenance of Headway, and my general opinion was that, although that novel didn’t work for me, I felt that there was something about Mills. And that I definitely would like something else by him. In stepped Annabel, who lent me All Quiet on the Orient Express… which I had so long that she said I could pass it on to a charity shop… oops, sorry Annabel…

The unnamed narrator is coming to the end of a camping holiday at Mr. Parker’s camp site in the Lake District, preparing to head off on the Orient Express (which I think might have been thrown in just for that wonderful title) when the novel opens. That seems a good place to start.

“I thought I’d better catch you before you go,” he said. “Expect you’ll be leaving today, will you?”

“Hadn’t planned to,” I replied.

“A lot of people choose to leave on Monday mornings.”

“Well, I thought I’d give it another week, actually. The weather seems quite nice.”

“So you’re staying on then?”

“If that’s alright with you.”

“Of course it is,” he said. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”
It seems a good deal, to our narrator, when Mr. Parker offers to knock a bit off the rent in return for Narrator (as I shall call him, for want of an alternative. Unless he is named and I somehow missed it) doing the odd handyman job here and there.

The ‘here and there’ becomes more frequent, and the tasks more laborious. Most of them seem to involve Mr. Parker’s endless supply of green paint – everything from fences to boats apparently require coating in the stuff. Everything is on account, as it were, and Narrator’s involvement with the family and the community grows deeper and deeper… whether he’d like it to or not. He joins a forceful darts team, he becomes a regular at the pub (which doesn’t always have his favourite drink; nor does the grocer have the biscuits he wants) and, all the time, the Parker family get him to perform more and more handyman jobs… All Quiet on the Orient Express is a bizarre cautionary tale for those (like myself) who find it impossible to say ‘no’…

What makes Magnus Mills’ writing so enjoyable is its eccentricity. The actual characters and events are surprisingly grounded, when you consider them in the abstract. There are no Dickensian grotesques (even the man who constantly wears a cracker paper-crown turns out to have a fairly reasonable excuse) nor are the motivations of characters unduly wacky – but the dialogue certainly is. It is spare, yet like the excerpt above, it is often repetitive and confusing, trailing round and round in circles without getting anywhere. Lots of unnecessary questions and characters repeating what the others say. It all adds to the claustrophobia of the place, and is done cleverly – so that it gives this effect without annoying the reader.

If I just-about liked The Maintenance of Headway, then I definitely much liked All Quiet on the Orient Express. I still feel that there is potential for me to love Mills, and I have The Restraint of Beasts on my shelf that will hopefully reach that standard. But even without being completely in love with this novel, I think it is incredibly good – and Mills’ writing is so different from almost all other contemporary writers. The only modern comparison I can think of is Edward Carey (see below). It’s the sort of quirky, strange-but-not-macabre-or-silly writing that I yearn to find, and so rarely do.

Thanks Annabel for lending it to me; sorry I’ve had it so long! If anyone who likes or loves Mills can recommend similar authors to me (less silly than Pratchett, and not macabre at all, please) then I’d be delighted.

Books to get Stuck into:

Observatory Mansions – Edward Carey: I’ve recommended Alva & Irva so often that I thought I should make a change. Francis works as a ‘living statue’ and is also horribly selfish, stealing/collecting objects that people love. Totally surreal, but brilliant.

The Skin Chairs – Barbara Comyns: not quite the same style, but enough odd, quirky elements – from those skin chairs on – to make worth suggesting in the same breath as Mills.

People on a Bridge

StuckinaBook All , 8 Comments

Regular SiaB-readers will know that I rarely read poetry. Indeed, few of the bloggers I peruse seem to mention poetry much – or perhaps, if they do, I skim over those posts owing to lack of interest. I’m aware that the failing is with me, rather than the form – but I very rarely manage to engage with poetry. Perhaps because I naturally read quite fast, and poetry has to be read slowly (or preferably, I find, aloud) to be appreciated? I don’t know. But at the bloggers’ meet-up book-swap we held months and months ago, Peter (aka Dark Puss aka Morgana’s Cat) gave me People on a Bridge by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Adam Czerniawski. I entertained myself for ages saying ‘Szymborska’ over and over to myself – it is a very satisfying word – and then put it to one side, intending to read it later. Later eventually came, and I was rather surprised to find that I loved the collection.


Before I say why, I thought I’d type out the title poem of the collection. It think it is about the cover image, ‘Squall at Ohashi’ by Hiroshige, but I can’t find any definite confirmation of this – he is mentioned in the poem:

People on a Bridge

A strange planet with its strange people.
The yield to time but don’t recognise it.
They have ways of expressing their protest.
They make pictures, like this one for instance:

At first glance, nothing special.
You see water.
You see a shore.
You see a boat sailing laboriously upstream.
You see a bridge over the water and people on the bridge.
The people are visibly quickening their step,
because a downpour has just started
lashing sharply from a dark cloud.

The point is that nothing happens next.
The cloud doesn’t change its colour or shape.
The rain neither intensifies nor stops.
The boat sails on motionless.
The people on the bridge
run just where they were a moment ago.
It’s difficult to avoid remarking here:
this isn’t by any means an innocent picture.
Here time has been stopped.
Its laws have been ignored.
It’s been denied influence on developing events.
It’s been insulted and spurned.

Thanks to a rebel,
a certain Hiroshige Utagawa
(a being which as it happens
has long since and quite properly passed away)
time stumbled and fell.

Maybe this was just a whim of no significance,
a freak covering just a pair of galaxies,
but we should perhaps add the following:

Here it’s considered proper
to regard this little picture highly,
admire it and thrill to it from age to age.

For some this isn’t enough.
They even hear the pouring rain,
they feel the cool drops on necks and shoulders,
they look at the bridge and the people
as if they saw themselves there
in the self-same never-finished run
along an endless road eternally to be travelled
and believe in their impudence
that things are really thus.
I am so used to writing about novels that I don’t quite know how to discuss poetry. But what I loved about this collection is what I love about my favourite novels. Szymborska doesn’t use overly-fancy or ‘poetic’ words (or, at least, her translator does not). There is a sense of the familiar and domestic running through the collection, with quiet, subtle emotions held up for close (but not voyeuristic) examination. Although the poem I’ve typed out is about a painting, it is still about people. Many of the poems are about little incidents – someone dialing the wrong number; waiting at a train station. One of my favourites, ‘The terroist, he watches’ tells the more extraordinary tale of a terroist watching a bar in which he has planted a bomb. Some poems touch upon philosophy and even ontology, but always with a personal touch that makes the writing absolutely accessible and engaging.

Of course, I am reading in English. Quite a different translation of ‘People on a Bridge’ can be found here, if you scroll down – reminding me how much of a translated work is in the hands of the translator. Well, I thank Adam Czerniawski (and Peter, of course) for enabling Szymborska’s work to get into my hands – and reminding me to widen occasionally my reading horizons.

Joy Street

StuckinaBook All , , , 14 Comments

I’ve mentioned on here before that I like to have a diary or collection of letters ‘on the go’ most of the time – and yesterday I finished the current read. It’s Joy Street: A Wartime Romance in Letters by Mirren Barford and John Lewes (ed. Michael T. Wise), and was a gift from my dear friend Phoebe, who always knows what to buy me.

These letters were sent between Mirren Barford, studying at Somerville College in Oxford, and Lieutenant John Lewes, also known as Jock, who was away fighting. They take up less than two years, in 1940 and 1941, but cover a whole spectrum of emotions, thoughts, philosophies, and document the growing relationship between the young letter writers. What starts out fairly cool becomes a romantic exchange – with all the peaks and troughs that might suggest – and eventually more or less an engagement. ‘Joy Street’ became something of a symbol between them – as a destination for their future, united happiness. From the letters we grow to understand so much about Mirren and John – their differences (they almost split over his intense desire to be a soldier, and her hatred of warfare), their connections, their subtle steps towards one another and their backward glances. This between two people who only had the chance to meet ten times – the reader knows from the outset that John did not return from war. The letter Mirren writes to his parents, months after his death, is quite incredibly moving. I have never lost anybody very close to me, but I shall return to this letter when I do.

It’s always a little uncomfortable reading people’s private letters, especially without their permission. Mirren was dead when this correspondence was discovered in the 1990s by her son. Here are three interesting excerpts on this topic:

[Mirren] Once I thought I could write a pretty phrase or two, but your letter with its magnificence has shattered all my illusions and makes me feel really weak. It was a fine letter; one day I hope my great-grandchildren will take the trouble to have them published for many people would read them gladly if they had the chance.

[John] Your reception of my letter is gracious and generous; your praise is very dear to me always and on this occasion it could not have been higher than by saying that many people would read my letters gladly if they had the chance. And yet the publication of our correspondence is unthinkable, for it is so essentially private to us as almost to be written in code undecipherable to others. Readers may detect a felicity of phrase and even at times magnificence, but the significance of Penelope’s design, wherein surely its chiefest value lies, must inevitably escape them unless they are supplied with a key

[John] It is a very great loss to all who read and write letters and journals that considerations of security forbid the detailed description of the lives that are being led in the multiform war. That is a loss to history and scientific record but it is no loss to literature, for writing is only worthy of that name which submits to a discipline both of substance and of form. and so perhaps, when this war’s writing comes to be read and reckoned up as literature, it may be placed in a higher norm than the indiscriminate journalism which is so well thought of now. The things that matter are not the things that happen, but rather things that grow, and literature if it is to live must deal with life directly and not indirectly through its accidents. […] And so the Journal to Mirren is not for the curious, who would find it dull indeed. It is for a lover of life, and its purpose is to try and present another life as worthy of that love.

Usually, reading collections of letters, there are all sorts of meetings or ‘phone calls which we only hear about in passing; visits which are referred to, or the building blocks of a relationship which the reader cannot grasp decades later. With Joy Street, although there are a few meetings between the couple, we are privileged to witness the majority of their growing attachment. Almost everything that was built between them was built through these letters. And because they are real, they naturally have an authenticity that no novelist could fully craft.

In a letter which John never read, sent but not received before his death, Mirren writes:
Indeed, I want you to go on being alive. Maybe we’ll never marry, but that isn’t the most important thing. You’ll go on, and you’ll give of yourself to the world, for you have the power. And I’ll go on too. If I’m ever capable of loving someone more than I love you, then there is no reason why my little ideal should be wrecked. If you die before we have had time to be together, at least I shall have the faith and love you have given me, deep rooted and eternal in my soul. And with that knowledge, I’ll never be defeated; I may fail to do as much as I hoped but I’ll never be defeated. And if I’m killed and you still love me as you do, then – I don’t know how you’ll feel. But I do know John, that you have given me something, and I, perhaps, to you, that no man or god can ever destroy. We call it faith, ideals, hope, but do we really and truly know what it is? I don’t think so, and I don’t think it matters, either. But it does matter that it is present, unforgettable, a part of my own self.

Books to get Stuck into:

–In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill: the best book about grief that I have read, or can imagine reading.

–Love Letters by Leonard Woolf & Trekkie Ritchie Parsons: the letters between Leonard and the woman he loved after Virginia are perhaps more revealing than Leonard would have liked, and a fascinating portrait of an unusual coupling.

Identity

StuckinaBook All , 4 Comments

When I reviewed (and reviewed enthusiastically) Immortality by Milan Kundera earlier in the year, I suggested that I wouldn’t read another for a while. Much as I admired and liked the novel (if a novel it can be called), I was left a little exhausted, and fancied a five year break before I returned to Kundera…

…but then I discovered that he wrote short books too! And you know how I love a short book. Identity has enormous font and wide margins too… But, before you think me a complete imbecile, this is the jacket blurb which persuaded me:
Sometimes – perhaps only for an instant – we fail to recognise a companion. When this happens to lovers, the effect is acute: for a moment the identity of the loved one ceases to exist, and we come to doubt our own.Doesn’t that sound an intriguing starting point for a novel?

Identity isn’t as postmodern as Immortality (those titles are so similar, I’m bound to get them mixed up at some point in this blog post… hopefully we’re on the same page so far). While Immortality really seemed to reinvent the novel structure, Kundera sticks more closely to a conventional form with Identity, despite being published eight years later (1998, compared to Immortality’s 1990). There is the odd dabble in unusual images and abstract thought (cue quotation…)

Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, friends.
…but, in amongst Kundera’s very individual – and to my mind, very good – writing style, there is a surprisingly traditional romance. But very nuanced, and very subtle.

He reflected that she was his sole emotional link to the world. People talk to him about prisoners, about the persecuted, about the hungry? He knows the only was he feels personally, painfully touched by their misfortune: he imagines Chantal in their place. People tell him about women raped in some civil war? He sees Chantal there, raped. She and she alone releases him from his apathy. Only through her can he feel compassion.
I think that’s quite a brilliant way to describe the closeness of a relationship, romantic or otherwise. Chantal and Jean-Marc are the couple in question – and it is Chantal whom Jean-Marc fails to recognise (or, rather, he thinks somebody else is her, until he gets closer to them). She, in turn, thinks that men have stopped finding her attractive – which shakes the identity she has formed for herself. And so it is with a mixture of pleasure and displeasure that she receives a letter saying that someone is watching her. These letters grow more complimentary, and instead of throwing them away, she keeps the letters in her underwear drawer – and starts trying to work out who is sending them.

Such is the plot – but Kundera weaves far more around this simple premise. All sorts of interesting musings about a myriad of topics, and (like Immortality) exceptional insight into the interaction of people, with all the subtlety and complexity of real emotions. How he does it is beyond me…

And then the narrative does get a bit more postmodern, dabbling between fantasy and reality without telling you quite where the line is. It feels just a little bit thrown in, and I’d have liked it to be a bit more developed, but it’s also an interesting touch… and obviously done because Kundera can’t help himself, rather than for any big effect.

Second Kundera, and I’m still very impressed – I still admire him more than I love him (and isn’t there sometimes a big difference!) but that isn’t to say reading him is a struggle, because it isn’t. Just – as, indeed, I finished my last Kundera review – not one to curl up with in front of the fire. And no, that delightfully bizarre cover never makes sense.

Immortality

StuckinaBook All , 14 Comments

A little while ago I mentioned that I was reading Immortality by Milan Kundera for my book group. I can’t remember what stage we were at then, whether the mutiny had taken place… well, tomorrow we’re meeting to discuss Immortality and/or An Equal Music by Vikram Seth, since people were either unable or unwilling to read one or other of these… so, a compromise, we’ve done both and can read either! If you’re not confused by now, then you’re doing better than me. ANYWAY, I have read Immortality – finished this morning – and I hardly know how to respond. It is completely different from anything else I have ever read. That’s a bit of a cliche, I daresay, but for this book it’s true – because Kundera has more or less reinvented the novel. (This is the only Kundera book I’ve read – he might have done this before Immortality, maybe I’ll wait for Claire to pop by, because I know she’s a big Kundera fan.)

It’s very postmodern, that’s the first thing to say. In that, we get bits of narrative from Kundera’s perspective – he mentions his own previous novels, he tells us what he’s going to write in later chapters. The novel (I’m going to use the word, even though it’s not really a novel… or is it?) opens with him seeing a woman making a gesture – he then names her Agnes and invents a story around her, around that gesture. And then weaves it into a literary, historical intertextuality that darts all over the place, including Rubens, Goethe, Hemingway, Beethoven… So many lives intersect and reflect on each other – the real, the fictional, the metafictional. And yet it isn’t formless or baggy – there is a definite feeling of wholeness, a structure – just a very unorthodox one. I haven’t read any reviews of Immortality, but I expect all of them mention this excerpt at some point, from the point of view of Milan Kundera-within-the-novel (who may or may not be the same as Milan Kundera the author, let’s face it): I regret that almost all novels ever written are much too obedient to the rules of unity of action. What I mean to say is that at their core is one single chain of causality related acts and events. These novels are like a narrow street along which someone drives his characters with a whip. Dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel, because it transforms everything, even the most beautiful pages, even the most surprising scenes and observations merely into steps leading to the final resolution, in which the meaning of everything that preceded it is concentrated. The novel is consumed in the fire of its own tension like a bale of straw. I don’t blame you if you’re rolling your eyes, and reaching out for the nearest Agatha Christie novel – but please don’t be put off straight away. I don’t know why postmodern stuff is so often annoying (it’s less the ‘shock of the new’ as the irksome nature of those who want to cause that shock) but, with Kundera, it isn’t annoying at all. He completely disrupts the novel form, and throws the reading experience into a whole new category, but it isn’t self-indulgent. His writing is so good, he is so very, very perceptive, that it works. It’s as I wrote after the first few pages – he notices things about human behaviour, or perceptions of the self, and finds beautiful or unusual images to demonstrate this. Nothing is overwritten, and nothing is carelessly written. There’s nothing worse than an author thinking they’re being profound, when they are actually writing truisms – I believe Kundera doesn’t fall into this trap. (The only trap he does fall into is being rather too obsessed with sex). But, of course, I haven’t read any philosophers, so…

Now I look at it, the excerpt I wanted to quote isn’t the most original thought in the book – that’s because the most original ones are connected to the tiny things individuals do, his perceptions being mostly filmic – like visual leitmotifs running through the book, through different characters and periods. But here’s a bit, to give you a small idea: I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that’s alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.
This isn’t my normal reading territory at all, and early feedback from my book group suggests some definite disdain for Kundera – but I am fascinated, admiring, and rather captivated… at the same time, it will be a while before I read another book by this author. I’m rather bowled over, and need to keep him to dip into now and then. But Immortality is an amazing achievement – just not one to curl up with in front of the fire.

Making the Cat Laugh

StuckinaBook All , 6 Comments

Oh dear… I was promising for so long to write about that book, the single woman in the 1990s, and I still haven’t. And now it’s too late for me to remember what I liked about it, but anyway, here it is…

This post has no pretensions to being a proper book review, because it could only fail, given my poor memory and the eclectic. After my not-particularly-favourable experience reading Diane Harpwood’s Tea & Tranquillisers, you’ll be relieved to hear that I had a much better time with Lynne Truss’ Making The Cat Laugh: One Women’s Journal of Single Life on the Margins. My Aunt Jacq gave it to me a couple of years ago, perhaps because of the cat theme, perhaps because she sensed it would be up my street. And this, ladies and gentleman, *is* the sort of book EM Delafield would be writing, were she a single woman living in a city in the 1990s, rather than a married woman in a village in the 1930s.

Here’s a confession – despite being a grammar pedant of the first water, I haven’t read Lynne Truss’ bestseller Eats, Shoots and Leaves. I don’t even own it – I know, you’d have thought that at least a dozen people would have bought it for me over the years, but no. I have, however, read Talk To The Hand by Truss, which my friend Holly gave to me for a birthday present a few years ago, since it was an expression we cordially shared with one another. It’s a look at the rudeness in everyday society – quite diverting, but made me realise how terrifying it would be to be a shop assistant for Truss, since she seems to thrive upon confrontation, and I run from it as much as is humanly possible.

Anyway. Back to the book in question – Making the Cat Laugh was first published in 1995, and consists of columns which had appeared in The Listener, The Times, and Woman’s Journal. That might make them sound a bit scattergun, but since they’re all essentially about Lynne Truss’ life, they all meld pretty well. And her life, throughout, is defined by two things: being single, and having cats. I’m reminded of a line from The Simpsons, when Lisa goes into investigative journalism: “Can a woman with this many cats really be mad?” But Truss is playing up to this image – oh, how she plays up to it. But I suspect there is a kernel of truth in her one-sided conversations with feline housemates, organising her life and living arrangements around them and their peculiarities. As the book continues, it becomes less about her single life and more about her views on life, the universe, and everything middle-class, domestic, and slightly bizarre in it. Supermarkets, paint names, Little Women, using friends in newspaper columns without their permission… they all get the treatment. And many more – and it’s very funny. Nary a whiney note, not a glimpse of a sulk – just good old British self-deprecation and mild indignation.

As an example of her cat-obsessed life, this is the beginning of the final column in the book:

When night falls and she doesn’t come in for her tea, I usually start to worry. So I go outside and call for her (the old story), and then feel helpless when she still doesn’t come. I tell myself that probably she is “eating out tonight” – because I know how easily she insinuates herself into other houses, and then cadges a meal by acting weak and pathetic. At the end of such an evening, she will come home to me in a telltale over-excited state, not really interested in food.

Still, I will say this for her: she always makes sure I’m all right. Out comes the tin-opener, and there’s half a tin of Felix, a handful of Kitty Crunch for my little jaws to work on, even a tub of Sheba if she’s been drinking. But it’s not the food I am worried about. It’s just that I am only properly happy when I know she is safe indoors, curled up asleep on that warm hairy rug of hers, her ears flicking contentedly as she dreams of Jeff Bridges.

She was thirty-one when I got her. Mangy and with a bit of a whiff, but also affectionate. She took time to settle down, and it was clear she had been badly treated in the past, because her mood swings were abrupt and inscrutable – one minute running about like a maniac, the next flaked out in weird angular poses in random places on the carpet. But gradually I earned her trust (and she learnt some basic grooming), and now she has this peculiar habit of rubbing her face against my leg, which is quite pleasant actually, though a bit of a nuisance when you are trying to walk downstairs.

To friends who haven’t got one, I always say, ‘Get one.’ I mean it, no hesitation. Yes, they are selfish. Yes, they moult. Yes, they yowl a bit in the night-time and they make it difficult for you to go on holiday. But they make it up to you in so many ways. For one thing, they can sometimes be persuaded to pose with ribbons around their necks. And for another, they are absolutely fascinating to watch. For example, mind spends hour after hour just staring at a big box in the corner of the living-room, not moving an inch, but silently grinding her teeth and tensing her muscles as if to pounce. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: I am convinced they can see things we can’t see.

So Many Books

StuckinaBook All , 6 Comments

I know I’ve read Simon Savidge’s post on Gabriel Zaid’s So Many Books, because I commented on it, but when I saw the book in a local charity shop, I came upon as a new friend. Just goes to show – there must be hundreds of blog posts out there that I’ve written “Oh, I must keep an eye out for this!” – and I always mean it – but somehow the book slips from my mind. What I *did* note was that a) it was called So Many Books, and thus was likely to be my sort of book, and b) it was published by Sort of Books, the wonderful people behind the Tove Jansson translations. And so I bought it…

Like Simon S, I wasn’t expecting quite what I got – I was in HEiotL-withdrawal mode, and was hoping Zaid had written something about his own book collection, and his relationship with it. What he *has* written is actually much more about books as commodities. I suppose this has the bonus that it can’t deter anybody with unheard-of tastes and obscure favourites, but equally So Many Books can’t rouse my love and affection much.

You can Simon S’s thoughts, best bet, because he sums up so well the topics covered in Zaid’s book. Zaid looks at the production of books – how people are reached, cost differentials, how it works as a commodity in the marketplace. He compares the book to speech, and wonders how a conversation can be had. He approaches the topics of electronic reader, public library, and ancient manuscript with the same investigative mind, facts falling out of his head onto the page, always keeping his love of reading peeping over the parapet of economics and functionality. And there are occasionally nice little phrases: And how many college classes are no more than the tortuous reading of a text over the course of a year? Is anything more certain to make a book completely unintelligble than reading it slowly enough? It’s like examining a mural from two centimetres away and scanning it at a rate of ten square centimetres every third day for a year, like a short-sighted slug.Well, quite. The point Zaid returns to again and again is, in fact, the title – so many books. If no books were ever published again, it would take me 250,000 years to read all the ones already published. Even reading a list of the titles and authors would take fifteen years. He comes back to this point throughout the book, it seems to haunt his life. But not with the wry smile I expect of a bibliophile, as they cheerfully take Pride and Prejudice off the shelf to read again, but with some sort of panic that he can’t get everything into his mind at the same time… it was a bit off-putting, to be honest.

And that sums up my lack of enthusiasm for So Many Books as a whole, actually. If all these topics I’ve touched on fill you with interest, then this might be the book for you – but I must confess, I found it a little dull. I don’t think of books as commodities – I think of them as acquaintances and friends. I love the sort of bookish book which feels the same. And this wasn’t it… So, a word of warning – before you spot the title and buy this for all your bibliophile friends, check first to see if they’re the sort of person who also thrives on facts, figures, and ref. fig. 1-ing. If not, perhaps I can recommend Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing…

Hours and Hours

StuckinaBook All , 10 Comments

It is many moons ago that I promised to write about The Hours by Michael Cunningham, and the 2001 film adaptation. And now, finally, I’m doing it – I daresay you haven’t been nervously scratching away at the computer keyboard, wondering when it would be posted about, but it’s always good to keep one’s promises. (On a side note – my surname is Thomas, and my parents used the phrase ‘Thomases Don’t Cheat’ throughout our childhood, in a bizarrely successful attempt to instil partisan responsibility in us. It’s only lately that I’ve been thinking ‘Thomases Keep Their Promises’ would have been equally noble, with the added advantage of rhyme.)

Anyway. Onto The Hours. Like many people my age, I suspect, the film of The Hours was my first introduction to Virginia Woolf. Having really enjoyed watching it, but remaining rather confused, I went away to read Mrs. Dalloway and the novel The Hours – setting me off down a Ginny track which hasn’t stopped, and which has significantly influenced my research at university. Mrs. Dalloway remains one of the books I have read most often – I think four times, maybe more.

Does anybody not know the plot of The Hours? Perhaps. I’ll summarise the premise as quickly as I can… the novel follows three separate trajectories. In 1923 Virginia Woolf is writing Mrs. Dalloway; in 1949 Mrs. Brown is reading Mrs. D, and in 1998 Clarissa Vaughan’s life in many ways mirrors Mrs. Dalloway’s. Michael Cunningham had originally intended simply a modernising of Mrs. Dalloway, the thread with Clarissa Vaughan, but eventually decided to write a more nuanced, and much cleverer, novel. The strands are all complete in themselves, telling in miniature the struggles and triumphs of three different women, but the true greatness of this novel (and it is great) comes from the ways in which the strands reflect upon each other. Mrs. Brown is trying to cope with marriage to the war veteran, popular at school, who feels that he did her a favour by marrying her. The scenes where she tries to pull on the guise of motherhood for the sake of her son, while feeling utterly adrift, are powerful and excellent. Clarissa Vaughan, similarly, is trying to find her place in life – a lesbian regarded by others as abandoning a ’cause’, and another slightly bewildered mother, her qualms about the superficiality of her life are those shared with Mrs. Dalloway herself. And the difficulties of Virginia Woolf’s life are not secret – the novel opens with her drowning herself, in 1941.

As well as an involving and ingeniusly-crafted novel, I’d argue that The Hours is a fascinating piece of social history investigation, and a not inconsiderable contribution to an understanding of Virginia Woolf. No novel, least of all one with three competing heroines, could wholly encapsulate a novelist’s life – but Cunningham certainly develops a credible and well-researched angle from which Woolf can be viewed. (For another excellent portrayal of Woolf’s life, through fiction, see Susan Seller’s Vanessa and Virginia).


So that is the book, deserved winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. Onto the film. Did it do the book justice? Well, my quick answer to that is YES, since it’s my favourite film ever. I should add that I am not particularly well versed in film history, and my points of reference are probably not that sophisticated – but it’s still my favourite film, and you might well like it too, if you haven’t seen it.

Stephen Daldry’s direction is spot-on – what is best about the film, and impossible in the book, is the swift comparison of the three strands. This is best demonstrated in the opening sequences, the morning passages of the three women, viewable here (about halfway through). The scenes shift between Virginia, Laura and Clarissa going about their morning rituals, and is done very cleverly, as the actions of all three conflate.

The lead performances by Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep are all quite brilliant, any of them would have been worthy of the Oscar (and, no, Nicole didn’t win because of the fake nose any more than she did for the fake hair. Why do people say that about her, and not about the make-up-frenzy – not to mention snooze cruise – that was Lord of the Rings? Cat now officially amongst pigeons). The Hours is one of those rare films where all the casting is incredible. Aside from the three leads, the film can also boast Ed Harris, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, John C. Reilly, Eileen Atkins, Miranda Richardson, Stephen Dillane, and Allison Janney. Quite an embarrassement of riches. The way it is shot, the script adaptation by David Hare, the beautiful soundtrack by Philip Glass – The Hours doesn’t put a foot wrong. The portrayal of Virginia Woolf may be simplified a bit (film doesn’t have the scope for characterisation that novels do) but, again, it shows an angle of her. Both book and film The Hours are exceptional, and should be classics of their respective media for decades to come.

Fugitive Pieces

StuckinaBook All , 2 Comments

I went to my first advanced-screening yesterday. My friend Hannah and I went to see Fugitive Pieces (which is on general release next week) and after a fun Chinese restaurant (‘Pock-marked Old Woman Beancurd’, anyone?) and getting rather lost, we eventually ended up in the little cinema with eleven other people, to watch it.

My friend Louie lent me the book Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels ages ago, and not long after that I found a cheap copy in a charity shop, so bought it intending to give Louie her copy back. Which, of course, I forgot to do. And the other day Bloomsbury sent me a review copy, since they’ve done a rejacketed edition. Three copies of it in my bedroom, and I still hadn’t read it when Marie emailed with the opportunity to attend a screening… One bus journey to London later, and I’d read it. Quite quickly, not picking up on all the details perhaps, but certainly it was read.

Fugitive Pieces was published in 1996, and won the Orange Prize for fiction. It might have been a really big deal: I was only ten so I wouldn’t know. The novel kicks off with Jakob, a Polish Jew, hidden in his house as Nazis come and take away his family. He buries himself up to his neck in the forest, to escape detection, and is found by Greek archeologist Athos, who takes him home. The novel takes so many turns and twists that I can’t simplify it here – but, to give a vague gist, it’s about Jakob’s life, the repercussions of what he’s witnessed, his continual meditation on lost sister Bella, and the relationships he has – both familial and romantic. The final section of the book is narrated by Ben, an admirer of Jakob’s poetry, and in his own way affected by the far-reaching effects of the Holocaust.

I didn’t think the book was very filmable, when I read it. The story is involving, but Michaels’ main strength is her incredibly viscous, rich writing style. Metaphors and images overlap and interlace, beautifully. But how to film this?

Somehow they did. Jeremy Podeswa (the director and writer) does an incredible job translating this moving novel to the screen. Though it doesn’t follow the same structure as Michaels’ work, quite, with more flashbacks and flashforwards, all the most memorable sections and expressions remain, and remain poignant. ‘The miracle of wood is not that it burns, but that it floats’ is there, for example, very moving in both film and novel. I’m often dubious about the possibility of capturing the ‘ethos’ or ‘atmosphere’ of a novel, rather than a direct translation of what the author set down, but Fugitive Pieces is a great example of this transferral succeeding.

Stephen Dillane plays Jakob throughout much of his life (though not, obviously, as a young boy – a rather mesmeric Robbie Kay) and does so brilliantly. I only know Dillane from his expressive portrayal of Leonard Woolf in The Hours, but Fugitive Pieces shows a range and depth which I hadn’t imagined. Though Rosamund Pike gets her name on the posters, her role as Jakob’s wife Alex is short, and doesn’t bring across Alex’s kookiness quite enough – a gently zany character who works better on page than screen, I suspect. Much more central is Rade Serbedzija as Athos, who is impressively warm and wise throughout, hiding pain without being oppressed by it.

Fugitive Pieces, both book and film, are poetic and sensitive narratives of the effects of the Holocaust – but that is only where they begin. It’s difficult to say anything new about the awful suffering and incredible acts of cruelty (as well as those of heroism) brought about by the Nazis – Michaels realises that a list of graphic ill-treatment isn’t the way to do it. By writing characters with strong loving relationships, and others desperately seeking them, she can best emphasise the trauma which pervades far beyond the moments of evil – and also how good can be brought out of despicable acts. Podeswa’s film expertly translates these themes, and – though not always a comfortable film to watch – is a beautiful, sensitive and captivating one.