1995

Two books about heatwaves

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During the recent heat wave in the UK (and elsewhere, but I experienced it in the UK) I decided to get two relevant novels off my shelves – Penelope Lively’s Heat Wave and Maggie O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave. Partly because it amused me, I’ll admit. And partly because it would feel odd to read a novel about a heatwave in any other temperature – though there is a good argument for doing it in midwinter, to warm myself up. It was also interesting to see how the two writers treated heatwaves differently – beyond Lively treating heat wave as two words, and O’Farrell using heatwave as one…

Heat Wave by Penelope Lively

Let’s start with Lively’s novel – or perhaps novella, coming in around 180 pages. Published in 1996, she doesn’t give a specific date for the heatwave in question, though it seems contemporary. It opens with Lively’s characteristically detailed, observant writing:

It is an afternoon in early May. Pauline is looking out of the window of her study at World’s End. She looks not at the rich green of the field sweeping up to the cool blue of the sky, but at Teresa, who stands outside the cottages with Luke astride her hip, staring up the track towards the road. Pauline sees Teresa with double vision. She sees her daughter, who is holding her own son and waiting for the arrival of her husband. But she sees also an archetypal figure: a girl with a baby, a woman with a child. There is a whole freight of reference there, thinks Pauline. The girl, the child, the sweep of the cornfield, the long furrowed lines of the rough track reaching away to elsewhere.

When I think of Lively, I think of fine writing – though I also think I’d struggle to identify her writing if I saw a group of examples. Perhaps it is that lack of a writerly idiolect that makes her a very good, but not a great, writer? Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself – let’s talk about what Heat Wave is about. Pauline is a middle-aged copyeditor (not, she is keen to note, an editor), separated from her husband and living for a summer in a cottage adjoining her daughter Teresa, Teresa’s husband Maurice and their baby Luke. None of them are permanent residents of this isolated rural pair of houses – but Pauline is living there for the summer, and has invited Teresa and family to take the larger cottage next to hers. Both seem quite small, and there is a claustrophobia to this proximity of family that is both feared and longed for.

The novel is about the experiences of this stifling summer, but also looks back to earlier stages of their life – of Pauline’s motherhood, of her unsuccessful marriage, of the stages of infidelity that led to the separation. The novel is third person, but Pauline’s own recollections do a good job of combining the close-up and the far away. She is both live-r and observer of her life. This is described in one memory, where she tried to burn a manuscript:

Each time she revisits this scene it becomes like a Dutch interior. She sees it with interested detachment: the quiet room across which lies a wedge of sunlight from the open door, beyond which can be seen the pram in the garden, in which a baby sleeps, the young woman who stoops before the fireplace, doing something with paper and matches.

Pauline is an exceptionally good character, and I suspect one with whom Lively has a good deal of empathy. She is intelligent and has moments of being determined and forceful. But these are anomalies in a life that is often passive – passive for fear of alienating her daughter, for fear of saying the wrong thing, for fear that she might indeed be wrong. Lively has built a strikingly complete and layered heroine. The other characters are perhaps not quite so layered, but neither are they flimsy. And this book is much more about people than plot. There are dramatic incidents, but mostly it feels calm and gradual, the long, hazy summer spreading itself wider than the 180 pages.

And the heat? Something I’ve learned from reading these two novels together is that it’s very hard to sustain the feeling that a story takes place in intense heat – because, after all, you can hardly have characters constantly saying “Gosh, I’m hot.” Or, rather, you can, but it would be terribly tedious. So in both novels I didn’t feel the continual oppression of a heatwave, but I liked how Lively threaded it through with occasional paragraphs describing the environment – often the fields behind the cottages, recognising the way the countryside is both romantically beautiful and dispassionately practical.

There is a day of such sledgehammer heat that no one ventures outside. And something curious happens to the wheat. It seems to hiss. Pauline keeps all her windows open, and through them comes this sound, as of some furtively restless surrounding sea.

As I said earlier, I think there is something, for me, that keeps Lively from being a truly great novel. Perhaps it’s that her style is not wholly distinct; perhaps it is simply that the 1990s is far from my favourite period for literature. But I only mention this because Heat Wave is such a good book that it’s surprising I don’t love her more. I wouldn’t be surprised if others called it a masterpiece.

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'FarrellInstructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell

While Lively’s novel is in an unspecified time, O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave (2013) is set firmly during the 1976 heatwave – including using quotes from the Drought Act 1976 as epigraphs for the different sections. The story starts in Highbury, with an Irish Catholic family who are first generation Londoners.

The heat, the heat. It wakes Gretta just after dawn, propelling her from the bed and down the stairs. It inhabits the house like a guest who has outstayed his welcome, it lies along the corridors, it circles around curtains, it lolls heavily on sofas and chairs. The air in the kitchen is like a solid entity filling the space, pushing Gretta down into into the floor, against the side of the table.

Only she would choose to bake bread in such weather.

Gretta is driven by tradition and routine, and she has made soda bread three times a week for her entire married life – and won’t let something like a heatwave get in the way of that. Her love of tradition has not been passed down to her three adult children. There is Michael Francis, whose marriage to Claire is falling apart (which he blames on her Open University degree, and the way that studying and her new friends are taking her away from him). There’s Monica, a recent stepmother to two girls who seem to despise her. And there’s Aoife, the one who escaped, living in New York and working as a sort of amanuensis for an artist. The children do not go to mass, to Gretta’s sorrow. Nor are they happy or satisfied. Each is suffering from something or other – which, perhaps a little artificially, comes to a head for each of them during this heatwave.

But the first crisis is that Robert – Gretta’s husband, and the father of these three – goes missing. He says he is going out to the shop, and he doesn’t come back.

If Lively’s contemplative novel is about character, then O’Farrell’s is about plot. That’s not to say the characters aren’t well thought through and interesting, but this is a pacy book about revelations, secrets, and decisions that will make life-long differences. It doesn’t really make sense for all of them to have epiphanies during such a short period, but we roll with it because O’Farrell is such an enjoyable writer.

She is great at making characters who are filled with flaws, and yet we want the best for. It’s not even the sort of flaws that are usually used to make a character realistic but still reassuringly empathetic. Between them, Michael Louis, Claire, and Aoife are selfish, jealous, resentful, deceitful, and thoughtless. Gretta’s failings are considered more with the frustrated affection that one might feel towards a clingy matriarch. I was relieved that her Catholic faith wasn’t treated as something that made her cruel or stupid (as so many novelists would do) – her sadness that her children don’t go to mass is recognised as an understandable human trait, even if not one the novel seems to agree with.

I found Aoife the most interesting character, not least because of her undiagnosed dyslexia. Or at least that’s what I assume it was, from the way she describes letters in words jumping around in different combinations, refusing to stay linear and safe. This is the 1970s, and she was at school in the ’50s and ’60s: her inability to read was just seen as her being wilfully naughty. O’Farrell takes this lifelong difficulty and sees how it might affect relationships, friendships, work – and the tangled web Aoife gets herself into (while still being a bullish, often bombastically unthinking character, rather than a quiet victim of circumstance).

Both novels concern heatwaves, and both have familial relationships at the heart – particularly the fraught relationship between a mother and her adult child(ren), trying to combine closeness and distance. From this starting point, it’s interesting how differently O’Farrell and Lively treat the material. It’s hard to even compare them – they are very different experiences, both rewarding and worthwhile.

Novella a Day in May: Days 20 and 21

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There’s a bit of a theme to the two novellas I’ve read in the past two days… or at least their titles.

Year of the Hare, The: Amazon.co.uk: Paasilinna, Arto: 9780720612776: BooksDay 20: The Year of the Hare (1995) by Arto Paasilinna

This novella, translated from Finnish by Herbert Lomas, starts with a journalist and a photographer hitting a hare in their care. The journalist (who is called Vatanen, we later learn) gets out to see if it’s ok.

The journalist picked the leveret up and held it in his arms. It was terrified. He snapped off a piece of twig and splinted its hind leg with strips torn from his handkerchief. The hare nestled its head between its little forepaws, ears trembling with the thumping of its heartbeat.

Tired of waiting, the photographer leaves the journalist in the forest – assuming that he’ll catch up to their hotel. But he doesn’t. Instead, he decides to abscond. He doesn’t like his wife anymore, he doesn’t much like his life, and he sees the opportunity to go off wandering through Finland – with the hare.

From here is a quite episodic novella, featuring all kinds of over the top acts – from bear hunting to dangerous fires, threats of pagan sacrifice and more. I’m going to be honest… it all left me a bit cold. The blurb and puff quotes all talk about how funny it is, but I didn’t really understand the wit. I found it all a little drab – big events but very little to make the reader invest in them. Even the hare is curiously characterless. I suppose it’s a sort of deadpan humour that I have enjoyed in other contexts, but for some reason this one didn’t move me.

Juan Pablo Villalobos's “Down the Rabbit Hole” - Words Without Borders

Day 21: Down the Rabbit Hole (2010) by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey, Down the Rabbit Hole comes in around 70 pages – all about a drug gang in Mexico. If I’d known that, I might never have bought it, because I really hate reading about gangs or the Mafia or anything like that. And I’d have missed out on a really brilliant little novella.

It’s told from the perspective of Tochtli, the eight-year-old son of a druglord. This is how it opens…

Some people say say I’m precocious. They say it mainly because they think I know difficult words for a little boy. Some of the difficult words I know are: sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic and devastating. There aren’t really that many people who say I’m precocious. The problem is I don’t know that many people. I know maybe thirteen or fourteen people, and four of them say I’m precocious.

He is indeed pretty precocious, and he does return to those words a lot – particularly sordid and pathetic, which he uses to dismiss a lot of people. (He also uses the f-word a lot, which I rather wish hadn’t been included in this translation.)

Tochtli isn’t shielded from the things happening around them, but he sees them with a child’s incomplete understanding and lack of empathy. He knows that people become corpses at their compound, but is more interested in how many bullets are needed for different parts of the body than thinking about any morality. He is amoral; the people around him are immoral. He is more interested in his various obsessions – Japanese samurai films, a collection of hats, and getting a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia.

Tochtli’s voice is brilliantly realised in this novella, and Villalobos has created a wholly convincing viewpoint on this horrible world.

Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham

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Fresh off reading The Snow Queen, I went to my Cs shelf to see what else was waiting by Michael Cunningham. Well done for stockpiling, past Simon – I had a couple to choose from, and opted for Flesh and Blood (1995). It’s 466 pages long, and if you’re familiar with my reading prejudices, you’ll know that I tend to be a bit scared of a long novel. But I decided to trust Cunningham on this, and I’m really glad I did. What a novel.

Flesh and Blood follows three generations of the same family, from 1935 to the far future, though the bulk of the novel takes place between the 1950s and 1990s. Constantine Stassos is a Greek-American who hopes his life with Mary will be the 2.4 children and white picket fence of the American Dream. He works in constructing homes, and is busy constructing his own too – trying to overlook his own short temper and Mary’s slightly other-worldly lack of contentedness.

They have the children. Sensitive Billy who can’t keep himself from being combative; beautiful Susan who oscillates between confidence and uncertainty; eccentric Zoe with her thirst for the new. As they grow up, and as we see one or two scenes in the family home each year, the cracks start to show. The reader is taken through the perspectives of almost every character, and we can piece together who they are from within their minds and from the vantage of all their family members. I thought moments like this – where Susan is watching her younger sister climb a tree – said what paragraphs of exposition wouldn’t achieve:

”She’ll fall,” Susan said, though she believed that Zoe was rising towards an accident, more endangered by the sky than by the earth.

And, later, they are at Billy’s university commencement ceremony – but he and his father have yet another falling out, and Billy disappears.

”We’re going,” Constantine told her. ”Come on.”

”That’s silly,” Susan said. ”If Billy’s being a brat, let him be a brat. There’s no reason for us to sit through commencement with a bunch of strangers.”

Mary couldn’t help marvelling at her elder daughter’s fearless shoulders, her staunch certainty, the crispness of her dress. She knew to call Billy a brat. She knew the word that would render his bad behaviour small and transitory. Mary couldn’t imagine why she so often felt irritated with Susan for no reason, and why Billy, the least respectful of her children, the most destructive, inspired in her only a dull ache that seemed to arise, somehow, from her own embarrassment.

The years keep going, and we get to the new generation – and to the new friends, lovers, and communities that the children move into. Billy is gay, as we have been able to tell from the outset – even if we hadn’t been prepped by the fact that it’s a Michael Cunningham novel. He doesn’t tell his parents, though they know. I shan’t spoil the paths of all the characters, but as the decades pass they include children, affairs, drug addiction, AIDS. There is a drowning that is the most beautifully written death scene I have ever read. People talk about ‘bad sex awards’ and how difficult it is to write good sex scenes, but I think writing good death scenes must be just as hard. For this one, Cunningham spends pages taking us through the waves and the thoughts, flowing in and out of metaphor. It is mesmeric and stunning and the greatest display of his extraordinary use of language in a novel that is full of extraordinary uses of language.

Some authors write a gripping plot that can make you race through a long book. Some write beautifully, pausing for striking imagery, and playing with how the right balance of sentences can reveal deep truths about their characters. Somehow, Cunningham is both. The novel is leisurely, allowing every moment to be saturated with meaning. But I also couldn’t put it down. I miss it so much. I don’t know how he does it, but Cunningham makes every cast of characters feel so vivid and real. There’s something in the way they speak to each other that would be easy to identify as Cunningham from a hundred paces.

I think The Snow Queen is still my favoured of the two Cunninghams I’ve just read, because there is something special in the way he condensed so much. But Flesh and Blood is extraordinary, and I’m sad at how few Cunninghams there are left on my shelf – just Specimen Days and a collection of short stories. But surely we must be due another novel before too long?

An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks

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One of the books I took to the Peak District was An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) by Oliver Sacks – a copy I bought in Washington DC, and thus one of those lovely floopy-floppy US paperbacks, rather than the stiffer UK ones. I’ve written about quite a lot of Sacks books over the years, and he’s one of my favourite writers (and people – though of course I didn’t know him personally). He’s certainly my favourite non-fiction writer – and that’s why it’s a bit of a shame that I didn’t love An Anthropologist on Mars quite as much as some of the others. It’s not where I’d recommend to start.

The themes and approach in this book aren’t wildly different from many of his others – it was perhaps the structure and specific topics that left me a little cold, but I’ll come on to that later. Sacks divides the book into seven sections, each concerned with a different patient and Sacks’ diagnosis and study of their lives. Rather than summarise them all myself, I’m going to shamelessly plagiarise the Wikipedia entry:

  • The Case of the Colourblind Painter discusses an accomplished artist who is suddenly struck by cerebral achromatopsia, or the inability to perceive colour, due to brain damage.
  • The Last Hippie describes the case of a man suffering from the effects of a massive brain tumor, including anterograde amnesia, which prevents him from remembering anything that has happened since the late 1960s.
  • A Surgeon’s Life describes Sacks’ interactions with Dr. Carl Bennett, a surgeon and amateur pilot with Tourette syndrome. The surgeon is often beset by tics, but these tics vanish when he is operating.
  • To See and Not See is the tale of Shirl Jennings, a man who was blind from early childhood, but was able to recover some of his sight after surgery. This is one of an extremely small number of cases where an individual regained sight lost at such an early age, and as with many of the other cases, the patient found the experience to be deeply disturbing.
  • The Landscape of His Dreams discusses Sacks’ interactions with Franco Magnani, an artist obsessed with his home village of Pontito in Tuscany. Although Magnani has not seen his village in many years, he has constructed a detailed, highly accurate, three-dimensional model of Pontito in his head.
  • Prodigies describes Sacks’ relationship with Stephen Wiltshire, a young autistic savant described by Hugh Casson as “possibly the best child artist in Britain”.
  • An Anthropologist on Mars describes Sacks’ meeting with Temple Grandin, a woman with autism who is a world-renowned designer of humane livestock facilities and a professor at Colorado State University.

As you can see, the title of the collection comes from the final essay – it is how Grandin describes her interaction with the world, while trying to comprehend social mores. I have a thing about titles – they’re often so important in how we understand a book – and was a bit annoyed that this collection took a comment by Grandin and made it seem as though Sacks were the anthropologist in question.

I’ll start with the positives – the chapter ‘To See and Not See’ was completely fascinating. Jennings, the patient, technically has the ability to see – but since he cannot remember ever seeing before, he has no concept of what sight is. Having lived for decades without seeing, he cannot understand the idea of visual distance, or representation (paintings mean nothing to him). Sacks explores how our comprehension of sight creates a world around us – and the very human reaction when someone is expected to understand their world in a fundamentally different way. The footnotes lead to various useful precedents, and it’s an extremely well put together chapter.

Indeed, the first three chapters before this were also good – though not with quite the same philosophical and psychological interest for me. Sacks is very humane and empathetic in portraying (in the first chapter) a painter who can no longer see colour – recognising not just the scientific elements of this, but the enormous changes and challenges the painter must face in ways that non-artistic people wouldn’t. On the flip side, Sacks writes with admiration of Bennett, the surgeon with Tourette’s – awed by how he maintains his professional life.

The final three chapters were less interesting topics to me (though it’s very possible that you’d find them fascinating, if they happen to be areas of interest to you). But there were problems there that existed even in the chapters I found up my street – everything is slightly too drawn out, and without the pacing of Sacks’ best work. He lingers just that little too long on every insight, not deepening our relationship with the patient, but slowing its progress down. There are fewer tangential details and anecdotes than in other of his books, too, and it’s impossible not to wonder if this was largely a collection of things that didn’t make it into The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

It’s still Sacks, so I still liked it – if it had been the first book I’d read by him, I’m sure I’d have loved it – but it was a little bit of a disappointment after reading some of Sacks’ brilliant, brilliant work. If you’ve yet to read anything by him, head to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or Hallucinations instead.

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

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The Blue FlowerAin’t it just the way, in a week where I’ve proclaimed my scepticism about historical fiction over at Vulpes Libris, that I’ve also written about two historical novels that I’ve really liked? The True Heart fell within my ‘safety zone’ of post-1800, but The Blue Flower (1995) doesn’t – although it is the 1790s, so it’s hardly a million miles away.

I think I have chiefly heard people talk about The Blue Flower in the context of being upset that it didn’t win the Booker – and it’s certainly considered Penelope Fitzgerald’s best novel, as far as I can tell. I’m not sure I’d place it above others that I’ve loved by her (The Bookshop and At Freddie’s are both fantastic), but I did really like it.

The main character was a real person, though not one I’d heard of. He is Friedrich von Hardenberg, famed later under the pseudonym Novalis, and his Wikipedia page tells me that he was ‘a practitioner of German Romanticism’ as well as occupied as ‘prose writer, poet, mystic, philosopher, civil engineer, mineralogist’. Exhausting, no?

We don’t see any of that in The Blue Flower, though he certainly speaks like a philosopher (he is a kind, thoughtful, and eloquent character). Instead, we see him as a man in his early 20s, a student of history, philosophy, and law at various universities, who has fallen in love with 12-year-old Sophie. Fitzgerald’s strength is that this is no Lolita. There is nothing unpleasant on the page. He does not sexualise her – rather, he idealises her, and is more than happy to wait the four years until she can marry him.

The blue flower of the title comes in a story that Fritz tells Sophie (and others), about a young man who longs to see the blue flower. What does it mean? Fitzgerald isn’t vouchsafing it to us, though we may come up with theories. Karoline Just – a close friend of Fritz’s, clearly in love with him, though Fritz cannot see this – can only rule out options for what the blue flower symbolises.

She said “The young man has to go away from his home to find it. He only wants to see it, he does not want to possess it. It cannot be poetry, he knows what that is already. It can’t be happiness, he wouldn’t need a stranger to tell him what that is, and as far as I can see he is already happy in home.”

It is not the key to the novel’s comprehension or anything like that – but it is representative of the way Fitzgerald frame s a story. We come at it sideways and unexpected angles, hearing mundane conversations that hint towards a whole, waiting for Fritz to confide in his father about the engagement.

What makes Fitzgerald’s novels so great is undoubtedly her style. Whatever she’s writing about, she has a wonderful wryness. I have realised that one of my favourite authorial techniques is that slight detachment – the shared awareness with the reader that the scene shown is, perhaps, slightly absurd. She laughs gently at her creations, while watching them as though from Olympus…

“Sophie, listen to me. I am going to tell you what I felt, when I first saw you standing by the window. When we catch sight of certain human figures and faces… especially certain eyes, expressions, movements – when we hear certain words, when we read certain passages, thoughts take on the meaning of laws… a view of life true to itself, without any self-estrangement. And the self is set free, for the moment, from the constant pressure of change… Do you understand me?”

Sophie nodded. “Yes, I do. I have heard of that before. Some people are born again and again into this world.”

Fritz persevered. “I did not quite mean that. But Schlegel, too, is interested in transmigration. Should you like to be born again?”

Sophie considered a little. “Yes, if I could have fair hair.”

Sophie is an enigma. To others, she is an average 12-year-old. Not particularly interesting or imaginative – even, perhaps, a little stridently silly. To Fritz, she is ‘my philosophy’. And Fitzgerald balances the two brilliantly, so that we never think Fritz an idiot, yet we never think Sophie truly has any hidden depths. Fitzgerald has, I suppose, shown us the subjectivity of love – even in so bizarre and uncomfortable a situation.

My favourite character, incidently, is Sophie’s sister Mandelsloh. She has a delightfully biting wit, and an acerbic awareness of her own shortcomings. Here’s a quick instance of why I like her, in conversation with Fritz (who speaks first):

“Courage is more than endurance, it is the power to create your own life in the face of all that man or God can inflict, so that every day and every night is what you imagine it. Courage makes us dreamers, courage makes us poets.”

“But it would not make Sophgen into a competent house-keeper,” said the Mandelsloh.

It’s an unusual, exciting, glittering novel. It should be disturbing and it isn’t (which creates its own questions); it is Fitzgerald showing what an excellent writer she is. Is it her best novel? Possibly, but I don’t think it much hurts where you start reading her.

Two Entirely Unrelated Reviews

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Normally, if I feature two reviews together, there tends to be a reason.  I try to find some links between them, and so forth.  Well, the only reasons that these books are combined is that I’ve finished them, and need to get all my Century of Books reviews out before the end of 2012.  Maybe unexpected connections will arise by the time I’ve finished writing about them?  At the moment the only thing I can think is that I didn’t really think either of them were great.

Sunlight on Cold Water (1969) is the second novel I’ve read by Francoise Sagan, after really liking her most famous novel, Bonjour Tristesse, last year.  That short novel focused on a young girl’s self-discovery, first love, and developing relationship with her stepmother.  It was all very introspective, but that was totally forgivable in the mindset of a teenager.  In Sunlight on Cold Water (title from a poem by Paul Eluard), this introspection is transferred to a middle-aged man…

Gilles Lantier is depressed.  Depression is such a difficult thing to convey, since it involves such listlessness and the deadening of emotions.  I was impressed that Sagan was going to give it a go and, if it didn’t make for very compulsive reading, at least it was sensitive and thought-provoking.  But… then it wasn’t.  He meets a woman.  He starts having an affair with her (she’s married).  He worries about his mistress back in Paris; he worries about being good enough for his new mistress.  And so on, and so on.  This sort of writing filled the book:

“That’s not it at all,” he said, “I’ve left out the main thing.  I haven’t told you the main thing.”The main thing was Nathalie’s warmth, the hollow of her neck when he was falling asleep, her unfailing tenderness, her utter loyalty, the overwhelming confidence he felt in her.  Everything that this semi-whore of a kept woman with her cockneyed perversions couldn’t even begin to understand.  But in that case, what was he doing here?
Lovely, isn’t it?  (Er, no.)  I’m afraid I am not remotely interested in the elaborate musings of a man who may or may not be in love, talking about the sight, sounds, and smells of his various love exploits.  It’s not Fifty Shades graphic or anything like that, but, boy, is it tedious.  This is the only excerpt I jotted down which I thought a bit clever:

“Could you love a man who was so rotten?””You don’t choose the people you love.””For an intellectual, you’re not afraid of platitudes.””I’m only too afraid of them,” she murmured, “they’re nearly always true.”
But, still.  Total dud for me, I’m afraid.  Only about 140 pages long, and dragged for ages.  Perhaps it’s my own lack of tolerance for this sort of novel, but I found it meandering, self-indulgent, whiney, and dull.  If I can find a Francoise Sagan that has nothing to do with introspective love affairs, then I’ll give her another go – because I so admired Bonjour Tristesse.

*  *  *

And onto the other novel.  I’m still not seeing any connections.  It’s The Simmons Paper (1995) by Philipp Blom.  I bought it in a charity shop, because the cover struck me as delightfully eccentric, and the topic appealed.

After his death, Simmons is discovered to have left behind a manuscript detailing his work in compiling the section P in a Definitive Dictionary.  Blom’s conceit is that the manuscript has become a famous, much-discussed piece of work – and this novella is framed as though it were an edition of the essay, footnotes and all.

Simmons is totally besotted with his work.  Most of The Simmons Papers concerns his daily life of researching words, philosophising about the role of dictionaries, and raging against neologisms.  He believes P to be ‘the most human letter in the alphabet’, and manoeuvres through various interesting facets of the letter and its history.  I love anything to do with linguistics, and it’s a rare novel that assumes you know all about Saussure.  I’m also rather drawn to novels where the main character gets obsessive and increasingly unbalanced (c.f. also Wish Her Safe At Home.)  Simmons certainly doesn’t disappoint in this regard – quite genuinely obsessed with the letter P (every section opens with a word beginning with P, and Simmons takes to eating mostly peas):

I must confess that in a sense even I am a victim of this daunting work.  Invariably the study of words, their history, meaning and evolution, etymology, connotations and formation, must impress on any mind its seal, especially since some words will resound for a certain person more than others and come to exercise a considerable influence of their own on any mind connected with them.  The long-winded proem which I am now engaging in now seems necessary before I can tell what I hardly dare admit: that I am subject to daydreams, voices and visions.  Words, p-words, emit and emanate images, stories, pictures and fantasies, which ultimately are impossible to keep at bay.
So, The Simmons Paper had all the ingredients of a novel I’d really like – and is packaged in a really attractive edition, incidentally.  So why didn’t it really work for me?  Well, it’s rather too close to what it is pretending to be.  The faux-introduction is amusing, some of the footnotes are really enjoyably silly if you spend a lot of time reading literary criticism – (cue interrupting my sentence for a long example of a footnote)

The pseudonym ‘P’ has been the cause of much controversy.  In the interpretation of Mandelbrodt and his followers, P designates ‘paradigm’, a notion which, in this reading, the text sets out to deconstruct by showing its inherent limitations and contradictions.  ‘The indefensible stronghold of the face of the dying Kronos falters from the owl, its death-ode on the phallus and His contemporaneous demise.  The giant turns back in agony and the very power against himself is the very powerlessness against this power’ (Mandelbrodt, The Question of Femininity, pp.345-6).  According to this reading, the destruction of the paradigm of male hierarchical order is what the text ‘which is by no means fiction, but an emanation of the act of writing in its existential peril itself’ (ibid.) sets out to prove.  While A. Rover takes P as quite simply Simmons’ own initial, Richard Silk suggests that it stands for ‘pater’.  ‘Simmons addressed his father with this name, traditionally used by public boys for “father”, throughout his life until “pater” died in 1946’ (The Dramatic Personae).
– but parody has to go further than imitation.  Examples like the quotation above do seem to work in this way, but, as a whole, the novel didn’t feel all that much like a novel.  It got a love interest towards the end (but not in the traditional sense) – but a lot of it read like critical theory.  And I read plenty of that for my day job!  There wasn’t enough novel in the novel.  I thought The Simmons Paper had real potential to be a little-known much-loved novella for me – have I ever told you about my fascination with dictionaries?  I wrote a thesis on them once – but I found the style a little clogging, and the thread of spoof rather one-note.  Good, but still disappointing.  Yet I will say this for it – it was much better than Sunlight on Cold Water.