2013

Nocturne by Helen Humphreys

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Nocturne: on The Life And Death Of My Brother : Humphreys, Helen: Amazon.co.uk: Books

One of the authors I’d been advised to look out for in Canada was Helen Humphreys. I did find a few of her novels, but they were almost all set in England, and I’d much rather read a Canadian writer writing about Canada. So I decided to buy some of her non-fiction instead – Nocturne (2013) from ABC Book Store in Toronto, which looked a little unpromising from the outside but had an amazing stock inside. The book itself is beautiful – a lovely covered, and deckled edges. It is just under 200 pages, and something rather special.

The subtitle tells you what the book is going to be about – ‘on the life and death of my brother’. I’m not going to write a very long review, but I do want to communicated what a wonderfully written book Nocturne is – both as a tribute to a brother and best friend, and as an examination of love and loss that perfectly combines the poetic and the grounded.

Fairly late in the book, Humphreys shares the short obituary she wrote for her brother, Martin – saying she never chose words more carefully. And it is evident from the writing in Nocturne that choosing words carefully is at the core of her being. I’m quoting the obituary first because it really tells you who Martin was, and what happened to him:

Brilliant, talented, passionate and compassionate, kind, handsome, disciplined, elusive, and stubborn, Martin loved music, art, new places and experiences, his friends, the West Coast, connecting with life in all its forms, having a beer, and watching the Maple Leafs (even this season). He hated cruelty, intolerance, stupidity, and Toronto winters.

He died too soon, from pancreatic cancer, and is deeply missed by his parents, Frances and Anthony; his sisters, Helen and Cathy; his many friends in Vancouver, Toronto, England, and Paris. We are lost without his beautiful spirit.

Through Nocturne, Humphreys moves between present and various pasts. She tells us about Martin’s life and his illness – the talent he had for music from an early age, and his triumphs and limits as a composer. His friendships, and his movements around the world, and his flawed relationships. And then his diagnosis and the cruelties of cancer. And, winding through it all, the grief and shock of losing your brother and closest ally. I think what I found most moving in Nocturne is the portrait of how you can know someone deeply and still not know everything about them. How you can live in different parts of the world and be deeply close, and be in the same room and not know how to communicate. But what comes across most is the great depths of love Humphreys has for her brother. Not enough fiction and non-fiction talks about this bond between siblings, and Humphreys honours it so beautifully.

And, my goodness, this woman can write. I’m keener than ever to read her fiction, particularly the one or two that are set in Canada. I noted this down on p.8, but there are so many examples of the same exceptional, reflective writing:

I come to the cemetery in a kind of ad hoc fashion. Sometimes I pick up a coffee and drink it out there, standing with my back to your gravestone. I like how the sun warms the stone and how the stone keeps the heat a little way into the evening, keeps it longer than the air. It’s strange, but when you died and the heat started leaking from your body, it left you at exactly the pace that a stone cools after being in the sun all day. It makes me think that we are made of the natural world after all, attached to it more securely than I had realized.

I am often drawn to books about grief – perhaps because they are the purest way of describing love. Nocturne is up there among the best I’ve read.

Road Ends by Mary Lawson

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Reader, I am distraught. I have read all the Mary Lawson novels there are to read – which, admittedly, is only four. Given that there are usually long gaps between them, it will probably be a while before I get another in my hands – but I can always reread. And I’m sure I’ll be rereading Road Ends (2013) several times. Unsurprisingly, it’s simply brilliant.

I bought it in a sale at Vancouver Public Library and read it on the plane between Vancouver and Toronto – what a great book for a plane ride, as it totally captivated me for the full four hours.

Like all of Lawson’s novels, the action of Road Ends takes place in northern Ontario – near the fictional town of Struan, and by a tiny community called Road Ends. She takes us further afield than other of her novels, as I’ll get to in a bit. But it starts in the middle of nowhere in 1967 – a short chapter where two young men Simon and Tom (Simon Thomas! me!) are witnesses to a tragedy at a cliff edge – Tom’s best friend Rob takes his own life.

He listened as their voices faded into the rumble of the falls. He was thinking about the lynx. The way it had looked at him, acknowledging his existence, then passing out of his life like smoke. . . It was the first thing–the only thing–that had managed, if only for a moment, to displace from his mind the image of the child. He had carried that image with him for a year now, and it had been a weight so great that sometimes he could hardly stand.

Until this moment the fear that it would accompany him to the end, enter eternity with him, had left him paralyzed, but the lynx had freed him to act. He thought it was possible that if he focused on the big cat, if by a great effort of will he managed to hold it in the forefront of his mind, it might stay with him long enough to be the last thing he saw, and its silence the last thing he heard above the thunder of the falls.

Oh Mary Lawson, what an extraordinary writer you are. Just absolutely stunning. And she leaves us with the mystery of why Rob has done this – who is the child mentioned? What has left Rob unable to escape from this memory?

We don’t get quick answers. Instead, we look at three people in some other timelines – in Megan in 1966 (a year before that opening chapter), and Edward and Tom in 1969 (two years after that climactic event). They are all members of the same large, dysfunctional family. Edward is the father – Tom and Megan are two of his children who are recent adults, while he has various other children right down to an ill-advised newborn. His wife Emily has retreated into caring for this baby, totally abandoning all her other children and seemingly losing her grip on reality.

At the heart of this family is a toxic assumption that only a woman can look after the young children. In 1969, with Emily incapacitated by all-consuming obsession with a baby, nobody is caring for the other young children. There is no food in the house, no clean clothes, and no structure or even conversation. None of the men quite express that it isn’t a man’s job, but it is the underlying belief – and Lawson is too subtle a writer to rail against this patriarchal nonsense in the narrative. She simply shows us how attitudes in rural 1960s Ontario are destroying a family.

Things are no better among the adults – Tom and Edward barely speak. Edward is a bank manager preoccupied with his mother’s diaries and his own tragic, violent past – desperately trying not to turn into his father, and missing that he is becoming a terrible parent in a different way. His is the only one of the three voices we hear in the first person – while he is emotionally unavailable to everyone, we do get access to his stumbling attempts to understand himself and his history, and how he has ended up where he is.

Just for the record, I did not want any of this. A home and a family, a job in the bank. It was the very last thing I wanted. I am not blaming Emily. I did blame her for a long time but I see now that she lost as much as I did. She proposed to me rather than the other way around, but she is not to blame for the fact that I said yes.

That phrase they use in a court of law – “The balance of his mind was disturbed” – sums it up very well. I married Emily while the balance of my mind was disturbed.

His son Tom, meanwhile, is in deep grief for Rob and has isolated himself from the world. He is a talented scientist, but has decided to stick to snow ploughing, where he needn’t interact with anyone. Lawson showed in Crow Lake that she is exceptionally good at families who are close-knit (even when they are stubborn and intractable) – she is equally good at families who dislike and distrust one another.

Fans of A Town Called Solace will remember one of the main characters beginning to thaw and get to know the community. While he is a newcomer to town, I also loved seeing Tom’s own thawing. He knows the place inside out, but not all the people – and it is a talkative young woman and her long-suffering brother who begin to bring him back to life. Spoilers: readers of Crow Lake will already know these two – it was such a delight for me to realise who they were, and encounter them a few years after the events of Lawson’s first novel.

So, where is Megan? She has been de facto mother to her younger brothers – but, as we see in the 1966 timeline, she has boldly decided to move to London. Not London, Ontario, but London, England. Despite never having been to a city before, she needs to escape her family and home and moves to stay with an old friend – only, when she gets there, she discovers the friend no longer lives at the address she has. She doesn’t even live in the country.

Megan is taken in by the houseshare nonetheless – she could scarcely be more naïve in some ways, but in other ways has lived a far fuller life than any of her new friends. The capabilities she has had to learn set her off on an unexpected career – and she begins to emerge from the shadow of her family. Over her years in London, she grows to find her group of people – including the handsome man across the corridor, whom she becomes infatuated with. But that, of course, is not a smooth journey. (Lawson moved to England around the same period and age as Megan, and I’d be interested to know how much autobiography seeps in here.)

Wow, what a novel – what characters. Because they are spread out, and there is so much sadness at the heart of the book, I don’t think it will call me back quite as often as Crow Lake. But, like all Lawson’s novels, it is a masterpiece. Her ability to balance brilliant writing, detailed characters who feel absolutely real, and compelling, page-turning prose sets her apart from almost every living writer I’ve read.

So, c’mon Mary Lawson, I need another novel before too long. Please!

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.

Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm

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Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers eBook : Malcolm, Janet: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle StoreWhen I was two essays into this collection, published in 2013 but collecting pieces from across several decades before, I was certain it would be one of my best books of 2021. The first two essays are among the best non-fiction I’ve ever read.

After that, sadly, it became a bit more run-of-the-mill – but let me take you on that journey.

The title of the collection is also the title of the first essay, and it opens like this:

There are places in New York where the city’s anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental, irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets—these express with particular force the city’s penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure.

Malcolm doesn’t go for sparse descriptions, so this might be off-putting to some. I think it is absolutely wonderful, and I was excited to dive in – to a piece about the artist David Salle. I’m afraid I hadn’t even heard of him. He was presumably a bigger name in 1994, when this essay was first published and before I’d reached double digits – something of an enfant terrible, disrupting art with collages and ‘quotes’ from other artwork and (or was it?) misogyny. He is a fascinating character, though I also imagine anybody that Malcolm meets and writes about is a fascinating character. She has a way of giving the details of a person that make them simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary. She will introduce someone with an unexpected comment on their handshake, or a piece of pottery they have, or how they exemplify a broader type – and they are instantly illuminated in a Malcolm-portrait that isn’t uncharitable but also is completely unsparing. She is never nasty or malicious, she is simply completely unhindered.

In ‘Forty-One False Starts’, though, we don’t just get this introduction once. As the title suggests, we get it 41 times. After a few paragraphs, Malcolm tries a different entrance to the essay. And over and over. Some are short, none are more than a page or two. Each looks at Salle and his work from a different angle – and while none paint a full picture, the composite is like the collages that they discuss. It’s such a brilliant idea for an essay and, more importantly, is brilliantly executed. (You don’t have to get a copy of the book to read it, either: it’s still on the New Yorker website.)

The second essay is almost as excellent. In it, Malcolm meets the photographer Thomas Struth and, in her conversation with him about photographing Queen Elizabeth II, gives us a vivid picture of the man. As usual, the way she conveys the conversations is odd, unexpected, and sublime. (My paperback doesn’t include any pictures, so I spent a lot of time on Google for the essays about artists, looking up the examples discussed.)

Sadly, the reason that Forty-One False Starts didn’t make my Top Books of 2021 is that it also includes a lot of essays where Malcolm doesn’t speak with her subjects. In most cases, admittedly, that is because they’re dead. There are essays on Edith Wharton, Vanessa Bell, Diane Arbus etc. She covers a range of artists and writers – the provenance of the essays isn’t always clear, but I think some must be introductions to books or intended to accompany exhibitions. And they are fine. There’s nothing wrong with her writing. But the spark is gone when Malcolm isn’t conveying conversations she has had.

There are still moments of Malcolm individuality. I loved ‘The Reef has been called Wharton’s most Jamesian novel, but it is merely her least cleverly plotted one’ and, from the Diane Arbus essay, ‘It is a measure of the power Doon wields in the Arbus world that no one dared protect her against saying something so breathtakingly silly in print.’ But they are few and far between.

I should add, there are still a couple of other essays where she is present, and those are wonderful. She is at her gossipy best while finding out the scandals and tantrums behind the magazine Artforum, and there is a great essay about meeting Rosalind Krauss that starts with a fantastic description of her apartment, including this:

But perhaps even stronger than the room’s aura of commanding originality is its sense of absences, its evocation of all the things that have been excluded, have been found wanting, have failed to capture the interest of Rosalind Krauss – which are most of the things in the world, the things of ‘good taste’ and fashion and consumerism, the things we see in stores and in one another’s houses. No one can leave this loft without feeling a little rebuked: one’s own house suddenly seems cluttered, inchoate, banal.

But the collection feels so diluted by those other pieces. The person Malcolm writes best about is herself – or, rather, she is brilliant at revealing two people in a conversation, where one of them is her. I would love a collection where she is front and centre alongside her subjects. It flies in the face of received wisdom about how to write an essay about an artist or writer, and it would be terrible in the hands of most essayists – but Malcolm was a genius, and she should be allowed to write her own rules.

As a collection, Forty-One False Starts is uneven. But I think it’s worth getting for the third or so of the essays that are truly extraordinary. Skim the rest.

Dreaming of Rose by Sarah LeFanu

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I love looking behind the scenes at books, and I’m particularly fascinated by the process of biography – because it’s a type of book that I can’t get my head around attempting. How to capture a full life of many, many days in one volume? How to approach it when there are already two existing biographies of that subject? These are among the things that Sarah LeFanu discusses in Dreaming of Rose, a diary of her research and writing a biography of Rose Macaulay, from 1998 until she finished writing it in 2002. It was self-published in 2013 and has now been reissued by Handheld Press.

I’ve read two biographies of Macaulay – but not this one. Still, a lot of the names will be familiar to anybody who has read any of the biographies, and you don’t have to have read any of Macaulay’s output to find this interesting. Indeed, LeFanu writes a great deal more about Macaulay’s personal life in Dreaming of Rose than she does about her published output – perhaps because trying to track down connections with possible-affair Gerald O’Donovan was more captivating a chase than analysing her novels.

Reviews of books like this tend to replicate all the information found therein, but I shan’t make this a potted biography of Macaulay. There are more than enough places to find that. Instead, I’ll talk about what I liked and didn’t like about LeFanu’s book – the former easily outweighing the latter.

It’s always terribly interesting to see how writers deal with the problems of structure – speaking as someone who finds this the hardest part of writing anything, and the most satisfying to fall into place.

Terrible frustration with my chapter on the Great War. It creaks and plods and I don’t really know what I’m saying about Rose and the war; I’ve been stuck on it all autumn. Reading the descriptive selection on the war in Told By An Idiot I found myself getting annoyed with Rose for not being sharp like Virginia Woolf was sharp, for muddling and muddying it, for sitting on the fence, for saying: the war meant this for this person, that for that person. I found myself for the first time feeling actively hostile towards her.

I suspect I’m blaming Rose for my inability to get on with writing this chapter. I desperately need a clear space with no teaching. I’m doing a day school on women poets the weekend after this, and haven’t even begun to think about it. And then there’s all next term’s reading still to do. Meanwhile a librarian at the Harry Ransom Research Centre will send me a copy of the Rose Macaulay card catalogue, and Muriel Thomas has unearthed six ‘chatty’ letters from Rose that she ‘can’t recollect proffering’ to Jane Emery [a previous biographer], which she’s going to photocopy and send.

For what it’s worth, LeFanu had a much better time with Harry Ransom than I did a decade or so later, where they wouldn’t send me even a photo of two pages from the only existing copy in the world of a journal I really needed for my DPhil. Still shocked at how unhelpful they were!

Of course, LeFanu wasn’t only preoccupied with her Macaulay biography during this period. She doesn’t write a great deal about her personal life, but there are intriguing aspects of other parts of her professional life – particularly when she is writing radio plays, one about Macaulay and one about Dorothy L Sayers. The back and forth with BBC editors sounds extremely painful. And I could have read a whole diary-worth about her brief experience at the helm of Radio 4’s A Good Read, and suspecting (correctly) that she is about to be fired.

This is one of many times when LeFanu has to consider her finances – and the precarious state of these is very illuminating about the process of writing. Grants become vitally important, as do other opportunities for work which are distracting but pay the bills.

As well as LeFanu’s travels all over the place to speak to people who’d known Macaulay, or might have some of her letters somewhere – and, of course, the correspondence with people reluctant to speak to LeFanu – I enjoyed the insights into the process of publishing. I wish she’d kept the diary going until after publication, because I’d have loved to read about her reaction to reviews, PR etc. But things like this, from towards the end of the diary, were great:

I think finishing a book is more like getting a divorce than like sending a child out into the world; and least of all like giving birth. Endless niggling details have to be discussed backwards and forwards, letters of supplication written to Random House, saying no I can’t afford such and such an amount for quoting just three lines of Virginia Woolf, and letters of protestation to the Wren at what they want to charge for reproducing some of the Macaulay family photos. Where are the feelings of pride, or relief? I’m filled with anxiety and frustration, tied by a hundred tiny ties to the book I want to cast off.

I’ll close with the short list of things I felt weren’t so successful in Dreaming of Rose. The addendum on some letters being released from their embargo was interesting but didn’t balance well with the rest of the book – it felt like a heavy weight on the end of the diary structure. Nobody wants to hear anybody’s dreams and, title notwithstanding, it wasn’t interesting to read about LeFanu’s dreams. Then there is a wearyingly familiar disdain for people of faith, which isn’t particularly helpful in a biographer of somebody who had faith.

Those are minor gripes about a book that was engrossing and very enjoyable, even without having read LeFanu’s biography. It hasn’t left me particularly feeling the need to read a third biography of Macaulay, and I think Constance Babington-Smith’s is probably the one that appeals most to me, because I always prefer one written by somebody who knew the subject (even if it less likely to be ruthlessly open, or that impossibility, ‘objective’). But even if you’ve never read a word of Macaulay’s writing and don’t have much interest in her life, I think Dreaming of Rose would appeal for that rare opportunity to glimpse behind the curtain at the life of a biographer.

Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen

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I read a second book for Women in Translation month, but didn’t get around to reviewing it. But here are some quick thoughts about Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen (2013), translated by David McDuff.

I read Boel Westin’s excellent biography of Tove Jansson when it was translated a few years ago. It was one of those times like buses, where you wait ages for a biography to come out and then two come at once. I’m not sure why I leaned towards the Westin – maybe it came out first? It was also the authorised biography, I believe, though I’m not sure I knew that at the time.

Karjalainen certainly didn’t go rogue with her lack-of-authorisation and spread all sorts of salacious rumours. Instead, she takes us on a journey through the work and love of the title. And it’s a steady, methodical journey.

I really enjoyed reading this book, but here is where we come across the main reason that I think Westin’s biography is better. Karjalainen compartmentalises Jansson’s life so thoroughly that it’s as though she were living four or five parallel lives, without overlap. She writes at length and sensitively about Jansson’s relationships with men and women, but at such length that for a while her career disappears completely. The Moomins are cautiously not addressed for half the book, except for an accidental stray mention that doesn’t make sense since she’s given no context. I can understand that this sort of makes sense, but it means jumping back and forth in time, and pretending that Jansson’s love life was completely unrelated to her career, or that her success as a strip cartoonist had little bearing on her painting. And so on and so forth. Then again, when I reviewed Westin’s book, I complained about repetition… maybe there’s no way to deal with the complexity and overlaps of Jansson’s life and career within the confines of a conventional biography.

I will add, in each of her compartmentalised areas Karjalainen writes interestingly – though leaning perhaps a little too much towards the ‘Jansson must have felt…’ school of biography. As with Westin’s, there isn’t as much about the adult books I love so much, but I suppose that’s inevitable. And thankfully, as with Westin’s book, there are lots of beautifully reproduced examples of the paintings being talked about – even if Karjalainen evidently didn’t know which would be there when she was writing it, as the composition of some paintings are described in unnecessary length when we can just looked at them on the page opposite.

Oh, and the book itself – beautiful! I love the design and the solidity of it. Surely one of the nicest-looking and -feeling books I have on my shelves.

Overall – yes, I’d forgotten enough about Jansson’s life since I read Westin’s biography that I enjoyed learning it all again. But for my money, if you only read one biography of Tove Jansson, this should be your second choice.

The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell

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My friend Mel and I have a history of buying each other the same presents. One Christmas we both (without consulting each other, but having set a £1 budget for gifts) bought each other a wind-up man on a penny farthing. This birthday (our birthdays are six days apart) we both got each other the non-fiction book The Disaster Artist (2013) by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell.

This one is perhaps less of a coincidence – we have both enjoyed the so-bad-it’s-good film The Room, and its a genre of films, indeed, that we love. There’s nothing quite like watching a movie that defies logic in its staggering ineptitude, and if you can find one where the writing, acting, directing, audio, visual, and scene-building all combine into being a horror show of terribleness, then you’ve hit the sweet spot. Such, if you don’t know it, is The Room. Here’s a (fan-made) trailer…

The history of this 2003 ‘masterpiece’ is a bit bizarre – the lead actor/director/writer Tommy Wiseau funded it being screened in a cinema for an age, and had a billboard advertising it for five years in Hollywood. Over time, it became a sleeper cult hit – the twice I’ve seen it were at special screenings at a cinema in Leicester Square, where people fling plastic cutlery at the screen, join in with many of the lines, and dress in costume. But how did it get made, and what was behind so many of the odd choices in the film?

The world is likely to become a lot more alive to this film soon, as The Disaster Artist is a film coming out in the next few weeks – but it is based on this book by Greg Sestero (who played Mark, the second lead actor) and a journalist Tom Bissell – by which we can probably assume that Bissell wrote most of it and Sestero’s contributions were in interview form, but who can say.

The Disaster Artist wisely jumps between two timelines, rather than being entirely chronological, so that we get chapters about the making of The Room from the outset – interspersed with chapters which show how Greg and Tommy met, and the story of their friendship. It is an odd one. They met in an acting class, and became oddball friends. Greg was a young, handsome man embarking on an acting career against the advice of his parents; Tommy was a loner who refused to give his real age, nationality, or where he’d acquired enormous amounts of wealth from – and, to this day, he won’t say those things.

An unlikely friendship developed, though every step would be a huge warning flag in a film about a stalker. Tommy let Greg use his apartment, which had almost no furniture, but wasn’t happy if Greg spoke to any other friends. He would drive Greg around until late at night, and get upset if he asked too many questions. He was clearly jealous when Greg started to have minor success as an actor, and would ramble to him for hours on the phone about it all.

Somehow Greg agreed to make a movie with him.

Undoubtedly, it’s the chapters about The Room that are the most entertaining (if you’ve seen it before, at least). Tommy’s behaviour is entirely bizarre – Greg’s involvement on screen only came about because Tommy wanted to replace the original second lead. Rather than fire this unfortunate (or perhaps fortunate) gentlemen, though, Tommy just filmed the same scenes twice – one with Greg, one with this guy – but didn’t use film for the latter. Eventually, shockingly, he was rumbled.

Tommy would ask for sets to be dismantled then demand they be put together again. He filmed on a terrible alley set, despite there being an available alley immediately next to it – because this is a ‘real Hollywood film’. He wouldn’t let anybody deviate from his nonsensical script, and he auditioned actors by screaming “you’ve just won a million dollars!” at them, and hoping they would act in response. And, despite his script-despotism, he couldn’t remember his own lines – it took him over thirty takes to deliver this 13-second scene:

The Disaster Artist is a hilarious and fascinating exploration of how appalling scenes came to be as they were, how the crew was replaced twice, and explains enigmas like the ubiquitous framed photos of forks, and an actor being replaced halfway through the shoot. Alongside, it is also a portrait of a man so unusual that he would be unbelievable in fiction. Because Tommy Wiseau seemed delighted with the result of his efforts. We don’t comprehend him because he is impossible to comprehend. But we see something of the frustrating composite that Greg saw. And they must still at least speak to each other, as they’ve made a new film: Best F(r)iends. Greg’s written this one…

The one major flaw in The Disaster Artist is that it’s written with the assumption that Tommy was the sole problem with The Room. Occasionally Sestero will acknowledge that (say) the sound guys were terrible, but blames this on poor guidance and lack of experience. More awkwardly, he doesn’t really acknowledge that his own performance in The Room is pretty shoddy. Yes, nobody else comes close to the surreal ineptitude of Tommy Wiseau, but Sestero ain’t great either. There were plenty of bad cogs in this machine.

In the end, Wiseau is something of a sad figure – lonely, driven by desperate ambition that can never be fulfilled. But Sestero makes him seem more like a man so deluded that he is protected from realising how much his dreams have failed. And, indeed, have they failed? I’d love to read a book that shows the aftermath of the film – how they dealt with its unexpected and slightly warped success – but, however that fame has manifested itself, Tommy Wiseau has undoubtedly made a film that has brought joy to millions. This is a unique Hollywood story.

Resurrection Year by Sheridan Voysey

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Resurrection YearI should start with the disclaimer that I know Sheridan Voysey a little. He goes to my church, but it’s quite a big church and I think our conversation probably has never gone further than me offering him a choice of tea or coffee. But he does sometimes speak from the front, and I once heard him speak about much of what happens in Resurrection Year (2013) and it was very moving. Soon after, I bought the book… and, eventually, I read it.

The book (a memoir of sorts) starts on Christmas Eve, 2010, in Sydney. This is from the opening pages:

“Let’s just get some takeaway,” Merryn says.

It’s dark but the rain has eased as we walk back to the car, with our packet of mince pies and some bread rolls for tomorrow’s drive. We get in, shut the doors, and Merryn bursts into tears.

“I feel so depressed,” she whimpers.

A Chinese restaurant is open. The motel has a vacant room. We dump our bags on the floor and the food on the table. Merryn collapses on the bed and my heart breaks into a thousand pieces.

I pull out my journal and write:

God, this is cruel – leaving us in the wilderness. We’ve walked round in circles for years – tired, thirsty, and confused. One minute we’ve glimpsed the Promised Land, and the next minute you’ve barred us from entering.

This section is really opening at the midpoint of the story, and it quickly goes back to 2000 to fill in the gaps. Over those ten years, Sheridan and his wife Merryn had been trying to have a child – naturally, through IVF, through adoption. After ten years, they have realised that the final door is closed, and that it almost certainly isn’t going to happen.

The first half of this excellent book takes us through those painful years – painful for the waiting and the hoping as much as the disappointment. We more or less know the outcome from the outset, but it is still a heartbreaking journey to witness, and to share. And Voysey writes it approachably, like a friend filling in a friend on the disappointments he and his wife have weathered, so it does feel like we share it.

Alongside this, of course, is the rest of life: Sheridan’s career as a radio host goes from strength to strength, while Merryn’s career is not going in the direction she wants. What she does want is the chance to work abroad, in an area of science that I couldn’t begin to understand. Their plan is to go to Switzerland – I was a step ahead, as I knew perfectly well that they ended up moving to the UK. Indeed, to Oxford. Indeed, my church – which has a little cameo. And that is exactly what they do.

The second half of the memoir looks at their ‘resurrection year’ – the healing and restoration that God could provide in this move across the world. Certainly it came with its own struggles: while Merryn thrived in her new role, Sheridan had to leave a job he loved, and found it hard to pick up his career in England. And the grief at not having a child couldn’t just go away – Voysey writes about how it affected so many parts of life, from planning for the future to being introduced to a pregnant neighbour.

Resurrection Year is not a theology book, but it is centred around God and soaked in the experience of living with Jesus. I don’t know what somebody without faith would make of it, to be honest, though I’d be intrigued to hear. Voysey never questions his faith (I think there comes a point in a Christian’s life, certainly in mine, where they have seen and heard too much to doubt God’s existence) but he and his wife do question Him about why this is happening – and ask themselves if they have made the right choices, and so on. And He answers questions and prayers in unexpected ways during this ‘Resurrection Year’. But above all this is really just a beautifully honest book about a couple’s experience, told in simple, poignant, disarmingly and almost ruthlessly honest prose.

I read the whole thing in a day or so, and I’m keen to read more by Voysey – and it also makes me wonder what other good faith-based memoirs are out there. Suggestions, please!

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Americanah cover

It’s the spinning blurry woman again! I’m over at Vulpes Libris talking about Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which I wasn’t super stoked to read, but which I actually ended up loving (spoilers!)

I usually choose to review books there that don’t necessarily feel like perfect fits for StuckinaBook – i.e. you’ll never find me reviewing a witty novel about spinsters opening a cafe over there – but this is a novel that I think everyone will value. And, let’s face it, I’m probably last to the party on this one anyway.

The Making Of by Brecht Evens

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The Making OfNot to brag or anything, but I read a graphic novel. I’m pretty sure that makes me the zeitgeist, right? And it was a graphic novel in translation. I couldn’t be more at the forefront of intellectual hipster thought if I tried.

This brings the number of graphic novels I have read to two: the other one was also by Brecht Evens, and I wrote about it about three years ago. As with that one, The Making Of (2013) was a review copy from Jonathan Cape that has somehow spent years on my to-read-really-soon shelf. (This shelf, it seems, is where books go to die; the moment I designate books as must-reads, they lose some of their appeal.) Thankfully, I was lured back towards it this week, and thoroughly delighted in Evens’ work – translated by Laura Watkinson and Michele Hutchinson.

The Making Of is about Peterson, an artist who gets a grant to help out an enthusiastic but disorganised community prepare a great art project. He has to stay in the shed of someone’s mother, and quickly realises that the whole affair is well-meaning but a shambles – from friendly Kristof right down to Dennis, who seldom speaks and contentedly covers (all) surfaces in little swirls.

As in his previous book, each character is a single colour – as is their dialogue – and scenes are often made of superimposed or incomplete shapes. His palette is chiefly green, blue, red, and yellow, and he uses beautifully sort watercolours to get across an often rather poignant or sharp story. For instance, this page seems to me to portray the mingled indignity and dignity of old age far better than many lengthy descriptions:

The Making Of (2)

 

The story was pretty involving, and certainly better structured than in The Wrong Place, which I seem to remember being a little confusing, but the main reason I loved the book was undoubtedly the art. (The story itself was slightly sleazier than I’d have liked, but still very engaging.) Evens’ way with colour and shape is deeply set in naivety, but it works beautifully. Another example…

The Making Of 3

I also think Evens is probably a lot cleverer than I was equipped to realise. There was one image which caught my attention. Surely (I thought) it was similar to an image I’d seen on the front cover of a Virago reprint of Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light (for my art education is found in such places). A bit of Googling later, and I discover that the image from the Mitchison book is The Unicorn in Captivity, a medieval tapestry, and Evens’ image is undoubtedly an homage to it. Here they side by side, with Evens’ on the right:

The Making Of 4

I felt a momentary triumph at noticing this similarity, and then realised… that probably means there are dozens in there that I missed. I spotted one still life that might be a nod to Léger, but is more likely to someone else… I’d love to hear back from any art experts better at identifying these sorts of things!

The hardback itself is a thing of beauty, incidentally; a lovely shape and feel, which is a relief, as poor production would really let down Evens’ exquisite work. And I really did spend ages just poring over the pages.

When I wrote about Evens’ previous book, I think I asked for graphic novel recommendations. I have been very lax at following them up, but I would still love to hear about any beautiful graphic novels, preferably colourful and not comic strip style…? And, dear reader, do go and seek out The Making Of and The Wrong Place. They’re such delights.