2014

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill #ABookADayInMay Day 26

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Dept. of Speculation: Jenny Offill (Best of Granta)

I can’t remember who first recommended Dept. of Speculation (2014) to me, but it was on one of the posts where I talked about loving books told in fragments – specifically Kate Briggs’ This Little Art, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and Joan Givner’s Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer. Those are all non-fiction – until I read Offill’s novel, I hadn’t tried anybody doing anything like that for fiction.

Dept. of Speculation is told in hundreds of fragment paragraphs – most over a few lines, though the longest are about a page and the shortest are one or two words. Together, they tell the story of a relationship, from dating to marriage to a lost pregnancy to a child to an affair. I don’t know if there is any autobiography in there – the unnamed female narrator of the fragments is a writing teacher who has published one novel and struggles to write the second. Offill was certainly all those things, though I couldn’t speak to her relationship.

Something I love about this splintered approach to writing is that there are no restrictions on tonal consistency. You might dive suddenly into the most heart-piercing moment of a relationship breakdown, or the joyful surprises of motherhood, or the painful fears of the same. And, next to this emotional peak, Offill will write something entirely objective – about the Voyager space mission, for instance (it is relevant in context), or – well, this is the opening fragment/vignette/call-it-what-you-will:

Antelopes have 10x vision, you said. It was the beginning or close to it. That means that on a clear night they can see the rings of Saturn.

This approach builds up a composite picture of the relationship that a more traditional, linear novel could do, but it will feel less fresh and perhaps a bit laboured. I don’t think you could get away with the same sharp philosophy or character insight that Offill can use – for instance, this next fragment works because of the format of the book. I think it would feel awkward in a less formally innovative novel:

There is such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.

I wasn’t sure that a novel in vignettes could sustain the level of character development one would hope for – particularly over the course of several years. But somehow Offill manages to portray the shifting state of the marriage, and the similarly evolving relationship of mother and daughter. You can convey so much in snapshots.

Stop writing I love you, said the note my daughter wrote over the one I had left in her lunchbox. For a long time, she had asked for a note like that every day, but now a week after turning six, she puts a stop to it. I feel odd, strangely light-headed when I read the note. It is a feeling from a long time ago, the feeling of someone breaking up with me suddenly. My husband kisses me. “Don’t worry, love. Really, it’s nothing.”

There is so much nuance in the novel. It’s not a case of marriage-collapsed-by-adultery. There is a complex response to it, with some of the complexity being what falls between the vignettes. The absence of every detail doesn’t diminish the novel. Somehow it elevates it.

I was so impressed by Dept. of Speculation (incidentally, the curious title refers to the faux ‘return address’ both the man and the woman would put on the back of letters). I think it’ll stay in my mind for a long time, and I’ll doubtless re-read. If you have any other recommendations of fiction or non-fiction told in vignettes, or fragments of paragraphs, I’d love to hear them.

This House of Grief by Helen Garner

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This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial: Amazon.co.uk: Garner, Helen, Weinman, Sarah: 9780553387438: Books

I hadn’t heard of Robert Farquharson or Cindy Gambino, or their children Jai, Tyler, and Bailey, before I started Helen Garner’s This House of Grief (2014). I suspect the same wouldn’t be true of most Australians. They were at the centre of a tragedy that led to a trial, and a retrial, for murder. This much was clear from the outset: Robert Farquharson drove his three young children into a farm dam and all three drowned. He managed to get out of the car. But was it murder or was it a tragic accident, caused by Farquharson blacking out during a coughing fit?

The initial trial took place in 2007, and Garner was there throughout as a journalist – as she was at the second trial, in 2010. I listened to the audiobook, after hearing Garner’s non-fiction praised repeatedly on the Chat 10 Looks 3 podcast – I’d previously read her novel The Spare Room but hadn’t tried any of the non-fiction. And it is absolutely masterful.

This is the sort of case that would make a compelling newspaper article, or perhaps a podcast episode or hour-long documentary. In Garner’s hands, it becomes something much more granular. Since she is able to devote so much space to the trial, it feels like we are in the courtroom with her. The initial trial took seven weeks, so of course it isn’t in real time, but it sometimes feels that way. Periods of questioning are detailed so thoroughly – say, for instance, the doctor who is brought in to answer questions about whether or not Farquharson could black out from a coughing fit in something called ‘cough syncope’. We go back and forth, back and forth – an aggressive cross-examination, the attempts to discredit his medical credentials, the reactions from the jury. The actual evidence the doctor relates is a small part of Garner’s presentation of the scene. Her eyes are everywhere.

Garner notices things other people wouldn’t – and probably wouldn’t mention, if they did. How often a witness bites their lip, or the look on the face of a juror, or even how bored some people seem during the more technical sections of evidence – ‘the air in the court became a jelly of confusion and boredom’:

The judge took off his spectacles and violently rubbed his eyes. Journalists sucked lollies to stay awake. Jurors’ mouths went square with the effort to control their gaping yawns.

This certainly isn’t an objective book. One of many ways in which Garner’s writing reminds me of Janet Malcolm’s is that the writer is fully present in the reading experience. Garner relates how she takes the trial home with her, how she desperately wants to believe that Farquharson is innocent but is very unsure, and the mental exhaustion of going back and forth. She writes about camardarie (and the reverse) with other journalists, including being berated by some for her supposed light-heartedness.

Her detailed observation does slip into needless cruelty at times. I was startled by one moment – she bumps into a lawyer she used to know, and he says one line. In that time, she manages to say he is looking bad for his age, has lines on his face, is wearing an ill-fitting suit and hasn’t polished his shoes. It’s all so unnecessarily unkind. Like Janet Malcolm, she doesn’t have any sense of what is kind or unkind to say. She is merciless in the way she presents any of the people she sees. Even the grieving mother is described as having put on too much weight. She censors none of her thoughts.

That’s not to say she always highlights negative things. They are just more shocking, in a context where we might expect a certain generosity of empathy. She applauds a female witness whenever she outwits the unpleasant machismo of the cross-examiner, or describes ‘that little buzz of glamour peculiar to the Australian tradie’ when Cindy Gambino’s new husband takes to the stand. Indeed, he sparks one of the asides which make Garner herself such a dominant figure in the reporting:

But, having recently watched a bunch of blokes pour a concrete slab in my own backyard, I was equipped to imagine the effect of this sight on a young woman in Cindy Farquharson’s stifling situation. A concrete pour is a dramatic process. It demands skill, speed, strength, and the confident handling of machinery; and it is so intensely, symbolically masculine that every woman and boy in the vicinity is drawn to it in excited respect.

Somehow, the tragic deaths of the three boys do not get lost in the maelstrom and minutaie of the court proceedings. Garner manages to keep the emotion of their deaths central, without being maudlin, even while we are preoccupied with the minute-by-minute trial. And it is that clash of the absurdities – and some mundanities – of the legal system with the searing emotional pain of a grieving mother that makes this book so extraordinary. To the everyman, it feels ridiculous that this tragic event can become, for instance, hours and hours of analysing photographs of wheel marks, and disputing over whether or not the police officer’s yellow lines next to them are accurate. Garner is too subtle a writer to spell out this disparity. But it is key to what makes her analytical eye work so well.

And her writing can be beautiful, without being self-conscious. Sentences like this tread the tightrope of poeticism and journalism so well: “Judges are men who in the cool of the evening undo work that better men do in the heat of the day.” ([sic] to ‘men’, please!)

I didn’t think I’d find a non-fiction writer as curiously brilliant as Janet Malcolm – but I think Helen Garner is in the same league. If you’re looking for reportage or dry facts or even a kind, considerate piece about a tragedy – this isn’t the place for you. But if you’re looking for something sharp, odd, poetic and haunting – This House of Grief is a masterpiece.

The Unexpected Professor by John Carey

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My friends Lorna and Will gave me a copy of The Unexpected Professor by John Carey in 2014, the year it came out – fast forward seven years and its time has finally come. I took it away on holiday with me, and it was somehow the perfect read – such a wonderful book.

It’s an autobiography, I suppose, but the subtitle tells you what the main gist of The Unexpected Professor is about – ‘An Oxford life in books’. He does talk a bit about his childhood, and a bit more about his time in the army, but those are not the selling point of the book for me. I couldn’t wait to get to Oxford with him – and even though that doesn’t happen for about a hundred pages, please excuse me glossing over the first chunk of the book to get to the bit that I loved most. (I should say – he writes very well about school life and various experiences during national service in the army, including wondering whether he’d accidentally shot a fellow soldier during an ill-advised demonstration with a gun – an incident that clearly stayed with him vividly. But naturally Oxford and books won me over more.)

Carey goes to Oxford as an undergraduate in the ’50s – following his stint of national service, as was expected then. Despite studying English literature, his interview had involved Latin, Greek, and French – and the course he was set to study ended somewhere before the Victorian period. He would later be instrumental in extending the course to include Victorian and 20th-century literature, and making Old English optional – by the time I arrived as an undergraduate in 2004, we spent a term on ‘1900-present’, though very few people chose to do anything after mid-century. And Old English was technically optional, but nobody ever seemed to present me with the option not to.

Much of what I enjoyed about reading about Carey’s time as a student was comparing what it was like for me, fifty years later. Some of it hadn’t changed at all. He defines things like ‘collections’ – when you sit with the head of your college and he/she talks to you about your studies and your future – which is still exactly the same, subfusc and all. On the other hand, there were no male-only colleges by the time I was studying, and only one female-only college – which is now also mixed.

Carey was at St. John’s College, which is where one of my two closest friends at uni was, so I spent a lot of time there. She lived in a building that is described as a beautiful garden in The Unexpected Professor – for it didn’t exist at the time. He glosses over the ’50s and ’60s desecration of colleges, building hideous concrete blocks in almost all of the beautiful college settings.

What he doesn’t gloss over at all, thankfully, is reading and writing. While he doesn’t mention a female author in any depth under towards the end of the book, Carey does write insightfully and engagingly about many different authors – Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Orwell. When they come up, he spends pages and pages analysing, exploring, talking about their shifting critical reception and the passages that most interest him. It would all be very self-indulgent if it weren’t also so enthralling for the reader. In these sections, autobiography fades away and literary criticism comes in – though in a style different from most books in that genre, which Carey openly derides. More on that shortly…

Carey seems to have lived a very charmed academic life in the next half century in Oxford. Time after time, he was given multiple job offers or funding pots. He even gets offered a job as a Fellow at Keble before he has finished his DPhil! I’m not sure if this is a sign of times changing or Carey’s particular talent, but it is unheard of now for an English academic to walk into a job – or even, for most of us, to get any funding. Carey misses out the years of scarcely-paid part-time work, scrabbling for any chance of a permanent gig. While he and his wife – their romance is dwelt on briefly but touchingly – aren’t exactly rich, they are certainly doing better than most of my academic contemporaries were at that stage. They also got to live on St John’s Street, one of the most lovely streets in Oxford – though apparently rather run-down at the time. His various academic posts and involvement with the English department are a fascinating overview of the changing ethos, and I found his genuine engagement with his students’ work, undergraduate and postgraduate, very admirable.

While teaching, Carey was also writing. Some of his best-received books were anthologies – the Faber Book of Reportage and the Faber Book of Science, the latter of which my father loves. To get his head around centuries and centuries of thought in these areas, and selecting innovative and compelling examples, sounds like a daunting task – but he makes it sound almost a pleasure. He also writes some literary criticism and other cultural texts, including the only one I’d previously read: The Intellectuals and the Masses. It is while compiling critical thought on Milton that Carey realises he thinks most literary criticism is drivel – not quite his word, but not far off.

I’m sure he’s right, but I am coming onto my only qualm about this book. He is very disparaging about his colleagues in the literary field, and not particularly gracious when they don’t like his work. I suppose that’s understandable – but it definitely became clear that when he is critical of someone, their book is bad; when someone is critical of his book, they are wrong – and probably histrionic. Sadly, this does become very sexist at one point – he writes of his former supervisor’s review of his book: ‘when I dipped into Helen’s Encounter review its bossy tone reminded me so forcibly of my mother’s shrill, bigoted denunciations of my teenage relationship with Heather that I never finished it’. Setting aside the fact that he definitely finished reading it, calling a woman’s review ‘bossy’ and ‘shrill’ is not a good look, and I wish his editor had spoken to him about it. Perhaps they did.

It’s a small quibble in a book I otherwise totally loved and relished reading. I might have suggested cutting off the beginning and making this entirely a book about Oxford and books, but also recognise that is because I love those things myself. Part of my pleasure was in thinking of the streets and remembering my time as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Oxford – but I think The Unexpected Professor would delight you even if you’ve never stepped foot in Oxford. Because we all, after all, love books.

The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham

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One of the most important things about a holiday, I’m sure we can all agree, is choosing which books to bring. If I’m going on holiday by car, I bring wildly too many – because then I can have some choices while I’m away. I took eleven books for my recent week away, and the eleventh of those, thrown into the suitcase at the last minute, was The Snow Queen (2014) by Michael Cunningham. And thank goodness I did, because it ended up being exactly what I wanted to read first – and it’s absolutely brilliant.

We start just before the 2004 US General Election, where various characters are sure that George W. Bush won’t get re-elected because he is ‘the worst President in US history’. Wry laugh. Barrett Meeks has just broken up with his rather-younger boyfriend, who told him by text that they had both seen this coming – Barrett had not – when he sees something extraordinary in the New York sky:

The miniature groundscape at his feet struck him, rather suddenly, as too wintery and prosaic to bear. He lifted his heavy head and looked up.

There it was. A pale aqua light, translucent, a swatch of veil, star-high, no, lower than the stars, but high, higher than a spaceship hovering above the treetops. It may or may not have been slowly unfurling, densest at its centre, trailing off at its edges into lacy spurs and spirals.

Barrett thought that it must be a freakish southerly appearance of the aurora borealis, not exactly a common sight over Central Park, but as he stood – a pedestrian in coat and scarf, saddened and disappointed but still regular as regular, standing on a stretch of lamp-lit ice – as he looked up at the light, as he thought it was probably all over the news – as he wondered whether to stand where he was, privately surprised, or go running after someone else for corroboration – there were other people, the dark cutouts of them, right there, arrayed across the Great Lawn…

In his uncertainty, his immobility, standing solid in Timberlands, it came to him. He believed – he knew – that as surely as he was looking up at the light, the light was looking back down at him…

This moment of inexplicable encounter happens early in the novel, but it is quite possible to imagine the novel existing without it. Its principle impact is to make Barrett look more closely at life, and try to work out how he was the only person to see this light – and what it could mean, and why he was chosen to see it. But, around him, the novel’s other characters continue their complex, anxious, vibrant, and ordinary lives. Few authors show the complexity of the ordinary, and the banality of the extraordinary, as well as Cunningham does.

For instance, Barrett;s sister-in-law Beth is seriously ill with cancer. Her possible death laces every word spoken in the house, where Barrett moves ‘temporarily’ to recover from his break-up. But, in the midst of this, Barrett’s brother Tyler is preoccupied with trying to write a song for his upcoming wedding to Beth. He is a singer-songwriter who has always been the talented one – but possibly not talented enough to ‘make it’, after years of trying, or to avoid falling into cliche when he tries to express himself in song to Beth.

Various other friends form part of the core cast, and we go between the minds of all of them – mostly Barrett and Tyler, but Cunningham elegantly takes the third-person narrative into different people’s perspectives, often for fleeting moments, while maintaining a cohesion and fluidity to the novel. He is so good at the moments that synecdochically represent whole lives. And he is equally good at showing, through narrative and dialogue, the precise degree of love and trust between two characters. Barrett and Tyler are closer than any two brothers I’ve seen in fiction, and Cunningham enables the reader to feel this almost viscerally.

I was a bit worried when I saw, in the blurb, that Barrett would start going to church. Christianity is seldom written about well by people who aren’t Christians. But Cunningham resists a dramatic conversion or a fall from faith – rather, it is one of the ways that Barrett’s life opens up, without ever developing beyond a sense of cautious wonder. The mysterious light sends him on a new path, even if it doesn’t reveal a new destination.

Mostly, I just love reading Cunningham’s prose. There is something about the way he forms communities of characters, and something in the elegant simplicity of his writing, that makes reading one of his novels feel like having  cold, refreshing water pouring through your hands on a hot day. The Hours remains my favourite of the four or five I’ve read, but this is a close competitor. I think there’s a danger that his novels are underrated because they give such an effect of simplicity – of things happening to ordinary people, and then the novel concluding. But to do that well, and even with a sense almost of transcendence, is surely one of the highest possible achievements of the novel.

Mrs Fox by Sarah Hall (25 Books in 25 Days: #24)

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Can you tell that the books are getting shorter as I get to the end of my 25 days? Mrs Fox (2014) by Sarah Hall is certainly short – it is, indeed, the winner of the National Short Story Award 2013. Faber turned it into a book all of its own, with wide margins, huge font, and only 37 pages.

Sarah Hall acknowledges that it was inspired by David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox – a 1922 novella that I’ve read a lot, because it was a major part of my DPhil. She also claimed not to have read it.

I’m not going to call her a liar, but Mrs Fox follows the same beats of Lady Into Fox to an astonishing degree. I found a useful blog post that details all of those common factors – but, in brief, a lady turns into a fox. Hall’s version is more visceral than Garnett’s, and certainly more grounded in the now (while Garnett deliberately used an eighteenth-century style for his). Her writing and pacing are excellent, but I found it so hard to judge it – because it is so, so similar to Lady Into Fox in plot. To the point that it’s a bit embarrassing that the competition judges let it win, if I’m honest – and probably the reason that the inspiration is acknowledged. It’s even acknowledged in the book, where the main characters’ surname is Garnett.

So, yes, it’s used in an interesting way to examine the dynamics of a marriage. And thank you Annabel for sending me this copy! But what an interesting case of not-actually-plagiarism.

Frank by Jon Ronson (25 Books in 25 Days: #16)

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I haven’t had that much reading time today, and so today’s book is the shortest so far – under 70 pages. Which is unusual for Jon Ronson, who tends to write quite chunky things – filled with the surreal and extraordinary things he has witnessed or investigated. I’ve enjoyed several of his other books, and was particularly impressed by one that wasn’t particularly about the surreal so much as the unpleasantly common, in So, You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

I’m not sure of the genesis of Frank (2014), though I suspect it might have been put out quickly to support the film. It tells of Ronson’s time as an almost accidental member of Frank Sidebottom’s band – Frank Sidebottom being the pseudonym of a musician called Craig who performed wearing an enormous cartoon head. In this slight volume, Ronson talks about the band’s meandering creation and lack of success – as well as all the people they bumped into who went onto bigger and better things. There is enough insight into Craig’s psychology to make me wish Ronson had written a rather longer book. And I still haven’t quite worked out how Frank ever became famous or notable – his legacy seems to come from nowhere.

But Ronson is always a fascinating and empathetic writer, managing to make the reader marvel alongside him, and become interested in whatever he is interested in. This was a fun one to pick up on a day I needed a short book.

3 books about reading

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I am so proud of everybody for the response to my most recent post. You’ve really shown the positives that can come of people coming together on the Internet. It brings a tear to the eye! I’m excited about my Furrowed Middlebrow books arriving, and will certainly report back on what I think of the books.

But for today – let’s look at some books about reading. This has certainly my go-to comfort-genre of choice over the past year or so. I picked up quite a few in my trips to America, and I am endlessly entertained, informed, and charmed by them – thankfully there are plenty more to read on my shelves. As I often turn to them when I want episodic distraction, I don’t always get around to making proper reviews of them – so I’ve grouped three together for mini-reviews. Sound ok?

Why I Read (2014) by Wendy Lesser

why-i-readThe subtitle to this one is ‘the serious pleasure of books’, and Lesser is certainly not taking the role of the average reader. She wears her education heavily (if that is the opposite of ‘lightly’ in this instance), and it becomes rather farcical how often she mentions Henry James, BUT it’s still an enjoyable and extremely thought-provoking look at the different elements of reading. She divides her chapters in ‘Character and Plot’, ‘The Space Between’, ‘Novelty’, ‘Authority’, ‘Grandeur and Intimacy’, and ‘Elsewhere’ – make of those what you will – and her thoughts and arguments cover great swathes of territory and many writers and nationalities.

I would certainly need to re-read to familiarise myself afresh with her lines of argument, and this is closer to a scholarly book than most of the books-about-reading I enjoy, but is still certainly accessible to the non-scholar. Indeed, it would be infuriating in a scholarly context, because there are no footnotes or referencing

Why does she read? The whole book is, of course, building that answer – but I also liked (if did not agree with) the summing-up of sots of ‘I read […] for meaning, for sound, for voice – but also for something I might call attentiveness to reality, or respect for the world outside oneself’. I’d certainly recommend Why I Read – and it is also beautifully designed and printed – but somebody should have a word in her ear about how often one can get away with throwing in Henry James. I shall always wryly smile in recollection of ‘Very little in the world can compare with the experience of reading, or even rereading, The Golden Bowl, but we cannot always be reading The Golden Bowl‘. Well quite.

The Art of the Novel (2015) edited by Nicholas Royle

art-of-the-novelI asked for this collection of essays for my birthday last year – thanks Rhiannon! – because my friend (can I say that on the strength of meeting once?) Jenn Ashworth has an essay in it. You may recall I raved about Fell earlier in the year; in this collection she writes on ‘Life Writing / Writing Life’. Everybody in the collection discusses different angles on how to write, from genre (Leone Ross on magical realism; Livi Michael on historical fiction) to broader concerns like place, details, plot twists, etc. Besides Ashworth, I’d only heard of a handful of the authors (Alison Moore, Stella Duffy, and – believe it or not – two Nicholas Royles, whom I’d got confused on a previous occasion) but I am hardly the benchmark for knowing about modern literature. Only one contributor, one of the Nicholas Royles in fact, takes a weird tangent – into the concept of the death of the author – which has little to do with practical advice.

This was one of the books I read in Edinburgh, and it was entertaining – I was reading it more out of interest than seeking advice – but I did particularly like how each essayist ended their section with a list of books they admired or recommended. It was interesting how often Muriel Spark’s excellent book The Driver’s Seat came up.

The Whole Five Feet (2009) by Christopher R. Beha

the-whole-five-feetThe most personal of the three books featured today, and the most unusual in concept (is there a word for ‘gimmicky’ that isn’t negative?) – and by far the longest subtitle. *Clears throat* ‘What the great books taught me about life, death, and pretty much everything else’.

The great plants in question are the Harvard Classics – Beha decides that he will try to read all of the Harvard Classics in a year. They supposedly take up five feet on a shelf, hence the title. For those not au fait with the series (as I was not), it was created in 1909 to be the best literature, fiction and non-fiction, made available to the everyman, in 51 chunky volumes. It is quite an unusual collection of works; the blurb describes it as ‘from Plato to Dante, Shakespeare to Thoreau’, but it also includes some more idiosyncratic choices – like Two Years Before the Mast, an account of sailing by Richard Henry Dana, Jnr.

What makes this book so engrossing is how well Beha combines the reading experience with personal accounts of his own life – losses and illness chiefly – that accompany the year, writing with a empathetic dexterity that makes the reader warm to him and care deeply. The actual responses to the books become less important as The Whole Five Feet continues, and it ultimately seems more of an endurance test than an engagement with literature. In some ways, this is more memoir than a book-about-reading, but it is none the worse for that.

Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar

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Guys, I love Virginia Woolf. That ain’t no secret around these parts. And now I’ve read four novelisations of her life… or at least where she features. Those are The Hours by Michael Cunningham, Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers, Virginia Woolf in Manhattan by Maggie Gee, and now Vanessa and Her Sister (2014) by Priya Parmar.

Vanessa and Her Sister

The Cunningham novel remains my favourite, but all of them have been good in their different ways – and Parmar takes the different angle of framing this as the diary of Vanessa Bell, which opens thus:

Thursday 23 February 1905 – 46 Gordon Square
Bloomsbury, London (early)

I opened the great sash window onto the morning pink of the square and made a decision.

Yes. Today.

Last Thursday evening I sat in the corner like a sprouted potato, but this Thursday, I will speak up. I will speak out. Long ago, Virginia decreed, in the way that Virginia decrees, that I was the painter and she the writer. “You do not like words, Nessa,” she said. “They are not your creative nest.” Or maybe it orb? Or oeuf? My sister always describes me in rounded domestic hatching words. And invariably, I believe her. So, not a writer, I have run away from words like a child escaping a darkening wood, leaving my sharp burning sister in sole possession of the enchanted forest. But Virginia should not always be listened to. 

Alongside these ongoing entries there is a collage-style selection of letters from various members of the Bloomsbury Group – most amusingly between Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf, the former trying to persuade the latter to marry Virginia Stephen. Spoilers: he does.

That does bring about one big factor in reading this novel, or any book about real people. The reading experience will depend a lot upon how much you know about the people in question. I read Vanessa and Her Sister for my book group, and some people there said they were forever flicking to the list of people at the beginning, and trying to work out how everybody was connected: I was in the lucky position that I already knew who everybody was, and what would happen to them, and even some nicknames (‘Goat’ for Virginia, for instance). I have rather immersed myself in Virginia and her circle, of course – as have many of you – and so I wasn’t surprised when Thoby died (for instance) and none of the novel held tension for me, per se.

This also meant that I had to read the book with parallel sets of people: the real individuals, and the characters that Parmar has created. She is keen to emphasise in her afterword that the novel and people are fictional – but, of course, one can’t help thinking constantly of the actual lives these people lived, and real events are constantly being referred to.

The focus of the novel, as both the title and the excerpt above suggest, is the relationship between sisters Vanessa and Virginia Stephen. The novel, indeed, ends before Virginia’s first novel is published – so we see them as sisters learning their craft as painter and writer respectively, without their later reputations clouding the scene. And most prominent in Parmar’s handling is the possessiveness Virginia feels over Vanessa.

Much happens in Vanessa and Her Sister that would probably have been cut from a complete fiction, as distracting from the main narrative – the Dreadnaught Hoax, for instance – but it is Vanessa’s marriage to Clive Bell and Virginia’s resentment of this that occupy most of the book. Virginia and Clive begin an affair of the mind, and Vanessa tries to deal with the fragility of Virginia’s mental health alongside the indignity of Clive’s other affairs, and this betrayal.

Tbh, Virginia comes off terribly in this book. We don’t see her talent, and we certainly don’t see her humour – which is always evident in her writing, particularly her non-fiction and letters. She is chiefly a clingy, selfish, extremely weak person in this narrative. But, then, who is ever charmed by their own siblings? Love them, yes, deeply – but we see our nearest and dearest in clear ways that nobody else would, and speak of and to them in ways that nobody else could. The angle is perhaps realistic?

Oh, and Parmar certainly writes well and very engagingly. We can’t know how Vanessa would have written her diary, because she did not. What worked less well, to my mind, were letters between people who did write letters to each other. When we can read the letters Virginia, Roger Fry, or Lytton Strachey wrote, why would we want to read versions that Parmar has made up? (Incidentally, Roger Fry is easily the novel’s nicest character. I don’t know much about him, and have yet to read the biography of him that Virginia Woolf wrote.)

My most pressing question throughout was: had Parmar read Susan Sellers’ novel? So much of it seems to be inspired by the same things, though Sellers wrote in a much more Modernist way, that worked very well.

You’re spoiled for choice if you want to read novelisations of the Bloomsbury Group. I’d still always recommend The Hours as a first choice, and would probably choose a biography before a novelisation anyway, but Parmar has tackled a difficult topic and approach very capably. This is certainly an enjoyable read, but perhaps for people who already know the figures well, rather than those hoping to learn about the individuals involved.

Where I’m Reading From by Tim Parks

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Where I'm Reading FromYou may be getting tired of me reviewing books about books – well, there are more to come, and I can’t get enough of them! Recommendations always heartily welcomed. I can’t remember where I first heard of Where I’m Reading From (2014) by Tim Parks, but I have an inkling that it might have been in the ‘You May Also Be Interested In’ section on Amazon. I do know how I got it – it was a birthday present from my friends Sarah and Paul, along with Michael Dirda’s Browsings which I’ll also be writing about soon.

Tim Parks (a name I did not know before, once I realised that I’d been getting him mixed up with Tim Pears) is a British novelist, translator, and professor who lives in Milan. As such, he is well placed to write about all manner of literary topics, from the nuances of copyright to the different ways to translate isolated sentences from D.H. Lawrence. His pieces, which previously all appeared in the New York Review of Books, are certainly engaging and thought-provoking. They are also maddeningly repetitive.

The same points come up over and over and over again – that writers outside of English aim for an international style rather than one linked to their own particular contexts; that translators have to choose between content and tone; that academic criticism is too engaged with the text and not with the author’s life. This last suggests Park hasn’t read any English Literature academic writing for about forty years, but the other two would be extremely interesting points if they didn’t each come up a dozen times. And it did begin to feel, at one point, as though D.H. Lawrence were the only novelist Parks had ever read. True, these articles/essays came out at intervals over a four year period, but he could still have gone in for a bit more variety. Michael Dirda did; that’s all I’m sayin’.

BUT I should add that, those recurrences forgiven, Where I’m Reading From is fascinating and offers much food for thought. Even acknowledging how much repetition is in the book (and now, it seems, in my blog post about it), the topics covered are many and various, and often unusually interesting. To pick one, ‘Why Readers Disagree’:

Enthusiasm or disappointment may be confirmed or attenuated, but only exceptionally reversed [by criticism]. We say: James Wood/Colm Toibin/Michiko Kakutani admires the book and has given convincing reasons for doing so, but I still feel it is the worst kind of crowd-pleaser.

Let me offer a possible explanation that has been developing in my mind for a decade and more. It’s a central tenet of systemic psychology that each personality develops in the force field of a community of origin, usually a family, seeking his or her own position in a pre-existing group, or ‘system’, most likely made up of mother, father, brothers and sisters, then aunts, uncles, grandparents, and so on. The leading Italian psychologist, Valeria Ugazio further suggests that this family ‘system’ also has ‘semantic content’; that is, as conversations in the family establish criteria for praise and criticism of family members and non-members, one particular theme or issue will dominate.

These might be bravery vs cowardice, moral vs immoral, success vs failure etc. – and these are, he argues, reflected in the qualities we look for in novels or characters. I.e. we may judge books on entirely different scales from one another. At one point Parks makes what he considers an exhaustive list, which is bizarrely brief, but it’s a very intriguing notion nonetheless.

I could either write thousands of words about the different angles and authors considered or end here – and I think it will have to be the latter. Parks doesn’t write with the eager enthusiasm of the avid reader, but rather the mildly detached intellect of the professional man of books – yet those of us who are avid readers first and foremost will find much to interest. This he certainly did – most so in articles on translation, where he resisted quoting examples that only the polylingual would understand, for which I am grateful. Perhaps one does not warm to Parks as a friendly voice (and his treatment of his parents in these articles does little to enamour me, I will confess) but he is not setting out to be a chatty companion so much as a muser. As that, he is very admirable. But he is not Dirda. More on him anon…

 

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

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LilaThe list of eponymous novels from the other day was going to include Lila by Marilynne Robinson – until I discovered that I never actually linked to my Shiny New Books review from StuckinaBook, apparently. And since it’s been so long, I’ll copy across the review here, rather than send you off to a set of SNB menus that aren’t the most recent. (But do check out the SNB update!)

It is difficult to write a review of a Marilynne Robinson novel that can even begin to do her writing justice. Reading one of her books makes me want to go and re-write all the other reviews I’ve written of other authors, toning them down, so that the words ‘excellent’ or ‘brilliant’ can be reserved for somebody of Robinson’s talent. Granted I’m not the best-read when it comes to 21st-century literature, but I would unhesitatingly call Robinson the greatest living writer – and in Lila, where she revisits the people and location of previous novels Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), she has continued this remarkable success.

Lila is present in the two previous novels – she is Mrs Ames, the wife of the aging minister whose first person narrative brings you so close to his thoughts and memories in Gilead. The couple are more incidental in Home, which focuses upon the neighbouring Boughton family, but in neither book is Lila anything comparable to an open book. This excerpt from Home is indicative:

Ames took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He felt a sort of wonder for this wife of his, in so many ways so unknown to him, and he could be suddenly moved by some glimpse he had never had before of the days of her youth or her loneliness, or of the thoughts of her soul.

If she is constant surprise to her husband, she is shadowy to the reader. We see her through the prism of Ames’ devotion, and his astonishment that he should (so late in life) find a wife and be given a son; Lila is a miracle he has been granted. His viewpoint is in no way possessive or selfish, but his grateful love means (naturally) we only see Lila as John sees her. We do not have access to her past or, really, her personality.

All that changes in Lila. Like Home, it is in the third person, but yet still offers an insight into the woman and her early life. We see her, ‘adopted’ (or rescued or kidnapped) by a woman called Doll; she lives in a world of poverty and uncertain loyalties. There is a group (a gang? a makeshift family?) that she is part of, but the boundaries of it are not secure. One day she and Doll may find themselves on the outside of it, and this daughter of man has nowhere to lay her head. We see recurring glimpses of this group – of the lynchpin, Doane, and of the event that separates Doll from Lila and sends her on her journey towards Gilead…

By showing us how different Lila’s early life is, it feels like coming home for the reader when we are eventually in Gilead. I spoke of the ‘people and location’ of Robinson’s earlier novels, but – more to the point – it is the community of those novels that Robinson has so brilliantly built up. A sense that they may judge or hurt each other as much as they love and protect, but that they are securely bound up with each other. This community requires a certain amount of trust – and it is trust that Lila finds so difficult to give. She is like a nervous animal, mistreated in the past and wary of sacrificing her independence for any sort of community.

The extraordinary triumph of Lila is seeing how the relationship develops between Ames and Lila, after she turns up in Ames’ church out of the blue. This is not a Cinderella story, or a heartwarming romance, or anything of the sort. The novel doesn’t fit into any sort of category. It seems too real to be fictional. We see the beautiful patience, honesty, faithfulness, and flaws of Ames that made him such a hero in Gilead – but heavily counterpointed by the impetuousness, wariness, and doubts of Lila. There is a poignant believability to the way she asks questions he cannot answer, then mistakes his silence for reproof; a painful beauty to his recognition that she may leave with his child, and that he can do little but make a home that he hopes will keep her peripatetic spirit. Their conversations are complex, mixing her doubts and his hopes; his long-earned wisdom and her vital awareness of the crueller side of human nature…

He said, “You know, there are things I believe, things I could never prove, and I believe them all day, everyday. It seems to me that my mind would stop dead without them. And here, where I have tangible proof” – he patted her hand – “when I’m walking along this road I’ve known all my life, every stone and stump where it has always been, I can’t quite believe it. That I’m here with you.”

She thought, Well that’s another way of saying it ain’t the sort of thing people expect. She had heard the word ‘unseemly’. Mrs. Graham talking to someone else about something else. No one said her belly was unseemly, no one said a word about how the old man kept on courting her, like a boy, when she was hard and wary and mainly just glad there was a time in her life when she could rest up for whatever was going to happen to her next. She felt like asking why he couldn’t see what everybody else had seen her whole life. But what if that made him begin to see it? First she had to get this baby born. And after that she might ask him some questions.

It is far too simplistic to say simply that these are two good people – both have deficiencies, and both are too well-drawn and complete to be tied down to any single adjective – but they are both deeply lovable people. Robinson writes with an intense subtlety about fairly ordinary characters – but, by examining them in such close detail, and showing so vividly what it is they want and what they fear, she has made the ordinary not only extraordinary but immortal. I don’t know if we will ever be given a return journey to the community of Gilead, but even if Robinson never writes another word, she is also (I believe) assured of a place among the immortals.