2015

The World Between Two Covers by Ann Morgan

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Every Christmas, I seem to read a book I was given for the previous Christmas. Partly that’s me looking at a particular book and thinking, “Gosh, I’ve wanted to read that for a whole year.” Partly it’s because I have time over Christmas to read anything I fancy, and so I grab a pile of books that look like fun. One of them this Christmas was Ann Morgan’s The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe (2015), also published as Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer. I can’t imagine why the title was changed. Anyway, thanks for buying me this last year, Mum and Dad!

(I say I read this over Christmas – crucially, I finished it this year – so this will be the first link in my Century of Books.)

Ann Morgan runs a book blog to this day, but the title refers to the reading challenge she set herself in 2012: reading a book published by someone from every country in the world. That puts A Century of Books in perspective, doesn’t it? This was back in the peak of the book blogging phenomenon, and when any popular blog seemed to be given a book deal. Morgan’s book is fascinating, even if it doesn’t quite do what it says on the cover.

The World Between Two Covers does start with the genesis of the idea – which came from a comment on her blog. The first chapter is all about deciding to embark on the challenge, working out the list of countries (as you can imagine, not the easiest or most politically neutral task), and wondering if it were possible. Throughout the book we do occasionally get hints about the difficult parts of the challenge (how to get a book from a North Korean? What about South Sudan, which had only existed as an independent country for about six months when Morgan started the project?) and there are mentions of readers and authors who post Morgan their favourite books from any particular country. But, by and large, the mechanics and experience of the reading challenge are largely absent from the book.

I was a bit disappointed by that, I’ll confess. I love reading about reading, particularly the difficult challenges – I think particularly of Tolstoy and the Purple Chair or The Whole Five Feet – and those books often become de facto memoirs. That makes them all the stronger, in my opinion. For whatever reason, Morgan’s book is not that. Perhaps the publisher, or she, decided that readers could already find all that information on her blog. So what The World Between Two Covers is really is a series of essays that are borne of the experience – not about the experience itself. On those terms, is a fascinating and wide-ranging collection.

There are sections on self-publishing and electronic books, on writing under totalitarian regimes, on book banning, on the legacies of imperialism. Morgan covers an enormous spectrum of topics and her research is extraordinary. I didn’t learn a huge amount about the almost 200 books she read, though a fair few are mentioned (almost never evaluatively), but I learned a lot about all sorts of other things. The legacies of her reading, rather than her actual reading. For instance, I loved the chapter on culture shock and the things that are left unexplained for an audience that will not need the holding hand, but which become baffling for an audience in translation. It was also about how we orient ourselves as readers, for better or worse.

In the absence of anything else, we tend to draw on our own experiences to make the best of things as go along. Because reading is an active process in which , as Wolfgang Iser has it , we participate by ‘filling in the gaps left by the text’, we search for things to plug the interpretative holes crying out for our attention. We look for equivalences between what we are engaged in imagining and what we have encountered before – just as in real life we might reach for a comparison to help others picture a place that they have never been, dubbing Montreal the Paris of the West, for instance, or Udaipur the Venice of the East. When I read Libyan writer Ibrahim Al-Kon’s The Bleeding of the Stone during my project, I found myself repeatedly drawn to make comparisons between the novel’s poetic evocation of the age-old practices of the Bedouian and the mournful homage to the rural traditions in the works of Thomas Hardy. The parallel may have some truth to it – both writers have negative things to say about the effect of progress on people who live off, and steward, the land – but it is also distorting, because expectations based on Hardy have no place in Al-Koni’s novel. If I were to give in to the temptation to read the novel in Hardy’s terms, I would find the gory denouement – in which the lone Bedouin protagonist Asouf is crucified – inexplicable and nonsensical. The jolt between what I anticipate and what comes would be too violent and I would have no option but to reject the story as absurd.

It’s a fascinating chapter, and naturally doesn’t come up with any hard-and-fast conclusions. But it did challenge my expectations on how much I can learn about a culture by reading fiction from it – particularly fiction aimed primarily at people also from that culture. And often, of course, in translation.

On that note, I found the chapter on translation particularly interesting. Perhaps the championing of translators isn’t something the book blogging world needs to hear as much as others, but it remains shameful that so few books published in the UK (and other English-speaking countries in the West) are in translation. We see so little of the world’s literature, and the things we do get are often filtered through such rigorous expectations that we only get what the publishing industry knows we won’t find too unsettling. As Morgan notes, that means that Scandinavian crime novels are translated – because they fit our expectations of what crime novels should be – while other cultures aren’t represented in our bookshops at all. I noticed last year that there were enormous numbers of Japanese books about cats available in translation – but not that much else. I can’t imagine that Japanese authors solely write whimsical books about cats (welcome though they are).

Not all the books Morgan reads are in translation. There were, of course, those already written by people from English-speaking countries – but other writers choose English as their language even when it is not their mother tongue. It opens them up to a wider market, and in some cases is a safer language to write in. The only book from her list that I have read is a case in point – Ilustrado by Filipino author Miguel Syjuco – though English is also an official language of the Philippines alongside Filipino (a standardised version of Tagalog).

When I went to look up Morgan’s review of Ilustrado, there was a grumpy comment from someone saying “This was a bad choice for a book representing the Philippines. […] I’m sorry you chose this.” As Morgan points out in her reply, no book could represent an entire country and that isn’t the aim of the challenge. But she also wants something that isn’t too unrepresentative – which is why she isn’t interested in (say) a book by a Brit about visiting the Philippines. Earlier in the book, she discusses whether or not her choice of book needs to be set in the country in question at all:

For the most part, however, just as residency in a place is only part of the picture when it comes to human beings’ sense of national and cultural identity, so setting makes for a rather one-sided approach when it comes to the quest for authenticity in literature from around the world. After all, if national identity is as much about thoughts, feelings and perspective as it is about physical presence in a region, then surely the cultural uniqueness or specialness of a work is likely to be located as much in its voice and mindset and assumptions underpinning it as in its setting, if not far more so. When you think about it, there’s no reason why a Zimbabwean work about a kingdom under the sea couldn’t every bit as enlightening, thought-provoking and culturally specific as the most faithful portrayal of life in Mugabe’s Harare.

This paragraph gave me pause for thought. I don’t think I entirely agree. It’s why, when I was looking for recommendations for Canadian novelist Helen Humphreys, I disregarded the ones set in the UK. I wouldn’t necessarily rule out the ‘kingdom under the sea’ option, but I don’t want to read a Zimbabwean author writing about Nigeria as much as I want to read a Zimbabwean author writing about Zimbabwe. Yes, the ‘cultural uniqueness or specialness’ is going to be found in ‘voice and mindset and assumptions’ (of course, every country will have as many of those as it does citizens) as much as the setting – but why not get both? To truly engage with a country, I want to read a book set in that country by an author from that country – ideally set in a time they know, too. But I recognise that is my own set of wishes and requisites, not a universal law.

Morgan’s book is continually thought-provoking, as well as engagingly written. It feels conversational as well as knowledgeable, and it’s a lovely combination. As I say, it isn’t the book I thought I was getting when I started it – but it’s very good at what it’s aiming to do.

A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham – #NovNov Day 6

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Today is definitely cheating, because A Wild Swan and other tales (2015) is, as the full title suggests, not a novella. It’s very definitely a collection of short stories, but it does come in at around 130 pages, so at least that bit fits the bill.

I’ve reviewed a lot of Cunningham books here, and he is definitely one of my favourite living writers. As far as I know, this is his only book of short stories – and they are all twists on fairy tales. Often they take the well-known story and see it from another point of view. What is the backstory for the witch in Hansel and Gretel? Was there a good reason that the Prince had been cursed in Beauty and the Beast? Did the Giant really deserve to have everything stolen by Jack, or to be killed?

It’s a mercy of sorts. What, after all, did the giant have left, with his gold and his hen and his harp all gone?

The book has wonderful illustrations by Yuko Shimizu – fanciful, surreal, exuberant, a little dark. You can see some of them on Shimizu’s website.

Cunningham is so good at delving below the surface of the mundane that it feels quite odd to have his take on the fantastical. There is definitely a little of his dry reflections, such as this bit from a take on Rumpelstiltskin:

He believes, it seems, that value resides in threes, which would explain the three garish and unnecessary towers he’s had plunked onto the castle walls, the three advisers to whom he never listens, the three annual parades in commemoration of nothing in particular beyond the celebration of the king himself.

And…

If the girl pulls it off one more time, the king has announced he’ll marry her, make her his queen.

That’s the reward? Marriage to a man who’d have had you decapitated if you’d failed to produce not just one but three miracles?

I did find A Wild Swan enjoyable and quirky. Maybe my only reservation is that, creative as it was, this is nothing new. People have been reworking fairy tales for generations, and it no longer feels very fresh to rewrite them from the antagonist’s perspective. If Cunningham had been the first to do anything like this then it would have been amazing. As it is, the book felt a little unnecessary.

I often find myself thinking of a line from Ann Thwaite’s biography of A.A. Milne, about his long poem about faith and philosophy The Norman Church: ”it was the sort of book which publishers accept ‘only out of deference to a writer who has supplied them through many years with better, more marketable books in other fields’.” I think about it for all sorts of books, and this was one of them. A new author would have a hard time justifying this book, but maybe his publishers thought Cunningham deserved to write what he fancied – and his name on the cover would sell plenty of copies.

So, I did enjoy this, in the same way I enjoy anything a little predictable and unchallenging. But did it need to be written?

By the way, I’ll be taking the day off a-novella-a-day tomorrow – because it’s my birthday, and I’ll be spending it with my bro. Back, maybe even with a proper novella, on the 8th!

Dry Season by Gabriela Babnik

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I’m slipping into the final hours of Women in Translation Month with Dry Season (2015) by Gabriela Babnik – originally in Slovenian, and translated by Rawley Grau. It won the European Union Prize for Literature, and is the final of the EUPL books I requested when I was asked by them to review some current and previous winners. As usual, more info at the bottom of this post.

I chose this one largely because one of my close friends in Slovenian and I’ve always intended to try some literature from her homeland – though Babnik’s novel is actually set in Burkina Faso, where a 62-year-old Slovenian woman called Ana is being a tourist. Early in the novel, she meets a young man from Burkina Faso called Ismael – though ‘meets’ is perhaps the wrong word, since he first sees her as somebody he might be able to mug.

Their motivations aren’t clear at first. When Ismael rejects his partner in crime’s suggestion that he grabs Ana’s bright yellow bag, it initially looks like he has decided to play the long con. Ana initially seems like a bit of a fool – exposing herself to dangers on the streets of Burkina Faso, without taking any precautions over her possessions or potentially her life. She is there to escape something – perhaps simply to escape her humdrum life, though the more we learn about her background the more we realise that dark secrets linger there.

And dark secrets linger similarly in Ismael’s past – not least what happened to his young brother. The present day scenes of the novel are interspersed with both of them thinking back to the past – we are jolted to the unsavoury activities under a lone bridge, or inadequate parents, or long forgotten antagonisms resurfacing. As Dry Season continues, the reader realises that these two characters have a lot more in common than it first appears.

This is driven home by the fact that all the novel is told in the first person, but we are given no warning when we shift between Ana and Ismael. Often it takes a while for us to realise who is speaking, or which period we are in. Dividing lines blur and fade continually. This section was one of the most disconcerting, because it describes something graphic and we don’t know who the victim is (content warning of sexual assault):

It happened so fast I had no time to think. He lay down next to me, took off my trousers and, with an adult hand, touched my thighs. I froze; everything in me froze. If I had been awake and the man had approached me in broad daylight, I would have said it did not happen. But his hand travelled up to my most intimate part and there was no way that it did not happen.

Dry Season is an intriguing mix of tones. On the one hand, the haziness and rejection of solid boundaries feels almost fairy-talesque, and there are moments of magical realism that seem to link to Burkina Faso folk tales. On the other hand, the whole novel feels quite sordid. Sex permeates the book, and both characters often think the phrase ‘he put it in me’ or ‘I put it in her’ as the sole description of the act, usually sans affection. Dirt – literal dirt – recurs, as the infant Ismael used to eat handfuls of it. Nothing is sanitised here, and when I finally landed on the word ‘sordid’, it did tie together a lot of the novel for me. It was an interesting, rather than a pleasant, read. I should add, I felt pretty uncomfortable about the racism in the novel – often from the perspective of characters, or received by Ismael, but I’m not sure there’s any excuse in 2015 for a white author to be using the n-word in her writing. Perhaps it doesn’t carry the same weight in whatever the Slovenian word is.

Ana and Ismael are intriguing characters, well-drawn with many layers, and Dry Season is an ambitious and complex novel. Not a cosy read by any means, but an accomplished one.

The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson

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My book group does a Secret Santa every year at our Christmas meal. Everybody wraps a book and puts it in a bag, and you pick one out. They’re not chosen specially for you, but I’ve come away with some great things in the past – notably, it introduced me to David Sedaris. It has also introduced me, now, to Jeanette Winterson – three years ago I got The Gap of Time (2015), which is a retelling of one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, The Winter’s Tale. Or a ‘cover version’, in the parlance of this edition – with a handy synopsis of the play at the beginning, for those who aren’t familiar with it.

It starts with a short section where an unnamed narrator witnesses a man being pulled from a car and beaten to death. Yikes! And then he and his son see something at the nearby hospital, where his wife had died.

And that’s when I see it. The light.

The BabyHatch is lit up.

Somehow, I get a sense this is all connected – the BMW, the junky car, the dead man, the baby.

Because there is a baby.

I walk towards the hatch and my body’s in slow motion. The child’s asleep, sucking its thumb. No one has come yet. Why has no one come yet?

I realise without realising that I’ve got the tyre lever in my hand. I move without moving to prise open the hatch. It is easy. I lift out the baby and she’s as light as a star.

Then we zoom back a little while to discover how the baby got there, and the plot does indeed closely follow The Winter’s Tale, albeit modernised in various ways. Leontes is Leo, a hedge fun manager who is rich and ruthless and rather too emotional to think about his actions properly. Hermione is MiMi, a French singer who is beautiful and fairly famous – and, as the novel opens, pregnant with the baby we will later see in the BabyHatch. Polixenes is Xeno, a video game designer – who is working on a game called The Gap of Time, in one of the few strands of the novel that I didn’t think was particularly successful.

As with Shakespeare’s play, Leo manages to convince himself that MiMi and Xeno are having an affair – and, indeed, that the baby is Xeno’s. Winterson convincingly makes him as impervious to reason as Shakespeare manages with Leontes – he has the same passions that cannot be calmed, and the same power that can turn those passions into deadly action. Interestingly, in a twist on the original that works very well and almost beguilingly, Xeno is rather lovelorn over one of the couple – but it isn’t MiMi. He is sexually very fluid, but it’s Leo who has his heart.

One thing leads to another, and Leo’s self-destructiveness sees the baby left at a hospital – but adopted by our narrator from that opening section. The second section of the novel sees Perdita retain her name from the play, though some elements of the plot have been changed since Shakespeare’s reliance on flimsy disguise and near-incest don’t translate quite as well to the twenty-first century.

I really loved this novel. Having not read any of her fiction before, I’d rather got the impression that it would be bitter and spiky and earnest. The Gap of Time certainly isn’t – there is a lovely playfulness and elegance to it, where she is having fun with the task of updating Shakespeare but also borrowing his ability to make sentences both amusing and profound.

You never feel the weight of the Bard looking over her shoulder – with the exception of when she echoes some of Shakespeare’s more idiotic comedy; the stuff that was thrown into the originals to delight the people stood in the cheapest spots.

‘[…]he found that Thebes was being terrorISed, TErrorised, terrORised – like having the Mafia come to stay – by this creature called the Sphinx.’

‘Sphinx? Isn’t that underwear?’

‘Spanx is underwear. The Sphinx was a woman – you the type: part monster, part Marilyn Monroe.’

It’s a good impersonation of the bits of Shakespeare’s plays that I tend to glaze over for – and just as glazable-overable here.

I think the first half and the final section, when we are back with Leo et al, were the most successful – I got less out of the middle bit, where we are introduced to a new and bigger cast, none of whom are quite as well defined or as interesting. But overall, her updating is both clever and engaging. The main mark of its achievement is that I would recommend The Gap of Time even to people who’d never read or heard a word of The Winter’s Tale – and it has certainly made me keen to read more by Winterson, if she is on this form elsewhere.

Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava – EUPL

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The team behind the European Prize for Literature (EUPL) got in touch to ask if I’d highlight some of the winners of the prize over the past few years, and I was really interested in exploring the list of winners from across Europe. Even better, I got to choose which ones I covered – and one of the first that caught my eye was Things That Fall From the Sky by Finnish writer Selja Ahava. It was published in 2015 and was one of the winners of the EUPL in 2016 – I should note that the prize judges all books in their original language, though I am reading the edition translated by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah. It’s original title is Taivaalta Tippuvat Asiat, which Google translate tells me means much the same thing.

I’ll explain a bit more about the EUPL at the bottom of this post – but, first, my thoughts on Things That Fall From the Sky. Well, my instinctive choice worked because this is a really brilliant novel. Here’s the opening:

“What’s on your mind back there?” Dad asks, glancing in the rear-view mirror.

Our eyes meet.

“Nothing,” I reply.

We turn off at the petrol station. You go right here for Extra Great Manor, left for Sawdust House. These days we mostly turn right.

Adults are always asking what children are thinking. But they’d be worried if they got a straight answer. If you’re three and it’s a windy day, it’s not a good idea to stare at the horizon and say, ‘I’m just wondering where wind comes from.’ You’re better off claiming you’re pretending to be a helicopter. And when you’re five, don’t ask too many questions about death or fossils, because grown-ups don’t want to think about dying, or characters in fairy tales getting old, or how Jesus died on the cross. When I was little, I thought Mum’s grandma was a fossil, because she died a long time ago. But these days I know you can get fossils with ferns, snails or dinosaurs in them, but not grandma ones. Or human ones, for that matter.

Saara narrates the first section of the novel. She is a young girl whose mother has died – as we learn, through a freak accident. A block of ice fell from the sky, crashed through their roof, and crushed Saara’s mother. It sounds like a fate one might find in a fairy tale, but it has had a real and disastrous effect on Saara’s life – and she is scrabbling to make sure she remembers what her mother was like. Her chapters often end with a simple description – what her mother’s fingernails looked like, or her morning routine, or how she liked to garden. Saara is making an inventory of recollections.

Saara has been compared to the little girl in Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, and I think they have more in common than being Finnish. She sees the world with a vivid child’s eye – which has clear vision, but also has yet to form rigid expectations of reality. The details she picks up are a little surreal, like the sawdust that fills their home from all the building work, but she is matter-of-fact too. Ahava has captured a wonderful voice, and it’s that commitment to her voice that lets the reader accommodate the strangeness of the premise.

Saara’s mum isn’t the only woman in the family who has had something very unusual happen to her – Saara’s aunt has won millions on the lottery. This is a far happier piece of chance, of course, but its impact is no less confusing for the people involved. In the middle section, the aunt – Annu – writes to a Scottish man who has been struck by lightning four times, finding a kindred spirit in anyone who has experienced the statistically very improbable. These letters also reminded me of Tove Jansson, in Letters to Klara, and they are a delight that also has significant philosophical undertones.

The final section is narrated by Saara’s new step-mother, some time later. I think she is perhaps the least compelling of the three women who accompany us through the three sections, though this may be because she is the last. She has her own very unusual circumstances, but I won’t spoil them.

At the heart of Things That Fall From The Sky is how people deal with the bizarre – how their worldview can expand to give room for the extraordinary. And the prose and characters that Ahava has created seem both dreamlike and vividly real – I don’t really understand how that combination is achieved, but it is done with astonishing consistency and assurance. I loved spending time in this world, and the way Ahava balances genuine pathos with a fairytalesque surreality is truly wonderful. I was certainly moved by the novel.

I’ve got a couple other EUPL winners to read, and if they’re all as good as Ahava’s novel then I’m very excited for what I have ahead of me.

The European Prize for Literature (EUPL) is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – see the video above for a bit about how it works.

The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk

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I can now claim to have read all the novels from Mauritania that have been translated into English – because it is one: The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk, originally published in French in 2015 and translated by Rachael McGill in 2018.

The novel is narrated by Rayhana, a young woman who is only recently an adult – she is on the run from her Bedouin tribe, though we don’t yet know why. Not only has she run from her community, she has stolen the ceremonial drum that is the most prized object belonging to her tribe – and she is heading across the desert to safety and a new life.

It was time to detach myself from the old ways: I was no longer from here. I was from nowhere, and I was going faraway. Straight ahead.

The Desert and the Drum takes place in several timelines – one shows her escape to a city, which is quite insignificant as cities go, but feels enormous and crowded to her. Alongside, we see her life in the tribe and the events that lead to her wanting to escape. I shan’t spoil any of them, but Beyrouk is very clever in the way he tells us things in increments that are just satisfying enough to keep the mystery going.

Rayhana only knows her tribe. Her father left years ago, but she is from one of the more important families of the community. Only desperation can take her from the safety of this communal lifestyle, and the confusion she faces in a city is done very well. That confusion leads quickly to distaste for the ways of life that are acceptable, and the way that city-dwellers have forgotten their past:

I began to feel disdain for the town and everyone in it. People seemed to have forgotten what they’d been only yesterday, what their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had been. They were content to no longer be nomadic, to no longer feel the sun on their heads. They were happy to eat new dishes made not with their own wheat or barley, or with the meat or milk of their own animals. They were proud of all that; they thought it meant they could look down on those of us who had stayed as we were, who hadn’t succumbed to the temptations of the new.

Meanwhile, change also came to the Bedouin tribe’s encampment a while earlier – what turned out to be workers on a government contract, drilling for resources.

Monsters of iron and steel appeared one day from nowhere. no one had warned us thy were coming. First we heard an enormous roar. Some people thought it was thunder, but the sky remained an unblemished blue. Others turned their eyes towards the mountains; the faraway summits stood steadfast and serene. The earth began to tremble beneath our feet. We listened, worried, and strained our eyes towards the horizon. In the distance, a cloud of ochre dust rose towards the sky. We remained immobile, gaping at this sight for which we had no name. When we realised the rumbling and the storm were coming towards us, panic spread like wildfire: people ran to hide behind dunes or collect livestock, men went to get their guns, women grabbed their children and ran inside tents. The tribal drum sounded to summon those who were away from the camp. We watched, stunned and powerless, as the terrible unknown thing approached.

I said at the beginning that this novel was ‘from Mauritania’ – it’s by a Mauritanian, about Mauritania, but I note in a comment from the translator on A Year of Reading the World that it was initially published in Tunisia. And the book certainly expects the reader to be unfamiliar with the mores of Bedouin people. It’s a difficult balance to strike: maintaining a first-person narrative of someone who has group up in her tribe and to whom customs obviously aren’t a surprise, while also making them accessible to the reader who knows nothing. Beyrouk finds this balance brilliantly, explaining from the inside – writing for the outsider, but without ever dropping the intimacy of Rayhana’s lived experience. This is particularly notable when he is writing about traditions surrounding weddings – Rayhana says what they are, but in sentences about how the individual acts are affecting her. They are gently introduced and explained, but in a way that would also make sense in the context of a conversation with somebody who knew them all already. It must have taken some doing, and it works very well. He finds the emotions of the moment, not an anthropological thesis.

That is true throughout. While the author is a man with far more education that Rayhana has at this time, there is a feeling of authenticity and immediacy throughout the novel. I certainly felt that I understood a great deal more about one way of life than I had before – and about clashing ways of life in a Mauritania where traditions and modernisation can collide, without either being ‘better’ than the other, just jarringly different to someone like Rayhana trying to make the leap between them.

I suppose the marker of an excellent translator is that you don’t notice their work, and I certainly never found the translation an obstacle to the excitement and insight of the novel. I really liked it, and I’m hoping that his other two novels might also get translated…

Notes on Suicide by Simon Critchley

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For my second book for Lizzy and Karen’s Fitzcarraldo Fortnight, I read Notes on Suicide by Simon Critchley – a very, very short 2015 book. It’s 92 pages in total, but the last fifteen or so of those reprint a David Hume essay on suicide. So Critchley is covering an astonishingly complex subject in very few pages. So this will be an equally brief review!

Not only that, he says he wants to do it from personal, philosophical, literary, religious, and moral angles.

It’s a tall order and, of course, he only scratches the surface. And I think it was best when he nudged towards the personal – not necessarily his own life (though the book opens ‘this is not a suicide note’) but other individuals, famous or not. He looks through the common themes of suicide notes, and considers them almost as art. They appear in the narrative to illustrate Critchley’s point, or to divert the paragraph into a different direction, even though we seldom know from where or how they’ve been selected. For instance, Critchley described this as one of the most poignant suicide notes he’s read:

Dear Betty,

I hate you.

Love, George.

I found the sections on moral philosophy a little less interesting, because they are rather cursory and abstract – and have obviously been considered in rather more detail elsewhere. He can hardly hope to plumb the depths of the topic in a handful of pages. But even a moment like his question ‘Why do we find suicide sad?’ can lead to all sorts of other questions in the reader’s mind, to contemplate in their own time.

And somehow the mix of the intimate and the global, the detailed and the distant, make Notes on Suicide a brief but captivating book. It barely touches the surface of what could be said about it, but it still made me think more deeply about this difficult and curious topic. And that’s probably one of the best things you can ask of an essay.

Love Notes From Freddie by Eva Rice

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I got Love Notes From Freddie (2015) as a review copy, based on how much I’d enjoyed her novels The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets and The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp, so I don’t know why it took me quite so long to get to it. In fact, I did give it a go a couple of years ago and wasn’t in the right mood – but Project Names made me get it off the shelf again.

I suppose I should start by saying that I was under Miss Crewe’s spell from the moment she walked into the room, picked up a piece of chalk and scratched an isosceles triangle on the blackboard. She had that effect on people – made all the more remarkable by her absolute blindness to her own power.

Reading it this time, I can see why it was a tougher sell than the others. It starts off in a school in the late 1960s, and you get the feeling that it might all be about detentions and stern headmistresses and that sort of thing. Marnie Fitzpatrick is the focus – a goodie two-shoes who is excellent at maths and impresses her teacher Miss Crewe. But perhaps she doesn’t want to stay well-behaved and predictable all the time – one of the reasons that she gets drunk with her friend Rachel. But during school hours and in school uniform – and so she and Rachel are expelled. Marnie is off to a different school that doesn’t have the inspirational Miss Crewe.

The chapters are alternatively from the perspectives of Marnie and Miss Crewe – we learn that the latter was an excellent dancer in her youth, but an injury (and her natural brilliance at mathematics) led to a teaching career.

They’re both interesting characters, but I didn’t find the initial set-up particularly interesting. Thankfully, though, it is just a background to what follows. And what follows is (finally!) Freddie. The novel certainly gets a new lease of life when he arrives, and we breathe a sigh of relief that the novel won’t be about a maths prodigy’s education. (Unless you wanted to read that sort of novel, I suppose, then you’ll be disappointed – but it didn’t seem quite to fit.) Marnie comes across Freddie at the local factory, where he works as an electrician. But he also uses the space to dance. Marnie sees him at it, and decides to volunteer her old maths teacher as a possible dance teacher. Diffidently, Freddie agrees.

Describing dancing is a difficult task, but Rice manages to convey the freedom Freddie feels when he can dance – along with the uncertainty, the self-criticism, and the insecurity – all from the perspective of somebody watching the dance, because we never hear from Freddie himself. And the perspectives of Marnie and Miss Crewe, watching him dance in different chapters, are cleverly different. Marnie sees him with the adoring eyes of a girl falling in love for the first time. Miss Crewe sees him with more world-weariness – superimposing her own failed dancing career, and the short-lived romance from the same period.

From here, Rice’s excellent storytelling ability takes us through to the end of the novel. It was a slower start than the other two I’ve read, but perhaps a deeper emotional centre once we’ve got going. There is a joy to the novel, but it is offset with greater uncertainty. Marnie’s naivety clashes with Miss Crewe’s hard-lost hope, and Freddie is somewhere between the two. Rice is very good at young love and the exuberant anxiety of it – and she’s equally good at reining the novel in to something more nuanced and cautious than a straightforward romance.

So, if you give this one a go, power through the maths at the beginning and get to something with Rice’s special touch. Or loiter in the maths and the school scenes, if that’s your jam.

Threads: the Delicate Life of John Craske by Julia Blackburn

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ThreadsI don’t remember putting Threads (2015) on a wishlist, but I think I must have done – otherwise the choice my friend Barbara made in buying it and sending it to me was more serendipitous than I can expect. I imagine I put it there while reading Claire Harman’s biography of Sylvia Townsend Warner – but I had the happy experience, with my terrible memory, of forgetting anything about the connection at all until Warner’s name cropped up near the beginning of this book.

In brief, Craske was a fisherman who had a serious breakdown that left him unable to continue that profession – and he turned, instead, to painting and (later) embroidery. He was discovered by Sylvia Townsend Warner and her partner Valentine Ackland, and briefly became something of a cause celebre in a select circle – though has since been rather neglected; the museums that hold his work are often ignorant or ashamed of the fact.

Blackburn’s book – beautifully produced by Jonathan Cape, with a lovely solidity and brilliantly chosen cover and illustrations – isn’t really a biography. It’s more an account of tracing his life story, which emerges in bits and pieces as the book continues – and of Blackburn’s life as it continues alongside.

I feel like I don’t know much more about Craske than I did when I read the blurb on the inside jacket. He proves quite an elusive figure – beyond the bare framework that Blackburn details of his ancestry, his occupation, and his war. Perhaps he let his work do the talking – and there is plenty of that in this book; we see his depictions of the sea and ships which he painted on any surface that was available, from trays to biscuit tins. Eventually there is the extraordinary, large embroidery of the D-Day landings – a tiny part of which is shown on the cover. Usually the art conceit of using ‘detail’ to mean anything that isn’t the whole image really annoys me – but in this case it is only a detail. Craske’s work, whether in paint or embroidery, is a striking mix of naivety and knowledge. As a fisherman, he knows precisely how the sea behaves; as an artist, he is teaching himself and has a unique perspective.

Craske

Two people truly emerge from this book. One is Laura Craske – John Craske’s wife, who valiantly and quietly cared for him through mental illnesses that she did not understand (and his brothers – defeating any sort of stereotype of unsophisticated rural fishermen – were equally sensitive to Craske’s ailments and requirements). She was also determined for his work to have exposure, when offered, though also rather alarmed at the money that Warner and Ackland offered her for the work. By incremental millimetres, we learn about Laura’s character and resilience, and I certainly warmed to her.

But far and away the most dominant character in this book is Julia Blackburn herself. Her style of writing is so unusual, as is her approach. I had to check to see if she’d written any books before – she has, quite a few – because this feels so like somebody writing for the first time, and striking it lucky. Like Craske’s work, and (who knows) maybe influenced by his work, Blackburn’s prose is almost primitive. Here, for instance, she is doing some research into the family:

Philip came back with the photograph album and there was Grandfather the good doctor, tall and pale-eyed with a big blond moustache and a look of benevolent abstraction on his face. And here was Granny Cats his wife, also abstracted, but less benevolently so, or was that my imagination? And here was their infant son who appeared so thin and wan and that you would never expect him to survive into adulthood, but he got through and became a solicitor and married and had a son called Philip so that was good.

So many of her accounts seem to be about artwork she forgot to see or questions she forgot to ask. The raw threads of her biographical technique are exposed here, like looking at the back of a piece of embroidery. Many of the people who might have known the family are now very old – and she comments on the erratic interviews she manages to get. And the tangents! A thought leads to a thought. There is a chapter on a man she knew who had a parrot, which has nothing to do with Craske; there is a chapter that is a story a man called Keith sent her; there is a surprising chapter on Einstein’s visit locally (and accounts of the firm rebuttals made to her by Einstein experts that he couldn’t possibly have been seen riding a bike at that point, as he had yet to learn). There are sections of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, which I, of course, loved. There are very moving chapters on Blackburn’s husband and his illness.

It is all a very unusual combination, and would put Hermione Lee into hysterics – but it works, and completely beguiles. Blackburn does nothing linearly. The quest for Craske is the book, and he is not the subject – instead he, and his art, are (yes) the golden threads shimmering through the centre of this strange and wonderful work.

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.