2017

This Little Art by Kate Briggs

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I’m back from a week in Northern Ireland, and I have a pile of books I’ve been meaning to talk about. Some of those are books that I read whilst I was away, but the first one I want to talk about is one that I read shortly before. It’s This Little Art (2017) by Kate Briggs, which I bought in Libreria – an independent bookshop off Brick Lane. I’d seen a few book bloggers writing about it, and I couldn’t resist.

The book is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, a beautiful and very simple edition – very sleek and chic and all things like that. It’s all about translation. Briggs is herself a translator, having translated some of Roland Barthes’ seminar notes from French to English. Don’t stop reading this review quite yet. While that may seem like the most niche thing known to man, this book is extremely accessible, even to people like me whose French is extremely rusty. Well, ‘rusty’ makes it sound like I once knew French, which is not true – or ‘vrai’. Ithankyou.

The book takes the reader on a discursive, surprisingly pacy adventure through the different facets of translation and how understanding translation can help you understand your relationship with authors, writing, books, and even one’s own self respect. the title is a quotation from Helen Lowe Porter, who apparently translated Thomas Mann works for much of his career, which became her career. She was using those three words to deprecatingly refer to translation, and Briggs looks quite a lot at how Lowe-Porter’s life and reputation were shaped by the debates relating to translation. Some of the most interesting sections, for those interested in literary feuding and scandal, were when Briggs talks about a famous demolition of Lowe-Porter’s work that appeared in some literary journal or other. But Briggs puts this into a fine tapestry of other debates about translators, including discussions about her own suitability to take on the work that she has done.

‘Tapestry’ is perhaps a good word to describe this book. It has the unconventional format of many areas of white on the page. While some pages are full of paragraphs, others have only a few lines at the top; each thought is given only the space it needs, and there’s a generosity with margins and white space that is very unusual in modern publishing. This feels perhaps odd at first, but soon becomes the only way that one could write or read a book like this. It is almost dream-like, how one thought leads to another, whether about Briggs’ own life or about the philosophy of translation or about particular nuances of individual words in different languages. I can only imagine that Briggs did have to do the usual editing that any writer has to do, but it is hard to believe that this book ever existed in any other form than that which it currently does. Each word leads so perfectly to the next, each moment follows beautifully and logically from the one that came before, that it feels as though it has emerged whole and wonderful from her pen.

As such, it is also difficult to compartmentalise. To pull any individual thought out from this book feels like pulling a thread from that tapestry – it only works at its finest when seen in the whole. And please don’t think that this is an unduly academic or self-indulgent book. The back cover talks about it having the momentum of a novel, and I was very sceptical – but that is exactly what it has. There is wisdom without sacrificing humanity; philosophy without losing humour or groundedness. I have a feeling that Briggs could write something brilliant on any topic, but choosing one about which she is so evidently passionate means that we have a true gem unfurled before us. I’ll leave you with a quote – the entirety of p.146, in fact – but I do encourage anybody to get a copy. (And, in passing, I will apologise for any odd typos in this review – I have been largely dictating it, as my RSI is playing up, this time in both hands. Off to a physio to see if she can sort me out!)

We need translations. We do, of course we do. The world needs them. And translation is work undertaken in response – direct or indirect response – to that demand. But the nature of the work involved, the time that writing a translation takes, together with its lack of material support, its little pay and uneven appreciation, will inevitably narrow the pool of people actually capable of answering it. Translation is necessary, vital work. It is also deeply pleasurable and instructive and intensely time-consuming work. Approaching a kind of leisure activity, then, but one with its own precarious economy;its per-word fees (as if translating one word, one sequence of words, one book made of words, were ever equivalent to translating another); its occasional prizes. It is not my aim to celebrate these conditions, exactly; it’s rather to recognise them in order for there to be a chance of varying them. As well to point out – no doubt too fast – that even these conditions (these apparently ideal conditions? The lady translator translating what she loves, working from home, grateful for but not entirely reliant on what Helen Lowe-Porter calls the ‘dribble of money’, or otherwise secure enough to risk trying to make the various dribbles of money work) are complicated.

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

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I’d seen a few friends (and strangers) on Twitter and Facebook talk about Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (2017) by Reni Eddo-Lodge, and was very keen to read it myself. When it came out in paperback, I snapped up a copy and read it quickly – and it’s extremely good. I heartily recommend it – particularly to any white people who don’t think that white privilege is a thing. The main problem with this book, of course, is that the people who most need to read it almost certainly won’t. (Not that I didn’t need to read it – but I didn’t need convincing on most of what she wrote.)

The title comes from a blog post Eddo-Lodge wrote a few years ago – about why she was so sick of defensive white people refusing to listen to conversations about race, and how she was giving up on trying to help them understand. It’s an ironic title, of course, because this book is exactly her talking to white people about race – thank goodness. I had thought it might be more memoir-based, and there are certainly elements of her story, but what kicks us off is a chapter (‘Histories’) which is entirely objective. It’s about the history of racial oppression and the civil rights movement – in the UK. Even here, we hear a lot, lot more about the civil rights movement in the US, or South Africa, than we do about our own country. There is a common belief that class is the British inequality issue, and that race is broadly fine. Well, as Eddo-Lodge demonstrates thoroughly and yet concisely, this is not, and has never been, the case. She condenses enormous amounts of research very well, making this history section very accessible.

The rest of the book looks more at the lived experience of being a black person in the UK – and specifically a black woman – and explains how racism works in action. It is not, she writes, simply abuse shouted in the street or people consciously refusing to hire a black person (though it does include this); it is embedded in the systems that make up many facets of our society. White privilege (as she explains so patiently and well) is not saying that all white people are rich or have all opportunities dropped at their feet – it is an absence of the barriers and assumptions that people of other ethnicities face. As  a white man, for instance, I have never had to worry if my race or gender will be held against me when I apply for a job, drive my car, go into a shop, or simply walk down the street. I have never had to feel that I am the de facto spokesperson for my race, or that I will be judged by what some other white man has said or done. I even have the privilege that I can decide when I want to engage in conversations and thoughts about racial equality. All of this is to say – it’s extremely easy to ignore or be ignorant of my white privilege, and it is only by engaging properly with books like Eddo-Lodge’s that I can fully recognise what it means. As a white person, my role here is to listen to other experiences and to listen to an explanation of the invisible frameworks of my life and my society – only visible if you are excluded from them.

Eddo-Lodge is an excellent writer and (praise be for popular non-fiction!) includes proper referencing – why is this so often absent? It leads one off in all sorts of other directions to explore. She also allows people with opposing views to have their say, even the bizarre and offensive Nick Griffin. I do wonder whether people like him need more air time, but she notes that the UK’s defamation laws could land her in hot water if she doesn’t give him a chance to air his thoughts.

Later chapters look specifically at feminism and class. The former I found particularly interesting – around the ways in which feminist movements have often been predominantly about white women, and how some white women have been reluctant to acknowledge that, though marginalised in one part of their identity (gender), they have privilege in another (race). She did lose points in my eyes by using the term “anti-choice” – nobody is ever anti-choice, or anti-life for that matter – and I would have liked a bit more interrogation around some more rational objections, like the abundance of theory-based rhetoric in what should be an accessible movement. But these are relatively small objections.

The afterword – a bonus of the paperback edition – looks at how people have responded to the book. Spoilers: people at book events tended to have a lot of opinions without having read the book.

I do realise the irony of saying how important it is that white people listen and try to understand while not quoting directly from the book at all. Sorry, Reni, I’m writing the review without a copy in front of me. But I heartily recommend this – it’s very readable, very informative, and has the potential to effect real change. If you’re scoffing at this review, I particularly encourage you to get hold of a copy. And if you’ve been nodding your head throughout, then you probably won’t have your life and perspective changed – but it’s definitely worth a read nonetheless.

25 Books in 25 Days: #20 Dear Farenheit 451

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I mentioned Dear Farenheit 451 (2017) by Annie Spence in one of my Weekend Miscellanies a while ago, and a bit later a review copy came through the post – whether or not the two things are related, I’m unsure, but thank you to the publishers! Books about books are always, always welcome, and this made a nice book to read on a little solo day out to Stow on the Wold and Charleston House (a National Trust property). Sadly, two secondhand bookshops have closed in Stow since I was last there – but another has opened.

Dear Farenheit 451 takes the form of Spence writing little letters to many books. Some of them are books she’s loved at different times of her life – from Judy Blume to The Time Traveler’s Wife – while others are books that she’s shelved or discarded in her job as a librarian. The last section of the book is all about book recommendations – either ‘if you like this then try this’, or books that pair well together, or other things of that ilk.

I really enjoyed reading it. Her bookish enthusiasm is evident, and I loved that she wrote about an unusual and personal selection of books. True, I had heard of relatively few of them and read a tiny amount, but I’d much rather this than another list of Best Books Ever with all the expected candidates.

It seems churlish to wish it were a slightly different book than it is – but I have to admit that I would have preferred it if it were less sweary and (I can think of no other word for it) vulgar. ‘As sh*t’ – without the asterisk – is used as an amplifier all the time, for instance, and I suppose the whole tone shook me out of my 1920s mindset.

But that’s a small price to pay for this level of bookish fun. It’s not a set of thorough literary analyses, or even unthorough ones, but it is a fun, lively look at the different books that surround Spence for one reason or another.

The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler

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Mum and Dad got me The Book of Forgotten Authors (2017) by Christopher Fowler, and I went to hear him speak about it earlier in the year – the only reason I didn’t buy a copy there was because it felt inevitable that somebody would get it for me. What could be more up my street than a collection about forgotten authors? (Based on a long-running column in The Independent, no less, which I did read occasionally.)

What makes an author forgotten? The title of Christopher Fowler’s book is inevitably a challenge to the reader – have you forgotten these authors? have you? – but it is slightly awkward to start off with Margery Allingham. Ask somebody to name five Golden Age detective novelist and, if they could get to five, I’d be very surprised if Allingham didn’t appear. Apparently Fowler’s method included checking with a circle of literary friends, and considering an author for inclusion if less than half had heard of them. It’s as good a method as any, but somehow authors like Barbara Pym, Edmund Crispin, and Georgette Heyer got through the net – I’d argue that if your books are all or mostly in print, you don’t make the grade for ‘forgotten’.

But I’ve started with the exceptions – I should say that I hadn’t heard of about half of these 99 authors, and that’s a much more impressive average than most of the ‘authors you don’t know’ lists. And I’ve read books by 15 of them – so plenty more to explore.

Somewhat coincidentally (unless Fowler requested it from the Bodleian… which I doubt) several of the authors mentioned were focuses of my DPhil thesis. E.M. Delafield, John Collier, and… Frank Baker! Yes, Baker gets a chapter, and I will love anybody who writes

Of his fifteen novels, Baker’s masterpiece is the enchanting and timeless Miss Hargreaves, which really deserves classic status.

Fingers crossed this mention brings Miss Hargreaves new fans, along with Barbara Comyns who also gets a chapter (oddly as Barbara Comyns Carr – her real name, though E.M. Delafield appears under her penname rather than Elizabeth De La Pasture).

Fowler manages to pack a lot of enticing detail into very short chapters; the punch and tautness that made them columns serves them equally well in this compendium form. And having them in alphabetical order is a nice touch – had they been thematic, it might have all got a bit samey, but this makes for a nice assortment of tantalising suggestions – Pamela Branch, Dino Buzzati, Margaret Millar, and Cynthia Seton being the ones I wrote down to explore. (Anybody read them?) And, unlike Martin Edwards’ equally tantalising The Golden Age of Detective Fiction, it’s easy to find at least some works by most of these authors.

In between the chapters about specific authors are enjoyable, slightly longer essays on particular themes – rivals to Poirot, deservedly forgotten authors, authors who were rediscovered (ironically, I’d heard of none of these). His love of literature and of unearthing bygone gems is genuine and delightful.

The problem with knowing quite a lot about some of these authors is that I could see quite a few errors. Some are typographical (Julian Maclaren-Ross becomes Juliane Maclaren-Ross) but others show a dubiously casual research. He writes about E.M. Delafield’s five Provincial Lady novels (presumably being fooled by the American republishing of Straw Without Bricks as The Provincial Lady in Russia, which it emphatically isn’t); he says the film adaptation of Miss Hargreaves was cancelled because WW2 started, which would be tricky given that the novel wasn’t published until 1940. These small things did make me wonder how much Fowler had got wrong about the authors I didn’t know anything about…

But, let’s face it, I’m not going to remember all the details, so it doesn’t necessarily matter if they aren’t all completely accurate – what it has done is given me a list of authors to look out for, and a smile on my face that some of my much-loved authors have had another moment in the sun. If you love new recommendations, and reminders of more obscure favourites, then use your Christmas book vouchers to settle down with this one in the post-Christmas indulgent phase.

My Life With Bob by Pamela Paul

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The first book I grabbed from my Christmas haul was, as I predicted in a previous post, My Life With Bob by Pamela Paul (2017), which my parents got me and which was one of the really difficult-to-resist books under Project 24. It was every bit as good as I’d hoped, though not quite in the same way, and I wanted to make sure I reviewed it before New Year in case it ends up on my Best Books of 2017 list. I haven’t decided the list yet…

The ‘Bob’ of Paul’s title is a book of books – that is, the list of books Paul reads, which she starts as an earnest teenager in high school. It has been filled in over 28 years, taking her up to her current life – as the editor of the New York Times Book Review, living with her husband and children in New York. And it is the thread which is drawn through this book – which is somewhere between an autobiography and a book about reading. (It’s also a lovely book – not just this fun cover, but it has deckled edges. Mmmmmm.)

I have kept a list of the books I’ve read since 2002, when I was 16. I write it in the back of each diary, and then (once the year is over) I also write them alphabetically by author in a set of notebooks designed for the purpose. Suffice to say, I’m not baffled by Paul’s desire to keep a list of her books, but apparently some people have been:

Though I’d never shown him to anyone, I’d told a few people about Bob in the past. This turned out to be a dicey proposition. Not everyone loved my Book of Books. “Tallying up books like the ticking off of accomplishments,” one boyfriend said accusingly, as if I’d admitted to quantifying parental love or indexing my inner beauty. “Hurry up, go note it in Bob,” he’d gibe every time I close a book, as if the act of recording invalidated the entire experience. Were the books truly being read for their own sake or in pursuit of some goal that sullied the entire enterprise?

“What does this tell you if you don’t remember anything about the books themselves?” another beau asked, suggesting an expanded Bob with a page for my impressions of each book in its stead. This Bigger Bob lasted for two books, the relationship not much longer. “You’re not seriously going to allow books on tape, are you?” wondered a third, scornfully. Competition, jealousy, misunderstandings, risk. Perhaps it wasn’t worth the bother.

How many of you keep lists of the books you read? I rather suspect it’s nearly all of you – because the sort of person who writes or reads a book blog isn’t likely to let that sort of information just disappear. Honestly, I’m more shocked that people recklessly finish a book and don’t make a note of it anywhere. Crazy.

I’ve read quite a lot of books about reading – it’s probably my favourite genre – but I’ve read one or two recently that only tread the surface; that either are a bit facile about how books can affect a person, or that act as though reading were their discovery entirely. Paul writes perfectly about reading. She understands that books are not an adjunct to a life, or solely an entertainment activity. The identity of ‘reader’ is all-consuming; books surround and define us, accompany and sate us, reward and disappoint us. The reading life lives parallel with our ‘real’ life, but the two overlap and inform one another – indeed, they become inseparable. And from an early age, picking books from her local library, Paul sees this.

We see Paul as a young reader, trying the classics for the first time; we see her as the child of divorce, taking advantage of her father’s willingness to buy her books (as her mother was one of those just-borrow-from-the-library types). We see her learning to understand her own literary taste – I will say that I never quite understood what Paul’s taste is, other than encompassing dark, difficult books. Perhaps she is too eclectic to have a single taste. Along the way, Bob is there to record what she reads – which, in turn, reflects her moods and activities.

Where Paul writes about reading she is, as you may have gathered, extremely relatable. In a world before Harry Potter, there was no widespread fad for pre-teen reading, and she was in the all-American world where outdoor sports and camping were considered normal fare, not reading. I loved discovering everything about her love affairs with books, even if we don’t learn all that many of the books she has delighted in over the years – each chapter is named after one, which features, and there is certainly a liberal sprinkling of titles, but it’s a small percentage of the total. What I’m saying is that I wanted a list of all of them, OK? At least as a sort of internet appendix, please-and-thank-you.

All of this was fun and fascinating, as I’d expected. What I expected less was Paul’s active life. Unlike some readers (ahem, me) who haven’t lived particularly adventurous lives, Paul read a book which persuaded her to walk an exciting path – in her case, buying a one-way ticket to Thailand. She lived in Thailand, she travelled around China. She went to France a dozen or so times. Bob went with her, and the chapters about these experiences merge the life of the reader with the life of the adventurer – and intriguing and well-told mix. It is unlike any travel account I’ve ever read, because the locus remains always literature.

And that’s before we get to the chapters about her less-than-a-year-long marriage.

Paul writes extremely well about any experience she turns to, whether that be her relationship with her father, working in a bookshop, travelling across Asia, or realising she wanted a divorce. The idea of tying it together with Bob works brilliantly, and reminded me a lot of another book I loved: Sheila Kaye-Smith’s All the Books of My Life. What a wonderful book that was (note to self: re-read). The only parts I found hard to swallow concerned Paul’s disdain for roles in marketing – where she worked on her way to being an editor – but, sadly, I have found quite a few editors who love down on marketers.

Any author who loves reading as much as I do is going to beguile and enchant me, particularly if they can write about it as brilliantly as Paul does. Throwing in her intense and interesting life just enhances this all further. It’s a great read, and I recommend it to anybody who loves books about books. And, let’s face it, that’s all of us, isn’t it?

A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin

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This evening I went to Blackwells to hear Claire Tomalin talk about her latest book, and it reminded me that I have yet to write about it. So… well, I suspect you’ve worked the rest out for yourself. Here we are, and here we go.

Since I moved house, I’ve had to start driving to work. Driving for about 40 minutes and walking for half an hour, actually, which has given me an awful lot more time for audiobooks and the like. I already listen to a lot of podcasts, but this has spurred me on to trying audiobooks more actively – starting, because why not, with Claire Tomalin’s A Life of My Own (2017).

I say ‘why not’ – I can actually give a pretty good reason why. I’d signed up for a trial with audiobooks.com because I wanted to hear The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero. And it turns out that the recording was only available in North America. Doh! (I have subsequently been given and have read the book – watch this space.) So I had a credit to use… and my first thought was: who would I want reading to me in the car? The answer, naturally, was Penelope Wilton. And when A Life of My Own came up in the search results, I remembered that I’d been keen to read it. I might talk more about the crooked path of audiobook selection another day…

I’ve only read two of Tomalin’s many biographies – on Jane Austen and Katherine Mansfield – and, other than knowing about some of her titles (and the fact that she’s gone for enormous, much-biographied names like Hardy and Dickens), didn’t really know anything else about her. Oh, except that she is married to Michael Frayn, and is the grandmother (or, as it turned out, step-grandmother) of twins who used to run a YouTube channel, called Jack and Finn. It was quite fun going into an autobiography ‘blind’, as it were.

The problem with audiobooks, of course, is that I don’t have any quotations to share, and I can’t flick back through to see what I wanted to write about. But I do recall that she starts by talking about her parents – which I almost invariably wish any biographer would skip, since I’m not that interested. With an autobiographer, it is a least coloured with a real human connection – whatever the opposite of ‘dispassionate’ is (because ‘passionate’ doesn’t feel quite right – and it’s with genuine emotion that Tomalin describes her mother’s musical genius, her parents’ hasty courtship, and the bizarre honeymoon she learned about properly from her father’s latterday memoir, during which it became more or less clear that the marriage was a mistake.

Tomalin has a great gift, in this autobiography, for describing people and her relationship with them with complete honesty which is subjective (for how it could not be) yet never feels unfair. She writes about how her father disliked her, and it seems like the scrupulously just conclusions of somebody who was weighed the evidence properly. She has an emotional response to this, but the description is arrived at honestly. The same is seen in her marriage to Nick Tomalin – a man who the reader (or listener) cannot help intensely disliking, given his violence and selfishness, and his many affairs, but Tomalin has no bitterness – she tells us what happened and how it affected her, but clearly still loved him in some way, and excellently portrays the complex emotions and feelings she has towards his memory.

I wanted to read A Life of My Own because I thought it would be fascinating to learn about the craft of writing biographies. My main criticism of the book is what a small part this plays – almost all her books are tidied away discretely and discreetly into a single chapter, and I would have loved to hear more. As some form of compromise offering, there is plenty to fascinate in descriptions of her rise as a literary editor at the New Statesman and the Sunday Times (and the sexism she faced – not least in her supremely unqualified husband having the job before she did).

But Tomalin’s own life is so full and so expertly shown to us that it is certainly an acceptable substitute. As well as describing her upbringing, schooling, and marriage, she writes brilliantly about parenthood – the highs and the very low lows. I don’t know how she managed to write about her daughter’s suicide attempts, which ended with a successful one, but she did so extraordinarily movingly – and writes astonishingly about loving somebody with inescapable depression. Unsurprisingly, this period of Tomalin’s life was not discussed at the event I attended, but it is done with bravery and, yes, honesty in A Life of My Own.

It is such moments that show, I think, Tomalin’s skill as a biographer coming through. She knows that she cannot shirk periods like this if she is to portray her whole life – and something of the biographer’s objectivity weaves its way constantly through the subjectivity. It is deftly handled throughout.

Perhaps almost any life is fascinating, if written about well, and Tomalin’s indisputably is. And to her, I suppose, her success as a biographer is of less interest than her family, so it makes sense that she writes so much better and so much more about that. Go into the book with the right expectations, and I predict you’ll find it brilliant. And if Penelope Wilton is reading it to you, so much the better.

 

Jacob’s Room is Full of Books by Susan Hill

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Jacob's Room is full of booksI was an enormous fan of Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill – a book all about her year of reading only books from her shelves that morphed into a series of short essays about anything and everything to do with reading. It was bookish, opinionated, and (I thought) an inevitable delight to anybody who loved reading. About that I was wrong – it divided people – but I have re-read and re-loved it, and have been waiting eagerly for the sort-of sequel for as long as I’ve known it might be a thing. Jacob’s Room is Full of Books (2017) was never in doubt as one of my Project 24 books.

I’ve been following the development of the book with interest. Ages ago, I saw Virginia Woolf is in the Kitchen listed on Amazon, and asked Susan about it on Twitter – yes, she confirmed, it was sort of a sequel to Howards End is on the Landing, but only about women writers. At one point it became Jacob’s Room is Too Full of Books, with a cover design on Amazon. Who knows when that changed, and when the title was changed, but what we’ve got instead is ‘a year of reading’ – she follows the calendar from January to December, talking about what she’s reading and what she’s thinking about, interspersed with notes on nature and life. The title doesn’t make sense (yes, Jacob’s Room is a novel by Woolf, but where Howards End is on the Landing and, indeed, Virginia Woolf is in the Kitchen can describe the place of books in the house – Jacob’s Room is Full of Books doesn’t mean anything, and will confuse anybody who doesn’t know the Woolf novel) – so, yes, it doesn’t make sense. But I don’t care. I still loved this book and raced through it in a handful of days – even while trying to savour it.

Though the calendar year structures the book, Hill darts all over the place. Sometimes for a moment merely – she throws in the thought ‘does Donald Trump ever read books?’ in a line or two – sometimes at greater length. She talks about the authors she loves, from Dickens to Ford Madox Ford to Ladybird Books. She talks about the literary scene – judging book prizes, getting into hot water in columns. She writes about the writer’s life. She writes quite a lot about things that aren’t connected with books, particularly flora and fauna. It’s wonderfully conversational and far-ranging – not as siloed as Howards End is on the Landing, but equally delightful to dip in and out of. Every page will have something to engage with. I couldn’t help picking it up and indulging when I should have been reading something for book group or the podcast. I loved it.

There are definite flaws. Hill repeats herself – the same points come up almost word-for-word at different times about (say) whether or not you can ‘catch’ a writing style – and there are silly errors (88 Charing Cross Road should have been caught – and somebody at the publishers will feel red-faced about putting an apostrophe in Howard’s [sic!] End is on the Landing on the dustjacket). Some of the paragraphs end in with that sort of trite beat that I find so frustrating in fact or fiction. This kind. To prove an argument. Perhaps.

And, yes, Hill is extremely opinionated – which is anybody’s prerogative, of course, though it is refreshing when she admits that she could be wrong about something. I can be very opinionated about books myself, but the only times it annoyed me a little were when Hill seemed to think her opinions were fact – or when she claimed that ‘nobody’ read such-and-such author. On almost every occasion, I had read that author. And this… well, gosh.

The Olivia Manning trilogies have grown in stature since they were first published – as some books do. They have already stood the test of time and I am sure they will go on doing so, while novels by many of her female contemporaries have all sunk without trace. Ivy Compton-Burnett, anyone? Kay Dick?

What a bizarre thing to say about Ivy Compton-Burnett! Not only is she (to my mind) one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, she is also in print with NYRB Classics. No mean feat, so many decades after she wrote – and hardly sinking without trace.

But this is, really, one of the things I find so beguiling and enjoyable about Jacob’s Room is Full of Books. Hill may be a little more strident than I can bring myself to be, but it’s still wonderful to hear from somebody who cares so passionately about books, who has read avidly for so long, and (incidentally – but truly incidentally) has met so many of the people she’s talking about. Some people complained that Howards End is on the Landing felt name-droppy. It didn’t to me, and this doesn’t, but perhaps others would find it so? Anyway – Hill and I do not share a taste at all, though there are overlaps. We both love Dickens and Woolf, for example. Our experiences with To The Lighthouse are so similar that I wrote ‘yes! yes! yes!’ in the margin. But there are definite divergences. She writes so enticingly about The Masters by C.P. Snow that I almost wanted to go and hunt it out – despite having read it earlier in the year and finding it one of the most boring, pointless books I’ve read in years. She – as mentioned – does not properly appreciate the genius of Ivy Compton-Burnett.

But disagreement makes bookish discussion all the more engaging. Obviously it’s not a duologue – though I suppose I could reply on Twitter or something – but it feels like a deep, thorough natter about books. I could have done with more about reading, more specifics about books, and perhaps a bit less about birds and whatnot (though plenty will welcome those seasonal variations) – but I loved what I got. Susan Hill has a strong personality, or at least a strong persona, and this book couldn’t be written by anybody else – but I hope she writes at least one more in this series. For now, I’m thrilled to be able to put this one next to Howards End is on the Landing on my books-about-books shelf.

 

Insomniac City by Bill Hayes

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Insomniac CityProject 24 is going so well, guys. Not just that I am (cough, very broadly speaking, cough) on track – 15 books so far – but that I’m reading most of the books I’m buying. That’s pretty good going, since there are still a fair few that I haven’t read from Project 24 in 2010.

I already have a fair few Oliver Sacks books unread on my shelves, but I couldn’t resist going out and buying Insomniac City (2017) by Bill Hayes – mentioned in a recent Weekend Miscellany here, and which Jenny informed me existed. I even paid full price for a new hardback for myself, which basically never happens cos they cost dollar-dollar. But think of the money I’ve been saving through Project 24! Think of it and, if you see them, mention it to my bank manager.

Bill Hayes was Sacks’ partner in the last years of Sacks’ life, and has written books on various topics including blood, insomnia, and Gray’s Anatomy. So it seems like Sacks and Hayes shared an interest in quirky books about medicine… they also shared a love of New York, though Hayes’ was quite different from Sacks’. While Sacks lived in a curious parallel timezone – never using computers or technology – Hayes embraced the noisy, hectic modern world in all its forms. Even when they had been a couple for many years, they maintained separate lives to an extent – separate apartments, separate forms of engagement with the modern world. But there was nobody closer to give a detailed account of this period of Sacks’ life – as ‘O’ – and it is beautifully poignant, mixing humour and memory (including many of Hayes’ diary entries from the time).

Undated Note – June 2011

The difference between us in two words:

“Me, too,” I say.

“I, too,” O corrects.

Hayes takes us through their meeting, their relationship, and Sacks’ cancer. It is an extraordinary depiction of moments scattered through their experiences together, forming a whole from the glimpses.

If Insomniac City is a love letter to Sacks, and it unquestionably is in many ways, it is also a love letter to New York. That’s the sort of phrase that would normally put me right off a book, but here it works. Perhaps because it is not the sort of love letter that deals in overblown similes and references that exclude the non-traveller; Hayes gives us a collage of photos, diary entries, and reflections about his experiences of the city.

The other day, I was on a local 6 going uptown and seated next to a young woman with a baby in a stroller. At each stop, a man (always a man) would enter the car and end up standing right above us. I had my iPod on and was just watching. Inevitably, each man would make goofy faces and smile at the baby, and the baby would smile and make faces back. At each stop, the standing man would be replaced by a new one, straight out of central casting. First, an older Latin guy. Then he gets off and a young black man appears. Then a white man in a suit. Then a construction worker with a hard hat. Tough guys. New York guys. All devoted to one important task: making a baby smile.

In fact, a collage is a useful way to think about this book. It is a patchwork of thoughts and observations that hold together unexpectedly, even while we are aware of all the bustling life that Hayes doesn’t document. I would rush towards anything connected with Sacks, and this is a wonderful addition to my Sacks shelf – not at all the sort of book he would have written, nor the way he would have written it, but a beautiful complement to the writer and the human that ‘O’ was.

The Runaway by Claire Wong

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The RunawayI don’t think I’ve yet got around to mentioning the second book I bought for Project 24 (still only bought 2 books! I’m 2 in hand!) – it’s The Runaway by Claire Wong, which I bought because Claire is a friend of mine from church. I think she’s the first friend I’ve had whose had a novel published – as opposed to friends I’ve made after reading their novels – and it’s super exciting. And, thankfully, it’s also really good!

It does feel weird writing a review of a book by a friend, but I’ll try to pretend I don’t know Claire while I write this… I’m even going to follow my usual reviewing style of using the author’s surname when referring to them. And that will feel so odd. Sorry, Claire – you’re Wong from now on!

The runaway of The Runaway is 17-year-old Rhiannon, who leaves her aunt (and guardian) Diana after the last in a long line of fights. She doesn’t go terribly far – into the thick Dyrys Wood, next to the small Welsh village she grew up in – but it is enough to make her unfindable by the search parties that come looking. She finds a shelter, learns some rudimentary skills, and manages to set up her own solitary life there. Solitary except for a rather fantastic hawk, called Lleu, that is.

It tries to move again, and achieves only a pathetic little shuffle. If its wing is broken, it won’t be able to hunt. It will probably starve. Hawks take care of their young, but that’s as far as the altruism goes.

“No one’s coming to help you,” I say, and the words come out sounding sadder and more sympathetic than I had expected. I find that I don’t like looking at it, so I decide to go and search for those tin cans by the path instead.

Meanwhile, back in the village there are appeals to find her – but life also goes on. The friendships and tensions of village life continue – there is a host of recognisable and well-realised characters, from pent-up Callum to shy Nia to Tom, trying to balance being everybody’s friend while also being the local policeman. My favourite – surely everyone’s favourite? – is Maebh, a sort of surrogate grandmother to the whole village, who retains all the stories that have happened there. She is something of an oracle, and weaves memory and fiction in the tales she tells – using the storytelling form as a way of reminding the village of its past, and trying to set the right path for its future.

I love novels which incorporate storytelling (Angela Young’s Speaking of Love is another great example), and Wong handles it deftly; the atmosphere of fairy tale and parable seeps throughout the whole novel, while also remaining (paradoxically) firmly on solid ground. As with fairy tale, it matters less why Rhiannon has run away, and more about what happens next. And part of what happens next is the arrival of Adam and Grace – whose father was from the village – looking to better understand their past. Needless to say, it ties pertinently in with the current situation.

One of the reasons I really liked The Runaway is because of what it says about small communities. Too often these are treated as places to escape – claustrophobic, nosey, and repressive to creativity. It’s ironic that a novel where somebody literally escapes this community doesn’t suggestion that small-town life is an evil. Nor is it a rose-tinted view either. Instead, Wong shows us that this sort of village can be supportive even while it is constraining – both a blessing and a curse. More to the point, it feels like a real place – with real limitations and real advantages. (Wong also manages to write a 17 year old who isn’t maddeningly annoying and isn’t unrealistically good – very impressive!)

This is a really enjoyable, thoughtful, and touching novel that also has spark and humour – it feels like a modern fairy tale in the best possible way.