Brit Lit Blogs

Team Ulysses - Camp Five

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (dovegreyreader scribbles) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:15:00 +0000

A really tricky reading month here but I'm not going to mess with the mountain or make excuses Team Ulysses because I think that's been more about me than the book. It's all been down to other books which I haven't wanted to set aside and trips away which play havoc with life in general and my reading in particular. I choose traveling reading which is most definitely not Ulysses, so I knew I was going to be very last minute, if I made it at all.
But I did and even managed some background reading from Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation - A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties & Thirties by Noel Riley Fitch.
The more I read the more I feel I want to know (it always happens, I can't stop myself) about this book's background and its genesis in the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop. James Joyce declared by Leon Edel in the puffs on the book to be

'the most incredible literary leech of all time.'

But with relevance to the two sections I have read this time, Sirens and Cyclops just knowing those extra details about the friendship between Sylvia Beach and Joyce has added an extra level of enjoyment to this month's reading.
James Joyce described in a play by Tom Stoppard as

'an essentially private man who wishes his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized'

The whole process of publication seems to have been akin to the twelve labours of Hercules for the poor long-suffering Sylvia Beach who admitted that Joyce's affairs were considerably more trouble to her than many an ordinary author. This all compounded by her willingness to allow Joyce the indefinite right to correct the proofs. Joyce made copious additions and the proofs became legendary for containing more handwriting than print.

' There were light moments of friendhsip and mutual excitement associated with the birth of Ulysses. Joyce would read aloud from Ulysses for her, often the Cyclops section. They would burst into peals of laughter at Joyce's rendering of the dog and joke about the growth of the novel. Joyce would tell her that Ulysses was no longer than many other novels, such as The Forsyte Saga, only instead of running into many volumes, his was packed into on hold-all.'

Sirens was a mystery read in a cloud of unknowing here, and but for footnotes I would have had little idea of the musical connotations that Joyce was aiming for. The deeper into Ulysses I wander the more aware I become of those parts which need to be read aloud and which I do in a sort of sotto voce mutter which would sound very odd if you overheard me. But I am also picking up the Odysseyian hints more frequently and given my scant knowledge of the sirens and their ability to lure the sailors onto the rocks, though I nearly ended up on the rocks again myself, I did see those analogies with the bar maids and the punters. I did emerge from that section, yet again, and to my ongoing complete and utter amazement, with some sense of what had happened, and of course laughing at Leopold's final Pprrpffrrppfff.
How long did it take James Joyce to work out how to spell flatulence I wonder?
With occasional mention of stars fading, that line from The Duchess of Malfi also kept flitting into my mind,

'Look you, the stars shine still'

Please don't think I have The Duchess of Malfi, at my fingertips because I don't, but that was quoted in a book I read last year, Molly Fox's Birthday by Irish author Deirdre Madden, and it's stuck in my mind.
However I was a bit pleased with myself and kept dashing to the footnotes thinking I'd been really clever to pick up a Joycean reference to something obscure, only to find that I seem to be on my own with that connection.
Heading on into Cyclops, feeling slightly one-eyed and mystified, how pleased I was to be able to say I've been there when the reading of the obituaries mentioned Barnfield Crescent in Exeter and I've probably been driven past 179 Clapham Road, Stockwell on many an occasion.
How odd that something like that draws you back into a book and much to laugh at alongside James Joyce and Sylvia Beach, especially the list of those Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity engraved on the seastone girdle 'which dangled at every movement of his portentous frame'...William Tell, Thomas Cook & Son and the Last of the Mohicans suddenly making an appearance and lest we forget, the Queen of Sheba, and Lady Godiva.
I'm also getting a sense of other people's unfavourable opinions about Leopold Bloom and also wondering when Stephen will really come to life, he seems like a minor and rather undeveloped character thus far.
I keep thinking back to Declan Kiberd's reference to his Dublin-born father's love of Ulysses, parts known by heart, parts glossed over and wondering which they were and for this month I'm trying yet another new schedule, the book is sitting on my desk and I will read a few pages each day.
Time for Joan's thermos of comfort soup now I think but don't miss Lisa's fantastic in-depth Team Ulysses thoughts over at ANZ Litlovers Litblog and please let's hear news of how you are all doing, the suspense is killing me....
Simon S is that you waving at us from the peak of Mount Garnet Vickers?
Ellinchador did you make a dent in it?
KevinfromCanada still with us?
Cheryl are you still have those trudging pages with moments of joy? I am!
Lisa have you sent the spouse away again?
Lauren, Curzon and Lesley Ann are you still there pitching the tents ahead of us and cooking up a feast?
Lesley have you got your breath back and stayed with us?
Erika, could you pass those chocolate biscuits around?
Novel Insights and Knitting Out Loud can you hear me...are you still there?
Caroline, have you given up your footnote tendency and has Declan Kiberd helped? Declan has been my best friend this month.
ss are you still doing the listening version and swimming gently rather than climbing strenuosly?
Sandpiper, did you ditch that bookmark?
Jean, any more unexpected crevasses to distract or are you bivouacked here at Camp Five already?
Do you all realise that by Camp Six we will have passed the halfway point?
How amazing is that?

Enlargement of the Imagination

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Eve's Alexandria) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 03:00:00 +0000

Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows - only hard with luminous edges - and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should have said "my universe": but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things.
In such a country, you will perceive at once that it is impossible that there should be anything of what you call a "solid" kind; but I dare say you will suppose that we could at least distinguish by sight the Triangles, Squares, and other figures, moving about as I have described them. On the contrary, we could see nothing of the kind, not at least so as to distinguish one figure from another. Nothing was visible, nor could be visible, to us, except Straight Lines.

It's an ingenious set-up: a first-person account of a two-dimensional world. Flatland (1884), by Edwin A Abbott (1838-1926), is a slim, fascinating little fable: part social satire, part musing on the limitations of human perception, and all inventiveness.

The book is couched as a description of the ways of Flatland, for the benefit of an audience in another world, glimpsed briefly and with the force of revelation by our narrator: Spaceland, where three dimensional shapes are the norm (i.e., our own world). The narrator is a Square, which - in a society where an individual's status rises with the number of their sides - makes him (self-consciously... it is a Victorian novel, after all) lower middle class. Herein lies one of the book's pleasant surprises: for the lead figure in an allegorical tale, whose role it is to channel the themes, our Square is an unusually complex and interesting character.

Much of the time, he presents a conservative, rather priggish image of himself - as when he explains, for example, the hierarchical structure of his society in terms of the essential qualities of its inhabitants. One's disposition depends upon, and can be readily predicted by, the acuteness of the angles one presents to the world: thus, for example, triangles are reckless and violent (all the more so if they are of the isosceles variety...), and are fit only to be soldiers or the lowest of labourers.

By extension, he is firmly convinced that the number-of-sides hierarchy is fundamentally a Good Thing, although he does condemn the hazardous, rather cruel ways that ambitious upper-class parents seek to improve their children's standing - by fracturing their young sides repeatedly to increase said sides' number. (As if hothousing them at some horrific boarding school wasn't bad enough...)

Nonetheless, he considers efforts to offset/undermine the hierarchy, by the introduction of colour into Flatland, to be "diabolical", since "the road would then lie open for a total destruction of all Aristocratic Legislature and for the subversion of our Privileged Classes". People whose sides are of irregular lengths, moreover, are a threat to the fabric of everything, because - the horror - one cannot easily judge who they are and where they fit into the hierarchy simply by examining their angles:

[I]t does not need much reflection to see that the whole of the social life in Flatland rests upon the fundamental fact that Nature wills all Figures to have their sides equal. [...] if no one could calculate the Regularity of a single figure in the company, all would be chaos and confusion, and the slightest panic would cause serious injuries, or - if there happened to be any Women or Soldiers present - perhaps considerable loss of life.

He considers irregularity to be a condition (analogous to physical or mental disability, or perhaps more broadly to simple non-conformity) that must be remedied by "the art of healing" with "compressions, extensions, trepannings, colligations, and other surgical or diaetetic operations"; or, if absolutely necessary (!), euthanasia.

The reference to women's violence in the passage above stems from the fact that women, in Flatland, are not shapes but straight lines, and thus the pointiest of all:

If our highly pointed Triangles of the Soldier class are formidable, it may be readily inferred that far more formidable are our Women. For, if a Soldier is a wedge, a Woman is a needle; being, so to speak, all point, at least at the two extremities. Add to this the power of making herself practically invisible at will, and you will perceive that a Female, in Flatland, is a creature by no means to be trifled with.

It is the familiar rhetoric of misogyny: women, by their very nature, are dangerous to men (not to mention devious); since it is their nature they cannot be trusted to do any better, and must be confined to special quarters and follow certain social rituals to minimise the harm they might cause to men. If there is a social hierarchy, women are always at the bottom of it. He is splendidly deadpan about the more extreme consequences of the arrangement:

On the whole we got on pretty smoothly in our domestic relations, except in the lower strata of the Military Classes. There the want of tact and discretion on the part of the husbands produces at times indescribable disasters. [...] The result is massacre; not, however, without its advantages, as it eliminates the more brutal and troublesome of the Isosceles; and by many of our Circles the destructiveness of the Thinner Sex is regarded as one among many providential arrangements for suppressing redundant population, and nipping Revolution in the bud.

(I especially like the combination of the dry, detached tone with near-hysterical words like "massacre" and "Revolution", here, and "the Thinner Sex" also made me chuckle; in places, Flatland is very funny indeed.)

But women are one topic on which our Square clearly entertains doubts about the wisdom and justice of the status quo; he anticipates, and agrees with, his audience's belief that the condition of women in Flatland is "truly deplorable". But what he deplores must surely have carried a ring of familiarity for the book's Victorian readers (as indeed it still does today):

About three hundred years ago, it was decreed by the Chief Circle that, since women are deficient in Reason but abundant in Emotion, they ought no longer to be treated as rational, nor receive any mental education. The consequence was that they were no longer taught to read, nor even to master Arithmetic enough to enable them to count the angles of their husband or children; and hence they sensibly declined during each generation in intellectual power. And this system of female non-education or quietism still prevails.

He goes on to note how many of the assumptions about differences between men and women are essentially in the eye of the beholder, and that ideas and actions which are considered irrational and silly in women become perfectly correct and admirable when they are done or felt by men ("'Love' then becomes 'the anticipation of benefits'; 'duty' becomes 'necessity' or 'fitness'; and other words are correspondingly transmuted.") He also notes how the language of chivalry - special regard for, and protection of, women - hides contempt:

Moreover, among Women, we use language implying the utmost deference for their Sex; and they fully believe that the Chief Circle Himself is not more devoutly adored by us than they are: but behind their backs they are both regarded and spoken of - by all but the very young - as being little better than 'mindless organisms'.

This particular passage ends with a restrained but heartfelt plea for the education of women that seems very clearly aimed as much at Spaceland as it is at Flatland.

Whether or not he always had such doubts about the inherent rightness of his world, as he narrates this account Square has undergone something like a religious conversion or a conceptual breakthrough. Towards the end of the book, the Square describes how he was, for a brief time, exposed to the world of three-dimensionality. He recounts his encounter with a Sphere, who urges him to "proclaim the Gospel of Three Dimensions to your blind benighted countrymen in Flatland" - something that lands him in prison, assumed to be insane, once he is back home.

But while Square is awestruck at the sight of solid shapes in Spaceland, he is inevitably led to wonder whether there are not further dimensions beyond the ordinary perception and comprehension of Spaceland, just as Spaceland is beyond his own; the Sphere, predictably, scoffs at the very notion:

I. And even as we, who are now in Space, look down on Flatland and see the insides of all things, so of a certainty there is yet above us some higher, purer region, whither thou dost surely purpose to lead me - O Thou Whom I shall always call, everywhere and in all Dimensions, my Priest, Philosopher, and Friend - some yet more spacious Space, some more dimensionable Dimensionality, from the vantage-ground of which we shall look down together upon the revealed insides of Solid things, and where thine own intestines, and those of thy kindred Spheres, will lie exposed to the view of the poor wandering exile from Flatland, to whom so much has already been vouchsafed.
Sphere. Pooh! Stuff! Enough of this trifling!

Abbott - a theologian, philosopher, and mathematician - was undoubtedly interested in the realms of imagination and thought that lie beyond our experience, and the ways in which such realms might call into question the things in our social order that we take for granted as 'natural' and 'correct'. For all the fun of the scenario, this is a book that punches above its weight; nineteenth-century postmodernism, anyone?

Still, the end result for our visionary Square is not a cheerful one; whether or not he is ultimately correct, being right in a cosmic sense isn't necessarily much help when faced with the daily realities of social expectations, which don't take kindly to either reformers or holy fools:

It is part of the martyrdom which I endure for the cause of Truth that there are seasons of mental weakness, when Cubes and Spheres flit away into the background of scarce-possible existences; when the Land of Three Dimensions seems almost as visionary as the Land of One or None; nay, when even this hard wall that bars me from my freedom, these very tablets on which I am writing, and all the substantial realities of Flatland itself, appear no better than the offspring of a diseased imagination, or the baseless fabric of a dream.

~~Nic

Auntie

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (dovegreyreader scribbles) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:15:00 +0000

So here I am and on time, even the iron exploding and taking out all our electricity the night before hadn't stood in my way.

'And who is expecting you?'
So I gave the producer's name with whom I had been in close contact all week getting these 400 words that I had to read out just right.
Frown...type into computer....another frown.
'Oh well she's based in Bristol.'
Might you have felt a bit sick then too?
Had I just jumped to conclusions? Was I really supposed to be in Bristol?
That would be just like me.
Fortunately all was well, right place, right time, right shoes and so I sat in the foyer and waited.
This helped no end. Nothing like a bit of Latin leering down at you to make you feel a bit daunted and out of your depth.

To the rescue O Level and I'd almost done a translational guess that my Latin teacher (who might still read this) would have been proud of by the time I was led through here

The programme, Off the Page presented by Dominic Arkwright requires lively studio debate so you can but oblige and after about a minute you completely forget the world will listen to all this and you're away, so heaven knows what I said but I think it is scheduled to broadcast on Thursday December 3rd at 1.30pm and I'll be leaving the country that morning:-)
One thing I will apologise for.
I read my intro piece out slowly as requested by several of you, enunciated wonderfully and expressively and didn't cough once. Except it was too slow and when the producer came back into the studio with retakes and everyone had a few words to repeat or the odd line, not me, I had to do the whole lot again and all I could think was 'they'll kill me for reading this so fast'.
Sorry.

The smoke

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (dovegreyreader scribbles) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:15:00 +0000

London, for anyone who gets there as infrequently as I do is always a bit of an adventure and this trip was no exception.
London in late Autumn

All those Plane leaves to scuff through and pewter skies that left me so convinced I was in for a drenching and would turn up at the BBC sporting the 'Just Up From the Sticks- Drowned Rat' look that it sent me scurrying off to buy a brolly...which was a cue for the day to remain dry.
But those do look like rain clouds don't they?
I love those views around every corner of the Telecom Tower...pshaw to that, it's the GPO tower,
and I was reminded, with a guilty smile, of the lanky Physics teacher who was the only one tall enough to play the double bass in the school orchestra without needing a stool to stand on, and who we fondly called the GPO Tower as a result.
I was on Blue Plaque alert as I walked from Baker Street, along Marylebone High Street, stopping here of course

and heading along here looking for the obvious one

Was it my imagination? Had the Barretts of Wimpole Street all been a figment of fiction?
I couldn't find it and didn't know then what I know now, it's No 50, but round the corner in Cavendish Square a name I did know.

Sir Frederick Treves, the surgeon who brought the Elephant Man to the London Hospital but anyone who has worked in an operating theatre knows a set of Treves forceps when they see them. Even me who decided theatres wasn't my bag after a surgeon threw a set of tonsils at me, heaven knows what it might have been the week after. All surgeons invent something and name it after themselves and as Sir Frederick performed the very first appendicectomy he probably had to invent quite a lot.
I always think it's good to see what London fashion is dictating for our Christmas decorations this year...

before I drag in the Christmas bough for the kitchen and get the box of ancient tatty old bits down from the loft as usual. This year perhaps perforated by the seven mice...the invasion seems to have stopped at seven.
Then around the next corner, Auntie was waiting for me...

"Watered-down Modernism" and watered-down watered-down Modernism

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (This Space) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:17:00 +0000

In 1997, Michael Hofmann expressed despair about the prospects for foreign literature in English translation. He does so in a review of a book heralded as in the tradition of Proust and Mann and 'one of the great novels of modern times'. However:

[Péter Nádas's A Book of Memories] is a bastard of romantic schlock and watered-down Modernism. To describe this as 'claiming and extending the legacy of Proust and Mann' is quite breathtaking. Yes, Nádas’s sentences are long and relatively abstract, but they have none of Proust's openended inquisitiveness or the purpose and design of Mann. They are without risk, without discovery, without grandeur. Far from resembling or – ha! – outdoing Proust and Mann, this is utterly epigonal writing, a third-generation Zweitaufguss for middlebrows.

Another writer whose three volumes are said to "constitute one of the great novels in modern European literature" and are also "already being compared with Proust" is reviewed by Margaret Drabble in this week's TLS (not online):

[Javier Marías's Your Face Tomorrow] has been compared to Proust ... But the trilogy also suggests an upmarket James Bond.

Shlomo Sand and Avi Shlaim in discussion

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:42:18 +0000

Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People, and Avi Shlaim, author of Israel and Palestine, were in conversation about their new books at a packed Frontline Club yesterday. Jacqueline Rose, author of The Last Resistance, was chairing. A video of the event is now up on the Verso blog.

50 Books You’ll Want to Read in 2010?

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:43:42 +0000

Bookmunch has listed 50 Books You’ll Want to Read in 2010. If you're anything like me, this is mostly a list of the books that you'll be avoiding next year, but will be getting blanket coverage in the papers... Nevertheless, it's a useful selection of what's coming down the publishing pipe.

The Wooden Doctor by Margiad Evans

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (dovegreyreader scribbles) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:15:00 +0000

Had I actually finished Charlotte Bronte's The Professor the last time I picked it up I might have been able to offer you some Bronte-esque comparisons to certain aspects of The Wooden Doctor by Margiad Evans, but I've been stuck on p96 of The Professor for the last four months, so I can't...well not with any certainty anyway and I'd better not speculate beyond saying I sense echoes of schools in Belgium.
But The Wooden Doctor has been another splendid read from Welsh women's press, Honno. First published in 1933 and like Eunice Fleet by Lily Tobias, this novel also met with enthusiastic reviews,

'an astonishing story...Heavens! What characters and what a plot!...This young woman can write.'

Sales never quite met up to that enthusiastic critical reception and yet another book went the way of lost classics.
And The Wooden Doctor is an astonishing story.
Narrated in the first person by Arabella, a tormented young girl who, emerging from a childhood blighted by a violent, alcoholic father and with veiled implications of much darker abuse, finds herself seriously ill at the age of twelve, an illness for which her mother ominously blames her father. Dr Flaherty pays a house call and Arabella develops an infatuation for him that develops into an obsession from which she can find no release. More serious illness follows and with it an exploration of the impact of Arabella's unrequited love for the doctor.
It's the first person narrative that does such a fine job here, locking the reader into Arabella's thought processes and her illness, described as a fox clawing away inside her and requiring all manner of delicate and painful investigations, hospital stays and long periods of convalescence, all requiring more of the hapless doctor's professional and often unchaperoned attention.
Margiad Evans' use of imagery is wide-ranging and frequently creates a wonderful correlation between landscape and Arabella's state of mind,

'Autumn, wild, angry, tumultuous, riotous autumn; killing. cleansing, ushering autumn, stripped of the gorgeous colours and the placid fruits, undimmed by hazy bonfire smoke, unseen but heard and felt in bitter storm alone at black midnight.'

and likewise the imagery of pain,

'In the night the pain came back. It was like a fox in a bag scratching and rending to get out. My spirits trailed in the dust. The claws penetrated my sleep; dragged me awake...I knew that I was ill.'

Pain not easy to describe and I'm reminded of my read of Mikhail Bulgakov's White Guard where the pain likewise leaped right off the page.
As the years move on, and Arabella's unchecked obsession gathers force, profound depression, that 'black dog', sets in and Arabella turns to the therapy of writing to help assuage her passion becoming compelled, driven and possessed as she commits everything to paper. Thus divested of the sharpness of her grief and having perhaps shed that obsession for Mr Wrong, might this be an opportune moment for Mr Right to come along?
If so, can Arabella's emotional state allow her to fall properly in love and can she sustain the demands of a grand affair?
Who will do a runner?
Arabella or Mr Right?
Or will there be wedding bells?
Well, I couldn't possibly comment but I hope you can see that Margiad Evans has set the scene perfectly for yet another Honno ending that ratchets up the pressure on the reader in those final pages...yet again I have to implore you...DON'T READ THE LAST LINE until you get there.
But who was Margiad Evans, a name that lends itself to a wonderful Welsh lilt if you pronounce it Marg-y-ad ?
Well I hate to disappoint but Margiad was actually Peggy Eileen Arabella Whistler, born in Uxbridge, Middlesex in 1909, and quite possibly I might be more Welsh than Peggy with my Griffiths ancestors.
A childhood visit to Wales left a lasting impression on Peggy and eventually the family moved to Ross-on-Wye. But the clue really lies with Peggy's second middle name, Arabella, because this book is autobiographical fiction and with that knowledge emerge all those complex issues of identity which Sue Asbee's excellent introduction explores in some detail. Much of that which is recounted happened to Peggy and it is her own interesting picture that graces the cover of the book, and how revealing that is when you look closely and see that clawing fox.
I'd have sold a cat (perhaps) to have been at this one day centenary conference on Margiad Evans earlier this year, because for me books like this gain huge ground with the application of some twenty-first century evidence-based theories of attachment and bonding. Much interesting evidence now also available that reveals the potential impact of an abusive childhood on adult behaviour and Margiad / Peggy / Arabella's mental health unwittingly offers clear signs of that impact.
There is plenty to speculate over concerning Arabella's obsession with the doctor, perhaps the first gentle man she had ever known in her life

'All that I craved, all the things existence had so far denied me, I found in him and him only...'

and then fascinating to look at the original illness, seemingly genuine and excruciatingly painful and trying to identify when and whether that develops into something fabricated.
Was this attention-seeking behaviour?
Was it all a cry for help from a desperately and deeply disturbed mind?
Had Arabella been so abused that she had taken few coping strategies into adulthood and was this reflected in her inability to enter into normal relationships and the resultant recourse into serious and life-limiting obsession ?
Using those themes there is a great deal to explore and debate in The Wooden Doctor and I've had a rare old time talking it over with myself in the absence of a one-day conference.
In reality Margiad Evans' demise was a sad one, diagnosed with epilepsy in 1950, a brain tumour was discovered in 1956 and she died in 1958 at the age of forty-nine but she did leave us the legacy of this amazing book.

The Beggar at the Door

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:15:58 +0000

I’m still standing at the door of life, knocking and knocking, though admittedly none too forcefully, and breathlessly listening to see whether someone will decide to open the bolt and let me in. A bolt like this is rather heavy, and people don’t like to come to the door if they have the feeling it’s just a beggar standing outside knocking. I’m good at nothing but listening and waiting, though in these capacities I’ve achieved perfection…

I’ve been reading Robert Walser’s The Tanners for more than a month. It’s a novel best consumed in small doses, full of wonderful writing and a touch of madness. In a way, it strikes me as the novel that I imagine to be most like Walser himself: contradictory, plotless, modest, and occasionally magical. It deals with dichotomies: freedom and dependence, city and country, money and the lack of money.

The Tanners is the story of the Tanner siblings: Klaus, Hedwig, Emil, Kaspar, and Simon, who is the main character. Simon is a man of little ambition, drifting through life, jobs, borrowed places of residences, friendships. lovers. His real talent is the gift of gab and its offshoot – the gift of self-delusion. As he alternates between berating himself for his total lack of ambition and cherishing his utter independence, Simon spends an inordinate amount of time convincing himself – at least momentarily – of the goodness of his intentions, whatever they may be at the moment. People either flee him in disgust or adopt him.

It’s curious that The Tanners, written in 1907, was never translated into English before this year, for the book would have been a Bible to the hippies and the Beats of my generation. “Misfortune is educational,” Simon declaims, echoing a sentiment many of us shared as we muddled through the awful 60s. Simon’s philosophy of life was one I could have called my own forty years ago: “I currently enjoy the respect of only a single person, namely myself. But this is the one whose respect is worth the world to me; I am free and can always, when necessity commands, sell my freedom for a certain length of time so as to be free again after.” What Simon rarely sees is the effect his dependence has on others; and, of course, no one can ever become dependent on Simon.

As I noted earlier, this publication of The Tanners contains the first English translation of W.G. Sebald’s essay Le Promeneur Solitaire, one of his most revealing pieces of writing on literature.

The Man Who Never Was

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (dovegreyreader scribbles) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:15:00 +0000

So I had Operation Heartbreak lined up to read and had heard Duff Cooper's son, John Julius Norwich, speaking at Dartington last year about his father, but I knew little about Duff Cooper himself, so time to head to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and back up the reading with some details.
A gifted orator and debater, Duff Cooper sustained a steady rise through the parliamentary ranks having reached the ranks of First Lord of the Admiralty in Chamberlain's pre-war cabinet, though he was seen by many as something of an 'indiscreet and belligerent firebrand'.
It was Chamberlain's Peace with Honour acceptance of the Munich agreement, at the price of Czechoslovak disintegration, which brought matters to a head.
In Duff Cooper's eyes legitimate reasons for war had been lost and, having seen and been considerably alarmed by Hitler's Nuremberg rallies in the early 1930s, Cooper had been warning of the inevitability of war for some time. Sensing that war remained inevitable but would now be one declared with dishonour, Duff Cooper tendered his resignation in 1938, but returned to the Ministry of Information under Churchill's leadership in 1941.
More visits to my primary source and his veteran's point of view and the Tinker always says, 'you needed to be there and to be living it to know'. He concurs with the opinion that though Chamberlain may have been pilloried for the Munich agreement, he bought this war-thirsty country, predominantly eager though unprepared as it was for war, some very valuable time.
Duff Cooper seems well placed to write a book like this, though Max Arthur mentions in his afterword that the novel's post-war appearance caused some consternation in diplomatic circles, fearing that it might harm Anglo-Spanish relations, whilst even suggesting that perhaps the operation might need to be repeated one day. Cooper was having none of that (indiscretion and belligerence to the fore) pointing out that Operation Heartbreak was fiction and in any case it was one of Churchill's oft-recounted dinner party stories.
And how clearly I remember the film, The Man Who Never Was.

One of those dreary 1950s winter Sunday afternoons, soaking up something of a war of which I knew little except that we'd "won" and my dad had helped.
Am I right about that opening scene, a deserted beach, waves lapping on the shore and... I look back now on all that heroic post-war glory that we imbibed as children and when I see the films again now, with a little more knowledge and life under my belt, it's slightly embarrassing to think we would then go out and play wars and battleships and heaven knows what else.
I'd take my maroon, coach-built doll's pram with me because I was a girl and girls did then, but it made a brilliant tank and with my roller skates on I could certainly rev up a good charge down Queen Anne's Gardens where my best friend Ann and her sister Christine lived, plus it was a cul-de-sac and very few cars...I'd be wearing a smocked frock, just visualise that if you can.
Novel, real story, film, whatever I'm delighted to have finally read this book because when I took the Tinker's little memoir Bugle Boy down off the shelf, there it was, a picture of a young Tinker with the following caption.

'HMS King George V, June 1943 at the invasion of Sicily. This was taken just prior to closing up at Action Stations. We wore boiler suits as anti-flash protection and my action station was in the 14" gun turret behind me. We were about to bombard the port of Trapani, where a Herman Goering Panzer division was stationed to make them think there was a landing imminent to keep them away from the beachhead, we also bombarded the islands of Favignana and Marsala on the way through.'

I know about 14" guns now I've been to the Imperial War Museum but I can also guarantee that as we sat and watched the film and Sicily was mentioned, the Tinker would have said 'I've been there' and we'd all have groaned and said ' you always say that,' because he did, and we'd have laughed without really understanding that actually he had been and why.

Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (dovegreyreader scribbles) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:15:00 +0000

Operation Heartbreak had sat unread on my shelves since it was first published by Persephone Books in 2004, but I've been browsing the books again with new eyes for this year's November reading and several have been a perfect fit.
This one has the lovely blue endpapers taken from a Jacqmar printed rayon entitled 'Happy Landings'
and I know those little decorative flourishes at the top of each page are carefully chosen too... for Operation Heartbreak these like little sets of wings.
It was interesting to walk around the Imperial War Museum and spot those little swatches of Persephone endpapers in the exhibitions, I instantly recognised 'London Wall' from Vere Hodgson's Few Egg and No Oranges.

Duff Cooper recounts the life of Captain Willie Maryngton, an orphan with an income, a career army officer who is utterly desperate to go to war. Bitterly disappointed to have missed out on active service in the First World War by a matter of days, Willie is even more distraught and disillusioned to find he is too old to serve in the Second World War and must stay at home and train the troops. Having been a cavalry man and subject to the all-consuming hobby of hippolatry (it's in the book, honestly) the changing face of warfare and increasing mechanisation leave Willie, a man without a war horse, stuck in the old groove.
But Willie nurses a constant sense of unbelonging and remains emotionally 'stuck' too, his parentless background has done little for his emotional maturity despite the presence of a family who have taken him under their wing, his relationships with women are doomed, often a complete disaster. His life takes on a routine of monotony and dullness, then add in the unrequited craving for front line action and it all breeds in him a streak of bitter regret and suspicion of those around him.
Everyone else is joining in the 'party' and somehow Willie is always on the outside looking in.
It slowly becomes clear that Willie is going to play a major role in the war and gradually Duff Cooper builds towards the ending that you know is coming if you are aware of the real wartime events on which the book is based. It is a book charged with increasing emotion and the final pages just turn those screws steadily as they quietly increase the poignancy of Willie's life.
I'm thinking these facts are well known to many but if not, and you think this might spoil your enjoyment of Operation Heartbreak, stop reading here ** and scroll down to ***

**
Operation Mincemeat, the actual British Intelligence Operation to deceive Hitler into thinking the allied invasion of Sicily would take place elsewhere, so the plan was for the body of Major Martin RM to wash up on a strategically chosen Spanish beach carrying secret papers. Spanish intelligence handed the papers to German intelligence before returning them supposedly unopened to Britain. It was only the misaligned refolding of the papers that gave any hint that the ruse might have worked and in fact it did. Hitler continued to expect an invasion via Greece and Sardinia weeks after the invasion of Sicily had begun.

***

Max Arthur's afterword offers a context to the events recounted in the book but more about Duff Cooper and the film of the real events on which the book is based tomorrow. I'll bet some you of you watched The Man Who Never Was, curled up on the floor on a dreary winter's Sunday afternoon as I did.

A profound conjunction

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (This Space) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:01:00 +0000

I've just discovered the London Review of Books' archive, access to much of which demands subscription. However, the letters archive is open. This gives me the chance to share an important moment in my early reading.

In 1988 I'd been reading seriously for only a year and a half, trying everything and, more often than not, being secretly disappointed. By "secretly" I mean that disappointment was held secret from me. I might have enjoyed a prize-winning author's prize-winning book, but something was missing. Deep down I knew these books weren't what I'd hope for yet kept on reading novels by the big names assuming I had missed something. What drove me back to the big city library and to read the Sunday review pages and journals like the LRB was the hope of isolating the decisive factor in those rare books that got beneath the surface. So this is why in November of that year I read Barbara Everett's review of Hugh Kenner's A Sinking Island, his highly-critical critical book about Modernism and modern English authors. Two issues later I read Gabriel Josipovici's letter in response. This is what I can repeat here. As you may notice from some of the names mentioned, things would never be the same again.

He begins by praising the review as "thoughtful, often profound" before getting on to the issues at hand:

Barbara Everett is right to insist that Eliot's impact depends on the interconnection of the aesthetic and the moral in his work, and that 'the inward debate of authority' is crucial to our sense of him. The same is true of Beckett, and the attempt to see both as ‘high priests of Modernism’ does a disservice to them and to Modernism, suggesting as it does that they wish to substitute art for religion. But the mere introduction of Beckett into the picture makes one see the weakness of Everett's attempt to see [Kingsley] Amis’s work as in some way akin to Eliot’s and as unjustifiably slandered by Kenner. Those novelists who are highly regarded in their own countries and in the rest of Europe, but not in Britain, such as Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke, Claude Simon and Marguerite Duras, Yaakov Shabtai and Aharon Appelfeld, have all, like Eliot and Beckett, sensed that to speak 'with the voice of a person subject to his own experience, like everyone else: not a preacher, not a poet' (Everett’s words about Larkin) requires a formal adventurousness, a willingness to take risks with the manner of speaking, which is quite absent from the work of Amis and the other much-touted English writers of the present.

Of course one can go on playing the game of who 'really' is in the Modernist tradition and who isn't. I myself, like Everett, would make Auden rather than Bunting central. But that, as I understand it, is not the main thrust of Kenner’s argument. In this country, today, 'ambitious' tends to mean 'long'; 'wildly imaginative' tends to mean 'working in the minor mode of fantasy'; 'sensitive' and 'compassionate' to mean 'this author still writes like Hardy.' Instead of the ambition of an Eliot, a Kafka, or Beckett, to speak the truth at whatever cost in terms of popularity, we have variants on Hemingway's absurd boast that he could take Tolstoy to 15 rounds, or the even more debased ambition to win a major prize. What I find absent from the bulk of contemporary English fiction and poetry, clever and witty as much of it is, is precisely that sense of the voice of a person subject to his or her own experience, which Everett finds in Larkin. 'Defeated, the poet starts to sound like a person: unique,' she writes. I think she is right, and not just about Larkin: there is a profound conjunction between the acknowledgment of defeat – as a writer, as well as as a person – and the quality of art. But the implications of that have not, it seems to me, ever really been taken on board in England. I don't think American letters have all that much to boast about at present, but unfortunately more of Kenner's critique of English writing holds than Everett is prepared to accept.

But it wasn't the names alone that stuck in my head, it was phrases too, from the original article and the letter: "the inward debate of authority", "the acknowledgment of defeat", "a person subject to his or her own experience", "formal adventurousness" and "a willingness to take risks with the manner of speaking". Simple summaries of now familiar ideas but then entirely new to me; new yet precisely those factors I had sought.

One still can't imagine such phrases being uttered by the gatekeepers of English literature in their Sunday Supplement columns, let alone being understood. Even the LRB has long since given up any interest in fiction.

Actual Conditions of Life

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Eve's Alexandria) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:11:06 +0000

The thick light of night stuck to our bodies. We moved slowly and with effort. At such times you had to save your strength to hold out for the end of the story, for death, or for whatever else.

Following on from The Foundation Pit, here's a tale about the end of Soviet collectivisation: Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk's Tales of Galicia (1995; English translation 2003), a nicely put-together little volume from Prague-based Twisted Spoon Press. (Twisted Spoon is a nifty small press specialising in translations, particularly from Eastern European languages, and I picked up the book in a Prague bookshop, while visiting my fellow Alexandrian Jo there some years ago.)

Tales of Galicia is a collection of short stories, all set in and around the same fictional village, in the same period (1989). Each tale is recounted by the same anonymous, first-person narrator, who assumes the detached tone and method of an ethnographer, but who cannot quite resist a certain emotional involvement in the exchanges he recounts. (Or a certain wordiness - for the most part the prose is fine, but several descriptive and analytical passages go on a few sentences too long.)

There are a number of shared themes: social fragmentation, looming change, boundaries and their transgression. But as you make your way through the stories, connections begin to emerge. This is slow at first - a glance of a character met in a previous tale, return visits to the village pub - and then more obvious - family members are met, personal histories are explored from other angles - and gradually pieces of a larger story can be seen.

It's never all tied together (and is all the better for it), and this larger story certainly never resolves into a linear plot; but it makes for a neat and reasonably effective sort of meta demonstration of how people's lives, even the lives of those who barely know each other, are entwined within the broader current of life in the village. This blurring of the lines between short form and novel is matched by a breaking down of the boundaries between observer-narrator and subjects: he goes from being the unobtrusive, unseen interlocutor listening to an old man recount how the area has changed over the generations (in 'Blacksmith Kruk'), to getting drunk with one of the villagers ('Lewandowski'), and ultimately in the final story to sharing a character's reflections as she lies alone on her death bed ('The End').

That said, the narrator undoubtedly begins with an agenda, or at least with an expectation about what he will find in a village emerging from collectivisation: people stripped of their identity and community by would-be altruistic values ("to each according to their needs" etc.), values that collapse when exposed to the real world. It is a reading of the situation that he pushes early on:

Certainly, those values are beautiful, but too abstract and inadequate to withstand the actual conditions of life. The system's logical and mechanical, as well as abstract, structure shattered to pieces because Jozek and his brothers and sisters lived in it - a legion of all those who had been disinherited and liberated from the harsh dictates of morality, religion and memory. Surrendering themselves to instinct, listening intently to nature's murmured temptations, they became a mass that the most ingenious structure could not contain. (--'Jozek')

But over the course of the book we, and the narrator, are presented with a number of challenges - if never a complete refutation - to the notion that the villagers are "a mass", without "morality, religion or memory". It could hardly be described as wildly optimistic, but nonetheless there are signs of hope, signs that humanity has not been wholly obliterated by the horrors of collectivisation.

Certainly, people's lives are grim (although not noticeably grimmer, I have to say, than the accounts of Russian peasant life in some of Anton Chekhov's stories, like 'Peasants' (1897) and 'In the Ravine' (1900), which at times reach wrist-slitting levels of despair'; but then, Chekhov was a much more powerful writer). Still, Stasiuk's descriptions repeatedly emphasise the monotonous, cold decay of the village and its surrounding landscape, in a way that melds pathetic fallacy with an explanation of the way of life that has developed there:

A few buildings like heavy barges, lichen-covered and dilapidated, taken on a journey to nowhere, motionless on a giant white wave. Sheds for wood, shelters for hay. Clothes on lines buffeting against each other, smacking like pieces of frozen meat. The wind from over the mountain pass laden with clouds of snow. That is how Jozek's world looked. (--'Jozek')

Even where the events of the stories are not explicitly linked, life on this iron-hard, unforgiving land entails many a shared - indeed, in some senses collective - experience for its inhabitants, and for the most part these experiences are difficult and draining. In places, reading about the experiences induces a similar feeling in the reader; much like the narrator, it was not until the final few stories (in particular those centring on 'Grandma' and her family) that I found myself really engaging with the characters.

Everything revolves around hard physical labour (predominantly agriculture and mining), unremitting cold, drink, and the ending of things. Alcohol is an escape primarily for the village's men, a framework to their lives as fundamental as the church ("It was a safe and familiar legacy, the limit of their patrimony, their christening, their Sunday mass and their graveyard", is how it is described in 'Janek'). Women who drink are questionable, difficult, and ultimately pitiable figures ("She started to hang around the pub even though, you know, around here that's not a place where women just stop by", we're told of the title character in 'Maryska'). The pub is a space for men, although women "sometimes showed up on payday to get their hands on the earnings" ('Janek'), because of course women are killjoys who have the strange idea that families can't be fed on their patriarch's vodka fumes alone.

Initially, at least, this is not a world that has much space at all for women's experiences. But around halfway through the book, female characters begin to appear, and even to speak. We begin to see that men and women share the hardships of labour and borderline survival, if not the vodka:

But raising grain was by this time art for art's sake, and probably just force of habit, since he had to do something else besides haymaking and potato farming. And thus, abundance will always assume the shape of lesser or greater poverty. (--'Wlodek')

Afterwards, Grandma wrapped herself up in an old quilt, huddled in a corner of the wooden shed, and fell into a shallow doze. The night's luminosity was airy - nothing like the day's massive brightness that her body had to make an effort to get through, bent over, creaking and animated only by the hope of eternal rest in darkness. If it was September, hoarfrost would cover the ground before dawn. (--'Maryska')

There is little comfort here. Death, too, haunts everyone. Literally, in fact, for while we see a number of characters die (including Jozek, in the very first story, and Grandma at the end), some of them return later in the book to interact with the living. Another boundary transgressed. (The village, I should note, is itself located on a borderland.)

I can't help but wonder, indeed, whether part of the fear of death doesn't stem from a fear that it won't be the end - that dying will be no escape:

The men would wake up and sober up in the same place, the place where they would resume their labours. Because life was round, it moved in a circle, and if someone did manage to tear himself away from it, then someone else would immediately appear to take his place. (--'Janek')

Is this a place, then, lost to morality, religion, and memory? One story ('Place'), discusses the removal, by anonymous external forces, of a local church (it is apparently taken brick by brick to a museum); hard to deny the symbolism of that, although the narration of its loss is intercut with an account of its founding and memories of its role in the community. Several characters are indeed morally repulsive, Grandma's abusive son-in-law, for example ("he worked, he drank, he fought, he slept", he locked his mother-in-law in the attic while she lay dying... the final story really does pack an emotional punch). Yet towards the book's end we meet a man who comes back from the dead, no less, to report the truth of a crime he witnessed and thus free an innocent man, which seems above and beyond the call of neighbourly duty ('Confession').

In terms of memory, the monotony of daily life clearly takes its toll:

Then there came a morning, maybe Monday, maybe Thursday. It was hard to tell, because as usual, yesterday's day had fled from memory, and today's trembling hands weren't any different than they had been the week before. (--'Janek')

But the narrator finds no shortage of people to tell him what life used to be like in the village, even if largely so they can contrast it with the uncertain present ("everything is changing so much now you wouldn't recognise it a week later", 'Blacksmith Kruk' notes). Indeed, the further into the stories we go, the more we encounter not "a mass" but a host of distinct individuals, from the violent Kosciejny (described in a fantastic thumbnail sketch: "The two fiery substances in his body - blood and alcohol - made him resistant to seasons and to weather") to the irrepressible Lewandowski, who meets a woman "who was as essential and accidental as he was, and he married her and started to build a house". Each is shaped by his or her own, various memories; Grandma, in the final story, provides the most vibrant, vivid imagery in the book as she sees and remembers the village in a light new to us:

Grandma was lying on her back on the white, bony bed, which had likely wandered its way there from some hospital. Through her half-open lips she breathed in the past, which blossomed out in her head like tissue-paper flowers in a magician's hand, exploded like fireworks at a village fair and lasted for just as short a time. She saw the sky, tinted deep blue with the sweltering heat and the reddened crest of the grassy hill. (--'The End')

The Soviet era has left deep scars on the village, and the changes it is undergoing look set to leave more; Stasiuk is clear-eyed on this, without belabouring the point. But some changes, at least, have produced outcomes both rich and strange, as in the transformation of a "penitentiary fiefdom" (former prison camp):

That time was long gone. The prisoners married the jailers' daughters, and even though barbed wire was still hanging here and there, the windows didn't have bars on them any more. The doors were knocked out between the cells, and a mixed breed of the guarders and the guarded was maturing in the two-room apartments. (--'The Pub')

~~Nic

On hype

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (dovegreyreader scribbles) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:15:00 +0000

Sometimes a book arrives steeped in publisher's praise as did Legend of a Suicide by David Vann and my thoughts on that next week, but I look at it and think, do I really want to read that?
Then the publisher might write to you again and ask if you've read it yet, and if not please, please do because it's really good.
Then you might hear again with news of a launch and little snippets of stunning reviews.
This is presumably the thankless world of the publishing PR person and you wonder if anyone does ever thank them?
Well I try to, though it's a bit of an uphill task keeping on top of the emails, often well into three figures daily, but I do try and so if any of you are reading this, thank you again, you do a great job of keeping me informed about what's out there and testing the boundaries of my comfort zone.
I have a shelving system that keeps them in month order of publication so that I can see at a glance what's current and thus occasionally try to offer some contemporaneous comment, though that can never be guaranteed if my reading mood is elsewhere. A book often has to bide its time and sometimes I like to let all the glitter and hype subside.
Hype, and hands up guilty as charged because I can readily jump on that bright sparkly roller coaster too, can be unpredictable because it can go either way, in fact it can seriously backfire here.
I'm thinking back to Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise, a reading experience from which I learned so much about not rushing to early judgements. Perhaps the hype unwittingly sets me off on the wrong foot and I sub-consciously end up determined to find fault.
I'm picky about that brand new suitcase on the dust jacket and I have distracted myself from the writing.
I can't get a grip on the book at all, my thoughts are disparate, unfocused and scattered because I'm a bit cross.
Then perhaps I've read something about the author that determines me not to like them, so I'm busy blaming the book, the writer, the paper, the font, what they've written about, the characters... anything in fact that will become a Room 101 repository for my dissatisfaction and lead to that damning indictment and the dismissal of the flawed book...but of course none of it's my fault.
Thankfully I've managed to turn my narrow thinking around to something much more open-minded. The book goes back on the shelf until I can approach it in a much gentler, more conciliatory mood, it will get another chance because I now tend to perceive that as a fault of the inner me, not the book, and I am quietly amazed at how often, given that chance, a book may then succeed where once it seemed to fail.
How fatally misguided I would have been to listen to those early misgivings about all things Irene Nemirovsky and discard her writing, and thank goodness you all took me to task in comments and told me to return to the book.
Equally how oddly liberating it is to be able to come here, eat some humble pie and admit that I got something wrong and I'm wondering if any of you have had reading turnarounds like this?
But one thing I'm now very careful not to do is to turn the final page of a book, rush to the laptop, type out my thoughts and post on here immediately.
There's a pondering process involved and it may span several weeks because isn't that the hidden and recurring value of a book? A sort of literary compound interest, a mathematical calculation which apparently no one comprehends anymore, but needs to if they are to understand credit card repayments.
How many hours did I labour over compound interest in maths lessons?
A book sinks down into my sub-conscious and needs time in there to ripen and mature, something will quite suddenly bubble to the surface out of nowhere to increase my understanding, often days if not weeks later giving me a completely new perspective on my reading. David Vann's book has been a fine example of that, a book which has delved right down and repaid a great deal.
The joy of this space for me is that I have no deadlines...except for Ulysses that is, and perhaps for some books a deadline is essential...can you tell I'm behind with it as of today?
I have been answering lots of questions about dovegreyreader scribbles of late and as always trying to explain that it is for pleasure not pain, but that's been good because it's all made me revisit those founding principles and also look at how things have developed and moved on since that day in March 2006 when I was setting this up and I had to think of a strap line. I dashed that bookaholic, sock-knitting quilter who was a community nurse in her spare time off the top of my head thinking I'd keep this up for about three weeks not three years. In fact if ever I try and tweak it to something slightly more refined one of you notices and swiftly and rightly reminds me of my proper place in the world and my thanks as always to Ruth for that picture of the dove bearing those books.

Not Even Past: Conjunctions 53

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (This Space) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:01:00 +0000

Not Even Past is the title of the 53rd and latest edition of Conjunctions, Bard College's literary journal. This edition's special features deserve attention:

Beckett's US publisher Barney Rosset contributes Remembering Samuel Beckett including "the Beckett/Rosset Correspondence about Waiting for Godot".
An extract from Roberto Bolaño's Antwerp
Thomas Bernhard's poem Ave Virgil translated by James Reidel "appearing in English for the first time, with a postscript note by Bernhard"

Of course, the last of these excites my interest. It is mentioned in passing in the Sign & Sight interview of 1986. Bernhard explains its 1981 publication, 21 years after he wrote it: Well, I found it and I thought to myself, this is actually a good poem, from that period, and that was it. [My publisher] publishes everything I give him.

As I'm likely to buy everything Bernhard published, I'll have to get this too, although currently it is not currently available at The Book Depository or Amazon.

But not everything is withheld: Web Conjunctions has published The Will of Achilles, a long poem by Robert Kelly.

An isolated note on Everything Passes

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (This Space) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:13:00 +0000

Over the Summer I was asked to contribute to a symposium on Gabriel Josipovici's novel Everything Passes and its relation to contemporary English-language literary fiction (a relation of distance). For various reasons the symposium never happened, so I'm posting my short essay below. It should be read with this context in mind. For another view, you can read Richard Crary's contribution at The Existence Machine.

An isolated note on Everything Passes

The first thing that strikes one about Everything Passes is its austerity. Unlike most other contemporary novels, it offers little in the way of framing information; no names, no faces, no time or place. It begins:

A room.
He stands at the window.
And a voice says: Everything passes. The
good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow.
Everything Passes.

A room.
He stands at the window.
Silence.
He stands.
Silence.

Readers of contemporary literary fiction – even those who relish what Nick Hornby calls "opaquely written novels" – are unlikely to feel at home here. It is as if writing is denuding itself. Where is this room? Who is "he", why is he standing at a window? And whose voice is speaking? So few words yet so many questions. Isn't it the job of fiction to fill in these blanks?

Given this beginning, there is an inevitable impulse to seek genre distinctions and so gain purchase on the smooth surface. "A novella" is the simplest label, though there are very few novellas like this. "Narrative poetry" perhaps; the short lines and caesura certainly suggest that. Yet the prose style does become more expansive later on, so perhaps it is more accurate to compare it to a piece of music; a string quartet perhaps. Josipovici has himself said the inspiration for the novel was to make a writerly version of Schoenberg's String Trio Op. 45. Also, the rhythmic repetitions of words and phrases provides the mesmerising experience of music. This direction of enquiry offers more clarity because, as questions of context and meaning are raised in music, they are answered at the same time, soothing the listener, diminishing anxiety, even if the music is by turns anxious and mournful as is the Schoenberg.

He stands at the window.
Cracked pane.
His face at the window.
Greyness. Silence.

And again the room.
The window.
He stands at the window.
Silence.

In listening to music, the reader is plunged into a world without distance or contradiction; feeling and movement are everything. Could Everything Passes then be affirming Walter Pater's submission that 'All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music'? Answer yes and, for 18 pages, the issue is settled. The unidentified man at the window is met by memories of a woman no longer present and by visits from his fussing children. It is as if the novel is developing a theme framed by the voice telling him that everything passes; a theme of memory and its permanence in what passes, our everyday lives. In this way we can place the novel as part of literary fiction, an idiosyncratic part – an experimental part perhaps – and thus more readily assimilated. We can then hurry back to the mass of more detailed novels in which backstory and expressive words fill in the gaps left open here. We may deem it a worthy failure too because, if Everything Passes aspires to the condition of music, doesn't its form admit to a inherent failure ?

What happens on page 18 provides the answer. A literary scholar called Felix interrupts the stream of memories to begin a conversation over a cup of coffee with his girlfriend Sal. He talks about how Rabelais had recognised the consequences for authorship by the advent of prose fiction. Until then authors knew their audience: for example Chaucer read to a royal court and Shakespeare had London theatre-goers. He also cites Dante who, in Purgatorio, meets an old friend Casella. Three times Dante tries to embrace him but, as a spirit, he is incorporeal and Dante's arms meet only themselves. Dante then asks if it is possible for Casella to sing one of Dante's poems he sang on earth. Felix sings it to Sal:

"Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona"
cominciò elli allor si dolcemente,
che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona.

The answer is that the narrative is as isolated as with the man at the window, as bodiless as Casella. The interruption indicates a determination to face the issue. What Felix's scholarly musings in a café then turn us toward are the consequence in the loss of this connection with an audience. It is a loss of community, of a guiding tradition and the loss, thereby, of writerly authority. It meant Rabelais, one of the first modern novelists, "was the spokesman of no-one but himself. And that meant that his role was inherently absurd. No-one had called him. Not God. Not the Muses. Not the monarch. Not the local community. He was alone in his room, scribbling away". Nothing has changed. Sal listens.

— How did it go again? she asks, looking him across the table.
— What?
— The Dante.
— Love that discourses in my mind (that’s the first line of his old poem), he then began so sweetly that the sweetness still within me sounds.
He smiles at her: — Che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona, he says.

Despite the subject matter of the conversation, this is more what we expect from an English novel. Except it is the subject matter that turns Everything Passes from what might be dismissed a mood piece into a challenge to English fiction. The sweetness sounding in Dante has an equivalence in the voices streaming through the man at the window. Opposed they reveal the duality at the heart of fiction: an experience that stills our daily disquiet yet also delays our progress, just as it delays Casella and Dante from climbing Mount Purgatory. Together they constitute our experience of art – its joy and its sorrow – whether it is poetry, music or fiction. Yet it is only poetry and fiction that can reflect on its own status and include this reflection in the experience. It's nothing new and radical. We see it in the scene with Casella, a 14th Century poem.

It's no coincidence that Sal asks Felix to repeat Dante's own repetition of the song (that is, sung first in Purgatory itself and then in his poem of the same name). In it she is prompted to recognise the love discoursing over the café table. So, by describing Rabelais' recognition, Felix has opened a space in which communication becomes possible. His own isolation is implicated in his scholarly proposition, yet it also offers a promise of its end: Sal has become his audience, his community. Very soon after, she agrees to marry him. Here the distance between art and life — which is also the distance between Felix and Sal — is given measure. However, we must now realise that the conversation is also streaming through Felix as he recalls a happy time in the wretchedness of Sal's absence. He has lost his community, perhaps driven it away with a selfish focus on his own scholarly concerns, or perhaps the ultimate failure of communication, and thereby of art.

Everything Passes then is not so much a metafiction reflecting with postmodern knowingness on the elemental opening 18 pages than an Orphic gaze into the underworld of art and our inner lives. In exploring the issue within a novel, Josipovici implicates itself and our reading in the same process. The voices we hear resonate uncannily in our mind, offering the possibility of real expression and dialogue outside of all constraints imposed by the genre of the novel, yet also threatening to reinforce them with yet another beginning, middle and end. It is difficult to distinguish between the pathway and the cul-de-sac. To do so, we have to read, listen and write again. For the man standing at the cracked window things begin to look brighter as, toward the end of the novel, he finds release in creative life, only to make a discovery that seems to reverse all progress. Everything Passes risks such failure as no other English novel dare fail.

Claude Levi-Strauss RIP

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:50:47 +0000

Via AP:

The Academie Francaise says that Claude Levi-Strauss, an influential French intellectual who was widely considered the father of modern anthropology, has died. He was 100.

Levi-Strauss was widely regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing new concepts concerning common patterns of behavior and thought, especially myths, in primitive and modern societies.

During his 6-decade-long career, he authored many literary and anthropological classics, including "Tristes Tropiques" (1955), "The Savage Mind" (1963) and "The Raw and the Cooked" (1964).

The Academie Francaise said Tuesday that it plans a tribute later in the week.

It did not give the cause of death or say when Levi-Strauss had died.

Die Ausgewanderten Audiobook

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:30:09 +0000

I’m grateful to a Vertigo reader for letting me know that W.G. Sebald’s book Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants) is available as a German-language audio book on 7 CDs, published by Winter & Winter. The reader is Paul Herwig. It can be ordered directly from their website or from Amazon.de. It was apparently released in late 2007.

Previously, the Max Ferber section of Die Ausgewanderten was available on a pair of CDs issued by Eichborn Verlag in 2000, with Sebald himself reading.

Robert Walser, My Constant Companion

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:17:52 +0000

“Walser has been my constant companion.”

Some artists obfuscate when it comes to talking about those who influenced them, while others readily identify their own artistic forerunners for us. When W.G. Sebald reflected back on Robert Walser’s writings in an essay first published in 1998, he also traced a deliberate path connecting his own writing with Walser’s. The essay, Le Promeneur Solitaire, which recently appeared in English in the guise of an Introduction to the new translation of Walser’s novel The Tanners (New Directions, 2009), is every bit as revelatory about Sebald as it is about Walser.

Originally published in his book of essays Logis in Einem Landhaus, Le Promeneur Solitaire begins with photographs of Walser – specifically seven portraits that span Walser’s lifetime, plus a series of snapshots of Walser posing during his infamous hikes. Every time he looks at those photographs, Sebald writes, “I think I see my grandfather before me,” and he reproduces two unidentified snapshots that seemingly show himself as a young boy hiking with his grandfather (the two photographs at the top of the right hand page below). After enumerating several similarities between the lives of Walser and his grandfather, Sebald asks:

What is the significance of these similarities, overlaps, coincidences? Are they rebuses of memory, delusions of the self and the senses, or rather the schemes and symptoms of an order underlying the chaos of human relationships, and applying equally to the living and the dead, which is beyond our comprehension?

There is scarcely a better description of the pattern behind Sebald’s own prose than this.

Sebald identifies so closely with Walser that he “has the persistent feeling of being beckoned to from the other side.” So, when he writes about Walser, it can be instructive on occasion to simply substitute Sebald’s name for Walser’s.

[Sebald] hoped, through writing, to be able to escape the shadows which lay over his life from the beginning…transforming them on the page from something very dense to something almost weightless. His ideal was to overcome gravity.

[Sebald was the] clairvoyant of the small.

Sebald pays much attention to Walser’s fragile state of mind, his remoteness from other people and from the momentous events of his own time, his utter lack of possessions, his lonely hikes, his eventual institutionalization. “He was the most unattached of all solitary poets.” He sees the handful of portraits of Walser as “stations in a life which hint at the silent catastrophe which has taken place between each.” Sebald turns all of this into something resembling a state of grace. “On the subject of the collective catastrophes of his day he remained resolutely silent. However, he was anything but politically naive.” For Sebald, Walser’s “purity” becomes the source for what he sees as Walser’s “aesthetic and moral assurance.”

Le Promeneur Solitaire is surely one of Sebald’s most personal essays about literature and it is wonderful to have it translated into English at last.

Sontag on Simone Weil

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:12:54 +0000

Simone Weil by Susan Sontag (1963; and available in Against Interpretation and Other Essays):

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering—rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who submitted his work to the elder statesman of German letters "on the knees of his heart"—the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kliest's plays and tales were mined—is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, Goethe is to some a duty. In the same way, such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction. Little Bookroom / Savoir Fare London

Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Thus I do not mean to decry a fashion, but to underscore the motive behind the contemporary taste for the extreme in art and thought. All that is necessary is that we not be hypocritical, that we recognize why we read and admire writers like Simone Weil. I cannot believe that more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous publication of her books and essays really share her ideas. Nor is it necessary—necessary to share Simone Weil's anguished and unconsummated love affair with the Catholic Church, or accept her gnostic theology of divine absence, or espouse her ideals of body denial, or concur in her violently unfair hatred of Roman civilization and the Jews. Similarly, with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; most of their modern admirers could not, and do not embrace their ideas. We read writers of such scathing originality for their personal authority, for the example of their seriousness, for their manifest willingness to sacrifice themselves for their truths, and—only piecemeal—for their "views." As the corrupt Alcibiades followed Socrates, unable and unwilling to change his own life, but moved, enriched, and full of love; so the sensitive modern reader pays his respect to a level of spiritual reality which is not, could not, be his own.

Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint (if one may use the latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense). Such a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation—like Kleist's, like Kierkegaard's—was Simone Weil's. I am thinking of the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil's life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction; and I do not exclude her homeliness, her physical clumsiness, her migraines, her tuberculosis. No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.

Thomas Bernhard's stories

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:57:34 +0000

Via Steve over at This Space:

In May 2010, the first translation of Thomas Bernhard's early stories is due from Seagull Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The website provides the following information: "First published in German in 1967, these stories were written at the same time as Bernhard’s early novels Frost, Gargoyles, and The Lime Works, and they display the same obsessions, restlessness, and disarming mastery of language. Martin Chalmer’s outstanding translation, which renders the work in English for the first time, captures the essential personality of the work. The narrators of these stories lack the strength to do anything but listen and then write, the reader in turn becoming a captive listener, deciphering the traps laid by memory—and the mere words, the neverending words with which we try to pin it down. Words that are always close to driving the narrator crazy, but yet, as Bernhard writes 'not completely crazy.'"

Steampunk

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 03:34:30 +0000

Anyone near Oxford should make the effort to head to the Museum of the History of Science's superb Steampunk exhibition. It is, we're told, "the world’s first exhibition of Steampunk art" and is a delight. One of the most enjoyable and surprising exhibitions I've seen in a very long time. Only two fairly small rooms, admittedly, but packed with some startling artefacts. Do it.

Imagine the technology of today with the aesthetic of Victorian science. From redesigned practical items to fantastical contraptions, this exhibition, curated by Art Donovan, showcases the work of eighteen Steampunk artists from across the globe.

Expect ’steam-powered’ computer mice, clockwork hearts, brass goggles and the latest state-of-the-Steampunk-art eye-pod (more...)

“Enough of that. And of this.”

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Asylum) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 01:00:36 +0000

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and the heart showing themselves in the minute, strange and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print – the love which had to be hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, at first tentatively, and then boldly, and then proudly.

- John Williams, Stoner

Asylum is taking a break. My sincere thanks to everyone who has read and commented over the last three years.

All Talk

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Eve's Alexandria) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:30:19 +0000

Time for another reprint SFX review; I wrote this one for issue 187, of Karen Miller's The Prodigal Mage (book one of the Fisherman's Children series). On balance, I found it quite an annoying read, but in a way that hasn't put me off trying something else by Miller in the future; when it's good, it's really very good. Its main problem, as so often with high fantasy, is excess.

"I'm his father. What I say goes." Parents. They never learn, do they?

Miller's latest - first in a follow-up series to her debut duology - is packed with fathers (and occasionally mothers) making a mess of parenting. With breathtaking obstinacy, short-sightedness, and (almost) always the best intentions, her adult characters manage to find exactly the wrong thing to say or do in any given situation. Bold, brash son getting overly curious about dangerous magic? Refuse to let him learn to use it safely, hide the spellbooks, and if all else fails don't bother to explain your reasons, just shout - louder and louder as he gets older. What could possibly go wrong?

Naturally, the magic of said son, Rafel by name, may be the key to saving the kingdom of Lur from the evil power that is steadily draining life from the land. But Lur is as divided and fractious as Rafel's family; social tensions between the Olken people and their former overlords the Doranen hamper every effort to take action.

Miller is clearly a very talented writer: her characterisation is a masterclass in nuance and sensitivity, and she has a visceral way with action. But the race against time to save Lur is off-puttingly slow, consisting largely of people discussing what is to be done - and why they absolutely will not let their loved ones do it - in ever shriller tones. These dialogues are well-crafted, but get wearyingly repetitive. It's frustrating, because when the plot gets going (from page 200, in fits and starts), it's so good: a compelling portrait of a blighted world in the company of flawed,
fascinating people.

~~Nic

John Williams: Stoner

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Asylum) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:00:34 +0000

The cover design of the NYRB Classics edition of John Williams’ novel Stoner might have been expressly chosen to emphasise that, even though the book was published in 1965, this is not a sort of literary Cheech and Chong. It is a sober study of one man’s slow journey to finding out who he is, and it is quietly magnificent.

Williams hits the reader straight away with a devastating summation of William Stoner’s career in the University of Missouri:

Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.

This is a tease, because the next 278 pages explain why such a dismissal is unwarranted. It gives us a chronological account of a life, and of a man, who grew up on a farm, with a father “stooped by labour” and a mother who “regarded her life patiently, as if it were a long moment that she had to endure.” The anticipation of a life with little expectation and fewer rewards is withdrawn from Stoner when, in the year 1910 aged 19, he attends the University to study agriculture at his father’s suggestion. Standing on the campus for the first time, “he had a sudden sense of security and serenity he had never felt before.”

Stoner switches from agriculture to English, and realises that he will never return to the farm. This is a ‘talky’ book, with a good deal of the development coming through dialogue – a difficult and welcome achievement. First is when Stoner’s tutor, Archer Sloane, takes him aside for a conversation.

“But don’t you know, Mr Stoner? Don’t you understand about yourself yet? You’re going to be a teacher.”

Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” said Sloane softly.

“How can you tell? How can you be sure?”

“It’s love, Mr Stoner,” Sloane said cheerfully. ”You are in love. It’s as simple as that.”

Already we see a pattern developing, of Stoner following the direction of another. However he does often branch out from these directions and make his own decision in the end. He comes to see the future as “a territory ahead that awaited his exploration.” When the First World War breaks out and the US becomes involved, his colleagues sign up to fight, with one saying, “I suppose I’m doing it because it doesn’t matter whether I do it or not.” Not for Stoner such a spirit: he remains in Missouri and courts, and then marries, a girl called Edith.

His marriage starts out as lukewarm and follows the laws of thermodynamics, and so it is through his work that he finds it “possible to live, and even be happy, now and then.” At home, his refuge is his study. ”It was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study … it was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible.”

Work means the university, and if you thought that ‘electrifying scenes of campus politics’ was an oxymoron, then you need to read Stoner. It is a book which is structurally unadventurous but emotionally and intellectually engaging. We see a man struggling to be allowed to do the one thing he has learned to do well, and to find the dignity in labour (“I think he’s a real hero,” said Williams of his creation), and to exercise love in the only way he can.

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and the heart showing themselves in the minute, strange and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print – the love which had to be hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, at first tentatively, and then boldly, and then proudly.

Thomas Bernhard's Prose

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (This Space) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:37:00 +0000

In May 2010, the first translation of Thomas Bernhard's early stories is due from Seagull Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The website provides the following information: "First published in German in 1967, these stories were written at the same time as Bernhard’s early novels Frost, Gargoyles, and The Lime Works, and they display the same obsessions, restlessness, and disarming mastery of language. Martin Chalmer’s outstanding translation, which renders the work in English for the first time, captures the essential personality of the work. The narrators of these stories lack the strength to do anything but listen and then write, the reader in turn becoming a captive listener, deciphering the traps laid by memory—and the mere words, the neverending words with which we try to pin it down. Words that are always close to driving the narrator crazy, but yet, as Bernhard writes 'not completely crazy.' "

Next May was looking Bernhard-Good already as Penguin Classics is reissuing his great late novel Old Masters. And, to keep to the theme of new books from genuinely great Austrian authors never to win the Nobel Prize, in February FSG is publishing Peter Handke's Don Juan: His Own Version in Krishna Winston's translation: "a book about storytelling and its ability to burst the ordinary boundaries of time and space." Do you think they is going for the Audrey Naffeneggernogger market?

UPDATE: Thanks to Gwilym Williams who provides news of the exhibition Thomas Bernhard and the theatre opening next month in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna where, of course, Old Masters is set. The exhibition features:

Numerous documents from the estate of Thomas Bernhard, as well as composition drawings and stage photographs, help to illustrate one of the most exceptional careers in the history of Austrian literature and theatre – one that alternated between spectacular triumphs and headline-grabbing scandals.

New translation of 'The Tin Drum'

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:58:09 +0000

Just out is a new translation, by Breon Mitchell, of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum -- to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Via the literary saloon, my attention is brought to Scott Esposito'a Q & A with Breon about the re-translation (over at Two Words).

The most powerful works of literature compel us to reread them—and often more than once. The effect they produce is a combination of linguistic artistry and richness of meaning. The Tin Drum treats universal themes (the father-son conflict, youth and art, sexual awakening, guilt and atonement) against the background of one of the most terrible moments of European history. The result is a stunning work of art—shocking and provocative, complex and innovative, richly rewarding more...

Neglected Classics at the BBC

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:47:36 +0000

The BBC's Open Book programme looks into some Neglected Classics:

There's nothing that Open Book likes more than browsing and discovering the forgotten treasures of the literary world - books that have been overlooked or become inexplicably out of vogue.

With Neglected Classics we're digging out some of the lost works and forgotten authors of the world of literature.

Ten of our best known authors have nominated the books that they feel most deserve to be re-read and reinstated onto our bookshelves.

We want you to vote for the title that most appeals to you and the winner will be dramatised on Radio 4 in 2010.

Tao Lin: Shoplifting from American Apparel

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Asylum) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:00:01 +0000

Tao Lin is a writer I’ve been meaning to read since seeing praise for his novel Eeeee Eee Eeee. Lin is a self-made phenomenon, seemingly as interested in presentation of himself as in his work, perhaps as keen on ‘being a writer’ as in being a writer: he sold shares in his forthcoming second novel (to be called Richard Yates), and reading his irony-laden interviews, it’s easy to see why various publications have seen in him little but “vacuous posturing” or have considered him “the single most irritating person we’ve ever had to deal with.” Still, the publication of his new novella Shoplifting from American Apparel in Melville House’s Contemporary Art of the Novella series, meant the time to read him was finally here.

A way into Shoplifting from American Apparel might be found in Lin’s blog. Just take a look at that URL. Depending on viewpoint, it is stupid, or funny, or – just possibly – a clever reflection on the replication of everything online: the copy-and-pastes, the clicking links, the lack of original content (nobody, after all, is going to be typing that URL in afresh). More than that, the importance of the tiny details also matches the content of the book.

Shoplifting in its opening, reminded me of the first lines of the first story in Bret Easton Ellis’s The Informers, ‘Bruce Calls from Mulholland’. Lin’s opening shares Ellis’s knowingly blank, mesmerising poetry (“Bruce calls, stoned and sunburned, from Los Angeles and tells me that he’s sorry”) – but without vampires.

Sam woke around 3:30p.m. and saw no emails from Sheila. He made a smoothie. He lay on his bed and stared at the computer screen. He showered and put on his clothes and opened the Microsoft Word file of his poetry. He looked at his email. About an hour later it was dark outside. Sam ate cereal with soymilk. He put things on eBay then tried to guess the password to Sheila’s email account, not thinking he would be successful, and not being successful.

The book continues in this affectless style, which becomes strangely funny when Sam engages in long Gmail chats with his friend Luis.

“I’m going to watch cartoon porn,” said Luis. ”No I’m not. I’m going to look at Indian women. Have you ever fucked an Indian girl.”

“No,” said Sam. ”Native American or Indian.”

“You are awesome,” said Luis. ”Is her picture online.”

“I’m confused,” said Sam. ”What are you talking about.”

“How did you meet her,” said Luis.

“No I haven’t,” said Sam. ”You’re confused.”

“What are you talking about,” said Luis.

“I haven’t had sex with one,” said Sam.

“Okay,” said Luis. ”What are you talking about.”

(The lack of question marks is key, I think, to why I find this funny.) We are in a world where everything is simultaneously uninflected and endlessly reflected upon, which is not surprising given that Sam is a writer very like Tao Lin. ”If I’m having a shitty time with Sheila’s mom I think about writing it in my novel later. I think about that the same time it’s happening.” We only occasionally find out how Sam is feeling. ”I felt emotional today thinking about the past, like a year and a half ago, at Sheila’s house,” he tells a friend. ”But there was nothing I could do with the emotion really. It just went away after a while.” It’s the lack of disclosure which packs a – bit of a – punch.

Everything here is dealt with in the same manner, almost. Sam’s online chats (which seem a timely acknowledgement of how, these days, so many of us get to “know” others – via social networking sites or blogs like this one – without ever meeting them) are presented with no more or less significance than his arrest for shoplifting from American Apparel. Yet the scales don’t quite balance. When Sam is with his friends, who are as languid and ‘alienated’ as he, the dialogue is pertinent because it’s so cutely banal (“I mean, I feel okay, or something”). In the police holding cell, by contrast, Lin introduces genuine ‘characters’ (“‘I don’t hold in farts,’ said a bony Hispanic lying on his stomach”), who invariably speak more fictionally (in a sense, more truthfully, for the purposes of a work of fiction):

“I am going to kill everyone here,” said the drunk man. ”Is everyone okay with that? Is everyone in this cell okay with that?”

Is it a weakness when a book becomes too entertaining? Is Lin adopting a pose, or doing the best he can, and does it matter? The spirit of Shoplifting from American Apparel is that the minutiae of our lives are rarely dealt with in fiction – that the things which take up most of our time are deemed unworthy of writing about. Lin suggests instead that everything is worth writing about, and the result is maddening, saddening and short enough to digest in between reading blog entries and updating your Facebook status.

The Cork-Lined Room: a new Proust blog

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:32:51 +0000

A new Proust-related blog is to launch next Monday:

You know you’ve been meaning to. You’re pretty sure that you’ve got a dusty copy of Swann’s Way sitting around somewhere. You’ve probably even read the book’s famous opening line, “For a long time I would go to bed early,” and thought to yourself, well, not now, maybe some other time.

That time has finally come. Next Monday, Publishing Perspectives is launching The Cork-Lined Room, a blog devoted to the reading, discussion and study of Proust’s masterpiece of 20th century literature, In Search of Lost Time.

Michael Hersch’s “Last Autumn” and Sebald

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:37:06 +0000

David Patrick Stearns of The Philadelphia Inquirer reviews a world premiere composition by Michael Hersch entitled Last Autumn, a work for horn and cello and “built around poetic fragments of the late W.G. Sebald”, according to a publicist for the event. Check out Hersch’s website for more information about the composer, including several video clips of the composer at the piano performing some of his pieces.

Luther Blissett is Wu Ming

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (ReadySteadyBlog) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:34:08 +0000

You may recall Luther Blissett's Q from four or five years back. Well, because the Luther Blissett "shared name" is dead, the Italian anarchists who wrote Q under that moniker now write as Wu Ming. They have a new book out, called Manituana, following their earlier 54. More details about this via the Manituana website.

A Garden of Forking Paths

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Eve's Alexandria) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:42:57 +0000

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary upon them.

There can't be much left to say about Jorge Luis Borges' (1899-1986) slim, astonishing collection of short stories, Fictions (1944) - nor many people who haven't already read it. It's now about six months since I read the book, and I've lost my notes in the interim, but it seems appropriately Borgesian to offer some rambling observations despite all this... :-)

The collections comprises 14 stories, written between 1936 and 1944, plus (in the second edition) 3 additional stories from 1952-3. The ones that I found most compelling all come from the first half of the book, subtitled 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (originally a separate collection, 1941). All of them are fantastical, or told in a fantastical register, infused with love for the imaginary, and a playfulness that merges the real and the surreal at every opportunity. There are portraits of invented worlds, lengthy discourses on fictional authors and made-up languages - even reviews of non-existent books:

It would be impossible to trace the adventures of the remaining nineteen chapters. [...] The story begun in Bombay continues in the lowlands of Palanpur, pauses for a night and a day at the stone gate of Bikanir, narrates the death of a blind astrologer in a cesspool in Benares, conspires in the multiform palace in Kathmandu, prays and fornicates in the pestilential stench of the Machua bazaar on Calcutta, watches the day being born out of the sea from a scribe's stool in Madras
(--'The Approach to al-Mu'tasim')

One story, 'The Library of Babel', contains an entire library of such imagined books: everything ever written, everything that ever could have been written, and every other combination (however nonsensical) of letters besides. "In order for a book to exist, it is sufficient that it be possible", the narrator tells us, and so the library is unimaginably vast: "The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries." No single inhabitant of the Library can ever begin to encompass its contents, of course, or even comprehend their scale, and so they tend to die unfulfilled, decaying amid the "endless" shelves without ever having made much of a dent in their TBR pile this vast repository of possibility. Definitely how I'll go!

It's all done in a style that is at once soaring and densely textured, outlined with a precision that is almost fussy, or would be if it weren't so frequently laconic. Sentence-by-sentence, the prose is packed with information. Perhaps by way of demonstrating his dictum quoted at the top of this post, again and again Borges assembles a wealth of off-beat references (historical, literary, cultural) and apparently tangential detail into bewilderingly rich fantastical canvases. So it is in 'The Approach to al-Mu'tasim', and also in 'Funes, the Memorious', a sort-of eulogy for a chap who spent his life seeing absolutely everything, with the improbable, imaginative accuracy of a poet:

With one quick look, you and I perceive three wineglasses on a table; Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compared them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once.

Even lesser stories, like 'The Shape of the Sword', still contain some wonderfully evocative lines in this vein, capturing whole stories in a phrase: "there were scimitars from Nishapur, in whose frozen crescents the wind and violence of battle seemed to be living on".

Many of Borges' narrators - who are often rather dry, unflappable, drawing-room types, like the librarian of Babel - are apt to fuss over these tiny 'facts' of the fiction. All the more when the playful absurdity of a story's concept is greater, and the landscape being painted is vaster and more colourful; they speak with the scholarly authority of the literary critic or the antiquarian, laying out for us the authentically-dusty trail by which they came across this impossible revelation or that high adventure.

Take the excellent opening story, 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', which not only gives us one of the collection's best and most characteristic lines ("In life, Ashe was afflicted with unreality, as many Englishmen are; in death, he is not even the ghost he was"), but also introduces us to a fictional land in a fictional world - one that becomes more real the more the narrator investigates it. The whole thing is told retrospectively, the history of a personal scholarly endeavour gone live. Having heard an offhand reference to a place called Uqbar ("a region in either Iraq or Asia Minor", it is suggested), the narrator is spurred to try to track the place down, which appears in none of his books, save one.

He discovers that Uqbar is part of a whole different world, called Tlön, which was invented by a mysterious cabal and whose language has no nouns - one of a number of things that makes both it and its metaphysics fundamentally different from our own world.

At first we though that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible act of imaginative license; today we know that it is a cosmos, and that the innermost laws that govern it have been formulated, however provisionally so. Let it suffice to remind the reader that the apparent contradictions of Volume Eleven are the foundation stone of the proof that other volumes do exist.

But it does, nonetheless, work; and by the end of the story, Tlön and its meticulous rules have been embraced so enthusiastically, by a populace eager to follow any semblance of order (this is, we're reminded, the 1940s...), that it has begun to encroach upon our world. Its triumph looks certain, and our narrator rues the day he ever underestimated its power.

Another darkly mannered tale - my favourite, I think - is 'The Lottery in Babylon' (which, as the author himself notes in his prologue, "is not entirely innocent of symbolism"). Set in a - of course - fictionalised version of ancient Babylon, it describes how the titular lottery grew from a small-scale game, occasionally rewarding those who played with prizes (and then, later, sometimes inflicting punishments), to an inscrutable system that permeates every aspect of life in Babylon. So much so, that no-one even questions its utter dominance anymore:

Mine is a dizzying country in which the Lottery is a major element of reality; until this day, I have thought as little about it as about the conduct of the indecipherable gods or of my heart. Now, far from Babylon and its beloved customs, I think with some bewilderment about the Lottery, and about the blasphemous conjectures that shrouded men whisper in the half-light of dawn or evening.

I love that final line, how he gets so much that is suggestive of place and mood into a single phrase. There is such grandeur and strangeness here. The story may be, on one level, an extended metaphor for the operation of chance in human life ("Babylonians [...] obey the dictates of chance, surrender their lives, their hopes, their nameless terror to it"); later, we're told that the "Company" reputed to run the Lottery may not even exist, that the whole "sacred disorder of our lives" may be nothing more binding than tradition, or something as inescapable as random luck. Yet Borges does not stint on the atmospherics or the depths of his thought experiment. And so the world of his story lives:

Like all the men in Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment. Look here - my right hand has no index finger. Look here - through this gash in my cape you can see on my stomach a crimson tattoo - it is the second letter, Beth. On nights when the moon is full, this symbol gives me power over men with the mark of Gimel.

Other stories, while still partaking of the characteristic precision and allusiveness - and, often, the dry narrators - discussed above, dive into visionary feverishness. 'Death and the Compass', about a detective investigating a series of murders that seem linked with occult principles, turns the profusion of information into an expression of a mind losing its centre:

An Irishman tried to convert me to belief in Christ; he would repeat, over and over, the goyim's saying: all roads lead to Rome. At night, my delirium would grow fat upon that metaphor: I sensed that the world was a labyrinth, impossible to escape--for all roads, even if they pretend to lead north or south, returned finally to Rome, which was also the rectangular prison where my brother lay dying, and which was also the Villa Triste-le-Roy. During those nights, I swore by the god that sees with two faces, and by all the gods of fever and mirrors, to weave a labyrinth around the man who had imprisoned my brother. I have woven it, and it has stood firm: its materials are a dead heresiologue, a compass, as eighth-century cult, a Greek word, a dagger, the rhombuses of a paint factory...

Not just a man trying to convert him, but an Irishman; not just a prison, but a rectangular one; not just a cult, but an eighth-century one. All points of reference loop back into the world of the story, and the conceptual world of the narrator, enriching both.

In 'The Circular Ruins', meanwhile, Borges returns to the themes of 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' - but this time his viewpoint character is not watching the imaginary infiltrate the real, but actively participating in it ("He wanted to dream him completely, in painstaking detail, and impose him upon reality. This magical objective had come to fill his entire soul.") Like his author, he creates life through imagination, through words - but in more visceral detail than most novelists generally go in for:

He dreamed the heart warm, active, secret—about the size of a closed fist, a garnet-colored thing inside the dimness of a human body that was still faceless and sexless; he dreamed it, with painstaking love, for fourteen brilliant nights. Each night he perceived it with greater clarity, greater certainty. He did not touch it; he only witnessed it, observed it, corrected it, perhaps, with his eyes. He perceived it, he lived it, from many angles, many distances. On the fourteenth night, he stroked the pulmonary artery with his forefinger, and the the entire heart, inside and out. His inspection made him proud. He deliberately did not sleep the next night; then he took up the heart again, invoked the name of a planet, and set about dreaming another of the major organs.

(This story also has one of the other great lines of the collection: "At first, his dreams were chaotic; a little later, they were dialectical.")

And then some stories are quite simply bonkers (and funny). 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', is perhaps the apogee of the playful idea, serious execution juxtaposition I mentioned above. In it, he spins an elaborate - and, indeed, encomiastic - account of the eponymous man and his epic/quixotic quest to rewrite Don Quixote. Rewrite Don Quixote, that is, in the exact same words as the original: "Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which is surely easy enough - he wanted to compose the Quixote." The idea is, as our scholarly - of course! - narrator is at pains to point out, that being Cervantes and writing Don Quixote in the 17th century was "easy", indeed pretty much an accident of context; whereas setting out, intentionally, to write that precise book again in the 20th century, puts the whole thing in a new light.

Having rubbished Menard's detractors in suitably condescending scholarly fashion, the narrator compares two passages side by side; naturally, they're identical, but the different context in which the second Quixote was produced, in the narrator's eyes, transforms the meaning of the work:

"...truth, whose mother is history, rival of the past, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present and the future's counselor."

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the "ingenious layman" Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hands, writes:
"...truth, whose mother is history, rival of the past, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present and the future's counselor."

History, the mother of truth! - the idea is staggering.

Bonkers. But brilliantly so.

~~Nic

Simon Crump Interview

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Asylum) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 01:00:05 +0000

“If I was born with a name like Simon Crump,” said Chris de Burgh, “I would spend the rest of my life trying to get all that anger and resentment out of me by being very rude about other people.” I recently reviewed Neverland: the Unreal Michael Jackson Story, Crump’s latest book. Normally I feature interviews only with authors who have become firm favourites; but Neverland has seeped its way into my brain since reading it, and I’ve since bought Crump’s other three books, so here we are. As one reviewer said of the book which agitated Chris de Burgh, My Elvis Blackout (2000), “it’s almost impossible to describe it without making it sound like one of the worst books in the world.” So I thought I’d let the author take that risk. Simon Crump is also the author of Monkey’s Birthday (2002) and Twilight Time (2004).

Simon Crump

You say that you were “living with Michael Jackson for three years”  while writing Neverland – yet it’s quite a short book. Can you tell us more about the writing process? Was material jettisoned along the way?

I read every single thing I could find to read about Michael. I listened to all of his music, I subscribed to his fan forums, and I checked the weather and local news in Los Olivos every day. Everything I did for three years, I wondered how Michael might have done it and how he might be feeling if he did. And then I wrote it all down.

For me, editing is everything. Get the stuff down on the page and then make it less worse. Neverland would have been around 500 pages long (rather than the 200 it is now) if I hadn’t hacked it into shape and taken out the ideas which were getting in the way. Most of the last year has been spent trying to make Neverland not shite, and a lot of material has had to be surgically removed for that to happen.

Getting the order of the stories right took forever too. I ended up making a fifteen feet high wall-chart to do that, and as you narrow a book down, it becomes harder and harder to lose the stuff you’ve sweated over.

There was a line in one story where Michael said, ‘If I do one more back flip I’ll go deaf,’ and I still regret not being able to use that.

You also say that you finished writing Neverland a few hours before  Jackson died. Did you resist the temptation to add anything to the book when you heard, or to alter, or soften, your portrayal of Jackson in any way?

You’ll have to take my word for this, but absolutely nothing in the book was changed. There was no point. To be pretentious, the stories changed themselves to a degree, and immediately became more poignant when they were suddenly about somebody who had just died.

The only significant change was that my publishers added ‘The Unreal Michael Jackson Story’ tagline to the Neverland title and brought the publication date forward by around six months. As you would under the circumstances.

Have your portrayals of famous people in fictional settings ever attracted wrath from their fans … or the celebrities themselves?

One of my favourite reviews for My Elvis Blackout was on a German Elvis fansite: ‘We do not know who is this Simon Crump, but he is not welcome in our town.’

Chris De Burgh took exception to being described as a reedy-voiced, ferret-faced little bastard by the Lamar character in My Elvis Blackout, but there was nothing Chris could do about that, because it is a fact.

What really got to him however, was that he was also characterised as being a stigmatic. Which probably isn’t true. Chris posted a long comment about me on his ‘Man On The Line’ website, where he mocked my unfortunate surname and then reminded me in no uncertain terms of his wonderful career, house, wife, children, etc. And my lack of.

I still cry myself to sleep when I remember his cruel words.

Neverland shows a particular interest in how “we love our stars, but we much prefer them broken”, and in the “the grisly ritual of historicization” of Jackson’s life and story. Do you think that Neverland in any way contributes to these problems, even as it addresses them?

Neverland is, and always was intended to be, a sympathetic portrayal of a talented, vulnerable boy called Michael who lived in a big house and was slowly losing his marbles. There was no way I was ever going to try to kick somebody when they were already down. You can sidle up to truth through fiction; it’s not a new idea. If you look at Agee’s Let us Now Praise Famous Men, or the shift between Herr’s Dispatches and his script for Full Metal Jacket, the notion that truth can be distilled and ultimately understood through fiction is right there in your face. And sometimes the only way to tell a sad story is to try to make it funny.

Which doesn’t answer your question at all does it?

You seem to be attracted to writing about simultaneously glamorous  and seedy figures (Elvis, Jackson, and I saw a mention of Cliff  Richard in another of your books), and in the twee and dark sides of  England: your novel Twilight Time has a character who lives in an 1930s English Trust house but swears like a trooper. Your work seems to occupy a unique spot. Do you feel a part of a British (or any other) literary tradition?

I’m interested in celebrity, people with talent, people who get what they want and are still unhappy.

I think every writer would hope that their work occupies a ‘unique spot’ of some description, however tiny and unpopular that place might be.

So far as ‘British’, I don’t know… I’d say ‘English’ really… and the self-loathing we do so well.

I always seem to get lined up with Dan Rhodes and Daren King, both of them more successful, more acclaimed and much better-looking writers than myself, and whose work I admire. I don’t really ‘feel a part’ of anything these days to be honest, I just want to keep writing the stuff I want to write and hope that one day, somebody might like it.

You’ve lectured in fine art and exhibited as an artist specialising in photography for over a decade before turning to writing. How did an interest in visual art lead to (if I can put it this way) such perverse prose? Is there any connection between the two?

All I’ve ever wanted to do is to make pictures.

I used to make ‘real’ pictures, very large and elaborate layered photographic collage affairs, measuring around 30 by 30 feet which never really turned out how I wanted. And each time I made one of the damn things it felt like I was trying to organise a bloody wedding.

It got to the point where after trying unsuccessfully to photograph a local Elvis impersonator in the deep end of a swimming pool, nearly drowning us both and ruining a perfectly good Hasselblad camera into the bargain, I decided to go for ‘the big one’, the greatest picture I was ever going to make, the one I’d been talking about making for years.

I bought a dead horse from a firm called Casualty Cattle in Derbyshire and had it brought back to my studio on a trailer. From that point on, things began to go wrong for me. Horses are actually quite a lot bigger than you think.

Anyway, the ‘great work’ never got made, I realised how ridiculous my practice as an artist had become, and looking back on the whole grisly business, I’m amazed that nobody tried to stop me.

I still make pictures now, much bigger pictures so far as I’m concerned and I don’t have deal with any of the crap I used to struggle with when I was an ‘artist’.

For me, writing is all about making pictures and it’s unfettered by anything but your own imagination. With writing you really can do anything you want. You don’t need any equipment, you don’t need a studio and you don’t even need to get dressed. In my writing, I can control the weather if I want to, how my characters think, how they behave, and what they have to say. And if I get bored with them, I can kill them without having to bag them up and dispose of their bodies. And this time, nobody is going to stop me.

Patrick White’s The Vivisector provides epigraphs for two of your books. What’s your particular interest in White and in this book?

I first read The Vivisector when I was fifteen and now that book is like The Sound of Music for me. I read it every Christmas. It’s a ‘widescreen’ book, awkwardly written in places, but cumulatively relentless in its details and descriptions. I admire White for the same reasons as I do André Gide and particularly Zola. White takes in everything with The Vivisector, a whole life. It’s hard going to read it, but definitely worth the effort. White is also very good on painting. I always think of the artist Sidney Nolan when I read The Vivisector and if you go back a bit and read White’s Riders in the Chariot, the makings of that character are there in Alf Dubbo, the naïve painter who ultimately destroys his work.

Can you recommend an overlooked book for readers of this blog?  (…apart from The Vivisector)

Researching Oblivion by Scott Murfin (if you can find a copy).

I’m currently re-reading alternate chapters of Fan Dabi Dozi: The Krankies, Our Amazing True Story (by the Krankies), Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers and Horse-Racing’s Strangest Races by Andrew Ward, which is an excellent way to mess with your mind without resorting to expensive drugs.

Stefan Grabiński: In Sarah’s House

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Asylum) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:00:40 +0000

After enjoying two titles by CB Editions – Gert Hofmann’s Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl and Christopher Reid’s The Song of Lunch – I went on a spending splurge and bought three more of their buff-backed books. They are to me a wholly admirable small press, publishing such interesting stuff as words-and-pictures meditations on the recession, to this volume of stories by ‘the Polish Poe’. Publisher Charles Boyle also maintains a worthwhile blog.

Grabiński (1887-1936) suffered from tuberculosis all his relatively short life, and a heightened awareness of the corporeal and sensory is everywhere present in the stories selected here. In the opening story ‘White Virak,’ children squeeze up sooty, claustrophobic chimneys, and people break out “in a peculiar rash, which covered our bodies with large white spots like pearly eruptions.” Such is the heightened awareness of the characters that the sensory becomes neatly muddled with the extra-sensory, which is where the Poe comparisons come in. When the narrator of ‘The Grey Room’ experiences disturbing visions, he suggests that they are simply dreams carried through into waking hours, normally blocked by “the misleading senses” and the “intellect in its arrogance. … For the stars exist in daytime too, though outshone by the mighty rays of the sun.” (I was reminded a little here of Maupassant’s superlative The Horla.)

Whatever the source, there are some strange things going on here. In the title story, the longest in the book at 36 pages, the sensory element is lethal. The narrator, a doctor, suffers torments as he sees an old friend fall victim to sexual obsession with Sarah, a sort of succubus who appears to be – literally – draining the life out of him.

Impassively he let me examine him. I put him into my Roentgen apparatus. The rays penetrated him fast, encountering abnormally low resistance. The result went beyond any documented experiment. His body had undergone some terrifying process of reduction: the bone structure showed signs of atrophy; whole layers of tissue had disappeared; entire clusters of cells withered. His weight was that of a child; the iron hands of the scale showed a ridiculously small number. The man was vanishing before my very eyes!

Grabiński has a nose for appropriate settings for his spooky stories: as well as factory chimneys and abandoned villages, two of the stories are set on disused railway lines. In ‘The Dead Run’, retired conductor Wawera cannot stand to see an old stretch of railway line fall into disrepair, so is permitted to take over its care. All goes well until he hires an assistant, who tells him: “It seems to me you are only kidding yourself. There’s nothing to watch over. It’s only a pastime, isn’t it?” This cold blast of someone else’s reality causes Wawera to withdraw into a strange and sad reality of his own.

In the other railway story, ‘Szatera’s Engrams’, heightened awareness returns, this time for a man who “could never come to terms with the eternal passage of men, objects and events.” A series of visions leads him to believe that “no event, even the most trivial, passes and dissolves into nothing. On the contrary: everything is preserved and recorded.” As with ‘The Dead Run’, this can’t end well.

The more straightforward stories here share with M.R. James the sort of dramatic irony which requires a balancing relationship between character and reader: the reader must be as expectant of supernatural activity as the character is ignorant, for the story to work. When the narrator of ‘The Grey Room’ opens by wishing that in his new lodgings “I should be safe from that strange malaise which had forced me to abandon the other place,” the reader rolls his eyes: but simultaneously rolls up his sleeves and prepares to be teased and ultimately satisfied. It’s the desire to find out the precise nature of the menace, and to see our expectations fulfilled, which keeps us reading. And thank heavens for CB Editions and their like: perhaps these are the places where everything worthwhile, however long forgotten, is preserved and recorded.

The secret centre: Blanchot and The Turn of the Screw

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (This Space) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:57:00 +0000

An essay that has stirred me lately is Blanchot's on the importance of Henry James' notebooks in relation to his development as a writer and in particular to his story The Turn of the Screw; "As the years pass", Blanchot writes, "and as James moves in a more deliberate way toward himself, he discovers the true significance of this preliminary work that is precisely not a work."

Endlessly, he speaks of these hours of preparation as "blessed hours," "wonderful, ineffable, secret, pathetic, tragic" instants, or even as a "sacred" time, when his pen exercises "an enchanted pressure," becomes the "deciphering" pen, the magic needle in movement, whose turns and detours give him a premonition of the innumerable paths that are not yet traced.

Blanchot asks: "Why this joy, this passion, this feeling of a wonderful life, which [James] cannot evoke without tears, to the point that his notebooks, "the patient, passionate little notebook becomes ... the essential part of my life"?".

This question and Blanchot's answer stirs me because I have noticed with surprise how much enjoyment I take in making notes; how much more, that is, than in the actual production of a work. Against initial assumptions, I sensed it is too easy to dismiss this as an eternal delay of the real thing or as the unobtainable carrot of perfection, but have never really appreciated why. We all know about Bruce Chatwin's attachment to his Moleskine notebooks, and how he offered a reward to anyone who could return one lost, but this reliance on the information contained within is something other than that addressed by Blanchot. The essay is so rich that it is difficult not to quote from every page, so this will be the betrayal of even a potted summary. In mitigation, the essay itself offers a good summary of the essence of Blanchot's form of engaged reading; a reading that does not lead to or from any theory.

The beginning of the essay looks at possible subjects of The Turn of the Screw before concluding, after various detours, that the subject remains a secret. However, it is not a secret to be found outside the story, in biographical anecdote or in speculation, but at the very centre of the story: its words, or, better, its writing. The subject, Blanchot says, "is – simply – James's art, the way he has of always circling round a secret that, in so many of his books, some anecdote sets in operation, and that is not only a real secret – some fact, some thought or truth that can be revealed – that is not even a detour of the mind, but one that escapes all revelation, for it belongs to a region that is not that of light." The anecdote – which may on the surface be the subject of a traditional reading – appears then only as a means to produce the experience "not of the narrative that he must write but of its reverse, from the other side of the work, the one that the movement of writing necessarily hides and about which [James] is anxious". This then is why notes produce an enchanted pressure. The other side of the work, the secret centre, is written and not written.

What can then be called the passionate paradox of the plan with James is that it represents, for him, the security of a composition determined in advance, but also the opposite: the joys of creation, which coincide with the pure indeterminacy of the work, which put it to the test, but without reducing it, without depriving it of all the possibilities that it contains (and such is perhaps the essence of James's art: each instant to produce the entire work present and, even behind the constructed and limited work that he shapes, to make other forms felt, the infinite and light space of the narrative as it could have been, as it is before any beginning).

How difficult that is, to subject a narrative in each instant to the pressure of its secret centre! Perhaps the ability to do this – perhaps rather to let it occur, involving both guile of craft and stubborn resistance to the easy gifts of craft – is the secret of great writing.

All this may seem typically cranky. Oh yes, here we go, Blanchot is turning a famous ghost story into metafiction. Except Blanchot ends with a remark piece of evidence. What, he asks, does James call "this pressure to which he submits the work, not to limit it but on the contrary to make it speak completely, without reserve in its nonetheless reserved secret, this firm and gentle pressure, this pressing solicitude ... ?". The answer is to be found in the notebooks themselves. James calls it "the very name he chose as title for his ghost story: The Turn of the Screw. 'What can my case of K. B. [a novel that he will not finish] give, once submitted to the pressure and to the turn of the screw?' " "Revealing allusion" Blanchot says:

It confirms to us that James is certainly not unaware of what the "subject" of his story is: this pressure that the governess makes the children undergo in order to tear their secret from them and that they also perhaps experience on the part of the invisible, but that is essentially the pressure of the narration itself, the wonderful and terrible movement that the deed of writing exercises on truth, torment, torture, violence that finally lead to death, in which everything seems to be revealed, in which everything, however, falls back again into the doubt and void of the shadows. "We are working in darkness – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion, our task. The rest is the madness of art."

An amusing irony for me is that this essay is one that has produced not one note in my Moleskine. Re-reading only a few sentences begins to close down the everyday busyness of thought and instead demand a renewed attention to the region that is not that of light, that escapes all revelation. Indeed, having read Blanchot with a patience one can gain only through reading Blanchot again and again, one begins to see this region illuminated both in every creative work and in one's own work to come. More prosaic, shorthanded, ideological, historical or psychological readings, readings of which this blog is inevitably and apologetically one, no matter how convincing they are in their own way, rarely casts the reader so far and so deeply into the sovereign realm of writing.

Note: all quotations are from The Book to Come.

Zone and literary translation

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (This Space) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:56:00 +0000

Introduced by Chad Post of Open Letter Books, Charlotte Mandell reads from her new translation of Mathias Énard's ZONE. From part four onward she talks about literary translation with EJ Van Lanen, also of Open Letters.

Forthcoming: Sebald’s “A Place in the Country”

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 09:13:20 +0000

Somewhat buried in the notices on the copyright page of the recently published novel The Tanners by Robert Walser is the first notice I have seen that an English translation of W.G. Sebald’s Logis in einem Landhaus is in the works. The Tanners opens with Sebald’s essay on Walser called Le Promeneur Solitaire (more in this in a forthcoming post), and the related copyright notice indicates that this essay from Logis in einem Landhaus has been translated by Jo Catling “from the forthcoming work A Place in the Country by W.G. Sebald to be published by Random House.” There is currently no mention of the book on the Random House website.

As I have written earlier, Logis in einem Landhaus (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1998) includes essays on Robert Walser, Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, and Jan Peter Tripp. Undoubtedly influenced by his earlier forays into fiction – Die Ausgewanderten (1992) and Die Ringe des Saturn (1995) – Sebald inserts images of all types into the essays in Logis in Einem Landhaus. In fact, each of the six essays receives a large foldout image in full color. Will Random House spring for the expense to do the same? Until Catling’s translation of Le Promeneur Solitaire, the only essay from Logis in Einem Landhaus to have appeared in English is the one on artist Jan Peter Tripp, which is included in the British and American editions of Unrecounted, the book on which Sebald and Tripp collaborated.

The Flight of a Lifetime

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Eve's Alexandria) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:26:11 +0000

Did I mention that Esther and I are going to New Zealand in two weeks time? No? Well, I haven't really dared talk too much about it for fear of getting over-excited too soon. We booked our flights in January this year, in quite a drunken state - probably far above the safe limit for being in possession of a laptop and a credit card - and have been planning ever since. The whole adventure was prompted by Esther's sister, who has been living and working in Wellington for the last year: in the circumstances it seemed silly not to take the opportunity to visit her and see the land of Lord of the Rings into the bargain. I have always wanted to go, but never really took the idea seriously - its such a long way, and expensive, and I've never travelled beyond Europe. Even now, with just 12 days to go until we take off, I can't quite believe we took the plunge and booked those tickets. Of course, if we'd known when we pressed the 'Buy Now' button on that fateful travel website how many more times we would find ourselves pressing 'Buy Now' over the next nine months, we probably wouldn't have plucked up the courage to do it. Since we're spending three weeks travelling in both the north and south islands there has been an inordinate amount of organising and booking of internal flights (four in total - eep), ferries (one, at present), train journies (two), bus journies (two), bicycle hire (in three places), hostels (too many) and B&Bs (definitely too many). It has been a most stressful and exhilarating experience. Until now I never really understood the 'travel bug'; I have wanted to go places but I haven't relished the thought of long distance holidaying. I get it now. The anticipation, mixed with the uncertainty, mixed with the sense of liberation and adventure.

Having gestated into a fully-grown, fully-planned trip over the last nine months, the time is almost nigh now. And I'm in need of your reading advice. As you can imagine, flying from the UK to New Zealand is a truly long-haul experience: 24 hours in the air, plus lay-over time in the USA. It turns out that choosing which books to take with me is the most difficult last-minute decision I have to make. I have to take into account weight (not too heavy) and length (not too short, not too long), and I have to choose books that I'm willing to leave in NZ at the end of the flight - since I'll have to buy more books to fly home with, I can't afford to cart back those I took with me.

I've decided that two books, each about 500 pages in length, is my quota. Enough to keep me occupied, but not too much to weigh me down. I have to remember that there will also be plenty of inflight entertainment. So far I've managed to decide on one of these books. A few months ago I picked up my first BookCrossing book, left in a local museum, and I've decided it would be fun to pass it along somewhere in New Zealand. It couldn't possibly travel further from York than that! The book is Shirley by Charlotte Bronte, and I'm just in the mood for it. But what about the second book? I've already got a Classic, so I want something contemporary. After an hour of vacillation and browsing I've narrowed it down to three possibilities, and would love your opinion on which I should go with. The choices are:

1. Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz - This is the first book in the Cairo Trilogy and is set in Egypt just after World War I. The blurb describes it as 'a sweeping and evocative portrait of both a family and a country struggling to move towards independence in a society that has resisted change for centuries.' It introduces the Al Jawad family - the tyranical, hypocritical Ahmad, a middle-class shopkeeping who runs his household strictly according to the Qur'an but dallies with the delights of Cairo; his three, very different sons; and his gentle, oppressed wife and cloistered daughters. I've had it on the TBR shelves for a few years now and am drawn by the quote from the Independent on the back which compares Mahfouz with Tolstoy or Proust.

2. The Echo Maker by Richard Powers - I received a copy of the Jan-June 2010 Atlantic catalogue yesterday, and noticed that Powers had moved his new novel and his back catalogue to them. It reminded me how much I want to read this book, which won the National Book Award in 2006. The synopsis sounds part psychological thriller, part commentary on the nature of the self. It is about Mark Schluter, a truck driver who nearly dies in an accident on a remote Nebraska road. When his sister Karin arrives in the aftermath to take care of him he becomes convinced that she is not his sister. Although she looks, acts and sounds like Karin, he is sure she is an identical imposter. Meanwhile, armed with only a note left my an anonymous witness, Mark attempts to learn what happened on the night of his accident. Sounds intriguing, yes? I have read the first paragraph and must admit to being extremely impressed with the prose.

3. Acacia (Book 1: The War with the Mein) by David Anthony Durham - This is probably the most indulgent novel of the three, a high fantasy recommended to me by someone who doesn't ordinarily read fantasy and whose appreciation, therefore, speaks all the louder of its quality. I won't give the synopsis because fantasy tome blurbs are always faintly ridiculous and this one is as impenetrable as usual, but it is enough to say it is almost certainly My Sort of Thing. Epic, blah, defiance of conventions, blah, morally ambigious, etc. You get the gist. While there is a part of me that wants to take Powers or Mahfouz because I want to read those novels desperately, and what better time to tackle a long-term TBR shelf resident than when trapped 30,000 feet in the air, there is another part of me that thinks they're too serious and dense (particularly because my other book is Bronte). Wouldn't a fantasy epic be the perfect anecdote to the trauma of flying and jet-lag?

What do you think? Has anyone read these books and loved/hated them? Votes in the comments much appreciated.

~~Victoria~~

Vivant Denon: No Tomorrow

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Asylum) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 01:00:48 +0000

Back in the mid-1990s, when novella trumpeters such as Pushkin Press and Melville House were not yet born, the grandaddy of cheap paperbacks Penguin quietly issued a series called Syrens. (So quietly, alas, that they quickly disappeared without trace.) These were slim paperbacks with plain covers in contrasting colours, covering a wide range of fiction, poetry and essays such as Kafka’s Aphorisms, Beckett’s Modern Love First Love, Hardy’s Poems 1912-13, and less well known titles by writers including Proust, Wilde, Voltaire and Perec. I noticed recently that two titles have now been issued by NYRB Classics: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter, and this book. My acquisitive nature meant that I picked up most of the Syrens titles at the time, but still haven’t read many of them. Fourteen years from purchase to reading must be a record even for me.

No Tomorrow (Point de lendemain, 1777) was first published anonymously, though its author, born Francois Dominique Vivant de Non, was no self-effacing recluse. The introduction to the Syrens edition tells me that, with interests in art, antiquities and the theatre, he became a favourite of Louis XV and travelled on official service to Russia and Italy as Baron Denon. Returning to revolutionary France, he astutely dropped his title and, before ingratiating himself into Napoleon’s service, survived by his engravings of official uniforms and obscene etchings. This combination of interests in social status and the erotic arts are perfectly preserved in this, his only work of fiction. (Its skimpy length – 38 small pages in the Syrens edition – makes it hard even for a novella publisher to justify as a standalone work. NYRB get around this by presenting a dual language edition.)

Denon was 30 when he wrote No Tomorrow, but his narrator is a mere boy of 20. Nonetheless, the qualities that made one academic sum up Denon in the phrase ”hedonist and scholar” are clearly present in the fiction. It opens with what Milan Kundera praised as “the playful elegance of repetition in the first paragraph of one of the loveliest pieces of French prose.”

I doted on the Countess ______; I was twenty, and I was naive; she deceived me, I was incensed; she deserted me. I was naive, I missed her; I was twenty, she forgave me; and because I was twenty, was naive, and, though still deceived, no longer deserted, I believed that lover was never more loved than I and I was therefore the happiest man alive.

But this dizzying opening – I had to reread it a couple of times – is deceptive. The Countess does not feature in the story. Instead, our hero’s journey begins when he encounters her friend, Madame de T____, in the theatre. “‘I see,’ she said, ‘that I shall have to rescue you from your solitary splendour. You look quite ridiculous all alone. Like patience upon a monument!’”

Through subtlety and sleight of hand, Madame de T_____ persuades the young man to accompany her home, where she is to meet with her estranged husband. “I was afraid that I should be dreadfully bored alone in his company.” Finally, left alone, they fall to the inevitable:

Now, kisses are like secrets. One leads to another, they quicken, they grow more heated by the process of accumulation. And so it proved now. The first had scarcely been given when a second followed, then a third, each crowding closely on the heels of the one before, interrupting our talk and then replacing it entirely, until at last they hardly left any path for our sighs to escape by.

The story proceeds by further passion and subterfuge, a slinky, cynical treat. Hedonism and libertinage are the order of the day: no tomorrow! (Though an earlier English edition translated the title, oddly, as Never again!) Madame urges her boy to believe in “the power of pleasure, our sole guide and only excuse!”, while he seeks an emotional crutch for this new love affair, fearing that “unbridled passion murders niceness of feeling. We run toward pleasure and ride roughshod over the delights which precede it. A ribbon is snapped, a bodice is ripped: desire leaves its mark in its wake and soon the idol of our heart looks uncommonly like its victim.” However he, by cuckolding his own mistress, is a player here as much as a victim.

It is only later, when he is permitted to enter into her highly symbolic “secret chamber”, that our young man learns just how ruthless Madame can be. At one point, as she initiates him in the rituals of cynical love, he “felt that a blindfold had been removed from my eyes, but failed to observe that a new one had been put in its place.” Blindfolds and masks are worn by all the players in this society, so concerned with surface that they decline to acknowledge their own feelings. David Coward, in an introduction to his translation in this Syrens edition, calls it “a masterpiece, as clear and self-confident as a line etched on glass with a very sharp diamond.” With its beautiful prose, seductive eroticism, precociously mannered methods, and clever ending, No Tomorrow itself resembles its central femme fatale, about whom another of her lovers cheerfully tells the hero: “She provokes, she arouses, but she feels nothing herself: that woman is a block of marble.”

Ramifying into life

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (This Space) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:12:00 +0000

Dan Green, his country's most durable defender of the merely literary, has some tough things to say about Ron Rosenbaum's response to Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura.

It expresses more interest in the "process of creation" than the creation itself. [...]

Rosenbaum makes this more or less plain when he suggests that "Encrypted within [Nabokov's] words, encoded indecipherably, ambiguously, is the equivalent of the secret of lightning. Something akin to the secret code of higher human consciousness, the DNA, the genome of genius." I have difficulty believing Nabokov himself would have had much patience with this sort of pomposity. He made fun, in his work, of the notion of "codes" ("Signs and Symbols," Pale Fire) and he was always critical of interpretation that wandered outside the text itself, into biography or psychology or "intention." "Higher human consciousness" was not the subject of Nabokov's books, encrypted or not. The manipulation of language in aesthetically pleasing ways was his concern.

While I agree with everything Dan says, the final sentence waved a red flag at me: "The manipulation of language in aesthetically pleasing ways was his concern." Moving closer, I think it's clearer why it stands out.

If Nabokov warned against biography, psychology and intention, then his particular concern for language should be of no undue concern to his readers. Instead, we must attend to what appears before us and examine how, if at all, this concern manifests inside the text. Dan writes that Nabokov "made fun" of codes in Signs and Symbols, a story of two parents' relationship with their grown-up son. Here's the opening paragraph:

For the fourth time in as many years they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to bring a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind. He had no desires. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his abstract world. After eliminating a number of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the gadget line for instance was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle: a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars.

There's already something comic about fruit jellies in such a scenario, and something pathetic about the son who, like a zealot obsessed with scripture, sees signs and symbols where there are none, or at least not as many as he suspects. But isn't this as horrible and disastrous as it is anything else, such as fun? Pleasure in the story comes from the tension evoked by the distance between text and reality; yes, an aesthetic pleasure. Only it's more than that. It ramifies into life. We are, like the son, condemned to interpret. After you read the final line, the next ringing phone will not be the same.

What this leads to is awareness of the ambiguity and ambivalence of reading. An awareness that enables Nabokov the writer to exceed his reputation as merely a beautiful prose stylist. The tragedy recurs when Humbert Humbert cries out in his prison cell: "Oh my Lolita, I have only words to play with". This is more than making fun of a criminal; it traces the tragic in writing – a tragedy that is tragic inasmuch as it is indistinguishable from fun. Humbert writes his memoir in such ornate language that only the most literal-minded reader (most probably the one more interested in the bedroom scenes than the story) can fail to realise that what is before him are words, and words alone.

So why is this – no pun intended – significant for reading and writing? What Dan's righteous take down of Rosenbaum emphasises for me is the absence of the disastrous in contemporary US literature, the disaster that ramifies out of fun or beauty and into life. At present US literary culture appears to be one in which gushing pieces that grab the most convenient alibi for discussing literature can guarantee themselves the front pages and the ability to set the literary agenda. (In this way it is identical to Britain). There seems to be a huge gulf between say, on the one hand, the studiously pitched levity of Steven Augustine's comment to Dan's post and, on the other, David Foster Wallace's suicide note, yet very little in-between. Tao Lin's novel Eeeee eee eeee, for example, may be an exception to the rule.

The Booker Prize Announcement...

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Eve's Alexandria) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:24:09 +0000

UPDATED, 7th October: Justice has been done. Hurray!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

...is tonight, and I'm sure I won't be the only blogger tuning in to the radio or the television to find out the winner with bated breath. I've read five of the six shortlisted authors this year, which probably means that the book I've missed (Simon Mawer's The Glass Room) will win. Personally I think the field is incredibly strong this year, and I'm not just saying that because I'm a historical fiction junkie. Yes, Mantel, Byatt, Waters and Foulds have written great historical fiction (in Mantel's case, magisterial) but their novels also represent great fiction generally.

I don't think you'll be surprised to hear that Wolf Hall is my favourite to win. I feel quite strongly about it - it feels necessary. I read an interview with Hilary Mantel in the Guardian in which she described her despair when a particular novel failed to make the Prize shortlist several years ago. She wept because it seemed impossibly unfair. I think I would feel the same; although there would be less weeping and more raging on my part. Saying that, there is no book I have read that I absolutely do not want to win. I think I would be disappointed if The Quickening Maze took it, simply because I feel Foulds can and should do better. For the rest, I'd cheer for Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger (her best book to date I think) if it won; and I can see the real merits of both A.S. Byatt and J.M. Coetzee. But my pleasure would be strained, because I would be thinking of that week reading Wolf Hall and the intense, continuing and probably permanant pleasure it gave me.

Here are the books I've read in order of preference:

1. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

2. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

3/4. The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt tied with Summertime by J.M. Coetzee

5. The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

We shall see if the judges agree with me...

~~Victoria~~

Sarah Waters: The Little Stranger

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Asylum) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:29:42 +0000

The Little Stranger is another book that I read only because of its Booker shortlisting (though I’m not sure that’s a good explanation in itself). I’d read her last two (also Booker shortlisted) novels, Fingersmith and The Night Watch, and liked them to varying degrees without doing anything mad like declaring myself a fan, or hanging onto them. These tempered expectations meant that her new novel turned out to be a pleasant surprise.

The Little Stranger is tagged on the blurb as “a chilling ghost story”, which is both true and misleading. In an interview, Waters said that while in the process of writing the book, she became ’stuck’ and decided then on the introduction of a ghost. Her primary interest initially was to explore the social changes in Britain after the second world war.

She does this very effectively. The story centres on Hundreds Hall in Warwickshire, home to the Ayres family. Our narrator, Dr Faraday, is a local family doctor, who worked his way up from “humble beginnings” to his present status, and is worried that the imminent introduction of the National Health Service by the postwar Labour government will send him crashing back down. Faraday’s mother worked at Hundreds Hall when he was a child, and he can still remember his first impression of the house:

[It] struck me as an absolute mansion. I remember its lovely ageing details: the worn red brick, the cockled window glass, the weathered sandstone edging. They made it look blurred and slightly uncertain – like an ice, I thought, just beginning to melt in the sun.

By the time Ayres returns to the Hall, called in the course of his work to attend to a sick maid, the melting is well and truly underway. Living in the house now are Mrs Ayres, and her twenty-something children Caroline and Roderick. With just two domestic staff, the fabric of the house (and spirit of the household) is crumbling, which Faraday attributes in part to the loss of the working class staff: “after two hundred years, those people had begun to withdraw their labour, their belief in the house; and the house was collapsing, like a pyramid of cards.”

There is another problem too. A belief begins to spread through the Ayreses that Hundreds Hall is haunted, perhaps by the spirit of Mrs Ayres’ first daughter Susan, who died aged seven. The story that unfolds tells of the effect that this belief has on the family, the house and on Faraday himself.

There is a great deal to like in The Little Stranger, in particular Waters’ almost miraculous ability to grab the reader and not let go through the long passages of spooky activity in the house. It is also a portrayal of those postwar social changes referred to above, such as the decline of the landed gentry: the upper middle classes, like the Ayres family, are haunted by the spectre of the rising working class, their Labour government, their welfare state. “What’s left for an old family like that in England nowadays?” The land around Hundreds Hall is sold off to make ends meet, and council homes are built up. Mrs Ayres feels that her world “is dwindling to the point of a pin.” Roderick tips closer and closer to the edge:

‘I think they’d like nothing better than to hang us all from the mainbrace; they’re just waiting for Attlee to give them the word. He probably will, too. Ordinary people hate our sort now, don’t you see?’

Faraday’s own relationship with the Ayres and their “sort” is complicated. He envies them their elevated status and resents them for allowing their house to fall into disrepair. He resents too his own origins in “labouring stock”, and is embarrassed by how, as a young man, he came to feel ashamed of his parents. Even his respectable occupation can’t obscure some kind of self-loathing: “I’m a nobody. People don’t even see me half the time. They see ‘Doctor’. They see the bag.”

The weakness of the book for me was the repeated hints dropped by Waters about the true source of the Ayres’s problems. It’s so heavily signposted that there is little room for interpretation, except around the edges of things like knowledge and intent. It closes down possibilities even as it opens them up. This, combined with the just-so symbolism and despite the room for discussion which is likely to make this a book group favourite, helps give The Little Stranger the neatness and cosiness of what some call ‘establishment literary fiction’. Nonetheless I enjoyed reading it, not least because Waters is a great storyteller who pulls the reader through 500 pages a lot more smoothly than Hilary Mantel does (or than Simon Mawer does through 400).

It struck me that The Little Stranger has some similarities with Patrick McGrath’s 1996 novel Asylum, not just in the postwar setting or the narrative by a medical man (an authority figure in whom we automatically place our trust), but also in the psychological playout of the story. However Asylum, I believe, is more subtle and complex (Jonathan Coe, a Booker judge in 1996, recently regretted that it didn’t win the prize then) … and at 250 pages, is also half the length.

Please note: if you haven’t read The Little Stranger, the comments below contain spoilers

Kiefer and Sebald

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 15:57:45 +0000

Anselm Kiefer, Buch (The Secret Life of Plants) mixed media on lead

Tim Hill has written a nice article in the New Statesman that references similarities between W.G. Sebald and the painter Anselm Kiefer. Recommended reading.

Deforming the medium: Summertime by JM Coetzee

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (This Space) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 09:39:00 +0000

[G]reat, groundbreaking books teach you how to read and good books remind you how. The best book to teach you how to read Proust's In Search of Lost Time is Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

Mark Thwaite's assertion is as simple and true as it is difficult to accept. After all, for the clearest understanding one has nowhere to go except back into the book. The claim prefaces a review of JM Coetzee's latest novel Summertime and, in listening to how the book asks to be read, it stands alongside the majority of reviews. The final line of The Complete Review's summary for example expresses the difficulty of its acceptance with a disconcerting conjunction: "Summertime is fascinating, but leaves one very uneasy -- about everything from Coetzee himself to the very idea of fiction and autobiography." Shouldn't that "but" be "and"? Isn't it fascinating precisely because it shudders the earth beneath one's reading seat?

However confounding the "but" is, it may offer an insight into the apparent schism in contemporary literary appreciation. That is, not between genre fiction and the genre that dare not speak its name – what China Miéville calls LitFic – but over something more specific. In the same paragraph as the one quoted above, The Complete Review offers another curious judgement: "Coetzee is an incredibly talented writer and a master craftsman -- and, yes, this is a meticulously crafted book, and one of [Summertime's] weaknesses is that it is so obviously a construct." The key words here being "so obviously". Perhaps the schism then is between those who are troubled by fiction as a construct and those who are not. One has to ask the question begged: how might this novel have been less of a construct; so obviously less of a construct? Of course, one can ask it of every novel.

The question is clearly one that troubles JM Coetzee, the writer currently living in Australia. In contrast, it seems not to be a question that troubled John Coetzee, the dead object of this novel's attention. His ex-lover and ex-colleague Sophie Denoël, one of the people interviewed by his fictional biographer, offers her opinion of the man's novels:

I did not read all of them. After Disgrace I lost interest. In general I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion. That's all.

Such withering criticism is perhaps the clearest guidance to the reader and to the novel itself. By including it, spoken from the mouth of someone both close and distant to the author, the critic is disarmed. How can one criticise a book that pre-empts the worst one can offer? Perhaps this is why the consensus has been welcoming albeit distracted by a witless need to tease out the differences between author-writer and author-character.

The consensus is a conspicuous reversal of that on Coetzee's previous novel Diary of a Bad Year which is, however, similar in many ways to Summertime, only more formally adventurous. Despite technical differences, Diary of a Bad Year is also driven by the relation between the self and the world; specifically, and to paraphrase my own review, an investigation into what it means to be singular in a plural universe. To put it another way, it investigates the demand made by Sophie Denoël for a deformation of the constructed medium in order not only "to say what has never been said before" but also to minimise the construction of a literary defensive wall in order to say what he cannot say in any other form.

Unsurprisingly, Diary of a Bad Year failed to make the shortlist for Man Booker Prize and was criticised for including apparently self-indulgent mini-essays under the title "Strong Opinions". Giles Foden's shocking inability or refusal to read the book as it asks to be read was the extreme representative of its negative reception; a reception that would be fair were it able to comprehend the prolepsis inherent to the novel itself. But such a reading is apparently beyond respectable literary discourse. The schism revealed then seems to be simpler, more straightforward, and thereby somewhat more demanding if it is to be closed. While at first the bizarre suggested answer is that Coetzee should become less talented, less of a craftsman, and thereby enable his books to match genre expectations, it is rather that the reader must do as the author has done, to open himself to the force and logic of writing.

In Tokyo

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 04:27:04 +0000

In Tokyo. No posting for another week.

Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Asylum) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:00:22 +0000

I approached Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall with great trepidation, and decided to read it only because of its Booker shortlisting. Aside from the length, my concern was the same one I have for most historical novels: that for full appreciation of the book, a good deal of background knowledge will be required of me that I don’t have. For example, would it be a problem that before reading about Wolf Hall, I’d never heard of Thomas Cromwell? Yes and no.

Wolf Hall covers, with a little fringing around the edges, half a dozen years in the reign of Henry VIII, as he flexes his constitutional muscle to break with the Catholic Church – partly because he wants its money and assets in England for the Crown, but mostly because he wants a male heir to prevent another war of succession. His wife Katherine of Aragon cannot give him a son – at least that’s how he views it – so he wants to end his marriage and father a child with Anne Boleyn. (“If only he wanted something simple,” says his Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of York, Cardinal Wolsey. “The Philosopher’s Stone. The elixir of youth. One of those chests that occur in stories, full of gold pieces.”) However it is not Henry who is the central character, but Thomas Cromwell, his fixer: “the inconsolable Master Cromwell: the unknowable, the inconstruable, the probably indefeasible Master Cromwell. … He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.” Cromwell appears in every scene of the book, referred to most of the time simply as “he”, which is an effective technique in training the reader to his viewpoint.

So, included in the fringes are Cromwell’s youth – son to the violent Walter, and subsequent runaway – and his quick learning. “You don’t get on by being original. You don’t get on by being bright. You don’t get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.” Cromwell’s cunning is present at a young age, when we see how he escapes from England to France:

He sees three elderly Lowlanders struggling with their bundles and moves to help them. The packages are soft and bulky, samples of woollen cloth. A port officer gives them trouble about their documents, shouting into their faces. He lounges behind the clerk, pretending to be a Lowland oaf, and tells the merchants by holding up his fingers what he thinks is a fair bribe. ‘Please,’ says one of them, in effortful English to the clerk, ‘will you take care of these English coins for me? I find them surplus.’ Suddenly the clerk is all smiles. The Lowlanders are all smiles; they would have paid much more. When they board they say, ‘The boy is with us.’

Cromwell begins his journey to Henry’s court as aide to Cardinal Wolsey. Initially a favourite of the king, instrumental in the dissolution of the monasteries and the crushing of heresies such as those who would translate the Bible into English, Wolsey “never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting, shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities.” However his power begins to exceed him: “[Wolsey] used to say, ‘The King will do such-and-such.’ Then he began to say, ‘We will do such-and-such.’ Now he says, ‘This is what I will do.’” He is accused of “running a country within the country” but the king is loyal to him until it becomes clear that Wolsey cannot deliver the “good verdict” from the Pope that he wants: an annulment of his marriage. Wolsey is doomed. Cromwell remains loyal (“What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold”) but is determined not to “go down with the Cardinal” – the only thing that Thomas Cromwell believes in, it seems, is Thomas Cromwell.

He ingratiates himself with Henry – the scenes where they come to know one another are among the most electrifying in the book – and becomes a councillor; Henry, in his turn, becomes Cromwell’s second surrogate father after Wolsey, and Cromwell is utterly invested in his life of ’service’: “I shall not be like Henry Wyatt and say, now I am retiring from affairs. Because what is there, but affairs?” He is not popular with everyone, as he drafts the Act in Restraint of Appeals (…this realm of England is an Empire…). “Until now Master Cromwell’s talent was for moneylending, but now he finds he has a talent for legislation too – if you want a new law, just ask him.”

This is the spine of the story, but there is much commotion around the edges, and so many characters that, even with frequent recourse to the five-page dramatis personae, I never did work out the difference between Lords Norfolk and Suffolk, or several of the other cuckolds, in-laws and court hangers-on. My usual weakness as a reader is attention to detail while overlooking the larger themes, but here even the detail was difficult to grasp at times, though the telling – sometimes serious, sometimes playful – was always admirable. Mantel makes the reader work but does not withhold rewards, and the court scenes, forever at the edge of my knowledge, trod such an expert line that ignorance acted to stimulate my interest rather than freeze it. This is a huge story, after all, of England remaking itself, and the conflict between monarchy and clergy, from Thomas More to Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury. When Henry gets his ‘divorce’ (sorry to spoil it for you):

Warham shuffles up the to king. ‘Henry,’ the Archbishop says, ‘I have seen you promote within your own court and council persons whose principals and morals will hardly bear scrutiny. I have seen you deify your own will and appetite, to the sorrow and scandal of Christian people. I have been loyal to you, to the point of violation of my own conscience. I have done much for you, but now I have done the last thing I will ever do.’

“The English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island,” we are told. But there is plenty of destruction back home too. When Anne is pregnant, with what Henry hopes will be a son, “he is the beginning, the start of something, the promise of another country.” Wolf Hall gives us the politics and the personalities – even though the invention of those personalities must be a matter of some speculation, and not for an historical ignoramus like me to rely on. The old country still exists, and Mantel relishes the opportunity to pile on details of the dirt and disease rife at the time, with even those closest to Cromwell succumbing to ‘the sweat’: “one day walking and talking and next day cold as stones, tumbled into their Thames-side graves and dug in beyond the reach of the tide.”

The re-formation of England the book describes (“a miserable country, home to an outcast and abandoned people”) is inextricably linked with the Reformation running in parallel. Henry moves from crushing heresy against Rome to creating a church in his own image. The issues that exercise the reformers include literal interpretation of biblical scriptures: the origin of Purgatory, the transubstantiation of bread and wine. Cromwell finds that he cannot always rely on the Bible: “he knows the whole of the New Testament by heart, but find a text: find a text for this.” Similarly, Wolf Hall denies the possibility of knowing everything from a line-by-line reading of a book. “Some of these things are true,” we are told,” and some of them are lies. But they are all good stories.”

Faded, with a Core of Steel

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Eve's Alexandria) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:27:14 +0000

Celeste's back was curved but, like the Nautilus, she had a core of steel. This building inspired by a spiral shell with a series of air-filled chambers was the fulfilment of a dream.

I read Shena Mackay's Orange Prize-shortlisted Heligoland (2003) quite a while ago - six months, give or take - but my inner completist has never quite let go of the urge to write about it, however distant many of its details now are. It was one of my reading failures this year, and so this brief post is intended as a gesture towards understanding and expressing my frustration with it. (The short answer, of course, is that it's Not For Me; but I want something more than that.) I also suspect more than one of my co-bloggers here at EA would like it rather more than I did, so perhaps they'll find this piques their interest. :-)

The story centres on Rowena Snow, a mixed-race woman (Indian/Scottish) whose life, we learn through flashbacks and reflections during the main narrative, has been more rootless than most: she grew up at a boarding school, a year-round resident of the sort of deconstructed, faintly hippy-ish establishment where children are encouraged to pursue 'projects', get in touch with their feelings, and talk to their teachers as equals. For Rowena, who has very little sense of who she is or where she belongs, it's all a bit of a disaster. After the closure of the school, she drifts into aimless, unassertive adulthood, and ends up working for an agency that provides home carers for the elderly and infirm. Being compassionate and well-meaning, it suits her, but proves an emotional trap for one so self-effacing and naive.

She can see Pipe-Cleaner Man lying in his curtained front room. It's a parallel universe, a world of hospice transport that doesn't turn up, meals on wheels, painful infirmities and indignities. Days lit by low-wattage light bulbs and warmed by one-bar electric fires and measured out in pills and dressings and patent remedies, at the mercy of a procession of strangers earning less than the minimum wage.

Passages like this had some resonance for me, having recently watched my late grandmother struggle against the dual tide of illness: physical suffering, and the slow, poisonous decline of autonomy that accompanies it. But it isn't what the book is about, except as a thematic parallel. As the novel begins, Rowena is shocked out of her life when she is falsely accused of stealing from one of her clients, and summarily fired.

Numb and half-broken, she makes the sort of dotty lifestyle change that people only really do in literary fiction: she packs up her stuff and invites herself to live in the Nautilus, a South London architectural folly (shaped like its underwater namesake) that was once home to a bohemian/utopian community. It was, we're told, "designed as a working community at the heart of the wider community", and Rowena imagines it as a sort of promised land of the self, the Heligoland of which she dreamed as a lonely child. But, left behind by the times, the Nautilus is a washed-up, crumbling shadow of its former self:

age was corroding its complex interior and, by the start of the new millennium, there were few visitors, the ultramarine piano in the Nautilus Bar was dumb and all the original residents but Celeste and Francis Campion were long gone, and ideas and ideologies were broken glass and crumpled paper

The remnants of its community, rattling around its many rooms, are matriarch Celeste Zylberstein, who designed the place with her late husband Arkady, somewhat flaky wide-boy Gus Crabbe, and ageing poet Francis Campion:

The covers of Francis' books, faded to the colour of dusty tea and embossed with the Nautilus Press colophon, enclosed experimental verse and political satire as well as lyric and pastoral poems, but now that the world had gone beyond satire, he saw how his youthful absurdism was but a product of his era, odd-shaped piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

Rowena soon installs herself as cook, cleaner and all-round low-key cheerleader for the Nautilus, finding a certain freedom in her eagerness to please others, if not yet - stop me if you've heard this one before - finding herself. It's an intriguing set-up, and Mackay's descriptions evoke the fading ambience very well; some of her imagery is quite lovely, helping ground the story in its vivid surroundings and its characters' moods (like this, from Rowena's childhood: "The child's response was shaken out of her in a shuddering lamb's bleat as home at last they came to the cottage friezed with icicles").

And yet, as I so often find with literary fiction of this type, the story told in this prose is... dishearteningly banal, and overly familiar. It's another story of mildly-unpleasant people being mildly unpleasant to each other, and eventually reaching mild emotional epiphanies in the "sullen south London rain". It has touches of humour, some mild frissons of peril, and Rowena was well drawn, but above all the narrative often feels smothered in that curious, dissatisfying mixture of voices - character and authorial - that reminds me of something like Arlington Park, by Rachel Cusk. Take this, Rowena's crisis when faced with a potential competitor for what she sees as her place at the Nautilus:

"You must leave at once. Now. Before it's too late."

"How melodramatic! You sound like some ghastly horror film," Izzie titters, but smooths the Elastoplast protectively over her grazes. "What on earth do you mean?"

Rowena can't say that this woman with her crazy radiant simper has hijacked her own initial responses to Celeste and the Nautilus, and poses a threat to the balance of the little family of Celeste and Francis, Gus and Rowena. It is imperative that she remove her netball player's knees from Rowena's territory before they become fixtures.

I love the creative snark of "crazy radiant simper" and the bathos of "netball player's knees" - both feel like Rowena's observations, and have an infectious ring to them besides. But "hijacked her own initial responses" and "poses a threat to the balance" sound too much (to me) like an author interpreting her character for us, leading us to conclusions we'd already reached. Already not really grabbed by the drifting, rather dreary story, I began to feel stifled by the ponderous over-analysis.

There are moments when the obsessive second-guessing works; I much preferred the reflexive but raw self-doubt of something like this (again from Rowena):

"I could tell, from the way she trusts you."

But I'm only pretending to be nice so everybody will like me.

But like I said, maybe it's just Not For Me.

~~Nic

William Trevor: Love and Summer

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Asylum) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:00:43 +0000

I’ve never understood the high praise which seems to greet each new book by William Trevor. Having read a couple of collections of his stories, and three longer works (My House in Umbria, Felicia’s Journey, The Story of Lucy Gault), I’ve thought of him as an efficient sketcher of lives of quiet desperation, but otherwise – well, otherwise I haven’t thought of him much. Nonetheless I am wildly susceptible to hype, and when his Booker-longlisted novel Love and Summer was published to critical delight, I thought I might like to read it after all. This feeling was galvanized when I saw Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent of the Irish Times, enter an hysteria of grief over its omission from the shortlist. In a short article, she laments the loss no fewer than eight times. (She also gets wrong the name of Hilary Mantel’s last novel as well as the number of novels Mantel has published, and mistakenly calls The Quickening Maze Adam Foulds’ fiction debut. Grief does funny things to people.)

Love and Summer is set in the fictional Irish town of Rathmoye around the late 1950s. It depicts a tiny ripple or flaw in the fabric of an otherwise eventless summer.

Compact and ordinary, it was a town in a hollow that had grown up there for no reason that anyone knew or wondered about. … Nothing happened in Rathmoye, its people said, but most of them went on living there.

In fact, “that nothing happened was an exaggeration.” The book shows that things have been happening to people, even if not spoken about, for decades: and they will go on happening. As the book begins, Mrs Connulty, the matriarch of a family central to life in Rathmoye, has died. The late Mrs Connulty “had been disappointed in her husband and her daughter,” and even her beloved son, Joseph Paul, did not achieve his ambition to become a priest. “The vocation slipped away from him, lost beneath the weight of his mother’s doubt that he would make a success of the religious life. In the end her doubt became his own.” His sister, whom we know only as ‘Miss Connulty’, is buttoned-up, for reasons initially unspecified (“She had been young when the trouble happened. She hadn’t let herself go when it was over. She hadn’t since”).

The Connultys are not the only family haunted by the past. Dillihan, the farmer, is crippled with guilt and shame over the death of his wife and child many years ago (“on Sundays he went to early Mass because it was less crowded”), but has since remarried, to Ellie, a girl introduced as a housekeeper: “We’ll try her so,” he said to his sisters. Ellie, for her part, felt “it was a kindness when she had been offered marriage; it would have been unkind on her part if she’d said no.” But she is young and perhaps with unacknowledged ambitions of a life greater than Rathmoye can offer, and feels with a special heaviness the weight of its stagnant days:

She sat in the yard in one of the kitchen chairs, with her tea and the Nenagh News. A pickaxe had been found in the boot of a car when its driver was arrested, declared drunk. Ore had been discovered near Toomyvara; Killeen’s Pride had won twice at Ballingarry. Top prices were being paid for ewes.

This seemingly gentle depiction or rural life even affords a moment of comedy – more against the reader’s expectations than the town’s way of life – when after the funeral, Ellie can’t go back to the Connulty house because “the artificial-insemination man was expected and she’d said she’d be there.” It is Ellie who notices a stranger in the town during Mrs Connulty’s funeral. He is Florian Kilderry, from nearby Castledrummond. Half-Italian, with artist parents (both dead), he’s an exotic bird in Rathmoye, cycling around the town taking photographs.

Much more than that would reveal the heart of the story, though the central connection is not difficult to guess. So it is, as expected, to some extent a story of quiet desperation, as Florian, “in spite of tenderness, in spite of affection for a girl he hardly knew, [...] made a hell for her.” But it is full of lovely things, fleeting moments such as the sequence of thoughts about Florian which distract Ellie from her conversation, and a series of intercut scenes where Connulty brother and sister work through their own reflections on Miss Connulty’s determination to come between Florian and Ellie. It would be nice to say that this is because her mother has just died, and grief does funny things to people, but this hunger in Miss Connulty is a sort of vicarious revenge for what was done to her in her youth: “the time for pain was over, yet her wish was that it should not be, that there should always be something left – a wince, a tremor, some part of her anger that was not satisfied.”

As a tale of how the past and future unfold from the present, and how each affects the other, it could be predictable – to some extent, is – but the slightness is appropriate to the subject matter of high emotions played out in a low-key style, and of unspoken memories. A weak link is the character of Orpen Wren, an elderly man with a dementia-type condition, who circuits the town seeking answers and getting nowhere (“it can’t be much of a joke,” says one of the townspeople of him, “your memory turned inside-out for you”). His primary purpose as a character seems to be providing a sitcom-style moment of anticipation and bathos, when his confused words strike Dillahan with horror. However he does remind us that memories turned inside-out might be less troublesome than those which are so strong and true, that they continue to cause pain and problems for decades to come.

The Vaulted Sky

no-reply@britlitblogs.com (Eve's Alexandria) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:01:15 +0000

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

I first read John Clare during my first semester at University - our syllabus was a whistle-stop tour of poetry from Chaucer through to Heaney. We were reading four or five poets a week, and Clare came lumped with Burns, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Not surprising that his peasant pastorals were passed swiftly over in such illustrious company. I don't remember very much of what was said on him in lectures; at least, not about his poetry. But I have always remembered a little of his biography: the son of a poor illiterate labourer, born in a nowhere Northamptonshire village, who briefly took the world by storm with his poetry of rural life before ending his life broken and forgotten in an asylum. And then there is his incredible walk - penniless, half mad and alone - all the way from a private asylum in Essex back to Helpston in Northamptonshire. It is a truly iconic moment in literary biography.

Adam Fould's second novel, The Quickening Maze, takes Clare for its strange and wonderful lynch pin. It is set in 1840/1 (just before the famous walk), the action taking place at Dr. Matthew Allen's Beach Hills Asylum in the Epping Forest where Clare was held between 1837 and 1841. The plot, if the novel can be said to have such a thing, is beautifully simple, charting the inexorable decline of Clare's mental state and the unloosing of his self-hood which categorised his later life. His story brackets the novel, which opens with a prologue recalling his childhood and ends on the road to Helpston. Gathered inbetween is a cast of characters, some real historical figures, some not: Alfred Tennyson, for example, in mourning for his beloved friend Arthur Hallam, the Allen family and a religious ecstatic called Margaret. But Foulds, like Clare, is a poet and this is a poet's book: it is about words, not events. What happens in it is not really the point. I mean, there are incidents (a woman is raped; another is courted by a bluff manufacturer; a business investment goes horribly wrong) and historical thematics, but these things are not the point. Its focus, its langorous movement, is a homage to one form in the guise of another. Prose serving poets and poetry.

I find poetry difficult; it doesn't make immediate sense to me. Which is not to say that I can't appreciate it - I have studied poets and, with help and effort, found inspiration and understanding. It doesn't come naturally though; it is not the same as when I read prose, and fall in love instantly. This probably means that I am a limited reader, but it also means that I very much appreciate what Foulds' does in translating one medium into another in The Quickening Maze.* It almost seems like a cliche to say that it is 'beautifully written', so instead I will say that it is sensitively and thoughtfully written. For the most part it is about the experience of life through words, about how language - the words we conceive and what we understand by them - shape us. Thus there is Clare's relationship with nature, which drives him to the edge of reason; and Margaret's relationship with God, which subliminates her selfhood; and Matthew Allen's relationship with his own genius, which only serves to highlight the shortcomings of everyone else. It is a meditation on nature, and how it impacts on our emotions. It is also about life's velocity, the way it feels quick-slow-quick, so that we run and then walk and then run again. This is an effect not dissimilar from the effect of metre in poetry; it is novel with great rhythm. Let me show you what I mean; a short passage will do. It occurs early in the book, when Clare has been tramping the asylum grounds like a dog on a short leash:

Ants fly over, carry beyond him. He can’t follow them further. Like a lock gate opening in a canal, the water slumping in, his heavy rage returns. He presses himself to the tree, looks down and sees the roots reaching down into the earth. The admiral’s hands. He has them himself for a second, thick, rooty fingers, twisted, numb. He shakes his hands and they’re gone. They reappear at his feet, and clutch down. The painful numbness rises, his legs solidifying, a hard rind surrounding them, creeping upwards. He raises his arms. They crack and split and reach into the light. The bark covers his lips, covers his eyes. Going blind, he vomits leaves and growth. He yearns upwards into the air, dwindling, splitting, growing finer, to live points, to nerves. The wind moves agonisingly through him. He can’t speak.

The prose is almost sexual; the writing intimate, and acute, conveying such an intense oneness with nature, at once terrifying and thrilling.

I note that some Amazon reviewers of the novel struggled with it, because Clare and his history were not familiar to them. Which led me to wonder if prior acquaintance with the characters and period is a necessary with this book. Like all historical novelists working with real individuals Foulds is plumbing (and therefore, expecting) a depth of foreknowledge in his readers; it is this foreknowledge that allows him to offer up nuggets of fact so sparingly. It strikes me that The Quickening Maze must seem a very vague novel without a ready built structure of events to support it. Similarly, it must help to know at least some of the poetry (Clares' and Tennysons') that weaves in and out of the text. So much so that I would say it was an inaccesible novel, if it wasn't clearly worth it for the words alone.

It is true, though, that words alone do not a novel make. Character is necessary too, and Foulds has some acute observations to make about his lead actors, namely Clare, Tennyson and Matthew Allen. He inhabits them well, drawing out their conflicts and impersonating their idiosyncracies. He is not so good at his female characters (although Margaret is something of an exception). Hannah Allen, for example, is the novel's inevitable passionate teenager, but any subtly in her character is warped out by a trajectory that carries her through a romantic obsession with Tennyson to a respectable marriage to a factory owner. Her mother, Eliza, is almost entirely missing from the narrative, although it is possible to see this as intentional. Like many women of her age she is taken for granted, by her husband and her children, the Angel in the House, taking care of the practicalities while the rest of the world swims about in a current of experience and feeling. Possibly Foulds intended her as the unsung helpmeet, offstage. But I am unconvinced. The rest of the novel does not reflect contemporary wisdoms in this way, and the narrator is omniscient, so it feels like an omission.

Perhaps it is because The Quickening Maze is better at extrapolating from historical realities, and building upon individuals who have left figments of themselves in poetry, biography and PhD theses, than it is at the purely imagined person. Foulds is a master at extrapolation, at enlarging and imagining from life, but he is not so sure or so deft at the act of creation. He writes with an inspired grace about things he has experienced - like forests, and food, and the sky - and likewise translates his research. In that sense he is a poet successfully transitioning into prose. However, he does not (yet?) have the great novelist's knack for playing God - for giving birth to something entirely fresh and new. We must continue to await his final transformation - poet into novelist - with anticipation. The Quickening Maze is not quite there yet.

~~Victoria~~

* Notably Esther, who does have a natural affinity with poetry, did not like the book as much as I did. She found it forced, and occasionally overwrought. It would be interesting to know if other poetry fans felt the same.