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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
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date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
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| 0571245781
| 9780571245789
| 4.48
| 15,296
| 1971
| unknown
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| Notes are private!
| none
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| May 04, 2013
| not set
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May 04, 2013
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| 1853262641
| 9781853262647
| 3.85
| 15,102
| 1839
| Apr 01, 1998
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-spoilers- Ackroyd states that Dickens’s concentration on ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ suffered because of the author’s concurrent concern with the launching of...more -spoilers- Ackroyd states that Dickens’s concentration on ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ suffered because of the author’s concurrent concern with the launching of a new journal. I’m not sure how accurate the following conjecture is, but I’d put money on Chapter 35 being the moment when distraction kicked in. ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ is the worst I’ve read of Dickens. In it, Dickens attempts to capitalise on the picaresque tropes which stood him in good stead in ‘The Pickwick Papers’, and relies on the power of his inventiveness to meet the conflicting demands of serialisation and plotting. And for the first half of ‘Nicholas Nickleby’, he does pull it off; Dotheboys Hall is horrific and hilarious, the grotesques are everything you can ask for, and the scenes in the Portsmouth theatre-company with the Crummles are great, as is Mr. Lillyvick and the Kenwigs. What’s more, as always with Dickens, there is that undergirding vision of materialism gone mad and the Shakespearean recognition that ‘nothingness’ is a far weightier proposition than it would seem – these being the observations picked upon by the likes of Beckett, and what can make Dickens appear more modern than he is. But, at least in ‘Nicholas Nickleby’, there is an important distinction to be made: Dickens’s writing does not privilege an individual, limited perspective – his is an outward looking art connected to the literature of the previous century and the likes of Smollet and Fielding, authors whose concerns over-reach the individual and who use that vision to structure their novels. As such, accusations of non-realistic plotting seem to me to be completely missing the point, and for the first half of this novel, the narrative fairly trots along. However, the second half is a bit of a mess – even though, as ever, glorious moments abound (Mrs. Nickleby’s meandering speeches are fantastic). The book effectively ends at its mid-point upon the appearance of the fairy-Godmother-like Brothers Cheeryble, whose rescue of Nicholas and family from penury results in Dickens having effectively written his first ever Romantic protagonist out of the plot-line. This is dangerous stuff because Dickens’s characters are so one-dimensional (in his better novels, this is their strength); if they are no longer to be implicated in plot, they don’t have the weight to stand alone. This also means that, rather than infusing a narrative with sub-plot, Dickens needs to fish around for hooks to keep the book rolling on: Ralph Nickleby and Arthur Grides’s scheme for Madeleine’s marriage is preposterous, Mrs. Nickleby’s dalliance with the mad neighbour, besides being badly rendered farce, is wholly superfluous, and even Mulberry’s dissolute world of libertine avarice and sleaze is rather naff. The effect is of having clunky plot-device after clunky plot-device heaped one on top of the other in an increasingly untenable push to get to the conclusion, an end which of course includes the villain’s demise – Dickens has never been great on rendering individual motivations, and this closing episode is no exception. But hey, for all its faults, there is still Dickens’s linguistic Catherine wheel to marvel at (no pun intended!). (less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Mar 2013
| Apr 2013
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Mar 01, 2013
| Paperback
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| 0701183055
| 9780701183059
| 3.83
| 4,806
| 2009
| Aug 2009
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--spoilers-- "...a sort of magic" is how Ali Smith describes Munro's stories on the jacket of my edition, and I don't think there is a better way to de...more --spoilers-- "...a sort of magic" is how Ali Smith describes Munro's stories on the jacket of my edition, and I don't think there is a better way to describe the pieces collected here. The stories in 'Too Much Happiness' draw in the reader the way only the very best fiction does; but what is astounding is that Munro achieves this with all ten stories. It's not immediately obvious how she does so, although what is clear is that her pacing and the overall shape of her pieces are brilliant; no story here is anything less than its own irreducible experience. I've seen her described as "our Chekhov", which is the sort of glib comparison that doesn't really pin down anything, but then it's not completely wide of the mark either. For as in Chekhov, Munro's stories are never about what they are most obviously about; meanings shimmer around the edges of the narratives and blur them, and she is content to leave things as such. This means that she can get away with an almost tabloid-esque litany of themes: triple-homicide, murderous children, child killers, sexual perversion, suicide. And I have to admit that after reading the first paint-stripper of a story, 'Dimensions', I was feeling a bit wary. However, Munro exerts such control over her narratives that as unnerving or even repulsive as whatever is being recounted may be, it never overwhelms the subtle sub-text she is working us toward. Be that as it may, I personally found her more mundane framings the more affecting, such as 'Wood', which begins by playing on a simple inversion of an aphorism, but which then uses this play to gesture toward something far more vital contained in the relationship between husband and wife; and also the truly masterful 'Deep-holes', which devastatingly abandons the reader in the isolation at the heart of an ostensibly forthright and all too recognisable family. This Chekhovian streak also makes summary rather difficult, but infused in these stories are concerns with temporality, guilt and deferred remorse, and the ways in which people adapt to the improbable and often shaming circumstances they suddenly find themselves having to confront. They are all also stories about story-telling, although this is far from a Coetzeean meta-fictional endeavour. The stories the characters tell themselves and each other stew in the juice of the fiction, and are largely damaging and distorting to the characters' lives. In 'Dimensions', Doree's murderous husband sends her letters from prison with stories of spiritual salvation so as to lure her back to him. In 'Fiction' Joyce reads the short story of her ex-husband's second wife's daughter, who she chanced to teach years back in the local primary school - the story is about the girl's recollection of Joyce, and although the story affords Joyce a brief moment of recognition and affirmation, Munro's story ends with her protagonist having been dispossessed of her own past. There are many others: imagined far off islands, or an uneasy complicity about what was never really an accident. Only in the final, long title story about the mathematician Sofia Kovalevsky does the novel that Sofia has written, and the idealised past contained in it, provide her with some comfort while she lays dying. But then, that is perhaps what stories have always been for. Munro is amazing, and I'm an instant convert. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| not set
| not set
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Feb 17, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 0099552477
| 9780099552475
| 3.61
| 765
| Jan 06, 2011
| Aug 04, 2011
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+spoilers+ Words to interfere with It may be the case that when a writer as renown as Barnes produces a collection of shorts, a straightforward amalgam...more +spoilers+ Words to interfere with It may be the case that when a writer as renown as Barnes produces a collection of shorts, a straightforward amalgam of stories accrued over time no longer cuts the mustard. "Pulse" is a collection with its own structure, and I believe should be approached as a novelistic-like work in and of itself, in which the mutually affective relationship between component pieces aims to provoke in the reader a complex - at times paradoxical - experience. Barnes divides his novel into two parts. In part one, we are treated to, by and large, 'slice of life'-style stories. The over-riding concern is the inability of human beings to communicate the essence of things, or the important stuff, if you prefer, and exploring the impoverishment of life which results. In 'East Wind' a hum-drum bloke called Vernon falls for a taciturn Polish waitress, but unable to simply accept her reserved devotion (we're in Cupid and Psyche territory here), he surreptitiously delves into her private life and ruins their affair. 'Sleeping With John Updike' follows the prickly conversation of two writer-friends as they travel back from a literary conference by train. If you've read 'The Sense of an Ending', the binary at the heart of this story may feel a little clumsy; one writer is obviously more modernist and rejects roundedness and tied up ends as self-indulgent, while the other writer can't see the point of anything without at least trying to get to a conclusion. Each writer's views on fiction are rather one-dimensionally embodied in their lives, and this literary schism gets in the way of true, open and honest friendship. A similar misconnection is played out in the relationship of a married couple conducting a cold war over what to do with their garden in 'Gardeners' World'. 'Marriage Lines' entrusts its poignancy to the reader's knowledge of Barnes's own tragic and sudden loss of his wife; unfortunately, without this knowledge, the story is far too bare bones to invoke much sense of loss in the reader - the protagonist's failure is also the story's, although it must be said that the final paragraph makes up for the rest. Perhaps the piece I enjoyed most in this first section was 'Trespass', a satirical and very funny story about a left-leaning hiker whose obtuseness and devotion to walk-wear, stop watches and quoting facts en route, tramples any chance he has of ever maintaining a meaningful relationship. However, if the stories in part one are meant to evoke disconnection, they mostly do so at the expense of not making a particularly strong connection with the reader. 'East Wind' just about gets away with it, but 'Sleeping with John Updike', 'Gardeners' World' and 'Marriage Lines' feel only half-successful - if the slim pickings of detail in 'A Sense of an Ending' made you nervous at times, then the stories here don't have the meta-fictional weight which the novel does to make up for their shortcomings in this area. Only 'Trespass', with the hop, skip and jump required by satire seems to leap off the page. This story also suites the narrow concentration of the story's action to hiking. In contrast, the playing out of the married couple's relationship through only gardening starts to feel laboured not long in - there's such a thing as drawing an analogy too far, and the whole story ends up resembling one big, obvious symbol. Or is this all part of Barnes's grand design? The pieces in part one are interwoven with various episodes of 'At Phil & Joanna's', dialogue pieces reminiscent of Carver's 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love', only here an equivalent title might be "What We Talk About If We Talk At All". At a basic level, Barnes is lampooning, supposedly oh-so English, dinner party chat, but he's also attacking what that kind of chat represents. As one guest says: "I think jokes are a good way of being serious. Often the best way." "Only an Englishman would think that, or say that." What's being implied here is that this kind of chat, or joking, or word play (and the conversations buzz razor sharp) can play both ways: it can be a way of keeping the serious sane, or it can disguise the fact that there is no longer anything serious there at all: "Isn't there an accumulation of evidence leading to doubt?" Not necessarily, by the looks of things; in this series of sketches, doubt is an insidious free agent. But if part one lacks 'hard evidence', then part two delivers it. And if part one is about disconnection, then part two is about the possibility of revitalising union with the world and the people around us. There are five stories, each concerned with one of the five senses (vision, touch, hearing, taste and smell - in that order). The stories here are longer and better developed . The first two are fables, and like all good tales involve transmogrifications: in 'The Limner' a deaf and mute painter transforms his subject through his craft into the malefic being he truly sees his subject to be; in 'Complicity', a young doctor experimenting with magnetic healing miraculously cures a blind and musically gifted young girl. At first the girl is in awe of her recovered faculty, and "did not want words to interfere with her sense of wonder". But more is at stake than simply restoring the girl's sight, and finally she is benighted once more so as to preserve her talent - and the income she thereby brings her parents. Not all is joyful in revitalising connections: in 'Complicity' our narrator tells us that "senses work together for the greater good", however the electricity generated by a touch is about to lure him into a doomed relationship. Likewise in 'Carcassonne', Garibaldi is rendered both romantic hero and feckless dupe by his heady submission to the whims of taste. The title story 'Pulse' comes last - it is the longest story in the collection, and, at least for me, complements the sketchiness of the earlier 'Marriage Lines' with which part one ended. It also manages to bring elements from many of the other stories -particularly the ones set in contemporary settings - into its fabric. I won't ruin its effect by revealing what it is about, but it is a really moving and quietly unsettling story of the senses shutting down - unsettling because Barnes leaves us where we began with the collection's first story: deadened, and at a remove from the world. (less) | Notes are private!
| none
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1
| Jan 30, 2013
| Feb 2013
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Jan 30, 2013
| Paperback
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| 1860461727
| 9781860461729
| unknown
| 4.09
| 1,931
| 1987
| Jul 04, 1996
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*Spoilers* The comparison should be drawn now and be done with: Carver. Ford and he were friends, and in one of those long, juicy Paris Review intervie...more *Spoilers* The comparison should be drawn now and be done with: Carver. Ford and he were friends, and in one of those long, juicy Paris Review interviews I remember reading years ago - which was most likely in some way connected to reading Carver, because this is the first thing of Ford's I've read - I remember Ford saying he thought short story collections were easier things to write than novels. He was goading Carver, but he was serious too. Having become a recognised master of the all-American novel, it might be said Ford has the credentials to deliver this verdict, but on the evidence of this collection, I'd raise the demurrer that by 'collection' Ford actually means 'variations'. Given that I tinker with writing shorts myself, perhaps I'm just being defensive, for I enjoyed this collection very much. There are stories in here which could be paragons of the short form within any writing course, and one of the problems with writing a review of such an accomplished collection, is that each of these small master-pieces is worth an essay in itself. I'm particularly thinking of the stories "Rock Springs", "Great Falls" and "Communist". In the first, Earl has stolen a car and is heading to Tampa-St. Pete with his young daughter, Cheryl, and his girlfriend, Edna. They don't get far before the oil-pressure light comes on and they're forced to dump the car just out of Rock Springs, where Earl seeks help from a woman living with her husband and grandson in one of the workers' caravans at a gold mine. Afterwards, Earl leads his little family to a motel in town, where the story ends and Earl's life is set to take another hit, with Edna having decided in the meanwhile to return to where they've come from. It's a misfired road-story; that American idea of the open highway and of living for the moment sublimated into the get rich quick haziness of gold mine promises, and the urban degeneracy into which hanger-on dreamers slump. By the end of the story, Earl sees through the easy-come, easy-go illusion of his life, but asks about himself of us, the reader, "Would you think he was anybody like you?" "Great Falls" and "Communist" are two of four stories in which the narrator is relating events which occurred in his childhood. They have a lot in common, although the tone is subtly different. Both are coming of age stories: in the first the narrator is younger and more passive - self discovery comes despite himself; in the latter the narrator is older at the time of the events, and takes a more active part, and is wiser about the sexual undercurrents which cause the shift of the adult world about him. Both stories also involve the fall (yes, Ford is playing with the place-name) of a significant male figurehead in the boys' lives: in the first case the boy's father, who is cuckolded by his mother and can't bring himself to accept his level of reliance on her; in the second the mother's communist-sympathising boyfriend, Glen, who takes young Les shooting geese, but, also unable to reconcile "something soft in himself" with regards the mother, fails in the perspective of the still impressionable boy. I would be very surprised if Ford didn't have Yeats's "The Wild Swans at Coole" and the later poem "Coole and Ballylee, 1931" in mind writing about the geese: Another emblem there! That stormy white But seems a concentration of the sky; And, like the soul, it sails into the sight And in the morning's gone, no man knows why; And is so lovely that it sets to right What knowledge or its lack had set awry, So arrogantly pure, a child might think It can be murdered with a spot of ink. Like Yeats's birds, Ford's geese defy the scale of human endeavour and can't be brought to symbolise anything. As Les's mother points out, "Geese mate for life", and her sympathies are with the individual birds being shot, just as Glen sees only a noisy, if beautiful, species for hunting. But it is Les who is made aware, in a Yeatsian moment, that both apparently irreconcilable visions actually co-exist; there is a greater underlying continuation represented by species which will outlast the travails of individual life, and this is a melancholy thing to think when considering one's self. At the end of this story, Les has become aware of the ultimate unknowability and mystery of life, the final certainties of his childhood quavering with the dissolution of Glen's ineffectual, masculine bravo. And in all these stories, Ford isn't shy of working his characters up to a good old-fashioned epiphany. Jackie comes to a similar conclusion in "Great Falls". In fact, almost all the characters come to a version of the same understanding, and if there is fault to find with this collection, it is that: Ford's characters seem to come to the same conclusion from one piece to the next. If I were to be a true cynic, I could summarise the themes of these stories as being either boys becoming adults, or men realising they are still juvenile. In fact, the story "Optimists" is in many ways a simple inversion of "Great Falls": where in "Great Falls" the mother's affair is brought to the surface and the father resists his murderous impulse , in "Optimists" the affair is left implied, the father succumbs to violence and the boy's epiphany is more overt. I believe "Great Falls" the better story, and can even imagine "Optimists" being a previous draft. The same can be said for Ford's tone; you'd be forgiven for getting a little weary of encountering such similar voices across ten different stories. All but two pieces are in the first person, half of those being narrated by a man recalling an incident in his childhood. However, the point of view of the only two stories narrated in third person are so limited to the perspective of the protagonists that I found it hard to see why Ford chose to change tack; they possess that same distance and fidelity to narrating concrete facts and thoughts punctuated with sudden and often surprising glimpses of the characters' insight. I suspect these stories may fare better on their own where they were originally published than pulled together into a collection in which similarities are too often on display. So when Ford says writing a collection of shorts is easier than writing a novel, I think we can counter with: yes Richard, but you always write the same story. I imagine the riposte: Yeah, but when onto a good thing... (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Jan 07, 2013
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Jan 07, 2013
| Paperback
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| 4.26
| 20,148
| 1934
| 1969
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As we're to spend a couple of nights in Rome over New Year's Eve, I thought I'd get in the mood by picking up again - having read it ten to fifteen ye...more As we're to spend a couple of nights in Rome over New Year's Eve, I thought I'd get in the mood by picking up again - having read it ten to fifteen years ago - Robert Graves's account of the reign of Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula. I remember liking it enough then to have sought out and read the sequel, "Claudius the God" - unfortunately my fondness for this novel hasn't accrued with intervening years. Not that there is anything particularly terrible about the book; it's historical subject matter is bloody and suggestively perverse enough to maintain almost anyone's interest, and the tid-bits of detail Graves indulges in are bait even for those readers lacking appetite for all things Roman. If that fails, the obvious parallels that can be drawn to regimes extant at the time of publication (1934) may add spice to the paranoid political landscape rendered, and any biographical knowledge concerning the author the reader cares to bring to the book will paste another layer of interest. But for all that, in its capacity as novel, I found it oddly flat - bland, almost. "I, Claudius" is structured around the conceit that what we're reading is the first-person, written account of how its author, Clau-Clau-Claudius (he stammers, and has a club-foot), came to be Emperor of Rome, following the failure of the Republic and ascension of Augustus to the head of an imperial monarchy, and the increasing folly and debauchery of the two succeeding emperors. It's a catchy idea, particularly given that Claudius was actually a historian; Graves interjects several scenes in which characters discuss the subject of History itself, the most complete being an argument quite early on in the book between Livy and Pollio: "Livy said: 'The trouble with Pollio is that when he writes history he feels obliged to suppress all his finer, more poetical feelings, and makes his characters behave with conscientious dullness..." (104) Claudius sides with Pollio's more "stoic way of looking at things" (290), and for a moment I thought Graves may have been treating us to a sly piece of irony. But no, Graves remains true to his narrator's "homely style"(281) - this is a novel of events and personages narrated plainly, and one of the chief enjoyments of the book - and perhaps Graves's achievement in writing it - is the sensation the reader can take of being 'inside' history itself. What shows through, however, is that this was a self-gratification that the author was granting himself also, for the voice of Claudius is plainly that of Graves; when he has his narrator side with Pollio it is because Graves seems to have decided that he does too. Thus no matter the interest of the historical and well-researched details, and no matter the escalation of executions, paranoia and sexual dissolution with which the reigns of the three Emperors depicted are brushed, we're maintained at a seemly distance by a narrator at once implicated in the story, but living at a remove because of a disability which results in him being misprized by the Roman aristocracy. This allows Graves to avoid complicating matters and concentrate on reporting events; right from the outset we're informed that the Claudian family can be divided into good and bad apples (19), and Graves doesn't upset the cart by investing his characters with any further depth: Augustus is well-intentioned but obtuse, Livia a witch, Tiberius paranoid and yellow, Germanicus a virtuous paladin, Caligula maniacal, etc. True, there are glimmers: Germanicus makes an uncharacteristic forgery for the greater good, Livia recounts how her poisonings were committed with Empire at heart, but for a 400 page novel there is a glaring paucity of depth, and ultimately it is an empoverished conception of individual lives flattened into historical players which is being presented, and in which Graves appears to take refuge. Claudius, as he is our narrator, jumps most from the page; his stroppiness and self-indulgence comes across as slightly icky given his cool historian's voice, as though his professional fidelity to truth is at odds with a natural tendency to prate. But as stated previously, it feels as though Claudius is simply and obviously a narrative crutch for Graves to play out his interest in researching the Roman Empire. And this reader wanted more than embellished fact. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Dec 08, 2012
| not set
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Dec 08, 2012
| Paperback
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| 1408804247
| 9781408804247
| 3.79
| 978
| Apr 05, 2010
| unknown
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**Spoilers** 3.5 stars... I came to this title after reading Lisa Hill's review, which wasn't glowing but which nevertheless sparked my curiosity about...more **Spoilers** 3.5 stars... I came to this title after reading Lisa Hill's review, which wasn't glowing but which nevertheless sparked my curiosity about the book, and like her I read with trepidation, at every turn expecting the inevitable blooming of the horrors harboured within Sierra Leone's recent tragic, scorched-earth history into which this - or rather these - stories are woven. And the horrors do come, as inevitably they must; however Forna's story isn't concerned with the war (or massacre) itself, but its aftermath, and the effect of such cataclysm on the lives of individuals and country. The novel revolves around a woman, Nenebah, also Mamakay (her sobriquet), but the principal protagonists are three men whose fates and lives, we come to realise as the novel progresses, are connected to each other through her, and it is their voices which relate the increasingly intertwined narratives of which the novel consists. Adrian Lockheart (whose patronymic is surely an ironic pun) is an altruistic Scottish psychiatrist come to Freetown in order to escape, we're given to understand, a drear marriage and a meaningless life in London. His efforts are a drop in the ocean in a country in which, we're told, 99% of the population are suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome (this condition being known as 'life', in Freetown), and his presence and good intentions at best wryly tolerated by his colleagues. Adrian is stationed at the hospital where the orthopaedic surgeon Kai Mansaray works - a young doctor with a depressing amount of experience for his slender years, as a result of the peculiar obsession the perpetrators of the war developed for severing limbs. Kai befriends Adrian, but has nightmares about a past event of which he will not speak, and swamps himself in work so as to forget the memory of his love for Nenebah. Lastly, the oleaginous Elias Cole relates to Adrian the story of his life while he suffers the final ravages of emphysema, his ploy being he has merely survived rather than lived it; Elias's tale will not be all it seems. But for Forna, Elias is a nexus between the binary of Adrian (healer of souls/minds) and Kai (healer of bodies), for story and memory and their relationship to the present are what are at stake in this novel. If this sounds complex, it both is and is not: Forna's narrative control is formidable in that the reader is never lost for moment and is largely oblivious to being hopscotched between points of view and voice during the unfolding of the overall story. However, "The Memory of Love" is a bit of a curate's egg of a read. One of its over-riding strengths is that it evokes well the cauterised emotions and souls of the people of Sierra Leone, whose strategy in dealing with the atrocities they have witnessed, were victim to or perpetrated, is to shut down, deny, and live lives suspended in a hopeless, penurious present - the undeniable past manifesting itself in mental disorder and shattered psyches. Elias Cole, by contrast, survived and indeed thrived by choosing 'not to know'. All of this Forna portrays in a numberer of ways, but principally by her patient, sometimes exasperating, sedimentation of detail; for the first 150 pages or so I was wondering where on earth things were going, and why I was reading about people shifting coffee mugs and whiskey tumblers around; however, the novel rewards persistence, as details accumulate into a portrait of a people and a country held together by little else. What felt incongruous, however, was Forna's plotting; her love triangle between the lives of her characters is superficially skilful, but undermines the deeper poignancy of her realism. I suspect this may be, to some extent, intentional, the necessity of stories to make sense and give at least an illusion of security to our lives being part of the point she wishes to bring home (it is a droll irony that westerner Adrian finds meaning in life through the carcinogenic void in the lives of others, but doesn't find a similar nullity closer to home as enticing, or at least not until the end). But narrative neatness clashes with the starker demands of the realist mode Forna adopts. What's more, the relationship between Adrian and Elias Cole never really establishes itself, or at least didn't for me. This is important, as it is Elias Cole's final attempt to ease his ex-nominated conscience through the telling of a potted story that backlights Adrian's presence in Freetown and Kai's deference and denial of pain, and again Forna's reliance on felicity of plotting in the latter part of the novel detracts, I feel, from a more nuanced texturing and exploration of the turgid space between world, memory and story signalled in her novel's incipiency and the relationship between would-be healer, wounded surgeon and word smith. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Oct 25, 2012
| Nov 2012
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Oct 25, 2012
| Paperback
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| 014003854X
| 9780140038545
| 4.25
| 4
| Nov 28, 1974
| Nov 28, 1974
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spoilers Love, desire, numina, class, bucolic: these are the hallmarks of the stories collected here, related in a profoundly English and yet unassumin...more spoilers Love, desire, numina, class, bucolic: these are the hallmarks of the stories collected here, related in a profoundly English and yet unassumingly unique voice with the power to glide almost unnoticed into variations of the short form: ghost stories, pastorals, allegory, folk tales and satire. I have only ever read one other story by Coppard ('Some Talk of Alexander', in The Oxford Book of English Short Stories ed. A.S. Byatt - which I loved), so I do not know whether what follows was an editorial focus, or a common trait of Coppard's writing more generally; however, the majority of the pieces in this collection deal with human will and desire disappointed by the variable and various forces into which they are embedded and by which they are predestined. This theme is present from the first in the shorter preliminary stories, for example in 'Weep Not My Wanton', in which a boy siphons money - and thereby cops abuse - from his bibulous and belligerent dad so as to slip the meagre ammount to his mother, presumably for food. This episode is bookended by dazzling paeans to the agricultural landscape, and the slow cessation of daily toil come evening. But however beautiful, the surrounding scene is indifferent towards the suffering borne by the family of the man: one fellow they pass working in a barn mocks the father for his castigation of the boy, but does not come to intervene. In 'The Black Dog', a man of wealth falls for a working class woman, and travels to the home she had previously run away from, so as to reunite her with her father. They discover the father has meanwhile taken a lover, competition the daughter won't abide, and so she sets about ousting the intruder from the house with a cruelty and crassness our refined narrator cannot reconcile with his desire. The word 'fool' and 'stupid' (and declensions) reoccur often throughout the story, and carry more than the obvious connotation: every character in the story, at one point or another, calls themselves a fool, for everybody in the story loves unwisely, but can, seemingly, do nothing about it; we are all fools, in this sense. I could go on, but will mention only that 'The Field of Mustard' is a must, and end as the collection does with 'The Presser'. Coppard himself finished school aged nine, and was sent to London to work (he educated himself reading Shakespeare and Milton et al.). 'The Presser' is Coppard's compressed 'David Copperfield', about a young boy working in hellish conditions in a London sewing shop. What is telling in this story is the boy Johnny Flynn's perception of himself within this seamy, adult world in which he is expected to earn his way: "If he was not exactly a Spartan, he was, you might say, spartanatical. Things happened to you; they were good, or they were bad - and that was the truth about everything." Here, I sense, Coppard has identified in his own fictionalised biography the wellspring of his written world. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Oct 2012
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Oct 11, 2012
| Paperback
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| 0099324512
| 9780099324515
| 3.89
| 468
| 1955
| Oct 27, 1994
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**spoilers** 'The Tree of Man' borrows its title from A.E. Housman's poem 'On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble', from the 'A Shropshire Lad' series (...more **spoilers** 'The Tree of Man' borrows its title from A.E. Housman's poem 'On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble', from the 'A Shropshire Lad' series (segments of the poem appear at one point in the novel), and largely embodies the dilemma set forth there: the paradox between human individuality and the relentless onslaught of impersonal time. 'The Tree of Man' is a pioneering saga, charting the Parkers' early endeavours to establish a farm and home in inhospitable enough, virgin outback in New South Wales, their encounters with floods and fire and drought, through the impact of community, and then the sudden gush of modernity as Stan and Amy's children defy and defile the lives of their parents, and what has developed into the township of Durilgai transforms into an outer suburb of Sydney. In this novel White's voice is, I think, unique; protean with often pastoral figurations transmuted into textual solidity, but pithy with the facts of things, it is a voice a priori exhausted by the futility of metaphor in the face of narration. The novel speaks to us from the weariness of slumped vision, which lends a certain impatience and even stroppiness to the telling, as if the writing would rather while upon the spiritual globules that, shivering, morph into unity, than plod on under the duty to recount. White's is also a romantic, often oneiric novel; the ache of the soul wishing to give of itself, suffering for the impossibility of communicating its essence to others. In this sense, Stan is the spiritual seeker, whose quest for truth and harmony with the natural world, and this quest's various phases and tinctures, gives the novel its shape and colour. Amy does not share her taciturn husband's yearning for quietude; she must know things and receive material proof of love, such that Stan could "[respect] and [accept] her mysteries, as she could never respect and accept his". This fundamental discord between husband and wife, which means they live their lives needing the other, but essentially alone, finds echoes throughout the novel. Their children amplify their parents' failures to eclipse humanity: in Ray, Stan's not complete enough paucity of need is perverted into meaningless itinerancy, crime, and finally, futile death; in Thelma, her mother's desire for material sign flares into obsession for social convention, ladder climbing and gentility. This, one feels all too keenly, reflects White's famously bleak, and not altogether unmerited, perspective on modern Australian society, an attitude he isn't above splitting upon irony: it is the gentrified Thelma who loves music; she is thus the member of the family who comes closest to attaining the ability to express, or at least comprehend, some fundamental aspect of her being through art - but she is by now so attenuate a soul, music only endows her with a sense of "nobility". By contrast, Stan and Amy's impasse is rendered gothic by the Quiggleys, the mentally retarded Bubs the enlightened soul at one with the world, Doll her brother's saint-like guardian. However, in pragmatic rural lives, such otherworldliness is unsustainable, and ends in horror. While the Parkers' neighbours, the O'Dowds, provide a much needed comic take on the same dichotomy. But as the novel approaches its close, it is Housman's wind that ruffles the pages and the composure of the reader. Upon the death of Ray, Stan listens to the mother of his grandson lamenting the existential void of her existence, and the rendition of her life seems to match Stan's, and everyone's: the recognition of one's specialness in the vastness of youth and outback, a life lived seeking its expression, either positively in culture or negatively through renunciation, and upon recognition of inevitable failure, the desire to return to emptiness. White seems to suggest this pattern is also Australia's. But at various points throughout his life, Stan is granted glimpses of truth, and so he is just before death, understanding "One, and no other figure is the answer to all sums." Like such previous moments, however, we understand that this one too is probably fleeting, or the kind of understanding useless in the cut and thrust of moment-to-moment living. And as the novel closes, his young grandson, mooning in Stan's garden, conceives a poem containing all of life he will never come to write. (less) | Notes are private!
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Aug 25, 2012
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| 0974607800
| 9780974607801
| 3.84
| 13,621
| 1853
| May 01, 2004
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SPOILERS Bet On the World The genius of Melville's tale "Bartleby, the Scrivener" rivals that of "Moby Dick", and despite the claim that with it Melvill...more SPOILERS Bet On the World The genius of Melville's tale "Bartleby, the Scrivener" rivals that of "Moby Dick", and despite the claim that with it Melville forecasts our (post)modern state sounding rather trite, it's very difficult to see it as doing anything but. Like the best of tales, the premise of "Bartleby, the Scrivener" is straightforward: having lost his job as "subordinate clerk" in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, Bartleby winds up working as a copyist at a law firm on Wall Street. A phlegmatic character, he soon begins to 'refuse' to carry out requests by his employer (our nameless narrator) with his famous "I'd prefer not to". The situation escalates when it is discovered that Bartleby is using the office as his domicile, and his employer's patience and altruism is further wrung when Bartleby ceases to perform even his basic function of transcribing and instead "do[es] nothing but stand at his window in his dead-wall revery." Unable to convince Bartleby to leave, the narrator moves office. Bartleby still "prefers" not to budge, and is eventually had arrested by the landlord and dies of starvation in prison. Melville's tale shears to the marrow of our lot. Bartleby seems to have been conditioned by his service in the Dead Letter Office, in which he sorted to be burnt letters to deceased persons. Like the letters, Bartleby is both excess and lack; a persistent, irrevocable, material presence which must be taken into account, he yet renounces willingness to take his place in the physical order of things. Bartleby is initially esteemed by his employer and his oddity tolerated because of his industriousness, but as what skerricks of wordly will Bartleby possesses fade, his employer is faced with an Other which divests the goodwill he believes he displays toward his intractable employee of all appearance: "Mere self-interest, then, if no better motive can be enlisted, should, especially with high-tempered men, prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy." The self-interestedness of altruism here possesses a functional, calculated quality (similar to some Buddhist thinking). Likewise, Bartleby is offered chance after chance to but fulfil his role, do his job, and so be well treated; if everyone does what they ought in the place in which it ought to be done, the world should keep spinning nicely. But Melville is sensitive to the contumacious excess which gives to us our humanity, but which presents itself as forever inaccessible. Desperate, the lawyer tries to ascertain who Bartleby is: "Will you tell me, Bartleby, where were you born? / Will you tell me anything about yourself?" "I would prefer not to", replies Bartleby, and the lawyer comes to think: "-a vagrant, is he? What! he a vagrant, a wanderer, who refuses to budge? It is because he will not be a vagrant, then, that you seek to count him as a vagrant. That is too absurd" Substitute "human" for "vagrant" and you have something like the paradox the story stands off against. Melville seems to be suggesting that our sense of our own humanity can only exist hermetically; whatever breach the world might win (even the most well-intentioned intrusion) is always-already reconstituted as exterior. Melville's tale makes us realise, of course, that no such differential is possible. As Kafka said: In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world. And as if to prove Melville's contemporary relevance, Radiohead do a rock 'n' roll version of Bartleby:  (less) | Notes are private!
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May 27, 2012
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| 0199561605
| 9780199561605
| 4.03
| 68
| 1998
| May 01, 2009
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In her introduction, Byatt is rightly cautious, maybe even a little suspicious, of being called upon to assemble a national collection of short storie...more In her introduction, Byatt is rightly cautious, maybe even a little suspicious, of being called upon to assemble a national collection of short stories. What is Englishness geographically, let alone in any other sense? And with many English speaking peoples identifying themselves in terms in various ways oppositional to the Union Jack, what value might a collection like this have? Well, Byatt keeps her selection criteria narrow, and the result is a fantastic anthology. She identifies the anomalous concepts of fidelity to the “thinginess” of things together with whimsy as being English short story traits – I’ll take her word on that – but more importantly her instinct for what surprises, for what is stylistically dissonant but thematically rewarding, are switch-blade astute; while personal taste will incline readers more toward one than another story, there really isn’t a bad example to be found here. There are the writers you’d expect to be appear (Dickens, Trollope, Hardy, James, Kipling, Wodehouse, Woolf, Lawrence, Waugh, Greene etc.) along with others less well known and some surprise inclusions. My own favourites included the stories by Trollope, Morrison, Lawrence, Coppard, Warner, Huxley, Whitaker, Pritchett, Greene, Fitzgerald, Ballard, Fuller, Tremain, and the wonderful final piece by Hensher, in which the English language's cultural associations begin to fade into archaism. If this looks like a long list of top reads, I put that down to the quality offered. My edition has quite a clever cover too. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Apr 20, 2012
| Jun 2012
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Apr 20, 2012
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| 0099499193
| 9780099499190
| unknown
| 3.87
| 3,254
| Jan 01, 2005
| Feb 01, 2007
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“Sweetness in the Belly” tells the tale of Lilly, a British girl orphaned in Morocco and raised a devout Muslim under the Great Abdal, cleric to the s...more “Sweetness in the Belly” tells the tale of Lilly, a British girl orphaned in Morocco and raised a devout Muslim under the Great Abdal, cleric to the saint Bilal al Habash (whose sainthood, Gibb reveals in her afterward, is invented). Her story is split between her youth in Harar, Ethiopia in the seventies, and her time as a sort-of refugee in 80s/90s London working as a nurse and setting up a persons-search agency for other refugees displaced by the Ethiopean revolution and subsequent bloodshed. While the premise sounds interesting, the end result is bland – Gibb tends to oscillate between hit and miss attempts at florid evocation, and one-dimensional exposition which on occasion totters into mild lecturing. Unfortunately, the latter comes to dominate the further into the book one wades – at just over 400 pages, I was happy to get to the end of this one. The writing fails to generate the foreboding Gibb wants to depict as permeating Harar in 1974, nor does the heartbreak and sense of self-discovery which Gibb wants to intertwine with Lilly’s tentative romances prove any more affective. It also seems amazing that someone who studied in England could send her characters to watch a cricket match at Christmas, and I’m fairly certain that doctors don’t ride public transport in their scrubs. Not being in a position to judge the Ethiopian sections, one can only hope similar blunders don’t occur. (less) | Notes are private!
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Mar 31, 2012
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| 0006551793
| 9780006551799
| 4.09
| 69,227
| Jan 01, 1999
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--SPOILERS-- In her later novel "The Namesake", Lahiri says of two of her Indian, immigrant characters; "In some senses Ashoke and Ashima live the lives...more --SPOILERS-- In her later novel "The Namesake", Lahiri says of two of her Indian, immigrant characters; "In some senses Ashoke and Ashima live the lives of the extremely aged, those for whom everyone they once knew and loved is lost, those who survive and are consoled by memories alone." In the final story "The Third and Final Continent" in her collection "Interpreter of Maladies", we encounter the 103 year-old Mrs. Croft, who the story's narrator - another Indian immigrant to America - rents a room from upon first arriving. Aged landlady and boarder are similar in that both are relics - she of another time, he of another place - and so they get on well; she thinks him a gentleman and believes America's recent lunar landing "splendid". Our narrator is too busy confronting the alienness of his new life to become wrapped up in this extra-terrestrial feat, although he does indulge his landlady in this regard, his graciousness tied up with foreignness. But in this story, unlike Ashoke and Ashima's situation in "The Namesake", the comparison between old age and the immigrant's experience is a positive one. Mrs. Croft's stoicism and individualism are admired by the narrator, and "While astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination." Fortunately for us, it is not beyond Lahiri's, although elsewhere in this collection comparisons are not so kind. Lahiri draws parallels between the alienation felt by her Indian immigrants and that found in US society generally. In the story "Mrs. Sen's", the character of the title is a woman who will fail, we infer, to adapt to the way of life of her adopted home. She says to the boy she baby sits every afternoon "You are wiser than that, Eliot. You already taste the way things must be." She has just received a letter from India telling her she has become an aunt, and is upset that she will not form a part of her niece's life. Eliot on the other hand isn't fazed by the solitariness of his upbringing and his having to bear a large part of its burden. So too in "Sexy", Miranda's lust for Dev stems from aloneness rather than love, and an unconscious yearning for the communal life Lahiri explores directly in two of her pieces set in India. "Sexy" forms something of a chiastic nub with "Mrs. Sen's" at the centre of this collection. In the latter the Indian Mrs. Sen is minding the American Eliot, whereas in "Sexy" the American Miranda must look after an Indian boy, Rohin, while her friend takes Rohin's mother out to cheer her up - Rohin's father has abandoned them for another woman. Miranda is likewise having an affair with an Indian man, Dev, and her encounter with the inscrutable Rohin decides her on ending the liaison. Earlier in the story, on visiting the Mapparium with Dev, he had called her sexy. They were standing at opposing ends of the Mapparium, and because of the wierd accoustics of the architecture she hears Dev's whisper "so clearly that she felt [it] under her skin". Later, when she is minding Rohin, the boy convinces her to put on a slinky number Miranda had bought with Dev in mind, but which she'd never had the opportunity to wear because of the speed with which their affair acquired a functional character. Seeing Miranda in her cocktail dress, Rohin also calls her sexy. When Miranda presses him as to what he means by this, Rohin's recourse is to his absent father: "It means loving someone you don't know." Lahiri's themes are cleverly rendered here: lonely Miranda is duped by the Mapparium-like illusion sex and desire give of emotional propinquity and fulfilment. However, there is a weakness in this story; just as it inverts the situation in "Mrs. Sen's", so too does it operate on an internal, symmetric differential. Miranda's affair is framed by that of Rohin's father's and the comparison is too obvious. It is only Lahiri's skill in depicting the clingy Rohin that saves what would otherwise be redundant and sententious. The title story of the collection suffers from a similar thematic palimpsest: Mrs. Das's personal revelation to Mr. Kapasi is too obvious a comment on his lust for her. Both characters are lonely and unhappy in their marriages, and both seek consolation in the other; again it is Lahiri's characterisations to the rescue. While treating minor quibbles, it should be noted these stories are not, for the main part, particularly short; most would be around ten thousand words plus. Not a problem in itself, but it does permit Lahiri to delve into the back-stories of her characters, the correspondence between characters´ plights and their pasts tending toward the mechanistically causative. Twinkle's ebullience in "This Blessed House" is a notable exception - this story works because Twinkle bucks the immigrant trend, and this reader would have enjoyed more surprises and 'in spite ofs'.Conversely, in "A Temporary Matter", when soon to be ex-husband and wife "wept together, for the things they now knew", for the reader the writing has been on the wall for too long already (if Raymond Carver had penned the story - and he might well have - he would have titled it Things They Now Knew). Where Lahiri's stories are all back-story we are treated to shorter tales, and both of these have Indian settings (perhaps it is telling Lahiri should adopt the cooler form of the tale for this material). I doubt most would consider "A Real Durwan" and "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar" - and particularly the latter - as constituting the best of the collection, but this form rather than Lahiri's fidelity to verisimilitude holds personal appeal. These tales also orbit one another, the first recounting the way in which Indian community can work to exclude penurious and marginal people, the latter the reverse, and they also bracket the 'nub' of "Sexy" and "Mrs. Sen's" to complete the collection's chiastic ordering (I don't know if Lahiri wrote with this in mind, but this parafictional structuring reminds me of Nam Lee's collection "The Boat", where the ordering of stories has its own important story to tell). "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar" also foreshadows the narrator's acceptance in "The Third and Final Continent" of his new life in America, a life which will always feel displaced, but is no less wondrous for being so. All in all, Lahiri's stories of encounters between India and America form a strong if well-behaved collection. (less) | Notes are private!
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Mar 31, 2012
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| 0007245904
| 9780007245901
| 3.90
| 107,275
| Sep 16, 2003
| Mar 05, 2007
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*Spoilers* Lahiri refuses to stop calling Gogol Gogol, despite her having him change his name to Nikhil upon coming of age. In this way she respects Go...more *Spoilers* Lahiri refuses to stop calling Gogol Gogol, despite her having him change his name to Nikhil upon coming of age. In this way she respects Gogol's (and her own) conclusion at the end of the novel that "his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another", just as his parents naming him "Gogol" had been an unpremeditated contingency when they were forced by American hospital administration to assign a name to their new born son, even though the letter hadn't arrived in which Gogol's grandmother would offer her choice of appellation. Indeed, the letter mysteriously never arrives, and so Gogol is stuck with Gogol, a Bengali pet name never intended to be used publically and elected because of his father's attachment to the Russian novelist. Even the importance of the Russian author to his father is due to his father, Ashoke, reading "The Overcoat" when the Calcutta to Jamshedpur train he was travelling on derailed, an freak accident Ashoke miraculously survived but which will haunt him for the rest of his life. The important question with "The Namesake" is to what degree Lahiri is successful in evoking this feeling of a "string of accidents" in her novel, and how happenstance shapes her characters. Gogol and Moushumi will be married briefly. Both are Bengali and knew each other as children because of the friendship of their respective parents. Both Gogol and Moushumi have, in their distinctive ways, attempted to distance themselves from their families' Indian heritage, so both are surprised they should actually fall for each other after being set up by their parents. Nevertheless, they do, and lust can't wait for dinner to cook: "But the smell of something burning causes them to bolt naked from the bed, rushing comically to the kitchen, laughing." Perhaps a cruelty to nit-pick possibly the worse sentence from the whole book, but it is symptomatic of Lahiri's tendency to second guess her readers' reactions, the risk apparently not worth running that we may find the scene un-comical, which would be a not unjustifiable reaction given the novel's general sense of gravitas. But Lahiri's proclivity to exposition provides the novel its shape; her present tense, third person narration allows her to inhabit her characters, who in the case of Ashima (Gogol's mother) and Ashoke, are adrift in the otherness of their never to be entirely assimilated, adopted American home; or Gogol and Moushumi - second generation immigrants - who feel detached from their Indian heritage but are archly conscious of their being different to the people around them. Lahiri is most successful when evoking the inner lives of her two female leads (let's call them that - the book was written with a cinema release in mind). The shallow and beautiful - but still sympathetic for that - Moushumi is well drawn, but better still is Ashima, for whom the transition from sweltering Calcutta to iced-over Massachusetts is over-whelming and something she never fully recovers from. And it is in her portrayal of Ashima's experience that Lahiri's narrative details are most convincing; she has a photographic imagination which homes in on the minute, and this is perfectly suited to developing the liminal space and tensions of cultural intersection. Thus at Ashima's and Ashoke's parties; "They sit in circles on the floor, singing songs by Nazrul and Tagore, passing a thick yellow clothbound book of lyrics among them as Dilip Nandi plays the harmonium. They argue riotously over the films of Ritwik Ghatak versus those of Satyajit Ray. The CPIM versus the Congress party. North Calcutta versus South. For hours they argue about the politics of America, a country in which none of them is eligible to vote." However, by the time we've reached the story of Gogol and Moushumi's sort-lived marriage, Lahiri's details are becoming more problematic, pedantic even. The minute naming and describing of bourgeois nibblies and the citing of period-defining logos and products begins to grate. When the final chapter opens with an entire paragraph devoted to Ashima's croquette recipe, the novel - in one of its ambits at least - has come to feel like a lifestyle catalogue. For the most part, however, this is Gogol's story, and while not an entirely unsympathetic character, he is nevertheless a passive one, resigned to surviving the slings and arrows of a rash of failed affairs - the first two with socio-demographically prototypical women, and the third with Moushumi - and the vicissitudes of a Bengali family life abroad. His one grand act of volition is to change his name, an effort insufficient to forge an identity independent of the changeable world at large to which he is, like all of us, vulnerable. My problem here is that Lahiri's exposition turns the vulnerability she wishes to represent into a narrative security blanket; put differently, the subject matter here feels safe and too secure in its delivery, and therefore emasculated. There is very little mystery in this book, very little unaccounted for, scant penumbra, and I found myself wishing that Gogol had something more of his mother in him, that his submission to circumstance was counterbalanced by some aspect which, no matter if involuntary or unconscious, couldn't be kept stilled. Perhaps I'm guilty of wanting Lahiri's novel to be something it isn't, but it was difficult to raise gusto for Gogol, her everyman. At least Akaky Akakievich's ghost showed a bit of pluck! (less) | Notes are private!
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Feb 21, 2012
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| 0140292934
| 9780140292930
| 3.30
| 76,161
| 1945
| Apr 26, 2001
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“The Pearl” is a straightforward fable concerning the evils visited upon a Mexican fisherman, Kino, and his family upon finding The Pearl of the World...more “The Pearl” is a straightforward fable concerning the evils visited upon a Mexican fisherman, Kino, and his family upon finding The Pearl of the World, which he believes will make him rich and provide them with future opportunities to rise above their station. The theme of the story is rather simplistic and mildly sententious; Steinbeck obviously esteems what he portrays as the interconnectedness of the indigent fishing community and their close relationship to the natural world. But what the tale lacks in complexity is made up for by Steinbeck’s extraordinary prose, particularly his evocations of the natural world and the suspenseful finale. A short but rich read. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Mar 13, 2012
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Feb 21, 2012
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| 0349118051
| 9780349118055
| unknown
| 3.71
| 4,876
| 2006
| unknown
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Of the five laudatory review quotes which appear on the cover and end paper (or whatever you call it in a paperback), “delightful” appears in three, a...more Of the five laudatory review quotes which appear on the cover and end paper (or whatever you call it in a paperback), “delightful” appears in three, a fourth thinks Alexander McCall Smith “a delight”, and the rogue fifth opts for the book’s “charm”. If at this point alarm bells aren’t sounding, this may be the book for you and what follows an affront. My poor Advanced reading group – just as I thought you couldn’t do worse than Mary Ann Shaffer, along comes “The Right Attitude to Rain”. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to maintain the ‘right’ attitude when it comes to discussing this book with them. The bio states Smith has written over sixty novels – for pity’s sake man, slow down, concentrate, and stop thinking of your bank balance. Reading this novel is like being sentenced to death by mashed potato: one prays a solid spud will deliver the final blow, but alas it’s pure slop being flung throughout. I don’t know, Smith appears to be renowned for a detective agency series, so perhaps this novel is a low-point exception, but somehow I doubt it. This ‘writer’ doesn’t seem to have an original thought in his head; he leches after cliché - both lexical and conceptual - to the point of inducing depression. The characters would be vile if they were characters at all, and what passes for philosophical/ethical musing is plain insult. Let’s not bother with the sack-cloth plot and structure or Smith’s proclivity for zombie-prose exposition (for the first fifty pages I found myself crossing out superfluous sentences and even entire paragraphs before giving up, over-whelmed). Of course, the right attitude to the reign of cliché and atrocious writing is to feel edified by a rendition of pedestrian, middleclass values upheld. Rot. I’m sorry to say I can’t recall reading anything so completely devoid of worth in a very long while. 0/5 (less) | Notes are private!
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Jan 28, 2012
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| 0006543545
| 9780006543541
| 3.36
| 1,622
| 1978
| 2006
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**Spoilers** Toward the close of ‘The Bookshop’, when the community of Hardborough (a very hard borough indeed not to want a bookshop) have turned agai...more **Spoilers** Toward the close of ‘The Bookshop’, when the community of Hardborough (a very hard borough indeed not to want a bookshop) have turned against Florence Green’s small business enterprise (although she was a bit green to imagine it would work in the first place), Florence’s young assistant, Christine Gipping, is prohibited from continuing in her after school, part-time position due to her poor eleven-plus test results and her thus having to attend the Technical rather than the more desired Flintmarket Grammar School. Christine’s mother has no illusions what this result will mean for her ten year-old daughter’s future: “It’s what we call a death sentence…what chance will she ever have of meeting and marrying a white-collar chap? She won’t ever be able to look above a labouring chap or even an unemployed chap and believe me, Mrs. Green, she’ll be pegging out her own washing until the day she dies.” Florence tries to take “a brighter view” – Christine is, after-all, one of Penelope Fitzgerald’s wise children, such as the Bernhard was in ‘The Blue Flower’, and is very intelligent and musical – but even Florence has witnessed classism beginning to manifest among the town’s children along the lines of which institution they are attending – traditional lines of exclusion already becoming entrenched, and Christine appears to have the wrong kind of intelligence. Still, she possesses understanding beyond her slender years, but while Christine is herself aware of what her bad result means, her reaction is still that of a child’s: “Christine was implacable. She could only find relief in causing pain. Her resentment was directed against everyone who had to do with books, and reading, and made it a condition of success to write little compositions, and to know which picture was the odd one out. She hated them all.” And here, it seems, is a distillation of what motivates the Hardborough community’s exnominational arraying of themselves against Florence’s desire to open a bookshop in the Old House. Even the resident rapper, or ghost, with who Florence shares the Old House seems pitted against her. But Florence persists. She sees and is kept awake by the image of a heron trying to swallow an eel, the eel struggling free of the heron. Florence is, of course, both; having bitten off more than she can chew by opening a bookshop, she is also striving not to be swallowed by local passive resistance to her business – a resistance nevertheless leavened with curiosity. And she is also one of Fitzgerald’s characters to who the author feels affinity and compassion, a dreamer who can’t control her ledgers, requires a ten year-old to manage customers, but who “[has] a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation.” The thinly veiled stinginess undergirding disinterested pragmatism and recourse to litigation which characterises the Hardborough community makes short work of Florence and her bookshop – this spearheaded by the painfully (if a little one-dimensionally) bourgeois Violet Gamart, who orchestrates Florence’s ousting by pulling strings through her contacts in the council. Only the old-world patriarch and misanthrope, Edmund Brundish, who everybody holds in awe for his long Suffolk lineage and aristocratic ties – although they do not emulate his comportment - is Florence’s ally (beside the tipsy Mr. Raven, who enlists his Sea Scouts to help Florence knock together shelving for her stock). Mr. Brundish represents an older, almost eclipsed order and a more capacious world-view tolerant of the foibles of people like Florence, conscious that a certain kind of value is in need of space in which to bumble – a space denied by the pinching meanness of the likes of Mrs. Gamart, and our increasingly litigious society in general. Fitzgerald is blisteringly dismissive of the self-interest lurking beneath veneers of shrilly proclaimed imperative. But after a visit to upbraid Mrs. Gamart for her conduct, Mr. Brundish promptly drops dead (so much for the old order!), and in the conclusion to Fitzgerald’s tale (a tale superbly evocative of place, I would like to point out) Florence is left homeless and penniless and on a bus to London. The only two books she has salvaged contain an inscription from Milton: “A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” In Fitzgerald’s vision, it seems, we are becoming too occupied dressing self-interest up as essentialism to treasure anything beyond the scaffolding of existence. Terribly important in Fitzgerald’s writing is her style. Please find some of my thoughts in the following reviews of her books “The Blue Flower” and “The Means of Escape”: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... (less) | Notes are private!
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Jan 14, 2012
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| 0007105010
| 9780007105014
| unknown
| 3.75
| 91
| Oct 19, 2000
| Oct 01, 2001
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**sPoIlErS** Redundant Curves “Only gentlemen could afford redundant curves, and indeed they must have them, to indicate their quite different relations...more **sPoIlErS** Redundant Curves “Only gentlemen could afford redundant curves, and indeed they must have them, to indicate their quite different relationship to the land.” As can often occur, while reading an otherwise completely off-topic article by Rosemary Hill the above sentiment jumped out as being germane to Penelope Fitzgerald’s collection of short stories, which I was reading concurrently. Incidentally, the curves Rosemary Hill refers to are those of waterways (one gentleman having awful problems converting a horribly rectilinear canal into a Romantic and more socially kosher stream), and the article was about 18th century landscaping (don’t ask!). But the relationship evoked here is similar to Fitzgerald’s concerns in this collection. “The Means of Escape” includes ten (well, my book had ten: GR seems to think there are only eight, so maybe there are various editions) short stories spanning Penelope Fitzgerald’s writing life, the first published in 1975, the last in 1998 two years before her death. What is immediately evident upon concluding the book is that Fitzgerald’s classical concerns were fully formed at inception and persisted through her relatively short career. The majority of stories here focus on the variously comic, pathetic and sometimes humble endeavours of people to alter the immutable, only to fall victim to the contingent. In ‘The Red-Haired Girl’, Hackett, an apprentice painter, attempts to cajole his miserably poor, afflicted subject, Annik (who works at the hotel in which he is staying) into acquiring for the benefit of his intended portrait a red shawl – at the end of the story, his having only made some preliminary sketches (with no shawl), she is no longer to be found. After several enquiries Hackett discovers Anny (he has changed her name) has been laid off for petty theft. In the wonderful ‘At Hiruharama’, having been gently impelled by his wife at various junctures in his life to get his act together, Tanner does likewise when she falls pregnant and makes elaborate preparations involving Blue Chequer homing pigeons (only Penelope Fitzgerald would make sure that detail was correct!) so as to be able to summon the doctor to their remote New Zealand farm for the delivery. Tanner doesn’t, however, bank on Brinkman, his distant neighbour, turning up unannounced for their bi-annual supper, smoke and chit-chat, nor that his visitor should be willing to install himself in the living-room to wait out the birth, thinking “that they would have to serve dinner sometime.” Meanwhile, by the time the doctor arrives Tanner has delivered his daughter, the doctor seemingly in time to receive only the afterbirth, upon which he dashes out to the garbage and comes back inside wringing life into a twin daughter a flustered Tanner earlier mistook for the placenta. The listing of example scenarios could go on, but one of the elements which distinguishes Fitzgerald’s writing is her strikingly askance view of the familiar matter in which she embodies such classical dilemmas. I have read somewhere or other that Fitzgerald is adept at showing us who we are by revealing who we were – from what little I’ve read of her fiction I would venture a more specific formula and suggest she shows us who we are by revealing our past selves on the cusp of the transformation which would produce our era. To my recent review of “The Blue Flower”, my GR friend Karen made the perspicacious comment that so many of the cognoscenti of that period (turn of the 19th century) failed to earn a living by the pen; royalties and copyright were yet to replace the disappearance of artistic patronage. But evident in the above two stories and throughout this collection is Fitzgerald’s concern not only with history and societal shift, but with the way in which gender and relations between sexes characterised change. ‘At Hiruharama’ subtly suggests that without intercession by Kitty, Tanner would never have come to much. Tanner himself recognises that he has, up until the time of his marriage, probably failed in the expectations of his only living relative, his sister: “She probably thinks I’m a skilled craftsman by now. She probably reckons I’m made.” When old-world Brinkman (living on the brink of a new age – Fitzgerald loves punning on names) breezes in looking for supper, upon discovering Kitty has given birth to two girls he thinks “if this sort of thing went on there should be a good chance, in the end, for him to acquire one for himself.” ‘The Red-Haired Girl’ casts things more starkly: Annik is brusquely pejorative of Hackett’s (who is a hack) aesthetic interest in Palourde, a fishing village on the Brittany coast, a place of which she says, “You can spend your whole life here, wash, pray, do your work, and all the time you might just as well not have been born.” Thus when Annik disappears, Hackett begins to imagine she has drowned herself, transposing his own despair at ever attaining artistic recognition onto her daily grind. The bathos of discovering she has been fired for nicking the Hotel’s silver confirms what we have known all along: Annik is a hard, practical woman intent on survival. As Hackett’s teacher remarks when criticising one of his sketches, she is “like a beast waiting to be put back in its stall”; Hackett’s artistic pretensions and solipsism by comparison seem flimsy. The brief and raucous farce of ‘Not Shown’ also concerns versions of the masculine and feminine in moulding ‘us’. Tailfirst Farm, on Tailfirst Estate (yes, another great name!) has been overlooked by the National Trust, but while the manor is not shown, the farm is nevertheless open to an oblivious public and Lady P. has hired itinerate no-hoper Fothergill to manage affairs – not that they have many visitors. The even more feckless Mrs. Twine and Mrs. Feare are also employed. But these hopeless appointments are such by design, Lady P. not trusting her husband as capable of hiring candidates with “something not quite right about them, who would come cheap.” The story opens with lady P. remonstrating with Fothergill about his having taken on the brash Mrs. Horrabin, who charges into the story declaring Mrs. Twine and Mrs. Feare redundant and herself hired, firing off changes to make the operation economically viable “[The public] want to see the bedrooms and the john”, and finally flashing décolletage in a gauche signal to the witless Fothergill that they’re up to the sexy seduction bit, Fothergill desperately spouting “It’s only twenty past nine in the morning”. He is saved by Mr. Horrabin texting his wife: he has been outside waiting in the car all along, apparently even more of a push-over than hapless Fothergill. The point of all this hilarity though, is that Lady P. isn’t interested in Tailfirst Farm making a profit. A practical woman, Lady P. seems to represent qualities which have become grotesque and exaggerated in Mrs. Horrabin, and is willing to preserve the sanctity of what is “not shown”. Thus are seen examples of Fitzgerald’s parade of pragmatic, practical women, and her straggling coterie of dreamer men. But before striking up three cheers for female know-how, it should be noted that Fitzgerald is at best equivocal about this – it may be more accurate to say she is sensitive to what the ascension of the bossy Mrs. Horrabins of the world may have cost us. To return to my initial quote, a gentleman’s redundant curves, while being an aristocratic luxury, nevertheless emblematise a “quite different relationship”, in Fitzgerald’s eyes a more capacious relationship to artistry, a greater humanity and thus indulgence toward failed intentions and dreaming, these often associated with the masculine sphere in her stories and a now eclipsed patriarchy. The thrifty, practical and limiting which expands into the pragmatism and rationalism of today she tends by contrast to associate with the over-extension of the feminine. This mightn’t sit well with some (although Fitzgerald is lightly mocking of the one and proud of the other) and in fact isn’t always the case in this collection – Penelope Fitzgerald is not a programmatic writer; she explores territory which isn’t, I suspect, always a source of comfort to her. In the title story ‘Means of Escape’ Alice Godley (yet another pun), daughter of Hobart’s Rector back when Tasmania was still Van Diemen’s Land, encounters alone in St George’s Church a convict called Savage who has escaped Port Arthur. Savage is desperate for shelter and food in lieu of a bid to escape on a boat back to England. Alice, unmarried and facing the prospect of spinsterhood, constrained by ideas of piety, literature and Romanticism in an unforgiving landscape in which pragmatism, opportunism and contingency are the order of the day, is seeking her own kind of escape. With the aid of her friend Aggie she decides to help Savage, cleaving to a half-imagined idea of romance and flight, even entertaining fantasies about the seamier side of love affairs – she isn’t to be prudish in this regard, and even puts on Savage’s filthy, smelly convict hood, thus identifying herself as a convict of a different kind . But in another bathic anti-climax, Savage instead escapes with the hired help, Mrs. Watson, a more world-weary woman better able to attend to Savage’s worldly needs; the lovey-dovey stuff, one presumes on the part of Mrs. Watson, can come later. Mrs. Watson is also, of course, of Savage’s class, and the disintegration of class barriers is another recurring theme. ‘Our Lives Are Only Lent To Us’ explores the crumbling space aristocratic and colonial wealth grant the world of cultural sensibilities, the upsurge of the ‘underclasses’ and ‘natives’ intruding a frightening, needs-driven vitality into a settled world: “The two cultures are complementary, but in the way that death is to life. The two cannot exist together but just as surely they cannot exist without each other.” Characters like the Colonel, and Beehernz in the story of the same name, have tried to escape into this pared down world only to discover the shackles of culture and class are not so easily shirked. And in the wonderful tale ‘Desideratus’, this concept of social mobility as a moving into death is superbly figured in a young rural boy’s chasing, literally, his desires; less successfully in ‘The Prescription’, a working class up-start discovers that his motivation for upward social movement makes his success a hollow one indeed. But perhaps the pièce de résistance of this collection is ‘The Axe’, which works on a literal transfiguration of the almost tacky double entendre ‘to get the axe’. As the earliest of the stories published here (1975) - first appearing in a collection of ghost stories - its tone is very different, but there is a lot more to this piece than a straightforward horror story – although it works perfectly well on that level too. The story is a report being written by the manager of a company branch about the sacking, due to cutbacks, of W.S. Singlebury. Singlebury (who at the end of the story won’t be restricted to a single burial) is one of Fitzgerald’s feckless men – he has worked at the same demeaning job all his life, has never married, has no friends, and nurtures vague literary/philosophical interests which are of no value in the narrow world of commerce. Worried about his impending ‘axing’, Singlebury invites the narrator to his bedsit, the place “where I bury myself, said Singlebury”. During a subsequent discussion he declares that “the mind and body are the same” (Fitzgerald would be writing about this twenty years later in “The Blue Flower”), thus within the mechanics of the fiction the idea of our narrator having ‘given the axe’ to Singlebury comes to literally haunt him: a transubstantiation of an enfeebled conscience forced into dishonour. With the exception of ‘The Axe’, however, the stories collected here bear all the hallmarks of the writing style Fitzgerald is renowned for in her novels – short stories are characteristically compressed and synecdotal, but having read ‘The Blue Flower’ it is difficult to imagine how Fitzgerald’s writing could be any more of either of these things. Hence many of the pieces here read much as episodes in her novels might, the difference being that across the breadth of a novel accruing episodes form a sediment of meaning, a luxury not afforded by the short story. And there are occasions in ‘The Means of Escape’ when stories feel a little thin: until its first main break, ‘The Means of Escape’ reads like the opening to a novel, then changing gear funnels itself into a new mould; ‘The Likeness’ too feels like it might offer us more were it allowed space to broaden scope. But such moments would be highlights in almost any other collection. With these stories Fitzgerald leaves us blinking from a clarity just beyond the spectrum of our vision. (less) | Notes are private!
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Jan 13, 2012
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| 0007718799
| 9780007718795
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| unknown
| 3.45
| 1,239
| 1995
| Jan 01, 2002
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**As usual, spoilers abound** Toward the end of 'The Blue Flower' Friedrich (Fritz) von Hardenberg, the man who would become the recognised Romantic no...more **As usual, spoilers abound** Toward the end of 'The Blue Flower' Friedrich (Fritz) von Hardenberg, the man who would become the recognised Romantic novelist and poet Novalis, considers the precious few moments in which "[he] felt the certainty of immortality, like the touch of a hand." These include his first entrance into the Justs' house, the sight of a boy with head bowed in meditation in the Weissenfels churchyard, and his first sighting of the 12 year old Sophie von Kühn, who he subsequently betroths. Although the first occasions have their place within the scheme of Fitzgerald's novel, it is the third which provides its main narrative thrust. But there is much more to ‘The Blue Flower’ than a straightforward historical novel depicting Frtiz’s bizarre attraction to such a young girl, a girl depicted here as being rather dowdy and none too bright - although Fitzgerald’s deft handling of such touchy subject matter is a marvel in itself. ‘The Blue Flower’ unassumingly nuzzles itself into the crux of historical epochs, echoes of the tricolours and then Napoleon finding their diminished, bemusing refractions in the domestic tit-for-tat of the noble but penurious Hardenberg household, the verisimilitude of historical details in depicting these faultless, unforced and indicative of Fitzgerald’s erudition in her chosen milieu. And her skill in this area likewise complements her rendering of the essential provinciality behind the wide-eyed naivety which allows Fritz to indulge all kinds of notions, such as Fichtean ideals… “Look at the washbasket! Let your thought be the washbasket! Have you thought the washbasket? Now then, gentlemen, let your thought be on that that thought the washbasket!” …continuity between body, mind and soul (and indeed the secret soul of mineral deposits), nature, and of course his imaginative vision of the blue flower. It is his fiancé, Sophie (Fitzgerald has Fritz punningly call her “His philosophy”), who embodies this vision in the real world, a vision nobody but Fritz’s younger brother, the Bernhard, who displays preternatural maturity and incisiveness, can intuit or come close to understanding. After Fritz reads the fragment of his story containing the blue flower first to Karoline Just (the woman everyone expects him to marry – the disappointed Karoline included) and then to Sophie without success, the Bernard sneaks a peek: “[The Bernhard] had been struck […] by one thing in particular: the stranger who had spoken at the dinner table about the Blue Flower had been understood by one person and one only. This person must have been singled out as distinct from the rest of the family. It was a matter of recognising your own fate and greeting is as familiar when it came.” That fate is the one the Bernhard recognises as his own – a premature death (a fate which would befall all the Hardenberg children); or in Fritz’s understanding a ceding of selfhood to a greater unity, harmony and depersonalised love. Sophie, who Fritz also calls his Wisdom, is tubercular and, after several excruciating and buffoonish attempted operations, dies. Fritz cannot bring himself to attend her, neither during the operations nor at her deathbed. This great, sprawling Romantic was, after all, also a successful and busy Salt Mine Inspector, Fitzgerald eking from these polarised aspects of his biography the subtlest suggestions of a civilisation poised – be it that of the early 19th century or our own – on a cusp. Indeed, in the latter portion of the book, Fritz as protagonist and focus has faded, his story ceding to that of his family and the vestiges of inherited religion-based nobility, and to that of the Mandelsloh, Sophie’s elder, pragmatic sister who cares for Sophie throughout her illness (and who re-marries judiciously outside the time-frame of the novel). Fitzgerald’s prose (elliptical, episodic) and style (paternally indulgent towards her characters’ foibles, her humour gently, almost fondly mocking traits she recognises as reassuringly familial – the resemblance between names is an obvious one) enjoin readers to look beyond the words on the page toward the greater historical, biographical and, most importantly, artistic conception they suggest and gesture toward. Masterful. A favourite. (less) | Notes are private!
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Dec 27, 2011
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| 1408810263
| 9781408810262
| 4.09
| 215,883
| Jul 29, 2008
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Did Fielding not put the epistolary novel to the sword in the first half of the eighteenth century? OK, it's probably unfair to blame Shaffer's chosen...more Did Fielding not put the epistolary novel to the sword in the first half of the eighteenth century? OK, it's probably unfair to blame Shaffer's chosen form - writers like Byatt have made great use of it. The truth is that "The Guernsey blah blah blah" simply isn't a book for a reader like me. Sicklier than molasses, more hackneyed than Hugh Grant/Julia Roberts feel-gooders, plotted with all the finesse of a six year old with aspirations to architecture and a pack of crayons to hand, perhaps this novel's most laudable property, given that I read it over Christmas, is as an efficacious emetic to yuletide excess. (less) | Notes are private!
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Dec 22, 2011
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| 014132063X
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| 4.15
| 3,528
| Jan 01, 2005
| Feb 01, 2006
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**Don’t spoiler it for the kids** Morris Gleitzman’s ‘Once’ doesn’t leave a dry eye in the room. This is a children’s book about The Holocaust, a fact...more **Don’t spoiler it for the kids** Morris Gleitzman’s ‘Once’ doesn’t leave a dry eye in the room. This is a children’s book about The Holocaust, a fact that, if you’re anything like me, immediately sets off alarms bells. The schmaltzy epigraphs don’t help: “My name is Felix. This is my story” and “Everybody deserves to have something good in their life”. But what succeeds is a really great kid’s book. Morris’s prose is laconic but hefty, and his narrative moves along at a clipping pace without losing equipoise. Furthermore, the voice of our protagonist and narrator, Felix, is pitch-perfect: the stories he tells to shield both himself and other children from the hell unfolding around him register as slightly more juvenile than what I imagine to be the age of the book’s intended readership, and this, at least at the beginning, would allow kids to engage with the incomprehensible reality of Nazi occupied Poland, as it is represented in the book, by recognising the gap between Felix’s stories and the actual situation, rather than diving straight into manifest atrocity. And the power and importance of story-telling is (well, besides the Holocaust) “Once’s” main theme. At the beginning of the novel Felix can stave off confronting reality by inventing stories – his parents have not been killed and will come to collect him, the Nazis are persecuting Jewish books and booksellers like his parents, not exterminating the race entire etc. But as he continues in his quest to find his parents, the truth of what is happening around him begins to impinge, and Felix’s powers of invention begin to fail to account for the cruelty he is witnessing and is himself victim to; “I tell myself a story about a bunch of kids in another country whose parents work in a book warehouse and one day a big pile of Jewish books topples onto the kids’ parents and crushes them and the kids vow that when they grow up they’ll get revenge on all Jewish books and their owners. It doesn’t feel like a very believable story. It’ll have to do for now, though. Perhaps while I’m on my way to find Mum and Dad I’ll be able to think up a better one.” Eventually, of course, stories can no longer shield him, and Felix loses all faith in this his great talent. At this point Gleitzman stops pulling punches and neither we nor Felix are spared the savagery of ghetto life and the Nazi’s quest to exterminate Jewry. Will Felix recover his faith in stories? Are fictions of any use in the face of barbarism on this scale? I don’t think I’m spilling too many beans by saying that, within the limits of its subject matter, “Once” does have a happy ending. Not only that, it is quite funny. Most of the chuckles come from Gleitzman throwing an incongruous, childish element into Felix’s chain of reasoning, so that, for example, the nuns in the orphanage get more soup than their charges because they are bigger and also because they are holier. But humour creeps into far darker circumstances: squished into the cattle carriages on their way to extermination, at every lunge of the train Felix keeps bumping into his fellow transportees, and each time he does so he apologises, which Gleitzman represents by inserting a “sorry” between every paragraph until someone can’t stand it any longer and yells at Felix to shut up – after which the other children in the group begin with “Are we there yet?”. Another nice touch is that each chapter begins with “Once…”, this leading event stated in a retrospective preterite before the narration swooshes us back into the present (which also lets us know that Felix does survive!) But this is definitely a kid’s book, and while it is certainly a great and emotive portrayal, the hoarier reader demands more from the too often harped on story-telling theme, and feels the author’s structuring of wit and pathos as too stark. Not that that will save you from needing a box of tissues handy for the last chapter. (less) | Notes are private!
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Dec 20, 2011
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| 0224094157
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| 3.69
| 50,117
| Aug 04, 2011
| Aug 04, 2011
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**Spoilers** I would probably have passed this book by were it not for Michael Wood's review, titled 'Stupidly English', in the LRB Vol. 33, number 18....more **Spoilers** I would probably have passed this book by were it not for Michael Wood's review, titled 'Stupidly English', in the LRB Vol. 33, number 18. I tend to imagine your Austers, Rushdies, Franzens and Barneses of the publishing world aren't short of readers and don't need me added to those legions. However, if 'The Sense of an Ending' is anything to go by, the greater loss is certainly mine, and I'm grateful Wood's review drew me to Barnes's Booker winner. On the face of things, 'The Sense of an Ending' is a simple prospect - deceptively so. Our narrator, Tony Webster (and he is a spinner of webs), is recounting something of an existential crisis which has befallen him and ruptured an otherwise peaceable retirement, a retirement capping off his over-all peaceable life. This crisis has been precipitated by the bequeathal to him by an ex-flame's mother of £500 and the diary of an old school chum, Adrian, who topped himself some months after swindling Tony of the aforementioned girlfriend (not that Tony was particularly smitten by her anyway) back in their college days. Barnes divides his short novel in two. In part one Tony relates, to the best of his recollection, the events leading up to Adrian's suicide. The longer second half deals with the various repercussions of this sudden, unexpected inheritance to his sense of personal history, the fabric of his memories and his sense of culpability and remorse for his friend's death, all of which is framed by his abstruse confrontation with mortality, the scant meaning he can retrospectively grant the life he's lived, and a general ontological foreboding. Read any of the plethora of reviews for this book and you'll have it pointed out time and again that Tony is an "unreliable narrator"; his memory is imperfect and he has suspiciously forgotten or misconstrued past events... "How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves." (95) ...to "avoid being hurt" (142), and the consequences of his doing so are now coming home to roost. I disagree, in part, with this assessment. Tony, as much as he may be unreliable is, nevertheless, perfectly dependable when it comes to pointing this out himself. In fact, part one is so saturated with caveats against the reliability of his own words that to call this a refrain doesn't do justice to just how insistent Tony's repeated warnings are. It wasn't until I finished the book that I could understand why a writer as renown as Barnes would perpetrate such a gaffe. Anyway, by the close of the novel, despite being doltishly slow, and with the help of a scrap of the diary in question, sent to him by Veronica (the ex), Tony is able to deliver the goods; he has filled in gaps, resurrected suppressed memories, faced up to role he may have played in how things turned out, and finally realised that; "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." (17) In this regard, Tony, in his passive-aggressive way and in the act of recounting, faces up to his inadequacies and imperfections. Thus, rather than describe Tony as unreliable , I would suggest that his figure is in fact Barnes's lure, or decoy. Woods in the LRB claims: "It's not always easy to tell style from symptom in Barnes, the irony he needs for his writing from the irony that is his characters' pride and weakness." This distance, this irony, is crucial in "The Sense of an Ending", and it is not taken up by most reviewers, who seem content to take Tony as a straight mouthpiece for Barnes's philosophical lucubrations (thanks Mr. Barnes for a spiffy new word!). Little recognition is afforded the fact that there are two incongruous strands running through the novel: the first Tony's concern with ipseity, integrity and memory; the second Barnes's with the detective novel. And it isn't until the gothic-toned final revelation that these two strands resolve themselves. Barnes has taken a great risk here, because, as a novel dealing with the vagaries of memory and shifting selfhood, "The Sense of an Ending", for the majority of its 150 pages, at best might be dubbed a dissonant experience. This is because the detective tropes - fragmentary and minatory emails, an impending sense of menace, Tony's illicit rendezvous with Veronica etc. - do not reflect well the processes of memory and remembering: recalling memories isn't simply a case of finding the missing pieces to a puzzle, and Tony on several occasions makes the point that concentrating on recalling them isn't going to yield what he desires. Thus the detective story element is an ill-fitting frame for Tony's self-reflections and philosophising, this figured in a sense by his memory of the reverse tide at Minsterworth, the sleuth work action of the novel forming a counter current which resists the flow of its protagonist's intellectual project. One gets the impression that no matter how much self-mining Tony may have attempted, without extraneous intervention he would never have got anywhere. Put differently, if Barnes had wanted to write exclusively about the action of memory and time on the process of self-discovery, he would have written a different book ('The Lover', perhaps!). What is revealed in 'The Sense of an Ending's' denouement, the final shocking twist, resolves this disparity in part two by sending the reader back to part one and Tony's initial recounting of "my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time." (41) (this quote a reminder that our narrator is speaking from the other side of a yet to be revealed revelation - both personal and narrative). There are seeded, even within part one's self-proclaimed narrative uncertainty, all the clues an astute reader of detective novels should need, clues Tony, if he hadn't been so intent on self-analysis at the time, would have cottoned onto without the necessity of, years later, retrospectively tallying them with his ego-centric memorialising. "He'll do, won't he?"(29) is the most obvious instance of the blindness his self-centredness produced to what was happening before his eyes. "You still don't get it. You never did, and you never will. So stop even trying."(144), Veronica says to Tony in her final, dismissive email. Meanwhile Tony is - "...endur[ing] a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt - and inflicted for precisely that reason."(142) While this may sound convincing, at this point Tony is still thinking of his own hurt, his obtuseness beautifully epitomised further in an idiotic, pointless argument with a barman about the authenticity of hand-cut chips. The actual situation, far from being obscured by tricks of memory, is right in front of Tony's nose. Tony is correct in self-diagnosing that the emotional and ethical paucity produced in his life is the result of his having lived it "carefully", but it is only after the final revelation that he becomes capable of realising solipsistic searching was never going to offer him a solution (solipsism indeed being the root of his problems), nor resolve in any concrete way the real extent to which his malicious letter to Veronica and Adrian was responsible for the latter's suicide. (Tony could just as easily have penned a compassionate letter with the same consequences). What remains in the extant scrap of Adrian's diary is a Wittgenseinian style musing on accumulation and responsibility, which connects us to the famous "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof must we remain silent"(9), quoted from 'Tractatus', right at the beginning of the novel, when, during their secondary school days "Colin and I would consider this idea in silence for a while, then grin and carry on talking."(9). Approximately half a century later, it seems Tony might have finally learnt to shut up and stop nullifying the threat of the exterior world by refracting it through the prism of his self(ishness). In this regard, we can consider the final lines of the novel as referring to an accumulation of evidence, the responsibility to act based on evidence (and the sense of responsibility such action bestows, and the consequent benefits of treating people and yourself fairly), and the unrest inherent in living a life based on a close relationship to that of which we may actually speak (i.e. the world as it is). In the second "There is great unrest"(150), what was once a smart-arse (and very British) high school joke now supports what we hope will be Tony's newfound and enduring seriousness towards what remains of his life. That we identify with Tony's solipsism, that we read this novel as the author's treaty on selfhood and memory and history making, is testament to the importance of what amounts to a (very sober) satire. The cleverness of Barnes's novel is that he has, in an oblique but unmistakable gesture, held up an unflattering mirror to his readers. (less) | Notes are private!
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Nov 01, 2011
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| 0099455420
| 9780099455424
| 3.56
| 3,292
| 1973
| Aug 13, 2003
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**Spoilers. But then you shouldn't be reading...** The Critics' Critic Prompted by Vintage's suggested pairing of Amis's debut novel with Fielding's 'To...more **Spoilers. But then you shouldn't be reading...** The Critics' Critic Prompted by Vintage's suggested pairing of Amis's debut novel with Fielding's 'Tom Jones' under the irresistible epithet of 'Vinatge Lust', the latter author's canonical novel has remained at the back of my mind while reading 'The Rachel Papers'. And it isn't long before, amid the myriad literary references clogging narrator Charles Highway's monologue, we are treated to a direct reference to Fielding; "The section [...] , I now see, is done in a rather pompous mock-heroic style, Like Fielding's descriptions of pub brawls - the sort of writing I usually have little time for. But there is a sense in which this style is suited to the subject, so I'll let it pass." (22) This short passage (along with the rest of the paragraph it comes from) is exemplary of the nuanced complexities of Amis's endeavours in 'The Rachel Papers'. If one aspect of Fielding's irony resides in his mock-heroic style, it could equally be suggested that an important part of Amis's novel relies on the mock-sloth style - acerbic, lurid, cruel, sentimental - of its narrator, Charles Highway (which is something of a mock-heroic name, as Charles himself points out), and that this is in turn the consequence of a kind of mock-knowingness which Amis seeks to satirise in literary culture - as if the mining and then organisation of brute experience were the only things constituting the writer's enterprise. While the frisson of his diction is invariably the first thing to jump off the page, Amis nevertheless deliberately binds this up with a knotty relation between author and reader via the narrator's intervening analysis of his own notebooks (the Rachel Papers, amongst others), of which the above quote is an example. Thus Amis's novel is Charles Highway's analysis and editing of these notes as he counts down the hours and minutes to his twentieth birthday and what he believes to be the commencement of adulthood, this impending moment itself tweaked by the narrator for maximum histrionic effect; "To achieve, at once, dramatic edge and thematic symmetry I elect to place my time of birth on the stroke of midnight." (7) Somewhere or other I've seen this scenario described as a conceit, which, as much as all fiction is precisely that, it may well be; however, it is this set-up which forms the bedrock of the novel, and although I would imagine Amis cringing (or snarling) at the comparison, it is the films of Peter Greenaway which this novel brings to my mind, films which invariably treat the absurdities occasioned by viewing the world and people through distorting, prescriptive epistemological lenses. 'The Rachel Papers' deals with Charles on the ostensible cusp of adulthood *dealing with* his teenage years by ordering and tallying the reams of notes written about his experiences, obsessively amassed over that time; "...folders, note-pads, files, bulging manila envelopes, wads of paper trussed in string, letters, carbons, diaries, the marginalia of my youth, cover the patchwork quilt. I jostle the papers into makeshift stacks. Ought they to be arranged chronologically, by subject, or by theme? Patently, some rigorous clerking will have to be done tonight." (8) And specifically the notes appertaining to Rachel, the older woman (by one year) he is determined to shag (those who have read the book will know why that is an appropriate predicate)to coincide with his coming of age and entrance into Oxford; "On my desk, a sea of pads, folders, envelopes, napkins, notes, the complete Rachel Papers stand displayed. Four-eyed, I indent subject headings, co-ordinate footnotes, mark cross-references in red and blue biros." (59) Such ordering of raw representations of turgid experience into an ultimatum of new maturity is then Charles's objective. Being equally cynical moderns we can rightly expect his enterprise to flop. But Amis would push things further, for Charles is as aware as we are that such a resolution is passé; "We have got into the habit of going further beyond the happy-ever-more promise: relationships in decay, aftermaths, but with everyone being told a thing or two about themselves, busy learning from their mistakes."(147) Boding ill for any reassuring denouement, Charles's voice comes to us from, supposedly, beyond the end; a voice therefore precociously self-aware of its own artificiality. And Charles constantly regales us with instances of self-fashioning to achieve his own goals: calculating accoutrement, adopting various class and even national accents, rehearsing lines to stage-manage up-coming meetings, boning up on the right authors to impress the ladies, making sure the right record covers and books are scattered about his room to smooth his seductions (such as they are!), and most importantly freely modifying and commenting on his own notes. Knowing there is no 'end', for Charles all means to secure his pre-conceived choice of ends become permissible - the Rachel-quest is one such arbitrary, self- assignation. As James Diedrick shrewdly points out (which sinks criticisms of Amis's two-dimensional rendering of Rachel's character), Rachel is all but an anagram of Charles, and her surname, 'Noyes', in addition to Diedrick's suggesting that it mirrors her first rebuttal and subsequent acquiescence to Charles's advances (no:yes), is also a literal, chiastic manifestation in the text mirroring Charles's own attraction and cooling towards her (yes:no::no:yes). However, for Charles this kind of meta-knowing is also a trap, a mediating barrier between himself and the authentic experience he craves and, on occasion, is temporarily sensitive to. It is what denies him pleasure even in the consummation of his relationship with Rachel, when the long-lusted after act of sex is reduced to a menagerie of dissociated body parts and gestures, so explicitly and painfully detailed that in a back-to-the-present and much needed interlude in the description, Charles admits; "I know what it's supposed to be like, I've read my Lawrence. I know also what I felt and thought; I know what the evening was: an aggregate of pleasureless detail, nothing more; an insane, gruelling, blow-by-blow obstacle course." (149) To return to Fielding's mock heroic style, his high, ironic addresses to the "sagacity" and "penetration" of his readers (ironic because we're all-too ready to assume the honour), according to Lothar Cerny is "primarily aim[ed] at the fanciful reading habits of dilettante readers." Charles Highway *is* one of Fielding's "sagacious" readers, for whom, to frame it in Cerny's Lockean terms, "to find out [] intermediate Ideas...and to apply them right, is, I suppose...Sagacity." There is no need to have read Fielding to eek this from 'The Rachel Papers'; Charles operates from a point of exhausted, supposed knowingness and Amis's mock-sloth is the voice of a threadbare being for whom even the body and its sexual impulse has no further meaning beyond the cheap thrill of grotesquery, "...the bizarre surfaces and sneaky tensions with which I was always trying to invest my own life", and for whom literature is but a ready store of semiotic weapons and don-able poses. Towards the end of the book, Charles's bluff is called by the don interviewing him for his candidature to Oxford. The don is highly critical of the essays Charles has submitted; "Literature has a kind of life of its own, you know. You can't just use it...ruthlessly, for your own ends [...] Stop reading critics, and for Christ's sake stop reading all this structuralist stuff." (211) This, of course, applies equally to Charles's cruel treatment of Rachel and his callous collecting of pre-processed, pre-nullified experience. A possible font of Charles's reactions is his fraught relationship with his father (who is the editor of a prestigious business journal), whose open liaisons with other women disgust Charles. Of course Charles, hypocritically, behaves no better, and although there is a glint of reconciliation between father and son at the end of this novel - the faintest whiff of hope, the first recognition of voice - Charles is quick to divert back behind the shield of mediating language: he congratulates himself on the "pleasingly unrehearsed air" (213) of his nastily larconic break-up letter to Rachel, has begun convincing his father that he is interested in another college because he "didn't much like the don who interviewed [him]" (215), and has picked up his pen again, this time, with his youth behind him, to write a story in which the character of Rachel has been thinly disguised behind the name "Ruth". A story Charles writes confident in reaping the harvest of an aftermath he himself has seeded.(less) | Notes are private!
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Having recently re-watched Winterbottom's "Tristam Shandy: a cock and bull story", Coogan's dead-on quote regarding Sterne, that he "was post modern b...more Having recently re-watched Winterbottom's "Tristam Shandy: a cock and bull story", Coogan's dead-on quote regarding Sterne, that he "was post modern before there was any modernism to be post about." could equally apply to Fielding. OK, "Tom Jones" mightn't be considered exactly post-modern, however I agree with Amis's quote on the back cover of this edition when he states "Two hundred years have not dimmed Fielding's realism. His humour is closer to our own than that of any writer before the present century." Fielding's epistemological/moral concerns, as represented by the relationship between reader and writer, and of both of these to the novel, remain ours - and never more keenly so - today. Fielding deftly interweaves irony and satire with empathy to (hopefully) challenge received practices of understanding, implicating and obliging his readers through direct authorial address and humour - all of which has important implications for the act of reading and writing fiction. Just a fantastic book really. (less) | Notes are private!
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I read this collection some time ago now and have probably re-read the novella “Death in Venice” on a handful of occasions – this most recent prompted...more I read this collection some time ago now and have probably re-read the novella “Death in Venice” on a handful of occasions – this most recent prompted by reading Naipaul’s “The Engima of Arrival” again. I confess to being a little surprised by the vehemence of some of the negative reactions here on GR, particularly given how ironic Mann’s writing is, but I for one am a sucker for the Apollonian/Dionysian artistic conundrum and love nothing better than a dose of Schopenhauerian pessimism in my fiction, followed by a Nietzschean pick-me-up, and all this washed down with a draught of decaying rococo decadence. However, in a time when someone like Carver is thought a paragon of the short form, I guess the reputation of a writer like Mann is in jeopardy. Oh well, there’s little point fighting it. I’ll just go on enjoying Mann secretly…(less) | Notes are private!
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Borrowing its structure from Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”, “The Enigma of Arrival” charts the possibility of its own realisation, although unlike...more
Borrowing its structure from Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”, “The Enigma of Arrival” charts the possibility of its own realisation, although unlike “In Search of Lost Time” there isn’t an epiphanic, tea-soaked cupcake or uneven cobblestone in sight. Rather, in measured calm the narrator of “Enigma” (ostensibly Naipual himself) recounts his departure from his native Trinidad, his determination to become a writer, and then how the continual process of writing eventuates in this novel. Such revelations of writing and self and the writing and written self are also brought about by Naipaul’s precise and deliberate observations of his newly adopted Wiltshire landscape and manor house residence. At first Naipaul sees romantic, literary ideas embodied in the land and people - most specifically in Jack and Jack’s garden – and their tenuousness in the face of increasing decay and usurping modernity. This vision is slowly replaced by an acceptance of change; an enticing conception of the substantiality of time and material trace. Finally, however, after a decade of his living on the manor, change begins to accumulate and become overwhelming; the presence of death burdens Naipaul, and it isn’t until he must return to Trinidad for the funeral of his sister that he regains some perspective on the landscape and on himself, allowing him to up sticks and begin a new phase of life. “The Enigma of Arrival” is then a contemplation – almost a meditation – on place and self, and Naipaul’s formidable literary prowess allows him to draw both autobiography and fiction into the orbit of this enterprise. These elements, together with the process by which the novel itself has been made possible, come to reflect the movements of our age, an age in which old certainties – which were probably never as certain as we think they were – have evaporated, their lack alienating even those who were once considered colonisers from their own homeland. In this way the people Naipaul observes, people he at first imagines to be emanations, almost, of the British landscape, turn out to be just as “homeless” as he (an immigrant) is himself, patching together ad-hoc lives from remnants persisting of ages gone before (something very much akin to Levi Strauss’s bricolage concept) and just like Naipaul, seeking to settle. However, as if this sense of dislocation and rootlessness were not enough, Naipaul’s is a disquieting vision for another reason. Rushdie in his review of the book lamented that not once does the word ‘love’ appear in Naipaul’s novel, and he has a point – in a sense. Naipaul has stated that in “The Enigma of Arrival” he purposefully excludes all reference to a personal life, that the narrator “is defined [exclusively] by his writing”. This is not the only conceit this novel engages in; not once does the narrator initiate contact with another person – it is always people who come to the narrator. And on more than one occasion we are treated to snobbish and even cruel judgements passed on those he does come into contact with. Indeed, when change begins to weigh on the narrator, causing him to sense the approach of a kind of death, the precise nature of these changes mean that it is his seclusion which is being threatened: trees have fallen meaning traffic noise now disturbs him; vagabonds are more frequently seen on the grounds. It could be said that it is not so much change which plagues the narrator as the increasing imposition of the world at large. So I think Rushdie’s implied question is a valid one: what value can such writing have if its insights evade the implications and vicissitudes of human life? It is as much “The Enigma of Arrival” as “Magic Seeds” which I think of as forming the missing half of “Half a Life” (Naipaul’s later novel). If in “The Enigma of Arrival” Naipaul eschews the banality of the personal in favour of the distant observer/contemplator, “Half a Life” follows a kind of hypothetical “Death in Venice” scenario (although without any obvious symbolic lure), in which a Naipaul-like character drifts away from the self-imposed discipline of writing and follows a kind of sexual odyssey of self-discovery. Although the books could be thought of as forming complementary opposites, the outcome in both is somewhat similar; the protagonists end by being alone, and there is the sense that the characters of both have failed as human beings. In this sense, Naipaul’s concern is with the mercilessness of materialism. This is most apparent in “Engima’s” final chapter “The Ceremony of Farewell”. When the pundit who is performing the funeral ceremony for the narrator’s sister is asked by the bereaved husband whether he can expect to be re-united with his wife in a future life, the pundit is cruelly dismissive, saying that even if this were possible, they would not recognise one another. This comment allows the narrator to realise that he can step out of his malaise and move on; embark on a new phase of life which is divorced from the previous. It is this final disconnection from his residence and the landscape and people that have become familiar to him over a decade which allows him to begin to write the book. However, this moving on is not as final as a true death, such as his sister’s. The self persists, albeit in a state of constant change. And indeed, it is this constant evolution of self, a constant moving through veils, which Naipaul seems to be suggesting may be necessary for writing, and thus “The Engima of Arrival” could be thought of as concerning itself with the writer’s self-imposed task - a question not at all dissimilar to that posed by Rushdie. Naipaul’s writer is a person living a half-life, seeking an impossible finality from which to be able to write of his self (and the world), realising at the same time that only death would offer that end.(less) | Notes are private!
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***22/06/2011 Lisa has just blogged (while at the ceremony mind you!) that Kim Sott has just received the 2011 Miles Franklin award for 'That Deadman...more
***22/06/2011 Lisa has just blogged (while at the ceremony mind you!) that Kim Sott has just received the 2011 Miles Franklin award for 'That Deadman Dance' - so I thought I'd include it here. A deserving win for wonderful book. Congratulations Kim! What's not in a song Early in part four Bobby Wabalanginy, Scott’s Noongar protagonist, is at the peak of his powers. He has just returned to the company of his white coloniser friends and his role in their whaling enterprise after a period of absence in which he was inducted into manhood by his own people. Now once again rowing out to the hunt, Bobby sings. He sings about the hunt, the experience of it, and because that experience includes the newcomers to his land his song necessarily incorporates both their presence and voices; “Asked to describe the song many would have struggled. One of those blackfella songs, they said, but with some of our words in it.” (That Deadman Dance p.318) But there are elements which Bobby’s song does not include, such as the “business of a white man thinking he was too good for a Noongar” (That Deadman Dance p.317), and there was “little of cutting up the whale” (That Deadman Dancep.319), “little of the thick blood that ran in rivulets” (That Deadman Dance p.319). This is because “Bobby had no part in these things. He could find whales, and could chase and run with them. But his hands could not kill a whale. He was only steerer.” (p.319) Recognisable here is Bobby’s self denial at his own complicity in the destructive activities of the whalers, and more pointedly his glossing of their depreciative attitude toward Noongar people. But contained here also is the conceit that Bobby will be able to maintain a distance from his new acquaintances; that he can somehow be involved without consequence, use their words and actions in his song without himself being changed. Add the fact that That Deadman Dance so conspicuously deals with such a meeting and merging of cultures to the even more indisputable subject of whaling, and it is small wonder Morag Fraser should “Think Melville...” when reading Scott’s novel. Moby Dick is surely required reading for any author wishing to treat the whaling industry, and Scott seems to evoke the same motley, worldly crew for his schooner as mans the Pequod, and shares with Melville a polyphonic, inclusive writing style capable of evoking multifarious voices. Furthermore, both authors allude, perhaps obligatorily, to the story of Jonah in their novels, Melville “go[ing] down in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison.” (Moby Dick, p.52) Jonah here is lost in what is seemingly “masterless”, or Godless, chaos, the whale representing a purgatory only Jonah’s submission and gratefulness to God will free him from. Bobby’s spirit on the other hand passed into the womb of his mother from a stranded, dying whale, this representative of a Noongar always-already connectedness with the natural world, figured in Bobby’s remembrance of a story his tribal elder Menak told him, in which it is possible to be drawn into a whale’s body and “Plunge your hands into that whale heart, lean into it and squeeze and let your voice join the whale’s roar. Sing that song your father taught you as the whale dives, down, deep.” (That Deadman Dance, p.2) While Melville’s Jonah prays God’s grace will deliver him from the threat of the external world, the Noongar celebrate that very “chaos” in song, dance and what Scott presents as being an almost symbiotic relationship to their environment; “Outside and inside, ocean and blood; almost the same salty fluid.” (That Deadman Dance p.294) This represents the fundamental cultural difference being treated in That Deadman Dance; as the English colonisers slowly gain a foothold their cultural hegemony also consolidates, its gravity drawing up even those individuals hitherto open to the possibility of a mutually respectful relationship between newcomer and Aboriginal. This is a culture that differentiates between inner and outer, us and them and which thus can’t help but view what is “other” as a threat to ipseity, and King George Town, then the country entire, as belonging exclusively to them and threatened by savages. As Bobby wryly points out; “Jonah woulda been alright if he was a Noongar man.” (That Deadman Dance p.295) This is the point at which That Deadman Dance concludes; the sad history which follows all the more so for the brief flaring of an alternate, miscarried possibility of accord between cultures. However Scott is too sensitive a writer to structure his historical re-telling around a reductive “us/them” binary; and as an author he is concerned with language (both English and Noongar), how it works through and upon us. When the narrative dips into the voice of its Noongar characters Scott’s prose collapses the distance between subject and object so that, for example “Cygnet River Colony was a strong wind blowing all morning from land” (That Deadman Dance p.25). In this way land, objects and people come to be identified with somatic qualities (Cygent River Colony with the feeling of wind on skin, for example), Scott presenting Noongar epistemology as deriving directly from experience and thus open, able to assimilate whatever should come into its field. For this reason, before Bobby was born, his ancestors had been able to develop the deadman dance from watching a beach drill, assimilating the alien movements of the equally alien mariners into their own language and expressions. Likewise, Bobby (among others) demonstrates great facility in acquiring English, and even phonetic writing. However, for Scott language and knowing are inseparable from identity, something Elizabeth Jolley is sensitive to in his writing; “Kim Scott captures the ambiguities, the troubles and the rewards which accompany the brutal and delicate nuances of relations when particles of one culture pass, as if through a fine sieve, into the heart of another culture.” Although Jolley was writing about Scott’s first novel, True Country, this seems equally apt to That Deadman Dance. And the character Wunyeran begins to experience this slow epistemological shift within himself; “And Wunyeran, up close now, motionless, waiting for the water to settle, saw part of his reflection but also, behind the reflection, that the sand was not white, but coloured like bark or ochre. Why? Because the water is dark. Why? Is the bush staining this shallow part of the ocean? Or is it the smoke, colouring the light and therefore the water, too? The questions you ask, learning a new way of speech. How it drives your thinking.” (That Deadman Dance, p.133) These are questions Wunyeran is not accustomed to asking – these questions, this way of thinking about the colour of the shallows, didn’t exist before his relationship with the philanthropic Dr. Cross. And while this broadening of thought at this stage might be considered one of Jolley’s “rewards”, an entity Scott has dubbed Bobby, but which exists beyond Bobby’s lifetime (presumably in our own) and who regales tourists with stories of the past, is much more ambivalent about the benefits of exposure to white culture, suggesting that something valuable has been lost; “...nearly all his listeners knew of books and of the language in them. But not, as we do, that you can dive deep into a book and not know just how deep until you return gasping to the surface, and are surprised at yourself, your new and so very sensitive skin.” (That Deadman Dance p.85-86) What is being presented here (besides the potential of literature to invoke new states in sensitive readers) is that the cost of an objective/objectivising knowledge is a loss of openness toward the world and people. This is why Bobby “never learned fear, because he was not just one self.” (That Deadman Dance p.128). With the gradual accruement of white ways and knowing Bobby falls out of the thrall of Menak and his other elders, and on the deadly cross-country journey after having been blown off course in a bid to explore eastward for fertile land with his entrepreneurial patron, Chaine, Bobby is siren-song tempted by the recently appointed Governor’s servants, two Aboriginal boys who have also been sent as part of the mission and who wish to abandon the party and try to get back without the white man contingent. These boys are almost symbolic characters in an almost allegorical parenthesis within the novel, representing as they do two Aboriginal people raised in white colonial society in Sydney, and at the end point of alienation from their cultural birthright, bitter and vengeful and a sign of things to come in King George Town (and surely meant as a none too subtle reminder of the effects of the White Australia Policy). After they shoot Killam, the other whitefella on the mission, so as to steal food and guns and brave the desert alone, Chaine murderers them, telling Bobby to keep quiet about what he’s just seen. But Bobby is unsettled; “...it felt as if [he and Chaine had] come from a dead place. What people stay there? Bobby knew stories of how they drank blood and ate their enemies. Well, they’d left behind some cranky spirits to trouble them. Those boys. He looked back the way they’d come.” (That Deadman Dance p.235) Told to walk a straight line out of Jonah’s hell into the promise of civilisation, this Orpheus takes his first uncertain glance back, and his first step toward the revelation that; “We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn’t want to hear ours...” (That Deadman Dance, p.106) But if Bobby’s deadman dance has transformed into a dance with death, it is equally important to recognise that Scott’s novel follows and is given narrative cohesion by the ley lines of white colonial history, his novel engaging with a western literary tradition rather than attempting to translate into the novelistic form an Aboriginal or Noongar modality of storytelling. It is significant that in That Deadman Dance, Noongar culture is barely represented in its own right; it is only ever present at the interface with the colonial world and even then filtered through the narrative of Bobby’s passage from child to adult. As such Scott would have his novel perform its own deadman dance and “attempting to fuse [voices] [...] prepar[e] for the birth of a new world.” (That Deadman Dance p.129) Sources Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance, Picador, 2010. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Norton Critical Editions, 2nd Ed., 2002. Elizabeth Jolley quote, Fremantle Arts Centre Press Morag Fraser review, The Sydney Morning Herald.(less) | Notes are private!
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Identity, voice and place in Kim Scott's "True Country". True Country begins and closes with a welcome, a welcome extended to a hovering, flying “you”...more Identity, voice and place in Kim Scott's "True Country". True Country begins and closes with a welcome, a welcome extended to a hovering, flying “you” which will become Billy but is also the reader, a “you” who “might fly in many times, high up and like reading river, hill, tree, rocks” (p.16, True Country), but who on the first occasion arrives by plane, noticing only landmarks which might locate Scott’s fictive Aboriginal settlement of Kanarma, where Billy has come to teach, on a map. It will not be until the end of True Country, in an epiphanic circularity which actually inaugurates and permits the writing of the novel itself, that we with Billy will descend in the spiritual manner intimated in the former, erroneous approach and be granted the possibility of entry into the true country of the title. But this first confounding landing, or grounding, is a necessary one and an important precursor to the spiritual welcome upon which the book concludes. It is vital that we with Billy do not stay airborne, floating, observing; we must first choose to descend. What True Country deals with is then the process by which Billy’s first landing can transform into the second. However, Scott’s novel is not an easy one and does not do this in a straightforward fashion. Aside from the confronting poverty and casual self-destructive brutality to be found in Kanarma, “True Country” also challenges the reader by self-consciously defying both the conventions we might expect in a narrative of self-discovery and also the consolations of a too-easy spirituality. True Country does not seek to delineate a single position or argue a proposal, either of which, after all, would ultimately bring it back into a colonial, Western discourse Scott seeks to question; nor does it, more importantly, relate the experience of Billy’s “awakening” as a personal narrative or journey. Rather, True Country is a legitimating performance of an alternative, Aboriginal mode of being and knowing, and this Scott seeks to accomplish by a dialogic, polyphonic articulation of identity and its relation to voice and place. A comparison to D. A. Miller’s observation in his essay on David Copperfield (Dickens’s canonical novel of self discovery) might serve to explicate the difference; “Paradoxically, writing is thus offered to us in “David Copperfield” as a socializing order from which the written self, always subject to omission, is separated, but with which the writing self, inevitably the agent of such omission, comes to be entirely identified.” (Secret Subjects, Open Secrets) Thus Dickens in David Copperfield evokes the experience of selfhood (and self discovery) negatively by delineating what it is not, this nevertheless constituting the very thing by which it can be identified - and thus in consequence the horrifying nullity of its non-being. By contrast, Scott in True Country evokes the experience of selfhood positively (if retroactively) by having his writing perform, or sing, those very experiences that he would have comprise identity, both Billy’s and the community’s. It is worth noting that Dickens and Scott are criticising a similar, internecine and spiritually impoverished way of knowing and being, a Western differential obsessed with designating and cataloguing what is “other” so as to be able to constitute its own centre and self, however where Dickens writes both of and from within this ontological bifurcation, Scott would have his writing suture the wound. If True Country, then, attempts to instigate the experience of an alternative and variegated modality of living and knowing, it must first be noted that in part one of the novel it is Billy’s traditional first person narration which dominates, albeit often interpolated by various other voices offering differing, independent viewpoints and texturing. Indeed, in part one Billy’s initial enthusiasm for recording and transcribing the oral histories of members of Kanarma’s community resembles something like the perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately condescending (or worse, assimilatory) cataloguing methods by which a linear-minded, colonial West appropriates and smothers “other” traditions. While Fatima tells him the story of her people’s first contact with white men, Billy is paying more attention to finding a reference to the story in a book he has borrowed based on the area’s mission’s journals than attending to Fatima’s actual words. After this session with Fatima Billy narrates; “I was taking huge strides, barely able to keep myself from breaking into a run, and leaping for the joy I felt within me. I felt I was about to take off, and soar. That’s what I thought, even then.” (p.51, True Country) The final sentence is significant, for as Billy becomes increasingly implicated in the lives of the people around him, the complexity of his self-appointed task becomes increasingly evident; “We agreed that English as people spoke it here was good for talking, and that the old people told stories well. But it wasn’t so good for writing, maybe? There were not enough words, different words. You needed to hear the voice.” (p.91, True Country) It is also significant that Billy’s first person narration cedes to a third person narrator in the much longer part two (again, this dominant voice being often interspersed with the voices of others), and that the disappearance of his direct(ing) presence in the novel should coincide with his receiving the news of his grandmother’s death. Billy’s grandmother was at once his last living family link to his own distant Aboriginal heritage and also the last living vestige of his alienation from that same past; when he receives the news of her passing he laments the questions he wished he had asked her while she was alive, questions like the ones he is now asking people in Kanarma, but while she was alive his grandmother’s life also represented and permitted his own deferral of exploring this aspect of an identity towards which Billy (together with his grandmother) feels great ambivalence – a strange mix of pride and shame. Important inhibiting questions are attached to such a search and these doubts likewise cause Billy to defer transcribing the oral histories of Kanarma’s “subjects”; “So, do I change it much? Do I write only for the kids here? Who speaks? Have I the right to...” (p.288, True Country) It is a position and question Scott himself is sensitive to and addresses in an article about his research into Noongar language; “My interest in Noongar language [...] extends to more than its use as a “research tool”, and is connected to my sense of self and my vocation as a writer. The interest is further stimulated by a phrase like, “He who has taken up the language of the coloniser has accepted the world of the colonizer and therefore the standards of the colonizer,” words which surely sting any indigenous person who has English as their first language, let alone a writer of what’s labelled “literary fiction”.” (A Noongar Voice, An Anomalous History) For Scott’s character Billy, True Country can be considered the result of Billy’s own revelation and his attempt to resolve something like this dilemma. Upon the death of his grandmother, Billy’s Aboriginal heritage, no matter how personally problematic, can no longer be avoided; the questions he should have asked her can now only be answered by himself, his Aboriginality no longer a history to be told but an experience (of discovery) to be lived should he choose to “land” and do so; “So Billy is doing it with us now, and with Gabriella too. We might be all writing together, really” (p.98, True Country) This signals the transition into the “Billy-less” part two of True Country; the “we”, of course, as with the “you” of the welcome, includes the reader. The disappearance of the narrating first person “self” and with it conventional novelistic (dis)connections inaugurates Billy’s answer to his own dilemmas about the ethical and cultural accountability in transcribing or narrating Aboriginal experience with the written (English) word. True Country is Billy’s transcription; however it is not a disinterested rendition of community stories nor is it an account of his own personal journey. The text of “True Country” seeks to live its own discovery, instituting through language and voice and their relationship to country, identity and desire a new modality of knowing which eschews linear narrative and instead embraces a plurality of voices and perspectives. If Scott’s novel is light on conventional constructs like character and narrative, these are replaced by polyphony, texture and voices which speak of and evoke places (the chapter “High Diving” is exemplary), desire (read the chapter “Desire”) and kindred. Thus Billy’s personal problems of identity take a back seat to the performance of how he has, in a manner, resolved them in a dispersed, variegated, discontinuous and at times ephemeral evocation of a people and a place in which he is but another member of a community rather than a privileged narrator. When the epiphany which allows Billy to write True Country comes at the end it does so suddenly, and is perhaps, from the point of view of narrative cohesion, poorly motivated, because the text has not been concentrating on Billy’s inner state. But then True Country’s difficult beauty is located elsewhere: in its acknowledgement, acceptance and exploration of an alternative and inclusive mode of writing and being, in its groundedness in the lives and voices of Kanarma. The novel’s tragedy is contained in its depiction of a people’s slow disinheritance of their cultural identity and the disastrous consequences which ensue. Sources •Kim Scott, True Country, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2008. •D.A. Miller, Secret Subjects, Open Secrets, Blooms Modern Critical Interpretations: Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. •Kim Scott, A Noongar Voice, An Anomalous History, Westerly Vol. 53, 2008. (less) | Notes are private!
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Mar 13, 2011
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| 0140114726
| 9780140114720
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| 3.56
| 16
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“A Delicate Adventure in Incredible Tenderness” (p.104) **Spoilers: to be read only by those who have read the book or don’t believe they ever will** Th ...more“A Delicate Adventure in Incredible Tenderness” (p.104) **Spoilers: to be read only by those who have read the book or don’t believe they ever will** This is only the second Elizabeth Jolley novel I’ve read (the other being Milk and Honey) but the sense both have imparted is of a craft practised in isolation from any faddish literary circuit tattle. I’m not sure of the veracity of this, and as is often the case with these things I can’t quite tell what came first: my impression or the knowledge that Jolley, prior to immigrating to Australia and being published (I don’t think she published anything until she was in her 50s), had spent most of her life writing in anonymity. The novels she did subsequently produce emerged and were adapted from this antecedent material (someone pull me up if I’m wrong here!) and the result, in this novel at least, is an enticing idiosyncrasy of voice – a kind of Edwardian sensibility which backlights rural Western Australia but which all the while struggles to locate itself within a scene of rugged, plethoric beauty and loneliness. Gothic is the mode most often associated with Jolley and although Palomino isn’t ragingly so it does borrow elements from this genre; the book is full of foreshadowed events and the landscape and weather directly image the emotional states of the characters. There is a sense also of fatality to this love story which Laura, the principal narrator, alludes to directly on more than one occasion. Present as well are the introverted and grotesque passions cultivated throughout Jolley’s oeuvre, and the novel’s already mentioned antiquated voice/s; Laura and Andrea feel like characters transported from another time and place. However if these elements align Palomino with the traditional novel, Jolley subverts these most obviously with her theme of lesbian love, which challenges classical concerns with achieving thematic harmony through the union of male/female opposites in marriage. Much maligned by Laura and Andrea, the dual narrators in this novel, is the institution of marriage. In fact both women seek the margins of society but their passions and assertiveness mean they are not marginalised; rather they are in search of agency and freedom to live as they choose outside of a restrictive social system, in harmony with each other and becoming the centre of their own world of tenderness, love, music and the gritty duties of pastoral care. And Jolley’s off-kilter punctuation seems to proclaim just as much independence and idiosyncrasy for her writing as her characters’ disinclination to justify their thoughts and actions does for them, implicating the reader with its subtly perverse but delicious ellipsis and elisions. But if Palomino is a love story charting Laura and Andrea’s attempt to instigate a world apart in harmony with one another, it also recounts through the voices of these two women the complications and impossibility of doing so. Laura and Andrea’s shared marginality, their shared gender and longing do not abrogate the complications of two individuals coming to terms with the monstrosities of not only their own pasts but that of the other, any more than it can buttress them against the intrusion of the social world. Laura and Andrea come together at a party, Laura being a friend of Andrea´s relations. The necessity of Laura returning the favour and inviting these well intentioned but inane people to her outback property, while deferred because of Andrea’s emotional state, is nevertheless a constant if muted threat to the sacred seclusion in which the pair have fostered their love. When the luncheon is eventually realised the bubble of their love is broken and their relationship begins its fated decline, a decline semi-consciously predicted by Laura in her delicate but insistent observations of the constant change at work in the natural world, these forming a leitmotif throughout the novel and gesturing towards a still more ubiquitous harmony underlying all. And this novel is heart-wrenchingly book-ended by two letters unwritten by Laura to Andrea, the letters typical in some ways of Laura’s constant deferrals, but also indicative of her acceptance of loss and a more dispersed love which clutches at no object though it desires nothing more than to do so. The parenthesising of the body of the novel by these unwritten letters also imparts the sensation that the joyousness and suffering ingrained in Laura and Andrea’s voices is to be eventually wrapped about by silence. I suspect that this isn’t a book for everyone. Palomino is at times precious, peculiar and overwrought; the characters’ dark secrets are a little excessive and flippantly assigned (the theme of incest is synthesised better in Milk and Honey), the gothic/monstrous not always adjoining well with Jolley’s domestic scale. But similar to Iris Murdoch’s writing, Palomino’s faults are robust ones, if not as declamatory, and I was drawn to the voices of Jolley’s lovers - intelligent and sensual voices desirous of a world for themselves alone. (less) | Notes are private!
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When reading writers who were destined to become literary luminaries - such as Calvino - I guess there is always the temptation to try and distinguish...more When reading writers who were destined to become literary luminaries - such as Calvino - I guess there is always the temptation to try and distinguish emergent greatness in their early works. The stories in ‘Adam, One Afternoon’, however, are completely stunning in their own right (and Archibald Colquhoun and Peggy Wright deserve accolades for their translation). David Mitchell writes an interesting article regarding his experience reading, and years later re-reading, Calvino’s ‘If On A Winter Night A Traveller’, but also makes a comment I think germane to ‘Adam, One Afternoon’; “...some books are best loved when young; the older me has more time for...Calvino the short-story writer (Adam, One Afternoon) ... however breathtakingly inventive a book [i.e. If On A Winter Night A Traveller] is, it is only breathtakingly inventive once.” What Mitchell is suggesting is that what was once innovative in Calvino’s more famous novels has become familiar to us through other writers since. By contrast, the stories in ‘Adam, One Afternoon’, while less challenging perhaps in their formal explorations than other of Calvino’s enterprises (as is noted on the back blurb, the majority of this collection draws on the conventions of fable in a rather modernist way), they do maintain their capacity to evoke surprise and wonder and questioning. Some of these stories I have now read many times, and I dare say I will continue coming back to them. (less) | Notes are private!
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