Zina Rohan's Blog, page 9

What I was saying before

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/...


Today's Guardian Newspaper (with its arts review section) has dipped into some of the writer interviews and provided short extracts to listen to. The original interviews are VERY long - apparently. On the British Library website I get the impression that one can either buy the CD or listen in situ. Not very helpful for you guys, then.

British writers, by the way...

What Writers Say

I hear that the British Library has been doing interviews with some 40 of Britain's leading writers (how to determine which to choose?) - asking them about the business of being a writer, how they write, why...

These interviews are meant to be quite unlike those done for publicity when a new book comes out. They are long, in depth, for the archive.

There seems to be a common thread. A message to any wannabe. "If you want to write, read."

If I find out whether they can be listened to online, I will post the link. I'll be in the Library next week, so perhaps I'll ask.

Death and Nightingales

Yes. Colm Toibin gives very good gifts. Eugene McCabe has written an extraordinary book. Set in the 1880s it is (as quite often books set in Ireland are) ostensibly about a young woman's attempt to escape her circumstances - above all her personal circumstances. Naturally, the politics of the times is the backdrop against which it all plays out, and that could not be otherwise. But the detail - of observation, of speech, of nature, of the way of living is so completely persuasive that it reads real. Never mind that the author uses vocabulary many readers, maybe most, will never have come across because the words are peculiar to the Ireland of the day, or even of that particular region. One understands.

McCabeis apparently a playwright, and his ear for dialogue is such that I feel he should be a good one. Read this. I am grateful it was put my way.

Birthday present from Colm Toibin

Apprently, Colm Toibin gives the book I'm reading to everyone as a present. I think I can see why.
More later - when it's appropriate

An Angry Man

Caleb Williams by William Godwin




Why don't I want to give this book any stars? Not because I don't think it deserves them but because I think sometimes this star-allocating business isn't appropriate.

William Godwin wrote this book in 1794. The author is best known (now) for having been married to the feminist Mary Wollstencraft, and engendering a daughter who would elope with Shelley and then write Frankenstein. But in his time, Godwin was a famed and impassioned reformer, above all seething with anger at the law as it operated in England, a law that pretended to offer justice but which was in the pockets of the rich to manipulate as they pleased. Having written a polemic on the subject, he produced Caleb Williams - by way of illustration.

It's probably - someone will correct me, no doubt - the first psychological novel ever written in the west, maybe anywhere. He allows his characters to be perpetually questioning their motives, while through his first person narrator, he speculates on motive generally. This is also a sort of thriller, the story of a man-hunt - and, of course, highly political. In its day some criticised it as propaganda, which in certain aspects is certainly is, and Godwin clearly had no problem with that.

But from our perspective - over 200 years later, what is also fascinating is the social history that was simply the background against which Godwin placed his characters. One learns so much. One also learns how much was acceptable in novel writing then that one simply could not get away with now. It is longer than it needs to be. Caleb Williams (the narrator) manages to be inside the heads of people when they are busily engaged in thoughts and actions where he is not, and about which he therefore could not have known. But William Godwin is not worried about this either, and it would seem, nor much was anyone else.





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I don't get it

There's a couple of small playgrounds on either side of an alleyway by my house. One is meant for tots, though as often as not evening teenagers monopolise the benches and roundabout and scatter their McDonalds boxes on the ground near the littler bin.

The other playground is for the teenagers, and includes an interesting hanging basket affair that swings, opposite a group of swings that, well, swing too.

This evening a group of kids (mixed girls and boys, black and white) were gathered chatting as I passed.

A girl, cross-legged in the basket, was scrolling through her iPhone. 'I've had a text from...(I didn't get the name.) She says, will people stop sending me jokes about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. My friend died out there.'

By this time I was leaving the alley. But wondering: why would people send each other jokes about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami anyway?

Nuclear Heroes

180 men have put their lives at risk to try and control the overheating of Japan's northern nuclear reactor near Sendai. What did they say to their wives, their parents, their children? How can the families at home be feeling? For the men themselves, terrifying as it must be, they are probably so busy they don't have time to worry as much as they might - or should. But imagine being the person at home, thinking about what's going on in the reactor, fearful for the future.

And what do you bet someone will make a Hollywood film based on this, but with American rather than Japanese, heroes.

Mother Nature

Watching the terrible pictures coming in from Japan I had the sense of Mother Nature, feeling a bit cramped in bed while she was having a snooze, and deciding to flex one shoulder...just a little. Ah! That's better.

Dreadful to think some people may believe that sin is involved, or an act of God. And blame themselves, perhaps.

The Barrier of a Common Language

Can one of you US-based GR people tell me whether, in American English, the word 'shelved' has two meanings: to put a book on a shelf, but also to set aside, or remove from discussion, a proposal?

I ask because an American friend, who until recently was running the translation unit at the International Court in The Hague, told me how astonished she was to discover that English English and US English give totally opposite meanings to the verb 'to table'. She found out just in time to prevent some horrific misunderstandings.

The Things One Misses

It was a not particularly good programme about the history of the British novel that brought William Godwin's Caleb William's to my attention. To my shame I hadn't heard of it. I could argue that, well, I didn't study literature etc etc, but all the same...

I am about a thord of the way through. I think it must be our first psychological novel, although possibly one was written elsewhere and yet more of my ignorance prevents me from being aware of it. Also, it's a precursor to Dickens in its biting social anger, although it has none of Dickens's humour or grotesques.

A visiting academic friend saw the book lying on my table and remarked, as he made his way out, 'I think I only know of three people who have ever read this book, and that's people in the trade. We all know about it but haven't read it.'

I am glad the programme made me feel I should.