Chloe Thurlow's Blog, page 26

Review: Borealis

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Review: The Old Star

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Review: Runaway Nun

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Anais Nin Ruined My Life

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Those few words from Anais Nin hit me like a revelation at university and I decided that from that moment on I would say yes when I should have said no, and no when I should have said yes. I made a vow to become more courageous and closed the door on my stifling world of private schools, sameness and security. 

I was led to Madame Nin by my tutor, a tall dark Heathcliff lookalike. He gave me a copy of A Spy in the House of Love, seducing my mind before inviting me a week later to a French brasserie. He poured glass after glass of Beaujolais nouveau,  the new crop had just arrived that October, and then took me back to his rooms to gaze at the moon through the old leaded glass windows.

“The time had come when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Again I quote Ms Nin. In the moon’s silvery glow I became Sabina, the young bohemian I had breathlessly devoured through the pages of A Spy in the House of Love, the character disdaining all commitments to dedicate her life to the pursuit of pleasure. Sabina adores sex with all its mystifying portals and potentials. She has a weakness for picking up strangers in the night clubs of New York in the 1950s, a precarious game I found myself replaying half a century later in the champagne bars of London’s Soho. Anais Nin had become my heroine, avatar, the dark shadow that crosses the room while the night planes follow the Thames into Heathrow and I stare at the words on my laptop wondering if I can make them better; whether, as Oscar Wilde put it, to take a comma out or put it back in again.

Anais Nin understood erotica. She wrote it beautifully, a stream of novels, essays, short stories and journals. She was an early feminist. For her, sex was therapeutic; submission, in an erotic sense, the crucible of pleasure and pleasure the path to equanimity and equality. Her female characters drove her stories as if from the reins of a chariot and she explored her own inner life through the lives of her characters. Life, she said, is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

Born in 1903, Anais was given the extravagant name Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell. Her parents were Spanish-Cuban, intellectuals well-known on the European social scene; she grew up in Neuilly, France, lived in Spain, Cuba and then the United States. She had affairs with John Steinbeck, Gore Vidal, Lawrence Durrell and, most famously, Henry Miller; she was shown as having a lesbian relationship with Miller’s wife June in the Philip Kaufman movie Henry & June. Her novel House if Incest, describes her stormy, sexual relationship with her father. She died in 1977 and her books remain as fresh as if the ink only dried on the page at sunrise this morning.

How did Anais Nin ruin my life, the heading above? She opened the door on a tall mountain, the peak hidden in the clouds, and through her words impelled me to climb the slippery moist slopes of erotica. I came to see that few things are more important than sexual relationships, it’s how we continue the species, and to write the erotic is an endless cycle of putting commas in and taking them out in a quest for unreachable perfection.

Anaïs Nin Ruined My Life

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Those few words from Anaïs Nin hit me like a revelation at university and I decided that from that moment on I would say yes when I should have said no, and no when I should have said yes. I made a vow to become more courageous and closed the door on my stifling world of private schools, sameness and security. 

I was led to Madame Nin by my tutor, a tall dark Heathcliff lookalike. He gave me a copy of A Spy in the House of Love, seducing my mind before inviting me a week later to a French brasserie. He poured glass after glass of Beaujolais nouveau – the new crop had just arrived that October – and then took me back to his rooms to gaze at the moon through the old leaded glass windows.

The time had come when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom – I quote Ms Nin. In the moon’s silvery glow I became Sabina, the young bohemian I had breathlessly devoured through the pages of A Spy in the House of Love, the character disdaining all commitments to dedicate her life to the pursuit of pleasure. Sabina adores sex with all its mystifying portals and potentials. She has a weakness for picking up strangers in the night clubs of New York in the 1950s, a precarious game I found myself replaying half a century later in the champagne bars of London’s Soho. Anaïs Nin had become my heroine, avatar, the dark shadow that crosses the room while the night planes follow the Thames into Heathrow and I stare at the words on my laptop wondering if I can make them better; whether, as Oscar Wilde put it, to take a comma out or put it back in again.

Anaïs Nin understood erotica. She wrote it beautifully, a stream of novels, essays, short stories and journals. She was an early feminist. For her, sex was therapeutic; submission, in an erotic sense, the crucible of pleasure and pleasure the path to equanimity and equality. Her female characters drove her stories as if from the reins of a chariot and she explored her own inner life through the lives of her characters. Life, she said, is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

Born in 1903, Anaïs was given the extravagant name Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell. Her parents were Spanish-Cuban, intellectuals well-known on the European social scene; she grew up in Neuilly, France, lived in Spain, Cuba and then the United States. She had affairs with John Steinbeck, Gore Vidal, Lawrence Durrell and, most famously, Henry Miller; she was shown as having a lesbian relationship with Miller’s wife June in the Philip Kaufman movie Henry & June. Her novel House if Incest, describes her stormy, sexual relationship with her father. She died in 1977 and her books remain as fresh as if the ink only dried on the page at sunrise this morning.

How did Anaïs Nin ruin my life, the heading above? She opened the door on a tall mountain, the peak hidden in the clouds, and through her words impelled me to climb the slippery moist slopes of erotica. I came to see that few things are more important than sexual relationships – it’s how we continue the species – and to write the erotic is an endless cycle of putting commas in and taking them out in a quest for unreachable perfection.

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What do you Give the Girl who has Everything?

The burning of the Royal Library of Alexandria is often cited as a Philistine response to art and culture,  the act of barbarians, a deed so vile it is still remembered 2,300 years after the match was struck. What is less known, is the library was razed on several occasions – by Roman fanatics, Christian fanatics and, finally, Moslem fanatics, who burned the ash to ash until it sailed away on the winds of history.

The Royal Library, also called the Ancient Library, was conceived during Egypt’s Ptolemaic Dynasty 300 years before Christ. Most of the books it contained were papyrus scrolls and tablets. The grand building, divided into lecture halls and meeting rooms, was set in tranquil gardens, the library just one part of the Musaeum of Alexandria, the first research institute ever constructed. The library attracted great scholars and philosophers who came to read and attend lectures. An army of scribes was employed to copy the ancient scrolls, (ancient even then), the Egyptians by all accounts being charged a pharaoh’s ransom to borrow the original works of the great Athenians Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides.

When Marc Antony married Cleopatra in 40 BC he gave this girl who had everything a book, well, actually, 200,000 books written on scrolls of vellum that he had appropriated from the Library of Pergamum. It was in this same period that Julius Caesar took a torch to the ancient library, perhaps in a fit of summer pique? It was rebuilt and stood for another 300 years before being gutted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian, another pyromaniac, although not a violinist like Nero.

Moving into modern times, the Christians in 391 AD devastated the building under the holy orders of the Coptic Pope Theophilus. And it was religion again that saw an end to this great temple of learning when the Moslems during the conquest of Egypt in 642 set the building afire and kicked over the traces until nothing was left.

It is usually religion, or nationalism, that finds it necessary to do away with books, although today, in contemporary conflicts new ciphers like freedom and democracy achieve the same shameful results. During the Iraq War a decade ago, no one stopped the looters robbing the Museum of Baghdad of some of the most valuable treasures on the planet, items from Mesopotamia and back to the dawn of human creation. During the Libyan conflict, the Great Necropolis in Cirene, founded by the Greeks in the 7thC, was partially destroyed and is now being sold of as parcels off building land – a symbol of liberty and freedom after the fall of Colonel Gaddafi. The museum in Al Minya, North Egypt, lost 1,000 objects, ancient statues and mummies, in recent months, their value incalculable; Abraham’s Mausoleum in Syria has been devastated, and the Taliban have destroyed centuries old mosques in Mali as well as the Buddhas at Bamiyan in Afghanistan, blown pointlessly, irreparably, to smithereens.

In Europe, if we go back to 1992, the entire collection of books in the Sarajevo library was destroyed by Serbian shelling; the library has since been rebuilt at the cost of $13 million – but the books are gone forever.

What do you give the girl who has everything? Leave a comment with your suggestions.

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Review: The Luck of the Weissensteiners

The Luck of the Weissensteiners by Christoph Fischer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Milan Kundera opened his novel `The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ describing the street where he grew up and how the name kept changing depending on the political heterodoxy of the time. In `The Luck of The Weissensteiners,’ also set in Czechoslovakia, in Bratislava, we are introduced immediately to Greta Weissensteiner and learn that she is likewise subjected to sweeping changes beyond her control. A bibliophile who speaks several languages and reads her favorite German and Russian authors in the original versions, she is bubbly, pretty, anxious for life.

The introduction of Germany and Russia puts us in the time frame of those tense years before the outbreak of World War Two, two decades before the setting of Kundera’s novel, but dealing similarly in the themes of identity, nationality, shifting ideas and shifting frontiers.

Greta, her head filled with stories of passion and loss, falls for Wilhelm Winkelmeier, a bookseller from Berlin, and he is immediately besotted. He is a German Catholic. She is Jewish – the seeds sewn for a great and troubled romance that takes us into and through the war, `The Luck of the Weissensteiners’ being the first book in Christoph Fischer’s epic trilogy of two families who suffer and survive.

I called up Kundera’s name because Fischer has the same oblique style and concentrates on the slow steady construction of his characters until they are flesh and blood people that we know as intimately as our neighbors and friends. His story portrays struggle, romance, separation and, ultimately, redemption in a way that is both moving and totally believable. The moment I finished this book I clicked into Amazon to find the second book in the trilogy. That says all that needs to be said.

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Review: Dead Medium: A Novel

Dead Medium: A Novel by Peter John

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Jean-Paul Sartre sprang to my mind the moment I started reading Peter John’s “Dead Medium”. Like the old existentialist, May Elizabeth Trump is something of a misanthrope, a medium and six feet underground. Well, in the corporal sense. Her spirit, though, is alive, not actually kicking, but in tremendous demand by those lost living souls seeking forgiveness, solace, advice, anything to get them through the dark hours of night when the dead rise from their rest and haunt us. As the old nutshell goes, everyone talks about ghosts but no one has ever seen one; Sartre, of course, ironically replaced the word ghost for love in the same epigram.

I don’t want to use the word unique, it is overused, as the Ancient Greeks noted, virtually nothing is unique, but what lifts this unpredictable ghost story from the abyss of the ordinary is that it is funny, I mean laugh out loud and apologize to the woman across from you on the train funny. A slow fizzing giggler. May Elizabeth Trump gets under your skin and in your head. I can’t remember what half the girls at school looked like (they all looked the same in their ludicrous red blazers and boating hats), but Ms Trump I could draw from memory. Like Scarlett O’Hara, Lolita and James Bond, she is real – a flesh and blood ghost who we feel for when menacing forces start spooking her – an unexpected plot twist that kept me turning the pages when I should have been sleeping. When I slept, by the way, I didn’t have unpleasant dreams and awoke with a silly grin plastered across my face. And that’s unique.

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Verbal Rape – STOP TELLING WOMEN TO SMILE

Last night I suffered verbal rape and went home shaking. It had been a disappointing day, as writer’s days often are. I had written 600 words in the morning. In the afternoon, scalpel in hand (who said the pen is mightier than the sword?) I went to work and ended up with 325 words. I bought some yellow espadrilles in the old town and, before going out, went back to the manuscript. By the time I left the house, I had 112 words of new material. Five hours work, 22 words an hour. A solitary tweet.

I didn’t feel depressed, just disappointed – the Black Dwarf is like a shadow, always ready to spring – and sat with three friends in a tapas bar sharing mini-hamburgers and patatas bravas. A bottle of cava, too, of course. As I listened to their tales of love and life, I was pondering how to continue from those 112 words with an exciting new scene (Katie discovering that Tom – my protagonists – becomes deliciously enthused when she bites his neck?)

The story will come, they always do, and in the meantime, the two men at the next table were clearly listening in on our conversation. As they left, one of them glared at me and said: “Cheer up, darling, it may never happen.’

‘Perhaps it already has,’ I replied.

He waved his finger. ‘Why don’t you just put a smile on your face.’ He turned away and the other one said as he was leaving:

‘Miserable bitch,’ and stalked off.

The girls sat there in silence, the evening ruined. It has happened to me before. It has happened to some of my friends, too. In fact, this form of verbal rape has become so common I wasn’t surprised to read on the net that night that the phenomenon has inspired artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh to launch in New York the poster campaign STOP TELLING WOMEN TO SMILE. Telling women to smile isn’t funny. It isn’t witty, and we don’t like it. Telling women to smile objectifies women, turns us into objects, playthings, paper-dolls. As Tatyana says, grabbing a woman’s wrist to force her to speak is not okay. Telling a woman to smile for you is not okay. Demanding a woman’s attention in the street is not okay.

Imagine reversing the roles, women telling men to smile. It just wouldn’t happen. We have the sensibility to understand that if someone isn’t smiling, perhaps it is because they have every reason to be miserable: you have just lost your job, your granny died suddenly, your book after 12 months work has been rejected by the publisher. After five hours on the coal face you have only 112 words to show for your labor.

Misery passes. It is the human condition to be happy, and, in the meantime, boys, if you see a girl looking depressed, don’t rape her with your brutal tongue and stop telling women to smile.

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That Obscure Object of Desire

My friend Katie Dylan was a teenager when she started working as a model and it has taken her a decade since she quit to become sane. Supermodels are getting younger – so young I have finally understood Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Girls don’t only seem younger, they are younger, which means at 1.45 in the morning when I’m dying to take off my heels and walk barefoot back through the village in Spain where I’m on vacation, the girls are giggling like a class outing as they dance on with the off-work waiters and keen-eyed fishermen before they set out to sea.

Beneath the flickering lights, these obscure objects of desire are spirals of smoke, shapely as hourglasses in uplift bras – more beautiful than Helen of Troy. I see them on the beach late afternoon with their boogie boards and inflatable rafts; they squeal and chase each other, uninhibited, doing things that children do. The sun sets and, like bugs becoming butterflies, or those mysterious flowers that only bloom at night, they change into tiny clothes and 5″ heels, children transformed into women kissed by the moon in his many phases.

As I circle the sea, a black mirror at night, I feel ancient, uncertain, shocked – a hypocrite, even. I write erotic books and I feel afraid for these all night girls of 15, 14, some barely teenagers, who have been turned by the marketing men from children with toys into sexualized consumers in one stealthy, profitable move.

I am writing a new novel; half way through, the hard part when things sag and you have to maintain the pace. The main character is 28. She will go to Spain in the summer. She will watch these pubescent girls playing on the beach and dancing beneath the swirling mirror ball, and she will work out what it all means, because I can’t.

Katie Dylan grew sane, by the way, penning a novel based on her life. She called it Cult of Beauty – it is one of my favorite books – just click through to Amazon and savor it those late nights after you walk home around the bay.

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