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Choosing Spectacles
the cover blurb
"It makes me sad, that there is no life without spectacles, that there cannot be, one has to choose spectacles, between spectacles and spectacles, how one is to see, and sometimes it is forced upon one."
He has left totalitarian Lutania for the West. His family remains behind, his wife is ill. Disorientated and alone he strives to adjust. He sees the Berlin Wall come down. Ceaucescu shot, the bemused absorption of the refugees and migrants. In Israel during the Intifada, he could stay but does not. The Gulf War finds him in France: in a village of the Cote d'Azure he is almost shot in mistake for a caterpillar nest. His dreams are bad dreams: yet he has kept an ironic wit.
Rosalind Belben's new novel is a resonant reflection on exile in a Europe of upheaval and tension. She is one of the most original writers in English today.
Review from the Independent
"It is all a question of deceiving and teasing the eye, said the eye doctor, in order to obtain the truth": the title-piece, or eponymous chapter, of this sparkling short novel - or it is seven interlooped stories? - is a tour de force of terse, philosophic narrative. In related chapters, its hero dreams his life, or perhaps retails his life as it penetrates his dreams - life-dreams that verge on nightmare, all of division, exile, fragmentation, abandonment. One moving, intricate, hard-eyed part is woven from snippets of the letters, thoughts, sensations of a couple separated by a totalitarian regime which he has escaped, leaving her behind. He, split, is everywhere as the world splits (in France when the Gulf War breaks out, in Germany as the Wall comes down), always an outsider, perpetually bemused and longing.
It is a small book that packs a strong punch, if your tastes run to powerful emotional writing that takes no romantic prisoners. Belben's lacquered, ice-pick prose has a Continental whiff to it, almost as if it actually were translated; her collision of high thought and earthy detail sounds un-English, her language dedicated to "making strange" in order to feel and record more freshly. She should be much more celebrated.
"It makes me sad, that there is no life without spectacles, that there cannot be, one has to choose spectacles, between spectacles and spectacles, how one is to see, and sometimes it is forced upon one."
He has left totalitarian Lutania for the West. His family remains behind, his wife is ill. Disorientated and alone he strives to adjust. He sees the Berlin Wall come down. Ceaucescu shot, the bemused absorption of the refugees and migrants. In Israel during the Intifada, he could stay but does not. The Gulf War finds him in France: in a village of the Cote d'Azure he is almost shot in mistake for a caterpillar nest. His dreams are bad dreams: yet he has kept an ironic wit.
Rosalind Belben's new novel is a resonant reflection on exile in a Europe of upheaval and tension. She is one of the most original writers in English today.
Review from the Independent
"It is all a question of deceiving and teasing the eye, said the eye doctor, in order to obtain the truth": the title-piece, or eponymous chapter, of this sparkling short novel - or it is seven interlooped stories? - is a tour de force of terse, philosophic narrative. In related chapters, its hero dreams his life, or perhaps retails his life as it penetrates his dreams - life-dreams that verge on nightmare, all of division, exile, fragmentation, abandonment. One moving, intricate, hard-eyed part is woven from snippets of the letters, thoughts, sensations of a couple separated by a totalitarian regime which he has escaped, leaving her behind. He, split, is everywhere as the world splits (in France when the Gulf War breaks out, in Germany as the Wall comes down), always an outsider, perpetually bemused and longing.
It is a small book that packs a strong punch, if your tastes run to powerful emotional writing that takes no romantic prisoners. Belben's lacquered, ice-pick prose has a Continental whiff to it, almost as if it actually were translated; her collision of high thought and earthy detail sounds un-English, her language dedicated to "making strange" in order to feel and record more freshly. She should be much more celebrated.
102 pages, Paperback
First published January 17, 1994
About the author
Rosalind Belben
9 books14 followersRosalind Belben is an English novelist. She was born in 1941 in Dorset where she now lives. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her novel Our Horses in Egypt won the James Tait Black Award in 2007. Among her other books are Bogies, Reuben Little Hero, The Limit, Dreaming of Dead People, and Hound Music.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 6, 2016
It is rather odd that someone born in Dorset should write about the pain of exile, but that’s essentially what Choosing Spectacles is about.
The novel is based on two separately published small-magazine pieces (“The Permit to Wake Up” and “Choosing Spectacles” ) around which a more continuous story has later been woven, involving a 1980s exile from the east European state of Lutânia (sic). Rosalind Belben adopts a distinctive, slightly edgy style that appropriately makes the book read like a translation. It works to good effect in the section or chapter called “Amor” where the exile – now forever the outsider – tries painfully to communicate with the family he has left behind both physically and mentally. Indeed failure to communicate, with the past and with the present, is one of the themes of the novel.
Washed up on the beach; and free, to return. In our former countries the great changes dreamed of are taking place, or have already, and there is no place left for us there, we are finished, and must live on, aware, it is really what exile means, not a temporary banishment but a rupture so total one can't catch one's breath.
Failure to see and comprehend is a linked theme, but the title piece – “Choosing spectacles”, narrated in a single three-page sentence by a sinister optician – is rather mystifying. ”One has to choose spectacles, between spectacles and spectacles, how one is to see, and sometimes it is forced upon one...” says the exile later, but the metaphor is opaque. Spectacles are surely for seeing more clearly, not for seeing in an alternative or deceptive way. But maybe they do things differently in Lutânia...
It’s a short book and stylistically interesting. But Choosing Spectacles reads rather like a collection of musings and laments on being a stranger in a strange land, rather than a cohesive novel.
The novel is based on two separately published small-magazine pieces (“The Permit to Wake Up” and “Choosing Spectacles” ) around which a more continuous story has later been woven, involving a 1980s exile from the east European state of Lutânia (sic). Rosalind Belben adopts a distinctive, slightly edgy style that appropriately makes the book read like a translation. It works to good effect in the section or chapter called “Amor” where the exile – now forever the outsider – tries painfully to communicate with the family he has left behind both physically and mentally. Indeed failure to communicate, with the past and with the present, is one of the themes of the novel.
Washed up on the beach; and free, to return. In our former countries the great changes dreamed of are taking place, or have already, and there is no place left for us there, we are finished, and must live on, aware, it is really what exile means, not a temporary banishment but a rupture so total one can't catch one's breath.
Failure to see and comprehend is a linked theme, but the title piece – “Choosing spectacles”, narrated in a single three-page sentence by a sinister optician – is rather mystifying. ”One has to choose spectacles, between spectacles and spectacles, how one is to see, and sometimes it is forced upon one...” says the exile later, but the metaphor is opaque. Spectacles are surely for seeing more clearly, not for seeing in an alternative or deceptive way. But maybe they do things differently in Lutânia...
It’s a short book and stylistically interesting. But Choosing Spectacles reads rather like a collection of musings and laments on being a stranger in a strange land, rather than a cohesive novel.
Displaying 1 of 1 review