If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact. – Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

When you read you forget. You’re forgetting right now. Reading is an act of forgetting but there are levels. Whilst reading you temporarily forget the outside world and become absorbed in the text before your eyes but as your eyes scan the page in front of you, you also almost instantaneously begin to forget what you’ve read. You carry the gist of what you’re read from page to page but if asked to remember even a single sentence from the preceding page most would be hard pressed to do so. We let go so easily.

Memory is an issue with me and so any texts that deal with memory issues are always of more interest to me than others and so from the very beginning of this book I found myself empathising with the narrator—not to be confused with the author although they could well be twins—and his inability to remember very much about any of the books he’s read throughout his life. When I first joined Goodreads I decided to go through the books in my cupboard, the old ones I’ve been carting around for decades, and enter them in the system to start me off and I was appalled to note how little I could dredge up from the depths of my mind. I had, for example, read four books by Nabokov when in my early twenties and could remember nothing bar the titles.

In ‘The Boy’s Name Was David’ the third of the four pieces of fiction in this book—Murnane doesn’t talk about his writing in terms of novels or stories—we’re introduced to a man who was for a time an English teacher and he makes an important point about reading, at least according to Joyce:

As a teacher, he had been fanatical in urging his students to think of their fiction, of all fiction, as consisting of sentences. A sentence was, of course, a number of words or even a number of phrases or clauses, but he preached to his students that the sentence was the unit that yielded the most amount of meaning in proportion to its extent. If a student in class claimed to admire a piece of fiction or even a short passage of fiction, he would ask that student to find the sentence that most caused the admiration to arise. Anyone claiming to be puzzled or annoyed by a passage of fiction was urged by him to find the sentence that had first brought on the puzzlement or the annoyance. Much of his own commentary during classes consisted of his pointing out sentences that he admired or sentences that he found faulty. At least once each year, he told each class an anecdote that he had remembered from a memoir of James Joyce. Someone had praised to Joyce a recent novel. Joyce had asked why the novel was so impressive. The answer came back that the style was splendid, the subject powerful…Joyce would not listen to such talk. If a book of prose fiction was impressive, the actual prose should have impressed itself on the reader’s mind so that he could afterwards quote sentence after sentence. [bold mine]

I managed to remember the first three sentences of this article in their entirety. Ask me in an hour’s time and it’ll be a very different story.

What happens when we read? No doubt whole books have been written on the subject although this article is interesting when it comes to the subject of fiction. It’s not something we think about. We pick up a book, locate where we left off and begin. But begin doing what? When we put down a book we say we’ve finished it but what does that mean? Samuel Johnson noted: “A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.” He meant something different though; he believed that a reader adds to the written word and oftentimes when a book fails the lack is with the reader and not its author: I can tell you here and now that I was too young to appreciate the Nabokovs I read as a young man.

Murnane opens the first work of fiction in this book with a famous quote:

After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal’s Pensées in an advertisement for soap. MARCEL PROUST, Remembrance of Things Past

I’m not sure what age Proust was thinking about but I believe—and I suspect Murnane would agree—that this process begins at a very early age. Images are a big thing with Murnane and he gets a great deal of satisfaction from discovering “at least once during the writing of [a piece of] fiction a connection between two or more images that had been for long in his mind but had never seemed in any way connected.” In the second piece of fiction in this book, ‘As It Were a Letter’, he talks about a time when he was eleven:

If [he] had been asked at the time what were the chief dangers of the modern world, he would have described in detail two images that were often in his mind. The first image was of a map he had seen a year or so previously in a Melbourne newspaper as an illustration to a feature article about the damage that would be caused if an Unfriendly Power were to drop an atomic bomb on the central business district of Melbourne. Certain black-and-white markings in the diagram made it clear that all persons and buildings in the city and the nearest suburbs would be turned to ash or rubble. Certain other markings made it clear that most persons in the outer suburbs and the nearer country districts would later die or suffer serious illness. And other markings again made it clear that even persons in country districts rather distant from Melbourne might become ill or die if the wind happened to blow in their direction. Only the persons in remote country districts would be safe.

The second of the two images mentioned above was an image that often occurred in the mind of the founder of Grasslands although it was not a copy of any image he had seen in the place he called the real world. This image was of one or another suburb of Melbourne on a dark evening. At the centre of the dark suburb was a row of bright lights from the shop windows and illuminated signs of the main shopping street of the suburb. Among the brightest of these lights were those of the one or more picture theatres in the main street. Details of the image became magnified so that the viewer of the image saw first the brightly lit picture theatre with a crowd milling in the foyer before the beginning of one or another film and next the posters on the wall of the foyer advertising the film about to be shown and after that the woman who was the female star of the film and finally the neckline of the low-cut dress worn by that woman. This image was sometimes able to be multiplied many times in the mind of the viewer, who would then see images of darkened suburb after darkened suburb and in those suburbs picture theatre after picture theatre with poster after poster of woman after woman with dress after dress resting low down on breasts after breasts.

This is very typical of Murnane. When he reads he is completely absorbed with the images that appear in his mind, some generated by the text obviously enough but others that are responses to what he’s been reading. Fiction is very important to him. It’s the environment that’s most suitable for the kind and level of thinking he gets the most out of. He notes that when a young man he actually “preferred to the visible world a space enclosed by words denoting a world more real by far.”

In ‘The Boy’s Name Was David’ he talks about a story written by one of his students. As an old man he’s been looking back on the various stories he’s read and graded over the years—over three thousand—and realises that he can remember very little of any of them. So he devises a kind of game, a race if you will—the winner of which will receive the imaginary “Gold Cup of Remembered Fiction”—to see which one he can recall most clearly:

The fifth contender was a sentence: the opening sentence of a piece of fiction. A few vague images hung about the man’s mind whenever he heard the sentence in his mind, but they meant little to him. The man was not even sure whether the images had arisen when he had first read the fiction that followed on from the opening sentence or whether he had imagined them, so to speak, at a much later date. The man seemed to have forgotten almost all of the fiction except for the opening sentence: The boy’s name was David.

[…]

The boy’s name was David. The man, whatever his name was, had known, as soon as he had read that sentence, that the boy’s name had not been David. At the same time, the man had not been fool enough to suppose that the name of the boy had been the same as the name of the author of the fiction, whatever his name had been. The man had understood that the man who had written the sentence understood that to write such a sentence was to lay claim to a level of truth that no historian and no biographer could ever lay claim to. There was never a boy named David, the writer of the fiction might as well have written, but if you, the Reader, and I, the Writer, can agree that there might have been such a boy so named, then I undertake to tell you what you could never otherwise have learned about any boy of any name. [bold mine]

Many times throughout these texts Murnane pauses to remind the reader that what they’re reading is a work of fiction. For example:

Since the previous sentence is part of a piece of fiction, the reader will hardly need to be reminded that the man mentioned in that sentence and in earlier sentences is a character in a work of fiction and that the newspaper clipping and the note mentioned in some of those sentences are likewise items in a piece of fiction.

There is at least one good reason for this. More than any other writer Murnane draws on his own life experiences as a basis for his fiction and it’s tempting to imagine what you’re reading is autobiographical in nature—it is undoubtedly semi-autobiographical—but the simple fact is that even if it were wholly autobiographical and as accurate an accounting as he was capable of producing it would still be fiction: we fictionalise it as we read it. I have never been to Melbourne. I’ve seen a few photos and some films (I watched a documentary about Murnane, Words and Silk – The Real and Imaginary Worlds of Gerald Murnane, which featured the city, for example) but the bottom line is that Melbourne might as well be Narnia as far as I’m concerned. Murnane exists in my imagination in exactly the same way and I exist in his imagination; I have a copy of Barley Patch signed to me and he got the city I live in wrong. As Murnane puts it, in A Million Windows, “Today, I understand that so-called autobiography is only one of the least worthy varieties of fiction extant.”

For me the most captivating piece of writing in this volume was the opening one, ‘A History of Books’, which consists of twenty-nine sections that trace his reading throughout the years and how little he finds he can remember of any of those books. It also looks at why he was reading. He’d decided he wanted to be a writer—he’d even taken two years off work letting his wife support him so that he could have the space to tackle this ambitious project—but what he discovers as he reads (and as he attempts to write) is what kind of writer he is. One like no other. Simply telling stories was not for him. He felt “as though writing fiction was too easy. It seemed to [him] the easiest of tasks to report image-deeds done by image-persons in image-scenery or even to report the image-thoughts of the image-persons.” Hence his unique approach to writing.

If this is the first book by him it will take you a while to get into step with him. He writes with great precision but also manages to be incredibly vague at times to. A simple example:

His surname ended with the fifteenth letter of the English alphabet.

I bet you just counted the letter on your fingers. It’s what I did. I didn’t even have to think about it. But you can’t say he’s not been precise. And he often directs the reader’s attention to things he’s written previously (or is about to relate) with comments like “the young woman mentioned in the first sentence of the previous paragraph”, “[t]he man aged sixty and more years had never read any sort of report of the fictional events reported in the previous five paragraphs of this work of fiction” and “[e]ach of the four previous paragraphs reports details of a central image surrounded by a cluster of lesser images that had arisen from several sentences of one or another piece of fiction.”

At the end of the book the publishers provide a list of the authors of the books referred to in ‘A History of Books’ are believed to include. I would discourage you from checking it until you’ve finished the piece. That said they don’t mention the actual books he’s talking about. Some were obvious—he provides the occasional quote which you can easily google—and he even names one (although he does so in the original German) but a number are very obscure. It seems as a young man he and his friends were attracted to esoterica:

The man and his friends liked to seek out and to read little-known books of fiction, especially books translated from foreign languages, and then to announce to one another that he or she had discovered a neglected masterpiece, one of the two or three greatest books of fiction that he or she had read.

Here’s an example:

An image of a man and an image of a young woman appeared at the base of a tall image-cliff. These images appeared in the mind of a certain young man while he was sitting beside a campfire at the base of a tall cliff and trying to explain to a certain young woman what he remembered having read in certain passages of a certain book that he considered, so he told the young woman, a neglected masterpiece of English literature. Since the young man spoke as though the image-persons were actual persons, they will be thus described in the following paragraphs.

The image-cliff was not a bare rocky cliff such as might have overlooked a bay or a seacoast but a steep embankment overgrown with grass and bushes and forming one side of something that was reported in the so-called neglected masterpiece as being a dingle, which word the young man had never looked for in any dictionary, preferring not to have to call into question the images that had first appeared in his mind while he was reading a work of fiction. At the base of the cliff was mostly level grass shaded, at intervals, by clumps of bushes. Near one such clump a small tent was pitched. Perhaps ten paces away, near another clump, a second tent was pitched. About halfway between the two tents, a kettle of water hung above a campfire. One of the tents belonged to the man mentioned and the other tent to the young woman mentioned in the first sentence of the previous paragraph. Both the man and the young woman were noticeably tall, and the young woman had red hair.

The man and the young woman had lived in their respective tents since their first meeting, which had taken place several weeks before. At that meeting, the young woman had struck the man but had later made peace with him. During the weeks when the young woman and the man had lived in their tents, they had often taken their meals together or had drunk tea together at the campfire between the tents. At such times, they had debated many matters, and the young woman had sometimes threatened to strike the man. Sometimes, beside the campfire, the man had persuaded the young woman to learn certain words and phrases in the Armenian language, which the man had learned from books for no other reason than that he felt driven to learn foreign languages. At one time, beside the campfire, the man had persuaded the young woman to conjugate in several of its tenses and moods the Armenian verb siriel, I love. In the course of this lesson, the man and the young woman were obliged to speak, in the Armenian language, such sentences as ‘I have loved’, ‘Love me!’ and ‘Thou wilt love’. At a later time, beside the campfire, the man proposed to the young woman that he and she should marry at some time in the future and should then go to live in America. At a later time still, the young woman left the dingle without the man’s knowing and did not return. A few days later again, the man received from the young woman a long letter telling him, among other things, that she was setting out alone for America and that she had declined his proposal of marriage because she believed he was at the root mad.

The book in question is Isopel Berners by George Borrow, specifically the events of chapter fourteen. Not a book I suspect many will have heard of. Not an author I suspect many will have heard of. But none of that’s important. Were I to list all the books I’ve ever read I’m sure there will be a few oddities in there which are unique to me and form part of the image bank that I draw on every time I read a book. I, for example, to the best of my knowledge have only read one book by an Icelander—Stone Tree by Gyrðir Elíasson. Murnane has also read at least one, an “English translation of a long work of fiction that had been first published in the Icelandic language in Reykjavik in the year before” he was born—so that would be in 1938. My best guess would be Halldór Laxness’s World Light. Either way Murnane will have his fictionalised version of Iceland in his head and I will have mine.

We’ve talked a lot about fiction—the word appears in the book over two hundred and fifty times—but what about non-fiction, facts? He has some interesting things to say on this subject. Two unrelated excerpts:

(Why did I write just then the expression a book of non-fiction? Why is the expression a factual book so seldom used? Is this our way of acknowledging that most seeming-facts are, in fact, fiction? And, if books of fiction are not called non-factual books, is this because we understand that most matters reported in books of fiction have a factual existence?)

[…]

The man who was aged nearly seventy years was making notes for a work of fiction in the belief that the power of fiction was sometimes able to resist, if not to overcome, the power of fact. The man understood that a fact could never be other than a fact, even though it might be reported in a work of fiction, but he believed that any fictional event or any fictional character might be said to have acquired a factual existence as soon as the event or the character had been reported in a published text.

You might be forgiven for thinking you were reading a book on philosophy rather than a work of fiction but this is very much philosophy-with-a-small-p. This is a guy trying to communicate how he sees the world. It sounds complex but then riding a bike sounds difficult when you try and put it into words and really for all this guy’s a writer his primary interest is in the visual, what he ­sees when he reads.

Although not arranged chronologically what we get in this book is a very specific kind of biography, from age eleven to nearly seventy; he’s seventy-five at the moment. Other of his works of fiction deal with different aspects of his life. As an addition to his existing canon I’d say it was invaluable but then I’m a fan as you can see from my articles on Tamarisk Row, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, Inland and The Plains. I’ve also read Barley Patch but never quite got round to writing about it.

The final piece of fiction in this volume is ‘Last Letter to a Niece’. I’ll mention it just briefly. This is a very different piece of writing. You’d almost think it was a story. And there’s a reason for this. It’s actually an adaptation “from one of the seven pages about the life and the writing of Kelemen Mikes in the Oxford History of Hungarian Literature.” Oddly, though, it fits with the tone of the rest of the book because the uncle in question has never seen his niece and so holds an imaginary image of her in his head (and from all accounts in his heart):

But I have not explained myself. I am interested in the appearance and deportment of young women in this, the everyday visible world, for the good reason that the female personages in books, like all other such personages together with the places they inhabit, are quite invisible.

You can hardly believe me. In your mind at this very moment are characters, costumes, interiors of houses, landscapes and skies, all of them faithful images of their counterparts in descriptive passages in books you have read and remembered. Allow me to set you right, dear niece, and to make a true reader of you.

A true reader. I’d like to think this is how Murnane sees himself and that his efforts in writing this book (as well as his others books) is to convert us into true readers too. In that respect this is the most evangelical of texts and yet somehow manages not to be at all preachy.

If you have read Murnane before this book will not disappoint. If you haven’t this isn’t actually a bad place to start. There’s stuff you won’t see as important—the marbles, the horse racing and his interest in Hungarian which he taught himself to speak late in life (see here)—but it’s not a great loss; the book stands alone just fine.

***

Gerald Murnane was born in Coburg, a northern suburb of Melbourne, in 1939. He spent some of his childhood in country Victoria before returning to Melbourne in 1949 where he lived since. He has left Victoria only a handful of times and has never been on an aeroplane.

In 1957 Murnane began training for the Catholic priesthood but soon abandoned this in favour of becoming a primary-school teacher. He also taught at the Apprentice Jockeys’ School run by the Victoria Racing Club. In 1969 he graduated in arts from Melbourne University. He worked in education for a number of years and later became a teacher of creative writing. In 1966 Murnane married Catherine Lancaster. They had three sons.

His first novel, Tamarisk Row, was published in 1974, and was followed by nine other works of fiction. He’s also published a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs.

In 1999 Gerald Murnane won the Patrick White Award. In 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. He has since won the Adelaide Festival Literature Award for Innovation and has received an Emeritus Fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours ― Alan Bennett, The History Boys: The Film

I don’t read in bed. I don’t read on the loo or in the bath. I don’t understand people who do. I think the reason is—now I’ve given the matter some thought, because before I began writing this a few seconds ago I’d hadn’t given the matter any thought—that I don’t particularly enjoy being in any of these places.

Beds are for sleeping in. If I’m not sleeping then I want to get up and do something. Sleep’s a waste of time. I resent how often my body wants to do it and when. For some reason I often get ideas last thing at night when I’ve no time—because I have to go to bed—to do anything with them. Some get scribbled down in the hope I can make something of them later—the best ideas don’t need you to strike when the iron’s hot but will wait for you—but most get lost out of pure laziness. There are few things old age has going for it but the one thing I long for is the ability to get by on three or four hours a night especially since by then the amount of years left to me will be considerably reduced by then and every minute will count.

Toilets are a necessary evil. If I ever got the chance to buttonhole God on the subject one of my top peeves will be how unpleasant the elimination of bodily waste can be. Especially solids. Surely he could’ve dreamed up something more agreeable. But either way it’s a job I want to get done quickly and efficiently so I can get back to doing more interesting stuff instead. I do like the idea of multitasking however. And so I tend to think while I’m on the loo. I frequently get good ideas too whilst cloistered away for those five or ten minutes, in fact quite often when I’m struggling with a problem and have to heed the call of Nature the break proves to be exactly what was needed to provide a solution or at least a new direction.

Baths I don’t take anymore. It’s been showers for years now. We never had a shower growing up and I can’t say I was overly impressed with the whole showering experience when I got introduced to it but now the utilitarian in me likes to get the whole bathing experience over with as swiftly and proficiently as possible. (Yes, I know that’s just another way of saying ‘quickly and efficiently’.) Bathing’s another one of those things I resent. Why when I don’t’ go out of my way to wallow in muck does my body insist on getting filthy? I spend most of my days sitting in a chair reading or writing. Where’s all this dirt and grime coming from? If I did still take baths I certainly wouldn’t read in them. The idea of holding a paperback with soggy hands just upsets me. I look after my books. I don’t turn down the corners of pages or break the spines or take them into rooms full of steam and soapy water.

I tend to read in two places in this flat: my leather armchair in my office or the Ikea Poäng armchair in the living room. I prefer the former if I’m reading a paperback because I have a lamp beside the chair. If it’s an e-book—I mostly read on a tablet—then I’m happy in either chair but if my wife’s up I’ll sit beside her and read. I’m not an especially fast reader. Nor can I fall into a book for hours and hours. I’m always very conscious that I am reading a book. If I’m reading a paperback I always count how many pages are in the chapter I’ve started so I know how long I have to go before I reach a natural stopping point. (I don’t like that you can’t do that easily with e-books.) Forty pages used to be my absolute max. Twenty was typical. Recently I’ve been getting better and I’ve even managed a hundred pages in one sitting but that’s rare. I read seventy-five yesterday and the same today but in two sittings; I was getting tired and had to leave the last fifteen pages until I’d had a nap.

I don’t read for pleasure. I don’t hate reading but if I want to relax I’ll watch TV. I read to educate myself. I’ve always wanted to be the kind of person who people regarded as ‘well read’. I don’t think I am. Well, that’s not true. I am well read in that the majority of books I’ve read have been good books—Auster, Beckett, Camus… that’s my kind of ABC—but I’m not widely read. The list of authors I’ve never read upsets me every time I think about it although one has to draw the line somewhere and mine comes in round about 1900. I’ve read virtually nothing prior to the twentieth century apart from the Bible and feel no great pressure to do so. I’ve never picked up a Dickens or an Austen and can live with myself. The TV and film adaptations have filled any gap there.

I do wish I retained more of what I read. I have a bad memory—I mention it often (it’s the bane of my life)—which is why I always write reviews of the books I read—if not on my blog then at least on Goodreads—as a way of reinforcing what I’ve read. What is the point in reading a book if you can’t remember a damn thing about it? I’ve books on my shelves that I read in my twenties and literally all I can tell you about them is that I once upon a time I turned all their pages, looked at all the words contained therein and retained sod all. Waste … of … time. When I was twenty I had time to waste. If I last as long as my parents that’s probably all the time I have left. That’s a sobering fact. Of course medical science is improving all the time and it really would be nice not to snuff it when I hit seventy-five but let’s say I do. That means I’ve got some 7300 days left. Or 1040 weeks. So if I only read a book a week I could reasonably read another thousand books before I die. I should make a list.

When writers are asked to give advice to newbies one of the things they usually tell them to do is read: read, read, read and then read some more. It’s not bad advice but I think it can be overemphasised. Read, yes, do, but do be selective in what you read. You can learn quite a bit from reading rubbish—what not to do, what doesn’t work—but once the lesson’s learned move on. Don’t keep reading tripe. Same with good books. You don’t need to read every book by every author but do try and read something by every author, every major author and certainly every author who chimes with you. This is why I feel no desperate need to read Dickens or Austen. They may be great authors but they don’t speak to me. Stumbling across an author who does though is a wonderful thing. It happens rarely. (It’s happens to me rarely and I can’t imagine it happening to anyone else more often.) You can even benefit from reading authors whose views you’re diametrically opposed to. (See Why It’s Important to Keep Reading Books By People Even If They’re Monsters.)

On 14 October 2013 Neil Gaiman gave the second annual Reading Agency lecture at the Barbican Centre, London. You can read the whole thing here and there’s a lot good in it but I’d like to quote just one section:

[A]s Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, over twenty years before the kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them.

Not so sure about the ‘bath-resistant’ but other than that I agree with him.

I like books. I like being in a library in the same way I like being in a supermarket. I love looking at all the packaging. I don’t always like what’s inside the boxes or the packets or between the covers of a certain book but I do like to be surrounded by them. The idea of throwing a book away really bothers me and probably the only ones I have consigned to the recycling have been technical books that are now outdated. And even ridding myself of them bothered me a wee bit. I try not to romanticise my feelings for books—they’re only books after all—but I find it hard. I have never known a world without books and I struggle to conceive of one without them even if they do all end up being turned into endless streams of ones and zeroes on some übercomputer somewhere in the distant future. I can imagine a world without sharks before I could imagine one without books.

Of course the Internet is full of lists telling you why you reading is important, Top Threes, Top Fives, Sevens, Eights, Tens but I don’t need a list to tell me why I should eat; I just eat because I enjoy it. Of course there’re reasons why we need to eat but once you start breaking things down like this, for me anyway (who doesn’t have a scientific bone in my body), it takes all the fun out of the thing. I feel better when I eat. I feel better when I read. It’s not complicated. I know that not everything that makes you feel good is necessarily good for you and, yes, reading has its minuses—tired eyes, sore neck, missing your bus stop—but that’s where we need to be grownup about reading.

My mother had a saying (it’s not hers but she made it hers): “You are what you eat” and as I may have mentioned here before in later life she lived off microwave chips so I’m not sure what the moral here really is but if you are what you eat then I suppose it’s just as true to say: You are what you read. My mother had another saying (this one was hers): “I don’t buy rubbish.” And you can see where I’m going here: I don’t read rubbish. What’s the point?

I have a daughter. I mention her periodically and if she bothered to read my blogs more often she’d probably be pleased that I mention her; people do like to be thought of. Before she was born she had a library of over one hundred books. I remember scouring the bookshops in Edinburgh looking for a complete set of Enid Blyton’s retelling of the Brer Rabbit stories—the first books I remember having a real effect on me (especially ‘The Tar Baby’ and ‘Mister Lion’s Soup’)—because I had a single ambition for my daughter: I wanted her to be a reader. That was it. Some parents try to live vicariously through their kids—that was never my intention—but if I have one regret (actually I’ve a list) it’s that I was never a voracious reader. I was never discouraged from reading but neither was I encouraged. I did not want that for my daughter. I wasn’t desperate for her to become a writer although it pleased me that when started writing poems and I have one of hers framed by my bed (one of the few she ever let me read) but it was important that she became a reader. Which she did. Everything else was gravy.

Why read? Why indeed? There are so many quotes I could insert here, pages and pages of them. I chose Alan Bennett to lead off this article because it was the one I related to most strongly but it’s only one of many and there’s some truth in all of them. Do we really need one more? Let’s have a go: Reading is the doorpost we measure ourselves by. Even on tiptoe few of us reach the lintel.

I’ll leave you with that lecture I mentioned earlier:

Everything disappears his books seem to tell us, and also—in small but omnipresent echoes—everything somehow stays. – Jordan Stump in the introduction to Out of the Dark

In his introduction to Out of the Dark translator Jordan Stump talks about the title he chose to give to this novel:

The French title of this book, Du plus loin de l'oubli, poses a particularly thorny problem, since the English language has no real equivalent for oubli, nor even a simple way of saying du plus loin. The phrase, taken from a French translation of a poem by the German writer Stefan George, is literally equivalent to ‘from the furthest point of forgottenness,’ and I have found no way to express this idea with the eloquent simplicity of the original.

You can read an interview with Stump here.

Out of the Dark is an okay title but that’s as far as it goes. And one might be forgiven for saying that Out of the Dark is an okay novel had its author not just been awarded the Nobel Prize. If I were asked for a single word to describe this book the one I’d go with would be ‘understated’. There’s a lot its narrator never found out and he can’t tell us what he never knew but he’s also looking back on events fifteen and thirty years in his past and so can be forgiven if he doesn’t get every detail straight—in 1964 the couple go to see the film Moonfleetbut as it was released in France in March 1960 it’s unlikely it would still be showing anywhere—but I suspect the real problem with the storytelling is that the narrator doesn’t choose to share everything. What interests him he describes in great detail; the dialogue, for example, moves slowly because he frequently comments on facial expressions and gestures and yet he skips over his past as if it’s entirely inconsequential.

A recent article in The New York Times following the news that Modiano had won the Nobel Prize reports:

Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize, called Mr. Modiano “a Marcel Proust of our time, “noting that his works resonate with one another thematically and are “always variations of the same thing, about memory, about loss, about identity, about seeking.”

And if that’s the case Out of the Dark is probably as good a novel to read as any if you want a taste of Modiano. Where it is, apparently, a little different is the fact it has little or nothing to say about World War II. According to Wikipedia:

Obsessed with the troubled and shameful period of the Occupation—during which his father had allegedly engaged in some shady dealings—Modiano returns to this theme in all of his novels, book after book building a remarkably homogeneous work.

It’s a short novel—just shy of 150 pages (none of his novels are epics)—and is written in lean, clean, easy to follow prose although he can be a little repetitious at times—just how many times does he need to mention that Gérard Van Bever’s overcoat was a herringbone and Jacqueline’s soft leather jacket was too light for the time of year?—but this is a minor criticism and Dan Brown’s survived worse. The narrator is looking back from 1994—he was born during the summer of 1945 so that makes him about fifty—firstly to the winter of 1964 where the bulk of the novel takes place (over a three or four month period beginning in August), then to 1979 (this time only dealing with two or three days) and finally to the present, October 1994. What ties all three periods in his life together is a woman called (at least in 1964) Jacqueline.

In an interview Modiano makes an interesting observation about his writing (assuming Google Translate’s done a fair job): “If an x-ray of my novels were made, we would see that they contain whole sections of the Profumo affair or the case of Christine Keeler.” Modiano was in London in 1960, the Profumo scandal came to a head in 1963 and his first book was published in 1968. Was Jacqueline modelled on Keeler? Who knows? But read on.

When our unnamed narrator meets Jacqueline she’s a part of a couple but when has that thwarted a full-blooded Frenchman? As I read the opening few pages I was immediately reminded of Jean Cocteau’sLes Enfants Terribles whose title is rarely translated into English these days so I think Stump might’ve been forgiven for digging his heels in and insisting that Du plus loin de l'oubli be kept as the title. The narrator is an outsider (which, of course, suggests another French classic with an untranslatable title) who gets embroiled in a world he’s not entirely comfortable in or fully understands. There is a reference to the novel A High Wind in Jamaica (a book in which children quickly become part of life aboard a pirate ship and treat it as their new home) and there’s definitely a feel of that here but even more so in the London section of the book. The couple he meets are essentially bohemians although neither’s artistic unlike the narrator who aspires to be—and finally does become we discover—a writer. They get by on charity, gambling and finally theft and for some reason open their arms and accept this young man into the fold without any explanation. He’s a dropout. Estranged from his family he lives in a cheap hotel and gets by selling books. He’s a good fit.

Modiano largely abandoned his own family and once said of his mother that her heart was so cold that her lapdog leapt from a window to its death. It’s also been said that he does not know where his father’s buried. There’s clearly a lot of Modiano in this book’s main protagonist. In the novel this is virtually all the narrator says about his parents:

I was drifting away from my parents. My father used to meet me in back rooms of cafés, in hotel lobbies, or in train station buffets, as if he were choosing these transitory places to get rid of me and to run away with his secrets. We would sit silently, facing each other. From time to time he would give me a sidelong glance. As for my mother, she spoke to me louder and louder. I could tell by the abrupt way her lips moved, because there was a pane of glass between us, muting her voice. And then the next fifteen years fell apart: a few blurry faces, a few vague memories, ashes . . . . I felt no sadness about this. On the contrary, I was relieved in a way. I would start again from zero.

Jacqueline, for me, was actually the most interesting character in this book. Like the narrator she’s also “underage” but that just means she’s not reached twenty-one and is technically still a minor—why she’s out in the world on her own we never learn—but she copes. She’s manipulative, self-interested and has no problems letting things or people—older men especially—slip though her fingers and fall to the ground once she’s done with them. She abandons Van Bever for the writer (an out of character move considering his age) and then, after a move to London (funded by money stolen from a man called Cartaud who’s been passing himself off as a dentist and also has a thing for Jacqueline) she forsakes the writer without a backwards glance in favour of the slum landlord Peter Rachman.

Rachman, of course, was a real live person although he died in 1962. Wikipedia has this to say:

Rachman did not achieve general notoriety until after his death, when the Profumo Affair of 1963 hit the headlines and it emerged that both Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies had been his mistresses, and that he had owned the mews house in Marylebone where Rice-Davies and Keeler had stayed.

Underlining this connection is the fact that Jacqueline is introduced to Rachman by Linda Jacobsen. In the (in)famous photo by Lewis Morley Keeler sits astride a copy of an Arne Jacobsen chair. Michael Savoundra, who they meet in the Lido with Rachman, is named after Emil Savundra who was an international swindler, confidence trickster and business partner of the real-life Rachman. There are also several references to Jamaicans in this section of the book.

Fifteen years later our writer encounters Jacqueline by chance—they’ve both returned to France by this time—and he follows her gate-crashing a party he suspects she’ll be at. Luckily she does arrive shortly after he does sporting a new hairdo, a new man and a new name but disappears overnight again. A further fifteen years on our writer again sees a woman he suspects might be Jacqueline and follows her for a bit but this time he decides to leave well alone.

None of the characters has what you might call a clearly defined identity and there’s virtually no backstory that we can trust. They’re amorphous beings. Even in his maturity it doesn’t feel like the narrator has settled down; found himself. What could possibly be gained by a third encounter with this woman?

On the little square you come to before the park there was a cafe with the name Le Muscadet Junior. I watched her through the front window. She was standing at the bar, her shopping bag at her feet, and pouring herself a glass of beer. I didn't want to speak to her, or follow her any farther and learn her address. After all these years, I was afraid she wouldn't remember me. And today, the first Sunday of fall, I'm in the métro again, on the same line. The train passes above the trees on the Boulevard Saint-Jacques. Their leaves hang over the tracks. I feel as though I'm floating between heaven and earth, and escaping my current life. Nothing holds me to anything now. In a moment, as I walk out of the Corvisart station, with its glass canopy like the ones in provincial train stations, it will be as if l were slipping through a crack in time, and I will disappear once and for all.

In this book no one is what they seem to be or say they are. Cartaud is clearly not a dentist, Van Bever is not a salesman, the writer’s not a student and he and Jacqueline are neither married nor engaged and yet parts are played as long as it’s convenient. At some later time—after 1979 but before 1994—the writer finds a photograph of himself with Jacqueline and notes, “I was struck by the innocence of our faces. We inspired trust in people. And we had no real qualities, except the one that youth gives to everyone for a very brief time, like a vague promise that will never be kept.” There’s definitely a touch of the mumblecore about this book.

I wasn’t sure about this book at first I have to say. The plain-speaking style is deceptive; it’s subtle. As his translator says in interview:

It is a very simple style, but it’s not plain and it’s not overly poetic. There is a kind of poetry in it, but it’s very discreet. So if you translate him too plainly, or if you translate him too poetically, you completely lose the voice. His voice is very elusive. It’s hard to get a handle on. But it’s straight-forward and it has resonance of meaning that isn’t on.

I recommend you give him a go. I’m not sure looking at the other mooted nominees he would’ve been my choice—we’ll have to wait until 2064 to learn who the competition was—but he’s certainly not a bad writer. He’s an interesting writer, quietly digging his own furrow. Or as he’s put it himself: “I have always felt like I've been writing the same book for the past 45 years.” And that reminds me of Brookner in more ways than one; she also writes short novels that sell remarkably well.

***

Patrick Modiano was born in 1947 in Paris, where he still lives. He received his secondary education at various colleges: Biarritz, Versailles, Chamonix, and Paris. His father, Alberto Modiano, was an Italian Jew with ties to the Gestapo who did not have to wear the yellow star and who was also close to organised crime gangs. His mother was a Flemish actress named Louisa Colpeyn. His family’s complex background set the scene for a lifelong obsession with that dark period in history. His big break came partly due to his friendship with the French writer Raymond Queneau, who first introduced him to the Gallimard publishing house when he was in his early twenties.

His first novel, La Place de l'etoile, published in France in 1967, won the Roger Nimier Prize and Fénéon Prize. Modiano won the Prix Goncourt in 1978 for his novel Rue des boutiques obscures (Missing Person) and the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française in 1972 for Les Boulevards de ceinture. He also won the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca from the Institut de France for his lifetime achievement in 2010, and the 2012 the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.

Although he has written some twenty-nine novels (which apparently have been translated into more than thirty languages) less than a dozen of his works have made it into English and several of which were even out of print before the announcement of the fact he had been awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize. The award-winning Missing Person had sold just 2,425 copies in the US prior to the Nobel announcement. Yale University had intended to print 2000 copies of his novel Suspended Sentences this year; that’s now been upped to at least 15,000 copies.

Ravi was too crushed by the school day to take the risk of any other failure, and heaved his school bag onto his back to slink home with the hope of going unnoticed—which he mostly was. – Anita Desai, ‘The Artist of Disappearance’

The cover states this volume contains three novellas. I’ll deal with each separately.

The Museum of Final Journeys

In his review for The Washington Post Ron Charles says that “The Museum of Final Journeys is a little toothache of a story that you’ll have trouble putting out of your mind.” It’s as good a description as any without actually saying anything about the story. It says on the cover it’s a novella but at only 11,000 words you can really only call it a novelette.

The protagonist is an inexperienced bureaucrat, the son of a successful bureaucrat, who as part of his training has been assigned a post in some backwater where he gets to play King Solomon for people he doesn’t understand and could care less about but this is a necessary stepping stone and dutifully he makes do and gets on with it. The first part of the story lets us get acquainted with him as he acclimatises and then what little novelty there is wears off. Very soon he’s read all his books and has little to look forward to bar the crossword in the newspaper, so when an unexpected visitor from an estate he’d heard rumours of arrives talking about a museum his interest is piqued and he makes the trip to see for himself.

It would spoil the story to say what he encounters there but what’s more interesting is what he does with the information. And Charles is right, this is a wee toothache of a story but I’ve never had a toothache in my life that I enjoyed. I don’t mind not knowing all the facts—in the real world we rarely have all the facts and we get by—but an author needs to be wary about what he or she chooses to omit. I thought Desai left me short-changed at the end of this story. That said I did enjoy what I read and she kept me turning pages but there were a few too many whys left at the end of this one for me. It is an interesting character study, however, even if we never learn the protagonist’s name or very much about him other than he’s subservient to the will of his parents; his mother eventually finds him a wife and he settles down to live much the same life as his father did before him. Only his father never experienced what the son does. He never saw the museum. To see the museum and then to end up exactly where he’d expected to be moving from one ministry to another until he reached the end of “a long and rewarding career of service” seems a little sad. It’s supposed to.

Translator Translated

Like the previous story this begins a little off-stage if you will: Prema Joshi, “middle-aged, even prematurely aged one might say,” arrives at her school reunion not expecting to be noticed by anyone; she was never anyone at school so why should she be anyone now? Her life since leaving school has been uneventful. She holds a “a junior position in a minor women’s college in a bleak and distant quarter of the city” teaching girls “every one of these [whom] would leave college to marry, bear children and, to everyone's huge relief, never read another book.” When Tara, the most glamorous girl in class, not only recognises her as a classmate but chooses to strike up a conversation with her Prema is taken aback. She’s followed Tara’s career since leaving school with interest. Tara “had founded the first feminist press in the country and made it, unexpectedly, an outstanding success.” You would think they’d still be poles apart.

And then a providential act took place. A small, grubby paperback slid out of the overstuffed, ungainly satchel that Prema was trying to keep from falling off her lap. And as Prema tried to stuff it back before any further objects followed it out, Tara, idly continuing the conversation since nothing else seemed to be happening, asked, 'What is that you're reading?'

The book is a collection of short stories written in Oriya, the predominant language of the Indian states of Odisha, and it just so happens that Tara has been wanting to branch into translations but neither woman makes any suggestion to the other and it looks like the opportunity is to be lost. Prema, however, is passionate about the language—her mother spoke Oriya to her as an infant but died young—and also about the author of the stories, Suvarna Devi, who she is determined to champion and so makes the effort to see Tara again who although clearly a busy woman is quite accommodating and suggests Prema have a go at translating the book into English.

Publication of Prema’s translation brings Suvarna Devi to the city for a conference, where the two women meet but much to Prema’s surprise and annoyance she’s very much side-lined as merely the translator. She does get to meet her heroine later and persuades her to let her translate the novel she is currently working on. And this is where things start to go awry: Prema’s burgeoning ego begins to get in the way of things and she’s starting to think of herself as a co-author; she really is getting ideas above her station and stations are a big thing in India. Curiously a couple of times during the story the narration slips into the first person although the style is indistinguishable from the third person narration. Clearly the author is making a metafictional point here.

So an interesting wee story about identity, the need to be aware of our limits (as opposed to knowing ones place although there is a touch of that here) and why we should never give into the temptation to meet our heroes. A more rounded and satisfying piece than the first one.

The Artist of Disappearance

This final story—a bona fide novella this time—nicely rounds off the group. In some respects Ravi, the old man we meet at the beginning of this story, is like the protagonist in the opening novelette. As a young man he’s sent away to study and obediently he acquiesces:

The years that followed, Ravi did not count. He did not count them because he did not acknowledge them as his: they did not belong to his life because they did not belong to the forest and the hills. They belonged to the family in Bombay, to the business office, to his duties there, his relations to the family, and some years at a college studying 'management' (although they never made clear and he never understood what he was supposed to 'manage').

On his return home, however, his life takes a very different direction. Ravi is… I suppose the best expression I can use is ‘a child of nature’. From a very early age he just wants to be outside:

Hari Singh [the majordomo as far as I can figure out] gave up setting a place at the table with the requisite glass and silverware, and took to letting Ravi eat his meals at a small table out on the veranda where he would not be separated from the outdoor world that provided all the nourishment he wanted.

He’s an adopted child—“at the suggestion of a distant, philanthropic aunt”—but never really takes to the family nor them to him. Luckily he’s comfortable with his own company especially when left to roam free. His parents die before too much pressure is placed on him to marry and so, after a tragic accident, he ends up living alone in the ruins of the old family home cared for by Bhola, Hari Singh’s son, and his family who still keep their distance appreciating his preference for solitude. And then the film crew arrive and discover what Ravi’s been doing all these years hidden away from prying eyes.

Summary

This is a book suffused with melancholy and occasionally full-blown sadness. I read them in the middle of what passes for summer in Scotland and so I couldn’t help but feel hot reading them but I suspect one might sense that even in winter, not that the books are heavy on descriptions but she makes them count:

The sun was setting into a sullen murk of ashes and embers along the horizon when he turned the jeep into the circular driveway in front of a low, white bungalow.

[…]

Through the suppurating heat of June and July, under a slowly revolving electric fan, and with perspiration streaming down her face in sheets, Prema settled to trying to rediscover the joy she had initially taken in translation.

[…]

When he looked up from it he found the woolly dusk had knitted him into the evening scene, inextricably.

Although Ravi is the only out-and-out recluse all three characters live, at least for a time, on the fringes of society and all aspire to better things. Success comes at a price and although all three better themselves—in very different ways—it costs them. Having been a little disappointed by the ending of the first story I was wary about proceeding but the other two were better and I think the last one was the best but I have a soft spot for loners and outcasts. In an interview Desai says:

I’ve often written about people who don’t go along with the mainstream, who go against the current, who live outside of the current, or are stranded whilst everyone else just flows along. I think I’m drawn to such characters. Even in the last three novellas that I wrote, that same type of character surfaces again and again. I’m interested in people who live in a kind of exile; it may not be political exile, but in some sense it’s exile from the rest of society. It may have something to do with my upbringing and my parents. My mother, having been German, lived most of her life in India and never felt able to return to Germany. After the war, we would sometimes suggest, “Why don’t you go back and visit your country? See who is still alive, who survived.” It would bring her to tears, and she’d say, “Don’t make me do that.” To have lost your country, your family, your society, so wholly, must have been a devastating experience. Somehow she survived it. My father was, in a sense, in exile too. He was from East Bengal, which then became East Pakistan. So his family lost their land and everything else they had there. Then he came to Bangladesh, which was another loss, another change. He didn’t feel at home there either and lived in North India, which was a foreign country to him. They were outsiders, and while there’s no reason why I should be that too—I was born there—I was brought up with the same sense of being an outsider. I certainly absorbed it from them.

Going back to Ron Charles, looking at the book as a whole he says, “Desai takes a certain perverse pleasure in exposing the self-pity of mediocre people; if Anita Brookner were a little meaner, she might write like this.” This really hits the nail on the head. I’m a fan of Brookner—oddly I have to say because there are so many reasons why you wouldn’t think she’d appeal to me—and I suspect I might become a fan of Desai. I was interested in what Manini Nayar Samarth writes in the abstract to her dissertation:

Desai's fiction is lyrical, because, as in lyric poetry, it combines the self (the writer/protagonist) with society through epiphanic insight. The achievement of selfhood is therefore defined by a sense of mystic unity or belonging to a stable and known world. In contrast, Brookner's ironic novels express the failure of a self/world synthesis in an arbitrary and amoral wasteland. Selfhood is defined by the ability to confront and resist the corrosive effects of abandonment and homelessness. These diametric responses to alienation lead to two affirmative modes of closure. In Desai's lyrical novel, the self rests in grace attained through vision. In Brookner's ironic novel, it generates the courage to survive isolation through stoical acceptance or by the creation of a private fiction. Either way, both modes of closure denote a triumph of character over situation, of will over circumstances, thereby establishing the resilience and creative power of the spirit.

That these stories are all based in India is a little problematic—they’re several steps removed from my personal experience of the world—and I found myself googling more Indian words than I would’ve liked but there is still a universality to the book; these people weren’t so different that I didn’t get them. Maybe that says more about me than I care to admit.

I’ll leave you with a very nice—and lengthy—interview with the author.

***

Anita Mazumdar Desai was born in 1937 in Mussoorie, India, to a German mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar. She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English outside the house. However, she did not visit Germany until later in life as an adult. She first learned to read and write in English at school and as a result English became her "literary language". She began to write in English at the age of seven and published her first story at the age of nine.

She was a student at Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School in Delhi and received her B.A. in English literature in 1957 from the Miranda House of the University of Delhi. The following year she married Ashvin Desai, the director of a computer software company. They have four children, including Booker Prize-winning novelist Kiran Desai whose novel The Inheritance of Loss won in 2006. You can read an interview between them here.

She is the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times; she received a Sahitya Academy Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Academy, India's National Academy of Letters; she won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Of all the mental illnesses that we’ve labelled the one I expect most people imagine they’ve got a handle on is Depression. I, myself, have suffered from depression-with-a-capital-d since I was a teenager but the more I read about other people’s experiences the more I think the following is true: If you’ve met one person with depression you’ve met one person with depression; I’ve heard the same said of sufferers of autism, Asperger's, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's. You would think being a depressive I’d’ve approached this book with a degree of empathy—and I did, I did—but almost from the jump I realised I didn’t get the main protagonist. If I didn’t know better I’d say the author hadn’t researched her subject too well but, of course, as this is a thinly-veiled account of Plath’s own life and she committed suicide not long after the book’s not exactly ecstatic reception, I can’t lay that one at her door. All I can say is she wasn’t me and thank God I wasn’t her.

I struggled with this book. I found it dated and that’s fine—it is of its time and were it an historical novel written today I’m sure its author would be lauded for her commitment to accuracy—but society’s moved on; a lot that was accepted as the norm in the early sixties is quite unacceptable nowadays. Attitudes to women for starters although we’re still working on that. As she puts it:

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.

This still happens but now we regard it as abnormal behaviour and the societies and organisations that sanction it as backward. It’s easy though to see where the seeds to Esther Greenwood’s breakdown come from though:

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days

Society at the time imagined a woman would want nothing more than to be a wife and mother and maybe keep the writing on as a hobby, something to submit to the parish journal. Oddly enough despite being a male I understand exactly the pressure Esther was under; I grew up in a working class household in Scotland where even going to university was still considered an odd thing to do.

The pressure to conform is a universal one and is a constant theme in modern Young Adult novels. And that’s really what this book is (Emily Gould in her article for Poetry Foundation agrees with me). I’m not using this as a disparaging term however and I’m not sure anyone today would object with Catcher in the Rye being reclassified as a YA novel (which is the book Robert Taubman in The New Statesman compared The Bell Jar to). On one level it’s a classic Bildungsroman. Professor Linda Wagner-Martin, in her essay, The Bell Jar as a Female ‘Bildungsroman’, writes:

Concerned almost entirely with the education and maturation of Esther Greenwood, Plath's novel uses a chronological and necessarily episodic structure to keep Esther at the centre of all action. Other characters are fragmentary, subordinate to Esther and her developing consciousness, and are shown only through their effects on her as central character. No incident is included which does not influence her maturation, and the most important formative incidents occur in the city, New York. As Jerome Buckley describes the bildungsroman in his 1974 Season of Youth, its principal elements are "a growing up and gradual self-discovery,""alienation,""provinciality, the larger society,""the conflict of generations,""ordeal by love" and "the search for a vocation and a working philosophy."

Janet McCann’s book on the subject argues the very opposite, “tracing Esther’s change from apparent knowledge and self-confidence to ignorance and uncertainty as the apparently open horizon shrinks to a point,” which is true up to a point but the point is that Esther survives the experience and (presumably, hopefully) goes on to have the happy and fruitful life of her choosing. Plath, herself, referred to the book as a “potboiler” and an “apprentice work” so I don’t think one should fret too much over descriptions. The real test is: Is it still—allowing her the credit that it was originally—a good read?

The first half, Esther in New York, was, frankly, a bit girly for me but it’s clearly important to see Esther in the company of “normal” women. Had the hero been a male and it’d been a men’s fashion magazine—do such things even exist?—I would’ve also found it equally off-putting. Just not my cup of tea. Once we moved into the book’s second half I found myself more interested; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest(1975) is one of my favourite books which IMHO wipes the floor with this book. Could twelve years make such a difference? Then again we’ve since had Girl, Interrupted (1993) and Prozac Nation (1994) and, of course, The Bell Jar is going to start to feel tame. Just after I finished reading this book I watched The L-Shaped Room which was released the year before (that would be 1962) and was granted an X certificate by the B.B.F.C.—its tagline was “Sex is not a forbidden word!”—but anyone going to see it looking to be titillated would be sadly disappointed. In both The Bell Jar and The L-Shaped Room things that are discussed openly these days—lesbianism is a side issue in both—are skirted around here but, for its time, I can see why young girls would be drawn to the book if only to read the section where Esther finally does have sex and it’s about as erotic as the single coupling in the dark that we get treated to in The L-Shaped Room.

The treatment of mental health has changed radically but, electroshock therapy aside, the second half of the book focuses less on her treatments and more on what she’s doing when not being treated. This is a saving grace because loneliness and confusion haven’t changed since the dawn of time. This is the start of Esther’s initial meeting with Dr Gordon:

I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and saying “Ah!” in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn’t, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out.
        Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn’t sleep and why I couldn’t read and why I couldn’t eat and why everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.
        And then, I thought, he would help me, step by step, to be myself again.
        But Doctor Gordon wasn’t like that at all. He was young and good-looking, and I could see right away he was conceited.
        Doctor Gordon had a photograph on his desk, in a silver frame, that half faced him and half faced my leather chair. It was a family photograph, and it showed a beautiful dark-haired woman, who could have been Doctor Gordon’s sister, smiling out over the heads of two blond children.
        I think one child was a boy and one was a girl, but it may have been that both children were boys or that both were girls, it is hard to tell when children are so small. I think there was also a dog in the picture, toward the bottom—a kind of Airedale or a golden retriever—but it may have only been the pattern in the woman’s skirt.
         For some reason the photograph made me furious.

There’s a scene not too dissimilar to this in The L-Shaped Room—Jane’s not got mental problems but she is pregnant and unmarried—and although the doctor there is also a perfectly decent individual you can tell there’s a gulf between the two of them and the main problem is one of gender; neither women conform to what society expects of them. This is how Esther’s interview with Dr Gordon ends:

When I had finished, Doctor Gordon lifted his head.
         “Where did you say you went to college?”
         Baffled, I told him. I didn’t see where college fitted in.
         “Ah!” Doctor Gordon leaned back in his chair, staring into the air over my shoulder with a reminiscent smile.
         I thought he was going to tell me his diagnosis, and that perhaps I had judged him too hastily and too unkindly. But he only said, “I remember your college well. I was up there, during the war. They had a WAC station, didn’t they? Or was it WAVES?”
        I said I didn’t know.
         “Yes, a WAC station, I remember now. I was doctor for the lot, before I was sent overseas. My, they were a pretty bunch of girls.”
        Doctor Gordon laughed.
        Then, in one smooth move, he rose to his feet and strolled toward me round the corner of his desk. I wasn’t sure what he meant to do, so I stood up as well.
        Doctor Gordon reached for the hand that hung at my right side and shook it.
         “See you next week, then.”

I found an article in The Guardian entitled ‘Sylvia Plath: reflections on her legacy’ in which a dozen women talk about Plath’s influence on them. Not one man? I don’t get this. Sylvia Plath is a writer, not a women’s writer. She wrote a book, not a women’s book. Granted men don’t come off too well in The Bell Jar but they’re not all irredeemable bastards; most, like the good doctor above, are simply products of their time doing what they see others doing and assuming that’s what’s expected of them too. But then that’s what the women were doing. And it doesn’t look as if any of them are particularly happy with the world in which they live but although individuals change the world most individuals don’t imagine they could ever change the world and so never try.

The fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication has just passed and a right kerfuffle’s there’s been over the new cover used by Faber & Faber. There’s a full discussion here but I’d like to highlight one paragraph:

"It should be possible to see The Bell Jar as a deadpan younger cousin of Walker Percy’sThe Moviegoer, or even William Burroughs’sNaked Lunch. But that’s not the way Faber are marketing it. The anniversary edition fits into the depressing trend for treating fiction by women as a genre, which no man could be expected to read and which women will only know is meant for them if they can see a woman on the cover," writes Fatema Ahmed. And I admit, she has a real point here. This 50th Anniversary edition does give the illusion that Plath's work is suited to the airport books section at Tesco, and definitely—we would never see Joyce or T.S. Eliot or Yeats sitting along those shelves. In fact, "books by men" are simply not marketed in this way.

This is a problem. Personally I don’t find the book cover particularly objectionable; it’s just not very apt.

It is true, this book’s lost a lot of its power. If books had been classified back in the sixties then I’ve no doubt whatsoever that this would’ve received the equivalent of an X certificate. The French film Jules and Jim received an X rating in 1962; that was changed to a PG rating in 1991. And that’s how I’d rank The Bell Jar. I’ve no idea if my daughter’s read the book. I know her mother has—she read it in the early eighties—but I do wonder if she passed it on. It’s a book that’s beloved by many and I can see mothers wanting to share the experience with their daughters as something special and the daughters being underwhelmed by it. I reread Catcher in the Rye when I was about thirty-five and was so disappointed by it.

The book has been filmed (in 1979) and some kind person’s uploaded a copy to YouTube. The quality’s not great but it makes interesting viewing. If you’re keen you can see it here until someone makes a fuss about it. The VHS tape was rated R, so the American equivalent of the old X certificate. What can I say about it? Marilyn Hassett—the director’s girlfriend at the time—tries hard but everything’s against her. She apparently read fifteen books on Plath in preparation for the role but the script only pays lip service to the novel. That it would be different to the novel is fine—just compare the film adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Kesey’s book (they both work on their own terms)—but the script plods along. You can read Jane Maslin’s less than glowing review of the film (which she wrote for The New York Times) here. In part:

The scenes that are supposed to trigger all the trouble—Esther's confrontations with her mother (Julie Harris) and her strangely sadistic editor (Barbara Barrie), a gratuitously sleazy orgy with a disk jockey (Robert Klein)—are appallingly flat, neither explanatory nor disturbing.

[…]

The script, by Marjorie Kellogg, is full of overwrought extremes, even though Mr. Peerce directs virtually all of it with an inappropriate evenness. The editing of the film is so choppy it calls constant attention to itself. The music, by Gerald Fried, is pretty, and so are the costumes, by Donald Brooks.

To be fair I didn’t really feel the book dealt with the build-up to Esther’s collapse as well as it might have—she seemed pretty together to me during the first part of the book—and this was where the film could’ve done the book a huge favour but it dropped the ball in the first act. I read passages like

        The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
        I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.

in the book but I really didn’t realise how much she was suffering. In the book, for example, Esther goes to a party and a guy won’t take no for an answer. On getting back to her hotel this happens:

At that vague hour between dark and dawn, the sunroof of the Amazon was deserted.
        Quiet as a burglar in my cornflower-sprigged bathrobe, I crept to the edge of the parapet. The parapet reached almost to my shoulders, so I dragged a folding chair from the stack against the wall, opened it, and climbed onto the precarious seat.
        A stiff breeze lifted the hair from my head. At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral.
        It was my last night.
        I grasped the bundle I carried and pulled at a pale tail. A strapless elasticized slip which, in the course of wear, had lost its elasticity, slumped into my hand. I waved it, like a flag of truce, once, twice....The breeze caught it, and I let go.
        A white flake floated out into the night, and began its slow descent. I wondered on what street or rooftop it would come to rest.
        I tugged at the bundle again.
        The wind made an effort, but failed, and a batlike shadow sank toward the roof garden of the penthouse opposite.
        Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the grey scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

Now compare that to the scene in the film:

She hasn’t been raped. But she has had to stand up for herself. A guy tries it on—guys try it on all the time—and although upset, very few women would be traumatized unless they were already on the edge. The writing here’s too poetic, too pretty to do justice to the moment. In this scene at least I can see that the scriptwriter’s heart was in the right place. Her name was Marjorie Kellogg. I doubt anyone will remember her nowadays but I watched another of her films a few months back, a 1970 adaptation of her novel Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, and it was quite wonderful.

So, bottom line: Would I recommend this book to you? Especially to the blokes out there. I want to say, yes. I do. But there’re only so many hours in the day. I’ve been making a conscious effort to read more books by women this year—which is how I wound up seeking out The Bell Jar in the first place—and what I’m finding is that I’m reading books because I feel I ought to read them rather than reading books that I want to read. The Bell Jar crops up on all sorts of ‘must read’ lists and in 1963 it was a must read but not nowadays. I want to say: No, read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest instead but there’re three things to consider. Firstly, if you’re reading The Bell Jar because you’re interested in the mentally ill then Kesey’s book is better BUT, secondly, if you’re reading The Bell Jar to gain some perspective into women’s issues then read The Bell Jar, not that you won’t learn a thing or two about women from Kesey but that’s by the by. Thirdly, I’ve not read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest since I was a teenager so maybe it’s also dated badly. Perhaps I should be recommending something like It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini—like Plath, Vizzini also committed suicide in his early thirties. Or maybe Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan.

Never explain what you do. It speaks for itself. You only muddle it by talking about it. – Shel Silverstein

I’ve mixed feelings about commentaries. I’ve said before that a poem which needs notes to explain it—e.g. Beckett’s ‘Whoroscope’—is basically a bad poem; the poem should stand or fall on its own merits. I do talk about my poetry in some of my articles but they’re not really commentaries. I don’t think I’ve ever dissected a poem for everyone to see. Perhaps I should.

I do what I do mainly for newbies. When I was starting out I hated the fact that everyone seemed to want to keep the hows of writing to themselves. I suppose I get it but it still annoyed me that I had to go it alone. I know writing is a private thing but it’s not as if I was asking them how they had a wank! I like that Kona Macphee produced a downloadable companion to her poetry book Perfect Blue which I reviewed here. In my article I included her poem ‘The earthworm’ which I’ll post again to save you looking it up unless you want to read the whole review:

The earthworm

No
one imagines
an earthworm dreaming
it might become a
butterfly or even
just Chuang-
Tzu

few
share its
urge to fashion
finer dirt from dirt,
to pass what
it passes
through

in
the ground
encompassing what’s left
of life’s green surge
and ebb, what’s
left of
you

This is what her companion has to say about the poem:

I like worms. They can eat dirt and make progress at the same time. They're great instructors in the fine art of just-getting-on-with-it.

This poem is about as close to haiku as I seem to get (which is not very close at all, really). Instead of fixed numbers of syllables, it uses fixed numbers of words in each line (which, from my point of view, feels pretty weird; normally when I use fixed line lengths, they're measured by the number of stressed syllables and the actual number of words doesn't matter at all).

Chuang-Tzu is the ancient Chinese philosopher who famously dreamed of being a butterfly, and then awoke to wonder if he was real, or simply the butterfly's dream.

Tim Love has a similar site here devoted to his pamphlet Moving Parts which I also reviewed here.

Part of the thing I have against commentaries is that they change how a person reads a poem. A poem is after all a collaboration between poet and reader and what they make of it will be unique to them. To then come along and say, er no, the poem’s actually about this isn’t really fair because that’s what I’ve made out of it in my capacity as reader plus I have access to all the other stuff that surrounded the writing of the poem which no reader need be privy to.

That said after I’ve read a poem as a poet myself it’s always interesting to learn a bit more about the process, something I might be able to take away and try myself. And by ‘after’ I mean a long time after. Once you’re basically done with it. I’m a student of Beckett as everyone knows and one of the great pleasures with Beckett is studying him. Sometimes I suspect he’s more fun to study than to actually read. One particularly good book I would recommend to fellow scholars is Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama 1956-1976 by Rosemary Pountney because she spends a great deal of time looking at his early drafts and analysing how Beckett wrote. Her breakdown of Lessness is particularly illuminating. But I’d like to highlight something more familiar, Krapp’s Last Tape.

The play was written in 1958—quickly, probably between March and April—so he would’ve been 52 at the time. In the final version the curtain rises on "[a] late evening in the future." It is Krapp’s 69th birthday and he hauls out his old tape recorder, reviews one of the earlier years—the recording he made when he was 39—and makes a new recording commenting on the previous twelve months. What we learn from Pountney is that “the future” once had a rather specific date. Typescript 3 reads as follows:

April 1986. A late envening [sic] in 1985 the nineteen eighties.

In Typescript 4 this has become simply “in the future”. In April 1986 Beckett would’ve been eighty and obviously seventy-nine in 1985. This is typical of the way Beckett worked gradually “vaguening” the text moving from the specific, from him most often, to the Everyman. In Typescript 2 the protagonist’s name is “Crapp” by the way; prior to that he was simply “A”. It’s interesting to see what was going through his mind as he wrote but is it helpful or ultimately distracting? Of course by the time I read Pountney I was very familiar with the play but I do have to say that a part of me doesn’t really want to hang onto the details I’ve learned. Krapp is not Beckett. He is of Beckett but he is not Beckett.

When I produced my poetry collection This Is Not About What You Think a while back I chose the title because it was the perfect title. I’d always imagined my first collection would be called Reader Please Supply Meaning but I’m saving that for my next one. Both titles, however, underline the fact that it’s up to the reader to decide what these poems are ultimately about and that’s all right. As I’ve said already it is interesting to know the background to a poem but that knowledge changes it. I left it out for a reason. It’s called poetic licence: “The freedom to depart from the facts of a matter or from the conventional rules of language when speaking or writing in order to create an effect”.

Let’s have a look at a few from the collection:

Father Figure

This is the floor beside my bed
where I kneel to talk to God.
If I press my ear to the floor.
I can hear Him talk to Mum.
About me. It is always me.

I know what God looks like.
He looks just like my dad.
I heard him tell my mum:
"In this house I am God."
I heard that through the floor.

Now I only pretend to pray
because I don't want my dad
to really hear the things I think.
Now he's not sure I'm so bad.
I don't want him to know I am.

I just want my dad to love me.

It’s a common enough image, the child kneeling beside his or her bed, hands pressed together—“God bless Mummy, God bless Daddy”—but the simple fact is I never did. I was brought up by god-fearing parents—that is true enough—but they never actually taught me how to pray. Ridiculous, I know! So all the praying stuff in the poem is made up. I never even attempted to talk to God until I was a grown man. The image of me lying with my ear pressed to the bedroom floor—which was directly about the living room—is accurate but that’s not where I heard my dad say, “In this house I am God.” That was years later. He was in the kitchen and I was standing in the hall. I’m not actually sure who he was addressing. I don’t think it was me directly. I get the feeling my mum and probably my brother were there but again I have no idea what prompted his declaration although I do know the scriptural precedent for him feeling he had the right to say that and mean it. Now the lines:

I can hear Him talk to Mum.
About me. It is always me.

suggest strongly that it’s Dad doing the talking whereas the reality was it was Mum talking to him. You see my dad’s name is also James so when I heard her say, “Jimmy,” I assumed she was telling on me—“Our Jimmy did this… Oh, Jimmy did that…”—when actually all she was doing was addressing her husband by name. More fabrication. The sentiment of the poem is an honest one. I did want my dad to love me. I always wanted him to love me for being me though and not for being what he wanted me to be and the truth is he did always love me but he never got me and that was the best I could ever hope for.

Tools

"Just because you have a hammer
it doesn't make you a joiner."
My father had his way with words.

So I took a handful of nails
and boarded up my heart
against him and against the world.

And safe on the inside I yelled:
"Screw you!"
but he was never one for puns.

This isn’t even about my dad. I was corresponding with a girl at the time—I believe her name was Connie—and she was talking about her relationship with her father so I wrote her this poem. Not sure why I didn’t include a dedication—not like me—but I didn’t and so that’s how the poem stands. My own dad was a mechanic—he looked after machines in a cotton-spinning mill and later in a wool-spinning mill and apparently there’s a world of difference between them—and the truth is he really didn’t have a way with words but he could quote scripture and often did. I might not have been writing about my dad but I was accessing the same sort of feelings I had towards him. I understood where Connie was coming from which is why the poem worked so well.

True Love II

My father had a heart transplant.
Years ago, before I was born,
        doctors took
        out his broken heart

        and gave him a machine instead.
The strange thing about this machine
        was it was
        powered by sadness.

Of course he was always just Dad,
        but, when I discovered the truth,
        at first I
        hated the sadness

        then I became thankful for it
        because as long as I could see
        him be sad
        he would be with me.

And so I made it my job to
        make him the saddest dad in the
        whole wide world.
What else could I do?

My dad never had a heart transplant. He did have two heart attacks and the second one killed him. But this poem isn’t about him. It’s not even me talking. It’s my daughter. “How the hell were we supposed to know that, Jim?” I hear you say and the simple answer is: You weren’t. I excluded that from the poem. Of course this is a metaphorical poem and the simple fact is my daughter makes me both proud and happy—although I’d be prouder and happier if she read my damn posts more often—but ask yourself: “What would I do if my dad got fitted with some weird mechanism powered by sadness?” It’s preposterous—it’s meant to be preposterous—but if you loved him—if you really loved him—wouldn’t you go out of your way to make him as sad as you could? How many kids nip their parents’ heads about their salt intake or their cholesterol or the need to exercise; they make them miserable but they do it out of love because they don’t want them to die and miserable living parents are better than happy dead ones. Love’s a funny thing. And then there are the kids who run wild and break their parents’ hearts and you’d think they were deliberately trying to make them sad.

Silent Echoes

My father lost his hearing
        soon after he retired
        or rather he gave it up.

At first his hearing became
        selective as befits
        a man of a certain age

        but over time he lost all
        interest in listening and
        his ears forgot how to hear.

He wrapped himself in silence
        like an old comforter
        to protect himself from us

        and from our onslaught of words.
Sundays I'd sit with him
        and we'd feed the swans on the

        pond outside of the hospice.
From a distance I'm sure
       we looked like some old couple.

        with nothing more to say and
        no desire to say it
        which was not far from the truth.

My dad did go deaf. He also went blind. He never went into a hospice. He died in the front room of his house. It wasn’t even his usual chair. He did go with my mum to feed the swans in the pond behind the sports centre. They’d come up out of the water and take the bread straight from his hand. Nipped him more often than not but my dad had tough hands, like leather, so it didn’t bother him too much. I don’t recall Mum ever feeding the swans after he died. I certainly never went with her. Or maybe she just started feeding the swans on the river as it would’ve been easier for her to reach on her own. Can’t imagine her not feeding something.

Sometimes when I used to visit my dad Mum would be out—she couldn’t let a day go by without a tour of her precious second-hand shops—and Dad would just be sitting there in silence: no TV, no radio, no audio books (he never really took to them). He had indeed wrapped himself in silence but I don’t think it was much of a comfort to him. And we certainly never went on at him although when we were kids we did—I have the audio tapes to prove it—and so I do suppose in that respect the peace and quiet had a certain belated comfort to it. That’s the thing about life: it comes in chunks, hard to chew and difficult to swallow.

Are these poems any clearer now or have I spoiled them for you? I can’t read them without knowing all the stuff I know. I knew my father for forty-odd years. Just the word ‘dad’ is hugely evocative but then ‘dad’ means something to everyone and there’ll be people out there who read these poems and go: “My dad was nothing like that.” Well, good! Hopefully when you say that you mean he was better and not some homicidal maniac. At least my dad wasn’t that.

I say I’m not an autobiographical writer and I still stand by that. Like all writers I use what material comes my way. I’ve loved several women in my life and I’ve been around people who’ve been in love, I’ve watched TV shows and films depicting people in love and read books about love and so I’ve built up a composite picture of what ‘in love’ means and who knows you might feel exactly the same as I do about love and you might feel the same about your dad and your mum and maybe, like me, you never had a pogo-stick growing up and never learned to skate but if you didn’t you can still imagine what it was like but imagining’s not knowing; don’t expect it to be. And even now you know the things I’ve told you, you don’t know. You weren’t there. Make the poems your own.

Vanishing twin syndrome usually occurs in the womb. In our case it came about considerably later in the developmental process. – Shelley Jackson, Half Life

If, as I did, you struggled with this book (especially its ending) you might want to read Stéphane Vanderhaeghe’s essay ‘How to Unread Shelley Jackson?’ published in Transatlantica. It won’t answer all your questions but it’ll probably help you ask more sensible questions than, “WTF?” I’ll come back to that.

For the most part this is… correction, appears to be, a fairly straightforward novel. It tells the story of two conjoined twins: Nora and Blanche Olney. There are two overlapping storylines that run chronologically: the first charts their lives from conception until, when she’s thirteen, Blanche falls asleep and refuses to wake up; the second thread begins some fifteen years later when Nora, tired of carrying around what she’s come to regard as dead weight, decides it’s time for Blanche to go (in fact the very first chapter of the book is a copy of her medical release and waiver document). Sandwiched between these two storylines are extracts from ‘The Siamese Twin Reference Manual’ which is really more of a scrapbook Nora has compiled over the years but it serves to provide the readers with some much needed exposition like, for example, why the world is suddenly teaming with “twofers” which is slang term for conjoined twins adopted by North Americans; in the UK it’s apparently “mushies” (“Mushy peas, Siamese … Cockney rhyming slang).

So this is a what-if? book, what would the world be like if, following the detonation of the first atomic bomb, something happened and women started having two-headed babies? Not every pregnancy results in a two-headed baby but there is a considerable escalation. That part of the book was dead interesting. There have been many books written that tweak history and set their storylines in alternate realities: for example The Plot Against America by Philip Roth looks at an America where Franklin D. Roosevelt was defeated in 1940 in his bid for a third term as President of the United States, and Charles Lindbergh was elected, leading to increasing fascism and anti-Semitism in the States; Harry Turtledove’sSouthern Victory series of novels are set in a world in which the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War, and Resurrection Day is a novel written by Brendan DuBois that depicts a world where the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated to a full-scale war, the Soviet Union is devastated, and the USA has been reduced to a third-rate power, relying on Britain for aid. It’s basically the butterfly effect.

The world as it now stands is full of minorities all banding together trying to first define and then assert their rights: the right to believe what they want, to marry who they want, to die when they want. This new world is no different in that regard:

[S]ome groups, like the Siamists, Togetherists, and so-called fusion theologists, aver that radiation has nothing to do with twinning. It was a deeper, more metaphysical split that took place when the first nuclear bomb was exploded at the Trinity site on July 16, 1945. Many consider this split no accident, but the essential next stage in the spiritual evolution of a species finally advancing beyond self-interest. To others, it is just the latest fissure in that ever-widening crack in the relation of Self to World whose warning signs first appeared in ancient Greece. Revisionist scholars, on the other hand, claim that a sizeable population of twofers has existed throughout history (“theirstory”), many more than were sung in ballads and broadsides. Indeed, the Togetherists, the most radical of the “fusion” groups, lay claim to an antiquity that rivals the Masons’.

I’ve been a fan of alternate histories for years. Oddly I’ve not read one until now and I really don’t know why—considering the amount of Philip K Dick I’ve read you’d’ve thought I’d’ve got round to The Man in the High Castle—but I did enjoy the setting part of the novel very much and there’re plenty of opportunities for humour, for example, reimagining the premises of television shows:

Three’s Company, about a sexy twofer and her male roommate, and Mork & Mindy: a dark comedy, in which one half of a two-headed alien falls under the delusion that he is a simple American girl.

Or films. She couldn’t resist slipping in a reference to Anna and the Siamese Kings.

But although there’s plenty of sly, wry and often dry humour in this book it has a serious, even a dark undercurrent. What right does Nora have to agree to have her sister’s head removed? Just as with the abortion and assisted suicide issues today there are widely differing opinions. In most countries surgical decapitation is illegal…

…to commit … an act of surgery against your other half, even if she is deaf, mute, an idiot, or insane, unless she’s also gangrenous and leaking pus out of her ears? And even then you have to get a court hearing and the consent of, like, everyone in the world: parents, both dead and alive, spouse, pet goldfish, next-door neighbour, kindergarten teacher, and five total strangers who looked at you once on the street.

But that doesn’t stop people doing it. And one of those whose services are available for a price—and not even an exorbitant price (she’s not in it for the money)—is Dr. Ozka, known in the press as “Doctor Decapitate”; her service is referred to as “The Divorce”.

When Nora completes her form she indicates that her twin is non compos mentis but what sort of book would this be if that was truly the case? It’s like the third head in Brian Aldiss’sBrothers of the Head. You just know it’s going to wake up at the end and that’s not going to be good. So is that what happens here?

I’m not going to spoil the book by saying what happens but the ending is far from straightforward. And this is where we start to get into WTF territory. But bear with me.

The book’s narrated by Nora who’s very much her own woman. Even as a child when Blanche was conscious Nora was the dominant twin but not necessarily the bad twin; things aren’t as black and white as they appear. (Nora ó noir ó black; Blanche ó white.) If Nora isn’t as attached (sorry, irresistible pun) to her sister as you might imagine there could be a good reason. The problem is remembering the past and as Nora tells the story of what it was like for the two of them to grow up in the ghost town of Too Bad, Nevada it appears she might not quite have all her ducks in a row. Especially when it comes to the foulmouthed girl she remembers as Donkey-Skin and the girl’s father Dr. Goat. To be honest if you extracted all the chapters about them growing up you’d have quite an acceptable YA novel. The big problem in childhood is gaining acceptance and it doesn’t matter if you’re the only kid with braces or ginger hair or a stutter or a sibling growing out of your shoulder you’re going to find it hard. I’ve known a couple of sets of twins in my life, an identical pair and a non-identical. The identical twins were inseparable—they might as well have been joined at the hip—but the other pair were like chalk and cheese. I was friends with George but I really didn’t have much time for David. Nora and Blanche have similar problems:

Gradually, something changed. The other kids decided that we were not one, but two girls. One had cooties, but the other was all right. They shared their lunch with Blanche—bartered chocolate pudding cup for fruit leather, peanut butter crackers for devil-dog—while I ate chopped olives. Once I tried to swap for a bag of raisins.

“Gross. Nobody wants to touch your food, Nora. Get a clue.” Blanche rolled her eyes apologetically at me and took another bite of Twinkie.

As an adult things have changed. For starters Nora’s no longer living in a backwater; she in the city where there are clubs and bars and a whole social world devoted to twofers. Oddly enough she doesn’t really seem to be a part of this. And the problem here is something along the lines of body dysmorphia: she feels like a singleton born in the body of a twofer and really isn’t that comfortable in the company of conjoined twins.

Oddballs abound. Not quite sure Nora encounters anyone who isn’t a little peculiar or who doesn’t have some agenda. She’s certainly more than a little mixed-up herself. But she knows her own mind. For as long as she’s sure it is her own mind. Because then there’s all that Lithobolia business:

I named the phenomenon after Lithobolia, the stone-throwing demon: a beige blur would whisper past my head, and somewhere, something would smash. I’d look up in mild, disinterested surprise.

The “beige blur” is her own arm or, since she’s not in control of it during these moments, perhaps it would be best to think of it as Blanche’s arm. Blanche who’s still asleep and, presumably, sleep-throwing random object. This is new. And worrying. But as long as Blanche is out of it Nora’s determined to proceed and, after some effort and a few adventures, does indeed make contact with Dr. Ozka. Needless to say things do not go as planned at the clinic and Nora nearly loses her own head. She’s forced to return to the States where she finds herself pulled irresistibly—is Blanche driving?—home where it (whatever ‘it’ is because even some 400 pages into the book at this point I still wasn’t sure) all began.

This is where we start to get into WTF territory and I would recommend reading the final section of this book with a clear head and not, as I did, rush to try to get the damn thing finished because you’d already spent days on it. No, it is not an especially quick read despite keeping my interest pretty much throughout. In her essay Vanderhaeghe writes:

Shelley Jackson’s novel barely functions as this old-fashioned object once called a book used to… Well, it is a book all right, or at least bears every external resemblance to what we usually call a “book”. As such, the object is tangible enough to let anyone open it and adventurously get lost amid pages (white) covered with ink (black)—pages “stained with words” as Nora will eventually claim. But, naïve as the question surely is, does that make it a “book”? And what, then, is a “book”, or what is left of it, in the age of digital manipulation and electronic saturation? One possible answer is that a “book” is something we can always go back to and find unchanged, its contents there for eternity, forever preserved on a bookshelf somewhere in the library next door ; in that case, then, and despite all contrary evidence, Shelley Jackson’s Half Life is probably not a book ; for a simple experiential, hence subjective reason at least : when the readers reach its last page, they suddenly feel it vanish between their hands, even as they are grasping it, and grasping it tight, to get a reassuring sense of ontological certainty. If Jackson parodically makes use of conventional novelistic devices throughout, it seems relevant that, among them, the climax that one usually finds towards the end of a well-driven plot is reinterpreted along literal lines. As a metaphor that over the years has become so familiar as to have lost its full, though ambiguous meaning (if full meaning, ambiguous or not, it ever had), the novel’s “climax” is here envisioned as an atom bomb exploding. Yet the ending of Half Life is not the expected final explosion that would conventionally give birth to its mushroom-cloud of an offspring, but rather its parodic, self-cancelling reversal: the bomb, going off, sucks back its offspring off a mushroom-cloud. In other words, one had better follow the (metafictional) suggestion of One and a Half, this two-headed kitten singing songs to Nora, and refer to Half Life not as a book in the end, but as a “device” instead which leaves nothing intact, least of all the “text” or the “novel”.

Yeah, I had to read that over a couple of times too. There is a diagram at the end of the novel which is slightly helpful once you’ve actually read the book so I’m not really spoiling anything by including it here:

When Nora writes “I start to write” this is the point in the book she’s looking back from and from that point on she’s not looking back she’s writing about what’s happening to them day by day because I’m not actually sure what’s left at the end of the book. Not once we’ve gone full (twin) circles. Nora writes:

Everything happens twice, first in the fact, and then in the telling. At least twice: the telling, too, is doubled by the hearing of it. A cleft passes through the centre of things, things that do not exist except in this twinship. That cleft is what we sometimes call I. It has no more substance than the slash between either and or.

Either and or, exclusive or: XOR, one of the four terms that serve as section headings: NOT, XOR, OR and AND. Yeah, it doesn’t hurt to have some idea how Boolean logic works. And Venn Diagrams.

The book gets mixed reviews. According to Goodreads at the time of writing:

I can understand why. Of the one-star reviews I think Wealhtheow puts it best:

This book is the written equivalent of the last twenty minutes of “2001”—I’m sure *something* “deep” is going on, but I’m not sure what and mostly I just feel bored and nauseated.

To be fair Nora is not the most likeable of characters—I’m actually not sure there was a single likeable character in the book (maybe Mooncalf, a chocolate lab)—and I can understand her thinking of herself as a singleton but what disappointed me most were the other twofers she meets along the way. None of them felt like twins, conjoined or not. There was none of this cute finishing off each other’s sentences or making up their own language (cryptophasia) or anything like that but to be honest I was basing my judgement on what little I’ve seen of Abby and Brittany Hensel:

Dicephalus dipus dibrachius. That’s two heads, two legs, and two arms: standard-issue twofer.

plus what I know of Poto and Cabengo and June and Jennifer Gibbons. And, of course, my own experiences.

Half Life is an ambitious book and there’s a lot crammed into it. Perhaps too much. As Stacey D’Erasmo puts it in her review for The New York Times:

All this razzle-dazzle, all the allusions, the narrative loop-de-loops: it gets a bit busy. By the middle of the book, I wasn’t sure how many more cleverness hurdles I could clear, and I’m sure I stumbled over some. I don’t really know what a Boolean system is; I looked it up, then I forgot again. I skipped past the Venn diagram, though it was charmingly drawn.

Those bits I got but then I’ve always had a head for maths. It was other bits that lost me or at least lost my interest. But I was glad I read it despite its length; 450 pages is really my upper limit these days. I would read her again. She manages to balance the intellectual and the visceral quite nicely and at 179 pages her short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy is more my length; should’ve read it first I think. Bodies clearly fascinate her. In an interview she says:

[T]he body interests me most as something to write about, not to touch (not in a professional capacity, anyway). I am fascinated above all with using it as a object of fantastical transformations, because we care about the body and we know it intimately, and I think that makes it possible to invest bizarre scenarios with very strong, creepy, personal feelings.

***

Born in 1963 Shelley Jackson is the author of the novel Half Life, the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, hypertexts including the classic Patchwork GirlandDoll Games (with Pamela Jackson), several children’s books featuring her own illustrations, and SKIN, a story published in tattoos on the skin of 2,095 volunteers. A Village Voice“Writer on the Verge” and Pushcart Prize winner, she is also the co-founder of the Interstitial Library, Circulating Collection. Shelley Jackson lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches at the New School University. Her website can be found at http://www.ineradicablestain.com/.

I would give up the unessential; I would give up my money, I would give up my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me. – Kate Chopin,The Awakening

Canongate Books have just republished Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening. In her e-mail to me their publicist wrote:

First published in 1899, this radical novel sent shockwaves through American society and continues to speak to readers over one hundred years later. Widely regarded in the States as one of the forerunners of feminist literature alongside Tolstoy'sAnna Karenina and Flaubert'sMadame Bovary, it is practically unknown in the UK—a fact we hope to change with this beautiful new edition, introduced by Barbara Kingsolver.

I have to say I hadn’t heard of the book and if pressed I would’ve said Chopin was a contemporary writer. The only example of early Feminist literature I was aware of (and have read) is The Yellow Wallpaper by a fellow American, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which precedes this novel by seven years, although I did know Gilman also wrote Herlandwhich is on my to-read list. Gilman was a prominent American feminist and a lecturer for social reform but in an interview David Chopin makes some interesting observations about his grandmother:

Kate was neither a feminist nor a suffragist, she said so. She was nonetheless a woman who took women extremely seriously. She never doubted women's ability to be strong. She came from a long line of strong women whom she loved and respected, the great-grandmother, grandmother, mother affiliation. She had strong women friends including intellectual women. Her lack of interest in feminism and suffrage did not have to do with a lack of confidence in women nor did it have a lack to do with a lack of any desire for freedom. She simply had a different understanding of freedom. She saw freedom as much more a matter of spirit, soul, character of living your life within the constraints that the world makes [or] your God offers you, because all of us do live within constraints.

[…]

I think she was an exceptionally talented and interesting woman and if I resist labelling her feminist or suffragist, or claiming her for a specific view of what women require or what women's independence requires, women's freedom requires. I resist it because I think she's much larger and more important than that. I don't think we do her any honour or further our own understanding by tying her to a particular political cause. I think she really was a dedicated and talented writer, who worked very hard to capture ineffable, delicate ideas and feelings in a prose that would do them justice. [bold mine]

A very brief summary then:

Edna Pontellier is an obedient wife and mother vacationing at Grand Isle with her family. While there she becomes close to a young man named Robert Lebrun. Before they act on their mutual romantic interest in each other, Robert leaves for Mexico.

From the 1982 film adaptation The End of August

Edna is lonely without his companionship, but shortly after her return home to New Orleans she becomes involved with Alcée Arobin. Although she doesn’t love Arobin, he does awaken various sexual passions within her.

Concurrent to Edna’s sexual awakening is her growing need for independence. Instead of spending her days concerned with household matters, she pursues her interest in painting. Since she has some capital of her own and a small income from painting Edna moves into a house of her own while her husband is away on business. At this time Robert returns, professing his love for Edna and his desire to someday marry her but, again, withdraws before anything improper can happen. Edna, increasingly struggling to cope with societal strictures, returns to Grand Isle where she first experienced her rebirth.

The Awakening is a book that can be read in a number of ways—everything from a künstlerroman to a Creole Bovary to a transcendental fable of the soul’s emergence—and there’s no reason why they can’t co-exist within the same framework but I’m not sure the book deserves to be called a Feminist text simply because its protagonist is a strong-willed woman; she’s not particularly interested in rights for women, only freedom for herself. There’s no proselytising, no burning of corsets (bras did exist in 1899 but probably weren’t commonplace), no wanting to emasculate every man she encounters. She simply wants to be able to do what she wants to do when she wants to do it. In some respects that’s a rather immature notion but as regards life’s freedoms she is something of a child despite being actually twenty-eight for most of the book, turning twenty-nine at the very end. I don’t mean ‘childish’ in a bad way, simply as a metaphor for innocence and inexperience; like all women of her time her world experiences have been limited to a “women’s sphere” cum gilded cage.

Birds crop up throughout the book (see here) beginning with a noisy parrot in the opening chapter but a particularly significant moment occurs when the pianist, Mademoiselle Reisz, puts her arms around Edna and felt her shoulder blades, “to see if [her] wings were strong”. When doing this she says:

The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.

I suppose in some respects flying and swimming are related. At the start of the novel Edna learns how to swim and can’t get enough of it; there’s a childlike delight in the fact she can now propel herself through water unaided. If you’re looking for a feminist metaphor here, sure, you can read it that way; she’s no longer supported by a man only it’s not only men. Chopin notes:

Edna had attempted all summer to learn to swim. She had received instructions from both the men and women; in some instances from the children. Robert had pursued a system of lessons almost daily; and he was nearly at the point of discouragement in realizing the futility of his efforts. A certain ungovernable dread hung about her when in the water, unless there was a hand nearby that might reach out and reassure her.

But that night she was like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who of a sudden realizes its powers, and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with over-confidence. She could have shouted for joy. She did shout for joy, as with a sweeping stroke or two she lifted her body to the surface of the water. [bold mine]

Yes, she’s a woman, and, yes, once she gains confidence she does say “[s]he wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before,” but one can read too much into that. Her discovering the freedom being able swim affords her is significant though:

She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself.

I’m not sure if this is her epiphany or if that comes later but considering how the book ends—she returns after her testing out her wings to the spot where she learned to swim—it’s significance can’t be overlooked. Here at Grand Isle, for the first time it seems, she discovered the pleasure of being alone; indeed the book is subtitled ‘A Solitary Soul’.

From the 1982 film adaptation The End of August

Five quotes:

“Oh! I don’t know. Let me alone; you bother me.”

She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places.

But after all, a radiant peace settled upon her when she at last found herself alone.

When Edna was at last alone, she breathed a big, genuine sigh of relief.

I want to be let alone. Nobody has any right—except children, perhaps—and even then, it seems to me—or it did seem—”

She doesn’t want to be a man—although she’s clearly fond of men and men certainly feature in what passes for her plans for the future—nor is she clamouring for a divorce but when she finds herself freed for a time from not only her husband—who’s really not a bad sort and far more understanding than the husband in The Yellow Wallpaper­—but also her children—whom she loves dearly but doesn’t feel a need to centre her life around—she finds contentment in the simplest of things: painting and reading, visiting her (as opposed to ‘the family’) friends and not having to oversee a household. At one point she goes to visit the Ratignolles and, on parting, notes:

The little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered her gave her no regret, no longing. It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an appalling and hopeless ennui.

From the 1999 film adaptation Grand Isle

It’s important to remember that the book’s title is called The Awakening. Edna takes time to wake up to the reality of her life. One of the most significant early moments is when she informs her husband that she’s thinking of becoming an artist:

        “I feel like painting,” answered Edna. “Perhaps I shan’t always feel like it.”
         “Then in God’s name paint! but don’t let the family go to the devil. There’s Madame Ratignolle; because she keeps up her music, she doesn’t let everything else go to chaos. And she’s more of a musician than you are a painter”.
         “She isn’t a musician, and I’m not a painter. It isn’t on account of painting that I let things go.”
         “On account of what, then?”
         “Oh! I don’t know. Let me alone; you bother me.”
        It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier’s mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world. [bold mine]

It takes time to awaken. It takes time to become. The realisation may feel sudden but there will have been a journey even if it is only a relatively short one. Edna Pontellier’s journey towards self-actualisation takes a year, a little less. As rebirths go it’s fairly smooth sailing. She doesn’t have to fight for her rights. She tells her husband, no, and he takes it. The first time this happens her husband, Léonce, has come home and finds Edna lolling in a hammock on the porch:

        “Edna, dear, are you not coming in soon?” he asked again, this time fondly, with a note of entreaty.
         “No; I am going to stay out here.”
         “This is more than folly,” he blurted out. “I can’t permit you to stay out there all night. You must come in the house instantly.”
        With a writhing motion she settled herself more securely in the hammock. She perceived that her will had blazed up, stubborn and resistant. She could not at that moment have done other than denied and resisted. She wondered if her husband had ever spoken to her like that before, and if she had submitted to his command. Of course she had; she remembered that she had. But she could not realize why or how she should have yielded, feeling as she then did.
         “Léonce, go to bed,” she said. “I mean to stay out here. I don’t wish to go in, and I don’t intend to. Don’t speak to me like that again; I shall not answer you.

He doesn’t drag her to her feet and give her a good slap. No, instead he draws up the rocker, hoists his slippered feet on the rail and waits out the night with her. He may not understand but he is understanding. And continues to be throughout the whole book.

From the 1999 film adaptation Grand Isle

Of course by today’s standards the book is tame and more people nowadays will be offended by the ways coloured people are referred to as blackies, negroes, mulattos, quadroons and, in one instance (and this was a new one on me), a griffe which is, apparently, a person of three-quarter black to one-quarter white ancestry. The last slaves were freed in 1865 so no parallels are drawn between slavery and the role of women apart from one early in the book:

“You are burnt beyond recognition,” [he husband] added, looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage. She held up her hands, strong, shapely hands, and surveyed them critically, drawing up her lawn sleeves above the wrists. Looking at them reminded her of her rings, which she had given to her husband before leaving for the beach. She silently reached out to him, and he, understanding, took the rings from his vest pocket and dropped them into her open palm. She slipped them upon her fingers; then clasping her knees, she looked across at Robert and began to laugh. [bold mine]

This doesn’t make Léonce a bad man because as we’ve seen already he clearly cares for his wife’s wellbeing. He’s also a man of his time and behaves as he sees others behaving. He has a business to run and is (perhaps overly) concerned about how he is perceived in the local community so it’s actually to the man’s credit that he doesn’t rein his wife in.

Tame as the book is by today’s standards the book was not well received. In her preface to the Norton critical edition of the novel Margaret Culley writes that The Awakening

…met with widespread hostile criticism and the book was removed from the library shelves in St. Louis. Chopin herself was refused membership in the St. Louis Fine Arts Club because of the novel. In 1906 it was reprinted by Duffield (New York); but then it went out of print and remained so for more than half a century in this country.

To be fair not all reviews were negative. C. L. Deyo in his review wrote:

It is sad and mad and bad, but it is all consummate art. The theme is difficult, but it is handled with cunning craft. The work is more than unusual. It is unique. The integrity of its art is that of well-knit individuality at one with itself, with nothing superfluous to weaken the impression of the perfect whole.

It was very much the exception. The novel “leaves one sick of human nature” complained another critic; “it is not a healthy book” said one more. (See more here.) The public reaction devastated her. In July 1899 she even went as far as publishing a retraction in Book News, a literary journal:

Having a group of people at my disposal, I thought it might be entertaining (to myself) to throw them together and see what would happen. I never dreamed of Mrs Pontellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did. If I had had the slightest intimation of such a thing I would have excluded her from the company. But when I found out what she was up to the play was half over and it was then too late.

“She was broken-hearted,” her son Felix said, and in the remaining few years of her life (she died in 1904) she produced only a few pieces, half a dozen stories and a few poems. How sincere—or indeed accurate—her retraction is who can tell? Me, I don’t buy it. I was only a few pages into the book and I already could see the writing was on the wall; she knew where this story was going from the jump.

I do, however, think the book was misread by many. In 1895 Grant Allen published a novel called The Woman Who Didabout a young, self-assured middle-class woman who defies convention as a matter of principle and who is fully prepared to suffer the consequences of her actions which is perhaps why certain reviewers saw The Awakening as part of the “overworked field of sex fiction”. Is there sex in the book? Yes, but Fear of Flyingit is not; blink and you’ll miss it. Kenneth Eble in his essay, states bluntly: “Quite frankly, the book is about sex.” It is not. If sex was what Edna was after then she misses a lot of opportunities. She chooses to have extramarital relations twice and that takes up a couple of lines in a book of a hundred and fifty-odd pages. When Robert, the male friend who she met on holiday at the start of the book and whom she falls for in a big way, returns towards the end of the novel (having done the gentlemanly thing and removed himself from the path of temptation) does Edna throw herself as him? No, she says, “I’d rather talk about you, and know what you have been seeing and doing and feeling out there in Mexico.” Chopin tells us earlier on that Edna “was almost devoid of coquetry.” She’s not a flirt. She’s not a tease. But she does enjoy the company of men:

There were one or two men whom she observed at the soirée musicale; but she would never have felt moved to any kittenish display to attract their notice—to any feline or feminine wiles to express herself toward them. Their personality attracted her in an agreeable way. Her fancy selected them, and she was glad when a lull in the music gave them an opportunity to meet her and talk with her.

The book’s ending, now, that’s another thing entirely and very much open to interpretation. My own reading of it is that the symbolism suggests she’s overreached herself—or is in imminent danger of doing so—and freedom comes at a price. Also once a caged animal, no matter how well cared for, has tasted freedom there’s nothing that would lure it back. I personally don’t think Edna does overreach herself; if anything she takes baby steps. I take umbrage on Edna’s behalf. It’s as much as I can say without revealing the ending but a lot has been written about it and I’m not sure I have a lot to add other than what I’ve hinted at here.

The thing about Edna, though, is that she’s actually a bit of a Romantic and I’ve never really seen Feminists as Romantics (as opposed to romantic feminists); they’re pragmatists, realists, women with their eyes open who see the world for what it is which is why they want to change it. There’s a part of me that feels Edna is being indulged and that her husband’s going to turn up any day with a short leash and drag her off to the Continent; he’s a patient man but even he has his limits. Of course we’ll never know because the book ends before his return. What if? What if? What if?

Some books can be read, enjoyed for what they are and forgotten. This is not one of them despite the sad fact that for years it was forgotten. There are layers here and much has been written about it since its rediscovery in the mid-sixties. I’ve read a fair bit in preparing this article but most of it I can’t talk about without saying too much which I’ve probably already done. The book is dated, without a doubt, but it’s more than a historical curiosity. I agree with her grandson in his estimation of the book. In chapter six Chopin writes:

In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. [bold mine]

That moment comes to us all eventually, the men, the women, the feminists, the romantics, even the deluded and, yes, there are those who think that Edna’s kidding herself. Read the book. Think about it. Make your own mind up.

If you are interested in learning more about her then The Kate Chopin International Society’s website is a good a place to start as any. As I’ve said, a lot has been written about this wee book over the years and the web contains a wealth of information from a variety of angles. The following list is a little long but if you’re serious about studying the book I’ve probably saved you a good couple of hours work. You’re welcome.
 

FURTHER READING

Kate Chopin's The Awakening: Struggle Against Society and Nature

Kate Chopin: A Re-Awakening (PBS documentary, transcript)

Kate Chopin's The Awakening: A Critical Reception

A Catalogue of Symbols in Kate Chopin's The Awakening

Adele Ratignolle: Kate Chopin's Feminist at Home in The Awakening

Kate Chopin as Feminist: Subverting the French Androcentric Influence

A Feminist Analysis of Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening

Deconstructionist and Feminist Analysis of The Awakening

The Bird that Came out of the Cage: A Foucauldian Feminist Approach to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

Out of Place, Out of Time? Reading Kate Chopin through Contemporary French Feminist Theory

Tenuous Feminism and Unorthodox Naturalism: Kate Chopin’s Unlikely Literary Victory at the Close of the 19th Century

Feminine Quest for Individuality in Beowulf and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

Reading and Translating Kate Chopin's The Awakening as a Non-Feminist Text

A "Cry of the Dying Century": Kate Chopin, The Awakening and the Women’s Cause

Edna’s Failure to Find Her Female Role in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

Writing The 'Solitary Soul': Anticipations of Modernism & Negotiations of Gender in Kate Chopin's The Awakening

Gender and Literary Valorization: The Awakening of a Canonical Novel

The Awakening: Female Characters and their Social Roles

Representations of Love and Female Gender Identities in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

The Female Artist in Kate Chopin's The Awakening: Birth and Creativity

The Masculine Sea and the Impossibility of Awakening in Chopin’s The Awakening

Edna Pontellier’s unwomanly vocation in The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening in the Light of Freud’s Structural Model of the Psyche

Dropping Hints and the Power of Foreshadowing in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

Marriage, Motherhood, and Reception in the Fiction of Chopin and Wharton

The Devil in the House: The Awakening of Chopin’s Anti-Hero

The Missing Link: Kate Chopin and The Awakening

Too High a Price: Sacrifice and the Double Standard in Kate Chopin's The Awakening

Loss of Self and the Struggle for Individuality in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (need to download PDF)

The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin's Fantasy of Desire

Solitary Blessings: Solitude in the Fiction of Hawthorne, Melville, and Kate Chopin

The Evolution of Kate Chopin’s Heroines

The Awakening - Multiple Critical Perspectives (only an extract but looks like an interesting book)

The Awakening and The Yellow Wallpaper: An Intertextual Comparison of the "Conventional" Connotations of Marriage and Propriety

Marriage and Sexuality in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying

The Criticism Surrounding the end of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (only read once you’ve finished the book)

Death as a Metaphor in The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin's At Fault: The Usefulness of Louisiana French for the Imagination (Not directly about The Awakening but as there’s so many French references in the book you might find it of some use)

The Awakening Study Guide (a bit basic but a decent enough overview although I would’ve thought more would’ve been said about the French expressions)

[T]here is no there, of course there isn’t, but what if you go there? –David Grossman, Falling Out of Time

The blurb describes this book as follows: “Part prose, part play, and pure poetry, David Grossman’s Falling Out of Time is a powerful exploration of mortality, mourning, and the long good-bye that follows the death of a loved one.” It’s an apt description but this description also pinpoints the book’s weakness: it’s neither fish nor fowl nor, as I suppose we need a third creature to pad out our comparison, beast. For my purposes I treated it as a novel in dialogue since I’ve been searching these out of late. I’ve also found myself reading quite a bit about loss recently—not exactly planned but these books keep falling into my hands—and so this was one more to compare with the others. And a very different exploration of loss and grief it was too.

Larkin has said his aim in writing a poem is “to construct a verbal device that would preserve an experience indefinitely by reproducing it in whoever read the poem.” I believe this goal can be achieved by carefully written prose too and a good example is the book I’ve just finished reading—Us by Michael Kimball—a book the author spent a great deal of time perfecting.Grossman also didn’t rush the writing of this slim volume—the dates at the end state it took him from April 2009 to May 2011 to complete the work and it’s much shorter than Kimball’s—but it takes a markedly different approach to the problem of reproducing the process of grieving.

That this work might get compared to Beckett—Edward Hirsch in his review for the New York Times described the book as “a medieval allegory or a Beckett play”—but the works it actually reminded me of were not plays but rather the novellas Stirrings Still and Ill Seen Ill Said particularly the latter from which this is an extract:

The cabin. Its situation. Careful. On. At the inexistent centre of a formless place. Rather more circular than otherwise finally. Flat to be sure. To cross it in a straight line takes her from five to ten minutes. Depending on her speed and radius taken. Here she who loves to – here she who now can only stray never strays. Stones increasingly abound. Ever scanter even the rankest weed. Meagre pastures hem it round on which it slowly gains. With none to gainsay. To have gainsaid. As if doomed to spread. How come a cabin in such a place? How came? Careful. Before replying that in the far past at the time of its building there was clover growing to its very walls. Implying furthermore that it the culprit. And from it as from an evil core that the what is the wrong word the evil spread. And none to urge – none to have urged its demolition. As if doomed to endure. Question answered. Chalkstones of striking effect in the light of the moon. Let it be in opposition when the skies are clear. Quick then still under the spell of Venus quick to the other window to see the other marvel rise. How whiter and whiter as it climbs it whitens more and more the stones. Rigid with face and hands against the pane she stands and marvels long.

The two zones form a roughly circular whole. As though outlined by a trembling hand. Diameter. Careful. Say one furlong. On an average. Beyond the unknown.

As with many of Beckett’s texts we’re given only as little information as is necessary—think of setting to Waiting for Godot: A Country Road. A Tree. Evening.—and it’s the same with Grossman. This is how Falling Out of Time begins:

TOWN CHRONICLER: As they sit eating dinner, the man’s face suddenly turns. He thrusts his plate away. Knives and forks clang. He stands up and seems not to know where he is. The woman recoils in her chair. His gaze hovers around her without taking hold, and she—wounded already by disaster—senses immediately: it’s here again, touching me, its cold fingers on my lips. But what happened? she whispers with her eyes. Bewildered, the man looks at her and speaks:

So reminiscent of Stirrings Still:

One night or day then as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go. First rise and stand clinging to the table. Then sit again. Then rise again and stand clinging to the table again. Then go.

We’ve no idea what place this is, not even the country (the town’s troops are called hussars but that’s little help), what type of dwelling, how old the couple are (assuming they are a couple) or where in history this is taking place. Or even where the Town Chronicler is. Is he in the room with the couple or is he somewhere else relating or making up this tale? Since the town has a train station it can’t be set in medieval times, that’s for sure, but that aside the setting is timeless and placeless and, most importantly, in a political vacuum. What we do know is this has happened before, this ‘it’ that’s here again. A stage setting is not hard to imagine. An empty room, empty bar, a table and two chairs. Very Beckettian. The man begins talking:

—I have to go.
—Where?
—To him.
—Where?
—To him, there.
—To the place where it happened?
—No, no. There.
—What do you mean, there?
—I don’t know.
—You’re scaring me.
—Just to see him once more.
—But what could you see now? What is left to see?
—I might be able to see him there. Maybe even talk to him?
—Talk?!

TOWN CHRONICLER: Now they both unfold, awaken. The man speaks again.

—Your voice.
—It’s back. Yours too.
—How I missed your voice.
—I thought we … that we’d never …
—I missed your voice more than I missed my own.
—But what is there? There’s no such place. There doesn’t exist!
—If you go there, it does.
—But you don’t come back. No one ever has.
—Because only the dead have gone.

There is like tomorrow. There is an idea. We, the living, are trapped in the here and now. Only in myths do people go there (Orpheus) or poems (Dante) or comics (Superman briefly became lord of Hell in Superman #666). We don’t even know where there is. Or, as the woman says, what there is. But if someone isn’t here they must be there otherwise they’d be nowhere and that’s even harder to imagine:

we are here
and he—
but it’s impossible!
Impossible.

We learn, as the two talk, it’s been five years since they lost their son, Uwi. They have now, as the wife puts it, “come back to life”, got on with their lives, but clearly grief is not done with them. The future is a place we can only imagine visiting but the past is easily accessible, too easy. “Don’t go back there,” the woman begs him. But it, whatever this ‘it’ is, has a hold of him:

MAN:
For five years
we unspoke
that night.
You fell mute,
then I.
For you the quiet
was good,
and I felt it clutch
at my throat. One after
the other, the words
died, and we were
like a house
where the lights
go slowly out

[…]

And together
we were born
on the other side,
without words,
without colours,
and we learned to live
the inverse
of life.

(silence)

Eventually the man can stand it no longer. He paces round and round the table. He has to go and begs his wife to come too but she won’t:

I would go
to the end
of the world with you,
you know. But you are not
going to him, you are going
somewhere else, and there
I will not go, I cannot.
I will not.
It is easier to go
than to stay.
I have bitten my flesh
for five years
so as not to go, not
there,
there is
no there!

But the man insists:

There will be,
if we go
there.

and he ends up leaving the cabin alone.

Again I’m reminded of Beckett. From Worstward Ho:

A place. Where none. A time when try see. Try say. How small. How vast. How if not boundless bounded. Whence the dim. Not now. Know better now. Unknow better now. Know only no out of. No knowing how know only no out of. Into only. Hence another. Another place where none. Whither once whence no return. No. No place but the one. None but the one where none. Whence never once in. Somehow in. Beyondless. Thenceless there. Thitherless there. Thenceless thitherless there.

At first he trudges round the house and then widens his circle until eventually he ends up walking around the entire town. Again from Stirrings Still:

Seen always from behind whithersoever he went. Same hat and coat as of old when he walked the roads. The back roads. Now as one in a strange place seeking the way out. In the dark. In a strange place blindly in the dark of night or day seeking the way out. A way out. To the roads. The back roads.

In this respect he is similar to the woman in Ill Seen Ill Said who is “drawn to a certain spot. At times.” The man too is being drawn to a certain spot, a wall at it turns out, a stone wall (stones are important metaphors in Beckett’s writing), but first he has to journey there. But, of course, it’s not a linear journey—he doesn’t go straight there (does he even know where there is?)—but, like May in Footfalls (whose ‘journey’ is also circular (or at least elliptical)), he still needs to feel as if he’s going somewhere. As Beckett’s Molloy puts it:

When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line.

At this point in the text he stops being Man and becomes Walking Man. Later on we encounter a woman walking round and around a belfry and she is very much like May:

What do they see? A woman
from the village, from by the swamps,
with a village face and heavyset legs,
a long silver braid, barely moving, walking
slowly,
slowly,
three or four steps
an hour, a madwoman.
They can laugh.
Laugh all they want. I walk
around the spire slowly, one step,
another, and another step.

The Town Chronicler, who had been watching events unfold through the cabin’s window, follows The Walking Man for a bit before being distracted by others. What has happened in his house is, apparently, not an isolated instance. The man is only the first of many beginning with The Cobbler who, as the text progresses, all join The Walking Man in his perambulations. In his notebook the Town Chronicler writes:

At times it seems, Your Highness, that a nameless power hovers over the town, envelops it, and—like a person sucking an egg through a hole in the shell—it draws these people and others toward it, from kitchens and squares and wharves and beds. (And—if there is truth to the shocking, dizzying rumours, Your Highness—even from palace rooms?)

It’s at this point we realise that when the Town Chronicler’s talking he’s not addressing us. Actually he’s writing to someone he calls “my lord” and “Your Highness” who turns out to be The Duke but we don’t learn anything more about him at this point and the action shifts to “midnight, at the old wharf by the lake” where we encounter the mute Net-mender. (Not quite sure why she’s described as mute because she’s given lines to say a few pages on. Maybe they’re thoughts. No, later on the Town Chronicler says, “Now she notices me and falls silent.” Then again the first man and woman talk about being mute so maybe they all have been and now, suddenly, their tongues have been untied.) Days pass. On his third night’s watch the Town Chronicler comes across The Centaur, not a literal centaur, but a writer we discover sitting at a table:

A dirty blanket is spread out on the desk before him. A few empty beer bottles, pens, pencils, a school notebook, all scattered around. The notebook is open; its pages have thin blue lines. As best I can tell from here, they are all empty.

“Scram before I wring your balls,” the centaur growls without opening his eyes, and I flee for my life.

We learn that the Town Chronicler has a wife and like the others they too have lost a child (thirteen years before, a daughter) as has the Net-Mender (a six-year-old), the Centaur (an eleven-year-old boy, Adam, fifteen years earlier), the Cobbler and his stuttering wife (a daughter, Lilli), the Elderly Maths Teacher (his son, Michael, twenty-six years for him: a prank gone awry, / a bathtub, a razor, / veins slashed / in the course of a game) and the Woman atop the Belfry (a son, a soldier I think). And the Duke himself it transpires (a son one August and now every day is August).

As the text progresses we find out a few things about the Town Chronicler and his relationship with the Duke:

It was he who commanded me, in a royal edict, to exile myself from my home, to walk the streets day and night recording the townspeople’s stories of their children. And it was he who forbade me—by explicit order!—to remember her, my one. Yes, immediately after it happened, he sentenced me, after she drowned, I mean the daughter, Hanna, after she drowned in a lake right before my eyes, and I couldn’t, listen, there were tall waves, huge, and I couldn’t … What could I …

[…]

[W]e used to be good friends, the duke and I. Soul mates. Yes, after all, I was his jester for twenty years, until the disaster befell me. His beloved jester … And to think that he, of all people, decreed such a terrible decree … How did it even occur to him?

Only it may not be as simple as that.

As the days slouch on and more and more join this seemingly aimless trek the Town Chronicler’s wife notices a strange thing:

In recent days I think I see, over their heads, in the air, some sort of reddish flicker, a chain of embers hovering above …

The only thing I could think of when this was mentioned was the tongues of flames that appeared above the apostles at Pentecost. It is not explained, not at first, but when he has his attention drawn to it the old teacher notes:

My heart tells me, my boy, that from the moment a person notices the blaze, he is destined to get up and go to it.

And they do.

TOWN CHRONICLER: They walk on the hills and I follow them, constantly darting between them and the town. They groan and trip and stand, hold on to each other, carry those who sleep, falling asleep themselves. Nights, days, over and over they circle the town, through rain and cold and burning sun. Who knows how long they will walk and what will happen when they are roused from their madness? The duke, for example—who would have believed it—walking shoulder to shoulder with the net-mender, her fluttering nets occasionally wrapping themselves around him. And the elderly teacher, with his thin halo of hair, walking swiftly, as he is wont, hopping from one foot to the other and reaching his head out to either side with immense curiosity, even in sleep. And the cobbler and the midwife, hand in hand, eyes tightly closed, with stubborn resolve. And at the end of the small procession walks my wife, dragging her heavy feet, her breath laboured, her head drooping on her chest, with no one to hold her hand.

[…]

Sleeping … They’ve been sleeping almost constantly for days, sleeping their minds away. Sleeping and walking, speaking to one another in their dream, each head leaning on another walker’s shoulder. I do not know who carries whom and what force drives them to walk—

But not the Centaur, welded to his desk. He watches at a distance, through binoculars, and notes and records what happens once the Town Chronicler is also caught up in the crowd.

I’ve often wondered about graveyards. I think they exist so that there can be a there to go to. We go there and stand in front of a stone marker, a wall if you like, and that’s as close as we can get. In Ill Seen Ill Said a stone draws the woman to a certain spot. In Falling Out of Time the townspeople end up facing a stone wall, a communal marker although probably not a literal one otherwise the Walking Man would’ve reached it on his own on the first day. It’s as far as they can go and yet they seek to go further and so they dig their own graves, strip and get into them. I bet Beckett’s kicking himself in his own grave for not coming up with that one.

At one point the Walkers, talking as one like a Greek chorus—as they often do towards the end of the book although what we really have here is an exchange between the Net-mender and Duke—say:

                               Well, m’lord,
that’s because poems suddenly
tumble out my mouth. It is the same
with me, my lady: poetry
is the language
of my grief.

How do we make the private language of grief intelligible to others? Is poetry the way? As a poet I’ve written several pieces prompted by grief and loss and so I’m a very bad person to ask; poetry’s where I go at times like this. But what about ordinary people, net-menders and cobblers and maths teachers? They’re not poets, not practiced poets (I suspect that everyone is a poet at heart) and yet so many of them in this book find they need to express themselves in chopped-up prose that resembles poetry and occasionally is actually poetic:

TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE:
Who will sustain her,
who will embrace,
if our two bodies
do not
envelop
her?


WALKING MAN:
Here I will fall
now I will fall—
I do not fall.
Now, here,
the heart will stop—
it does not stop—

Now doesn’t that last quote remind you so of the end of The Unnamable which closes with the phrase “You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on,” That said I find myself agreeing with Hirsch when he notes, “the staccato line breaks are flawed and the lineation is probably the weakest aspect of this otherwise well-written book.” What is interesting is how the character of the Centaur clings to prose for so much of the novel but only towards the end, when he finally gives into his grief, do his words turn to poetry:

CENTAUR:
Imprisoned
in my room,
on my cursed body-desk,
I finally have written. Like fingers
probing crumbled earth,
I wrote the story.

The writing down is important. In writing down he comes to understand. And that is what Grossman’s been doing. His book was for himself first, and then us. I get that.

David Grossman lost his younger son, Uri, in the last Lebanese incursion by the IDF when an anti-tank missile hit its mark. George Packer’s essay in The New Yorker fills in the details and is worth a read. The statement issued by the family at the time read:

Uri Grossman was born on August 27, 1985. He was supposed to celebrate his 21st birthday in two weeks. Uri studied at the experimental school in Jerusalem. He reached the armoured corps and fulfilled his aspiration to be a tank commander. He was about to be released (from the army) in November, travel the world, and then study theatre. Friday evening he spoke, from Lebanon, with his parents and sister. He was glad that a decision on a ceasefire was taken. Uri promised that he will be eating the next Shabbat dinner at home. Uri, son to David and Michal and brother to Yonatan and Ruthie, had a fabulous sense of humour and a big soul filled with life and emotion.

That was in 2006 and so Falling Out of Time is very much Grossman’s considered response to his son’s death.

This is a profound book and even if the poetry is not always the most poetic the book as a whole is. It takes us there. And then reveals the hardest truth matter-of-factly: "Maybe there has always been here all this time?"

“And maybe we’ve been there, too, just a bit, since it happened to us?” [The Town Chronicler’s wife] straightens up and a new momentum seems to drive her steps. “Maybe there has always been here, and we just didn’t know it?”

Some have suggested this might work as a play, specifically a radio play—Kate Kellaway in The Observerand Edward Hirsch—and it might with a little careful adaptation.

***

David Grossman was born in Jerusalem, where he still lives. He is the best-selling author of several works of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature, which have been translated into thirty-six languages. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the French Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Buxtehuder Bulle in Germany, Rome’s Premio per la Pace e L’Azione Umanitaria, the Premio Ischia International Award for Journalism, Israel’s Emet Prize, and the 2010 Frankfurt Peace Prize.

I had to do things and not die – Roberto Bolaño, A Little Lumpen Novelita

When starting a new book it’s tempting to hurry through the first few pages. You want to get into the meat of the book and I can’t count the number of books when on finishing them and looking over the opening page or two I realise just how much was said in those four or five hundred words. In this novella it’s the opening clause that one needs to pay close attention to:

Now I’m a mother and a married woman…

It tells us that our narrator is now a grownup, a woman and, most importantly, a survivor. The events outlined in the novella are what she survives. Then she gets married and starts a family so it’s not enough to say she survives—she prospers. Things might’ve gone very differently for her because that short opening sentence ends

…but not long ago I led a life of crime.

She and her brother are orphaned at the start of the book—their parents are killed in a car crash—and they’re left to fend for themselves. Exactly how old they are we’re never told. Her older brother is still a teenager and they’re both still attending school. The dynamic suggests that the girl is younger but probably not by much. Suffice to say they’re old enough to take care of themselves. A small government pension helps. It’s smaller than they’d hoped and so it’s only a matter of time and they’ve drifted out of education and into employment, he as a cleaner in a gym and she as an assistant hairdresser. They both dream—as I suppose everyone in poverty does—of the future. In fact when the novella was adapted for the screen this was its title: Il Futuro:

Once [my brother] told me that he dreamed of being Mr. Rome and then Mr. Italy or Master of the Universe. I laughed in his face and gave him my frank opinion. To be Master of the Universe you have to train from the time you’re ten, I told him. I thought that bodybuilding was like chess. My brother said that if I could dream of owning a mini-salon, he had the right to dream of a better future too. That was the word he used: future. I went into the kitchen and got our dinner started. Spaghetti. Then I set out the plates and silverware. Still thinking. At last I said that I didn’t care about the future, that I had ideas, but those ideas, if I really thought about it, never extended into the future.

“Where do they go, then?” howled my brother.

“Nowhere.”

The Future seems like a good title for this book. So why call it A Little Lumpen Novelita? For starters ‘little’ seems redundant. The key—and by ‘key’ I mean the key to the novel—must lie in the word ‘lumpen’. I’m British and I thought of ‘lumpen’ as “lumpy and misshapen; ugly and ponderous” but in a Marxist context it means “uninterested in revolutionary advancement” and that’s where we get the word ‘lumpenproletariat’ from, a term coined by Karl Marx to describe that layer of the working class that is unlikely ever to achieve class consciousness and is therefore lost to socially useful production, of no use to the revolutionary struggle, and perhaps even an impediment to the realization of a classless society—the dregs of the dregs in other words.

In some respects the siblings actually do alright for themselves. They have jobs and a place to live. They don’t hate each other. The brother had started to bring home dirty movies which he watched with his sister, to “[l]earn how to make love” he insists; she’s sceptical but doesn’t object strongly and continues to watch them with him. Things could be worse. And the day the brother returns home with two bodybuilders he’s befriended, a Libyan and a Bolognan, it looks like things are going to head in exactly that direction.

The two visitors do not live up to expectations however. They stay for five days and then leave:

Even I couldn’t deny that their conduct had been impeccable for the five days they’d stayed with us. They always washed the dishes, three times they made dinner themselves, and they didn’t try anything with me, which was important. I could sense the interest in their eyes, in the way they moved, and the way they talked to me, but I also noted their self-control and found it flattering.

Eventually they return and this time it looks like they’re there to stay. One night one of them slips into the girl’s bedroom and she doesn’t object and then the next night the other—she shows no preference nor even that much interest in who’s having sex with her—but they take advantage and eventually she cuts them off; a girl’s got to get some sleep. Relations do resume, however, after a time:

Once a week, sometimes twice, I let them into my room. I didn’t need to say anything, I just had to be more talkative than usual or give them a meaningful look (or what at the time I imagined was a meaningful look) and they knew immediately that they could visit me that night and they would find the door open.

So, as I’ve said, things could be worse. The men continue to take care of the flat and (supposedly) look for work—by this time the bother’s been (so he says) laid off but times are hard and there’s (so they say) no work to be had. They tighten their belts and feast on the future to come:

Deep down, I think I was afraid something bad would happen. I think I sensed that it was coming soon and I worried about my brother, whose fate seemed so bound up with his friends’ fate. I didn’t care what happened to them. They were older and they were used to hard times, but my brother was innocent and I didn’t want anything to happen to him.

One day, though, things change:

They had a plan. That much I do remember. A hazy plan on which each of them, my brother included, had gambled his future, and to which each had added his bit, his personal touch, his vision of fate and the turns of fate.

She listens, agrees it’s a good plan and thus begins her life of crime. At least one could call it a life of crime if one included planning and talking about committing a crime. In no court in the land will you be convicted for that. The crime to be committed is one of robbery and the man they intend to rob is known as Maciste, a now-blind and obese former bodybuilder and actor—‘Maciste’ was actually the name of a character he played in several films—who lives alone. The girl is to be the bait. In her account the girl is keen to emphasise, “I’m no prostitute. I used to lead a life of crime, but I was never a prostitute,” but that’s simply not the case. She lets her brother and his friends (effectively serving as pimps) deliver her to Maciste’s house on Via Germanico where she has sex with the old man for money. Any court in the land would call that prostitution but as far as she’s concerned that’s just a means to an end, an act. While there she’s supposed to scope out the place, locate his safe and report back. Finding the safe does not prove to be as easy as they expected and so she keeps having to go back—assuming there ever was a safe and this was all a ruse to get her to sell herself—and that’s where the real story begins because she develops feelings for Maciste and he for her.

I’ve never read anything by Bolaño before but apparently he likes to puts his characters in positions where they must choose between what's right and utter depravity. And they usually choose the latter. While it’s true that the girl goes along with the three guys—and so willingly chooses depravity—as I pointed out at the beginning she survives it, she learns from her experiences. I guess it’s the whole you’ve-got-to-hit-rock-bottom-mentality. Rock bottom’s there for a reason.

In his lengthy review of this book Craig Epplin says that “Bolaño is a master of the simile.” Looking through the book carefully I came across several:

Sometimes I saw the negative of a whole life: a bigger house, a different neighbourhood, children, a better job, time passing, old age, a grandchild, death in the public hospital or covered with a sheet in my parents’ bed, a bed that I would have liked to hear creak, like an ocean liner as it goes down, but that instead was silent as a tomb.

[I]n that brief how are you I sensed an incredible fragility, a fragility like a manta ray falling from the ceiling, the dark foyer the bottom of the sea and the manta ray watching us from above, halfway between the sea floor and the surface.

[F]rom the moment I stepped into his house, from the moment I saw him naked and hulking and white, like a broken refrigerator, everything stopped (or I stopped) and now things were happening at a different speed, an imperceptible speed that was the same as stillness.

The stylist listened without getting up from her chair. It was as if the girl’s words were sliding off her face, a hard face without a hint of indulgence. That’s what I remember. And I remember the sunset, a sunset of rose and ochre that crept all the way to the back of the salon, but never touched me.

I’ve come to remember each of Maciste’s words as a key or a dark bridge that surely could have led me elsewhere, as if he were a fortune-telling machine designed exclusively for me, which I know isn’t true, though sometimes I like to think so, not often, because I don’t lie to myself the way I used to, but every once in a while.

Because much of what happens in this book is frankly banal it’s easy not to notice these little gems. There is poetry here but it’s deadpan, indifferent almost. And because of the book’s length it’s also easy to think of it as a slight work but it’s really not. Its central theme is about a young woman taking control of her life and of course since she’s telling her tale sometime in the future we know everything works out but there’s an underlying regret here. She survived—she did what she felt she had to to survive—but it cost her to get where she ends up. If she was a criminal then this is her confession. But what exactly is she owning up to? What was her crime?

The book has an interesting—but not especially helpful—quote at the beginning:

All writing is garbage.
People who come out of nowhere to try and put
into words any part of what goes on in their minds
All writers are pigs. Especially writers today.

ANTONIN ARTAUD

The book’s not about being a writer. There are very few books in the novella; only the schoolbooks they turn away from. They only read newspapers and magazines when they can afford them. Most of their time is spent vegetating in front of the telly. Maciste has a room he calls a library “in which there wasn’t a single book” which is noteworthy because in an interview with Héctor Soto and Matías Bravo first published in Capital in 1999 Bolaño said:

A library is a metaphor for human beings or what’s best about human beings, the same way a concentration camp can be a metaphor for what is worst about them. A library is total generosity.

So how am I to understand the novella’s opening quote?

In an interview Bolaño said:

The truth is, I don’t believe all that much in writing. […] For me, the word writing is the exact opposite of the word waiting. Instead of waiting, there is writing. Well, I’m probably wrong—it’s possible that writing is another form of waiting, of delaying things. I’d like to think otherwise. But, as I said, I’m probably wrong.

The girl does admit to being a storyteller. Dan Piepenbring has some thoughts on the subject in The Paris Review as does Craig Epplin in his review. I also found a tweet from Aaron Boothby that expands on the quote: “All writing is garbage" because it pretends a solution to the unsayable. ... All are tormented because all words fail to do what they promise: communicate.” I wonder though if the answer to why Bolaño uses this opening quote might be explained by what Susan Sontag had to say in her essay ‘Artaud’:

For Artaud, the extreme mental—and also physical—pain that feeds (and authenticates) the act of writing is necessarily falsified when that energy is transformed into artistry: when it attains the benign status of a finished, literary product. The verbal humiliation of literature ("All writing is garbage," Artaud declares in The Nerve Meter) safeguards the dangerous, quasi-magical status of writing as a vessel worthy of bearing another's pain. Insulting art (like insulting the audience is an attempt to head off the corruption of art, the banalisation of suffering).

The link between suffering and writing is one of Artaud's leading themes: one earns the right to speak through having suffered, but the necessity of using language is itself the central occasion for suffering.

Let’s take an extreme example: Is a painting of Holocaust atrocities art? Technically, yes, of course, but what right does anyone have to record another’s suffering? And that is what Bolaño is doing even if the people involved are works of fiction. Only the girl can tell her story, can take the garbage that her life was comprised of and reform it into art or literature or something greater than the sum of its parts. I don’t know. You’ll have to read the book—it’s not long—and see what you come up with.

The film adaptation is mostly in Italian so if subtitles annoy you then you won’t much care for it. What might help is the casting of Rutger Hauer as Maciste. He only speaks English and so (conveniently) does the girl when she’s with him. When I was reading the book and imagining Maciste I couldn’t help but think of the character of Prétextat Tach in Amélie Nothomb’sHygiene and the Assassin. The dynamic is different but for purely practical reasons neither actor cast in the films is nearly as obese as the characters they’re being asked to play. For a seventy-year-old Hauer is actually in pretty decent shape. That’s he’s not gross is really neither here nor there; it’s enough that he’s old enough to be her grandfather. I actually think he was a good choice. He’s no Marcello Mastroianni but he does a decent enough job. My only real problem was how chatty he is but that’s the scriptwriter’s fault. He’s not like that in the book. Here’s a clip of their first meeting which will give you an idea what I’m talking about. You can view the trailer (with subtitles) here.

***

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile on April 28, 1953. He’s led a nomadic existence from an early age. His family moved between several towns in Chile, before they moved to Mexico City in 1968. Bolaño was dyslexic and as a result, no academic. He dropped out of high school in 1968 to focus on poetry and, as at this time there were often mass riots in the streets of Mexico City, he identified with the leftist movement and went off to El Salvador where he spent time with other leftist poets as well as an El Salvadorian left wing guerrilla group.

He returned to El Salvador in 1973 where he became a spy for the resistance during the coup of Augusto Pinochet. In 1974, Bolaño returned to Mexico City where, along with poet Mario Santiago and a handful of others, he formed the Infrarealists, a poetic movement that identified with both French Surrealism and Dadaism. He published two poetry collections during his time in Mexico before heading abroad in 1977.

Bolaño spent a year traveling France, Spain, and North Africa before settling near Barcelona. He job-jumped during those years, working as a dockworker, grape harvester, and campground watchman. He also continued to write poetry and short stories, which he would submit to contests. His switch to writing fiction—short stories and later novels—had much to do with his maturation and the birth of his son in 1990, which instilled in him a sense of responsibility to earn a living, which he knew he could barely do as a poet.

Bolaño was most prolific during his forties and fifties. He wrote a dozen novels during these years, poetic works that concerned themselves largely with the purpose of literature and its relationship to life. His most famous work, The Savage Detectives, concerns the life and adventures of Arturo Bolaño, an alter-ego who appears in other stories and novels.

Written in 1989 and published posthumously, Bolaño's The Third Reich predates The Savage Detectives and shows some of the traits that Bolaño had yet to fully develop—particularly surrealism and an obsessive attention to detail. Between Parentheses similarly provides an excellent retrospective on Bolaño's work, collecting as it does many of the newspaper columns and articles that he wrote during the last five years of his life.

Perhaps the most well-known of the posthumously published Bolaño oeuvre is 2666, 900 apocalyptic pages of stories within stories and murder after murder. Bolaño was posthumously awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for 2666, and Time also awarded it the honour of Best Fiction Book of 2008.

Roberto Bolaño died in 2003 from liver disease.

The last time my wife went back to the States I watched the documentary To Be Takei. I have to confess to not knowing very much about George Takei other than his work on Star Trek, frequent cameos and occasional guest star spots in shows like The Big Bang Theoryand his renaissance as a wit on the World Wide Web. I didn’t know that after Japan entered the war in 1942 the Takei family had been sent to the Rohwer War Relocation Centre for internment and then later transferred to the Tule Lake War Relocation Centre in California. I knew that it’d happened just like I knew about the camps here in the UK for the internment of civilian enemy aliens but I didn’t know details and what the documentary makers did in the relatively short time they devoted to this time in Takei’s life was put a human face to the tragedy. It also helped us appreciate that there’s more to being Takei than any of us probably imagined.

When I picked up Julie Otsuka’s second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, I knew little about it which is always the best way to approach a book if possible. I knew nothing about her or the fact her debut novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, was set in an internment camp in Utah. (In an article in Newsweekshe talks at length about her family’s wartime experiences.) I might’ve been tempted to read it first because the documentary had piqued my interest. It’s good though that I didn’t because The Buddha in the Attic really serves as a sort of prequel—maybe prelude would be a better term—dealing with a group of picture brides who sail to the States in the 1920’s under a variety of illusions all of which are shattered within a few days of their ship reaching land:

ON THE BOAT we could not have known that when we first saw our husbands we would have no idea who they were. That the crowd of men in knit caps and shabby black coats waiting for us down below on the dock would bear no resemblance to the handsome young men in the photographs. That the photographs we had been sent were twenty years old. That the letters we had been written had been written to us by people other than our husbands, professional people with beautiful handwriting whose job it was to tell lies and win hearts.

It is a most unusual book.

A few weeks back I came across a novel by Zakes Mda called Ways of Dying which was written in the first person plural—the book is narrated by the community as a whole:

When in our orature the storyteller begins the story, ‘They say it once happened . . .’, we are the ‘they’. No individual owns any story. The community is the owner of the story, and it can tell it the way it deems it fit. We would not be needing to justify the communal voice that tells this story if you had not wondered how we became so omniscient in the affairs of Toloki and Noria.

If one of them has not been there to see events unfold with their own eyes all they can do is report what others have told them. It’s a novel approach to narration but the story itself is a straightforward relationship drama and mostly we forget who’s telling the story. Imagine my surprise when I came across a second book written in the first person plural. (Since writing this article I’ve encountered a third: Then We Came to the Endby Joshua Ferris.) Otsuka’s approach is very different. We are never in doubt, not for a moment, that the narrator is a ‘we’ and that we’re not getting one person’s story, we’re getting snippets from the lives of dozens upon dozens of young girls but eventually a different kind of story appears. It was a book the author struggled to give form to. In an interview she explains:

One day, while reading over my notes for the book, I found, buried in the middle of a paragraph several pages in, a sentence I had written months earlier: ‘On the boat we were mostly virgins.’ I knew at once that this would be the first line of my novel. There would be no main character. I would tell the story from the point of view of a group of young picture brides who sail together from Japan to America.

She expands on this here:

Using the ‘we’ voice allowed me to tell a much larger story than I would have been able to tell otherwise. At first I tried telling. Each sentence gives you a brief window into somebody’s life – it’s like catching a glimpse of someone’s house from a train... the story from the point of view of a single picture bride, but this approach felt too narrow and confining. In my research, I had run across so many fascinating stories, and I wanted to tell them all. Using the ‘we’ voice allowed me to weave them all in. It’s a very capacious and infinitely expandable voice. Each sentence gives you a brief window into somebody’s life – it’s like catching a glimpse of someone’s house from a train – and then we move on.

This, then, is the book’s opening paragraph:

On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years—faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times. Some of us came from the mountains, and had never before seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives. Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on.

Many books begin like this but after a page or two we expect to learn who’s doing the talking, who amongst this group has decided to tell their story, but we never do. So to a certain extent this has the feel of a documentary—maybe a new genre, the documentary novel or is that what creative non-fiction is?—but here’s the thing, despite never dwelling on any one individual for more than a sentence or two what presented is an extremely personal picture of what life was like for these women. We begin with the voyage, then there’s the shock of the first night, the jobs they found themselves doing, babies they had (and so many!) and the children they grew up to be. And then, some twenty years on, there’re the notices that begin to appear around town and their newfound Americanness is put to the test.

There are many striking passages in the book and yet finding a clever quote is hard because of the nature of the writing. An image builds over several pages. Think of it like a camera pulling back. You begin with one detail—what am I looking at?—and then you pull back, pull back, pull back and suddenly you go, “Aha! That’s it!” Let me illustrate. This is how the chapter ‘First Night’ begins:

That night our new husbands took us quickly. They took us calmly. They took us gently, but firmly, and without saying a word. They assumed we were the virgins the matchmakers had promised them we were and they took us with exquisite care. Now let me know if it hurts. They took us flat on our backs on the bare floor of the Minute Motel. They took us downtown, in second-rate rooms at the Kumamoto Inn. They took us in the best hotels in San Francisco that a yellow man could set foot in at the time. The Kinokuniya Hotel. The Mikado. The Hotel Ogawa. They took us for granted and assumed we would do for them whatever it was we were told. Please turn toward the wall and drop down on your hands and knees. They took us by the elbows and said quietly, “It’s time.” They took us before we were ready and the bleeding did not stop for three days. They took us with our white silk kimonos twisted up high over our heads and we were sure we were about to die. I thought I was being smothered. They took us greedily, hungrily, as though they had been waiting to take us for a thousand and one years. They took us even though we were still nauseous from the boat and the ground had not yet stopped rocking beneath our feet. They took us violently, with their fists, whenever we tried to resist. They took us even though we bit them.

It goes on and on and on. It’s a single paragraph of almost a thousand words but it feels longer. Never has sex seemed so unsexy. But this technique illustrates how very different the Japanese mentality is to the egocentric western mindset with all its Is, mes and mines. (This article which attempts to summarise the characteristics of the Japanese people makes interesting reading.) It can be tempting to compare the Japanese work ethic to that of bees or ants and although they do work exceptionally well in groups those groups are still made up of individuals and that’s what comes across more than anything in this kaleidoscopic text. The Washington Independent Review of Books says:

Though Knopf, publisher of The Buddha in the Attic, classifies the book as a novel, it is more like a beautifully rendered emakimono, hand-painted horizontal scrolls that depict a series of scenes, telling a story in frozen moments. […] The Buddha in the Attic is a tessellation of the fragments of these women’s stories. Pieced together, the novel comprises a gorgeous mosaic of the hopes and dreams that propelled so many immigrants across an ocean to an unknown country.

This is the most poetic of novels. One reviewer called The Buddha in the Attic a “lovely poemovella. Or novellem? How would one categorize this hybrid poem-novella?” But it’s not poetic like By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept or Eugene Onegin. This is a Japanese book. So think Japanese poetry. Haiku does not use metaphor, personification, simile, or many other poetic devices so popular in other forms of poetry. It is about the essence of a moment, stated simply. And that’s what we have here: moment piled upon moment. It shouldn’t work. It should be exhausting to read. But unlike a writer like David Markson or Padgett Powell (I’m thinking about his novel written entirely in questions) although on the surface you might call this an experimental novel what we have here is accessible writing, the kind you get wrapped up in. You feel for these people. Not just Katsuno or Matsuyo or Roku or Chiyoko “who had always insisted that [people] call her Charlotte”. The names of individuals really don’t matter. Occasionally you recognise one or think you do but there’re simply too many to keep track of and most are nameless. On the subject of innovation the author had this to say:

I wasn’t thinking about genre or how a story “should” be told while I was writing the book, I was just . . . writing the book. And I never thought of myself as being an innovator. I do believe that every book just has its own organic form—and the voice I chose for Buddha was the voice that seemed right for the material. Once I decided to use the “we” voice, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. I don’t think it was until I finished the book that I realized it was a little different. Which is probably best. One doesn’t want to get too self-conscious while writing, you know.

The book’s garnered mixed reviews: 709 readers on Goodreads (that’s 3%) and 55 readers on Amazon (that’s a whopping 8%) give the book only one star. The biggest single complaint is that this is not a book but a “laundry list”. Cindy Lutz’s one-star review is particularly creative:

Some of us read "The Buddha in the Attic" because we like well researched historical fiction. Some of us hoped it would evolve into a story. Other of us thought it was fun to read pages of lists. We thought it might narrow down into a real story, but some of us grew bored at 41% and started to guess that each new thought would be followed about how the rest of us did something else. Then some of us readers kept going. It made us feel smart, like scrambling through James Joyce for bragging rights. Some of us got to chat it over in book club. Oh if only Oprah were still on regular TV! Some of us deleted it from our Kindle. Some of us wrote fan fiction listing all of the possible outcomes about another historical event, just to show we can do lots of research and fit it into one book.

Some of thought it was extremely clever to write an entire book suggesting every imaginable outcome to every variation of a situation. Some of us thought it was completely silly and shows a lack of ability to sift through a mountain of excellent research and create a real story. So we wrote an Amazon review in first person plural.

Well, I’m sorry, but I loved this book. I fully understand why others have hated it. But not me. Telling a story is relatively easy. Hundreds of books appear every day telling stories: Girl meets vampire, girl loses vampire, girl meets vampire again. Enough. This was creative and imaginative. It was something unique and risky. I believe she pulled it off and I highly recommend it to you.

Three extracts have been published in Granta and Harper’s and are available online: ‘Come Japanese’, ‘Whites’ and ‘The Children’.

***

Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. After studying art as an undergraduate at Yale University she pursued a career as a painter for several years before turning to fiction writing at age 30. She received her MFA from Columbia. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Asian American Literary Award, and the American Library Association Alex Award.

Her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, is about the internment of a Japanese-American family during World War II. It was a New York Times Notable Book, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers finalist. The book is based on Otsuka’s own family history: her grandfather was arrested by the FBI as a suspected spy for Japan the day after Pearl Harbour was bombed, and her mother, uncle and grandmother spent three years in an internment camp in Topaz, Utah. When the Emperor Was Divine has been translated into six languages and sold more than 250,000 copies. It has been assigned to all incoming freshmen at more than 35 colleges and universities and is a regular ‘Community Reads’ selection across the US.

Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction (2011) and won the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction (2011), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (2012) and the Prix Femina Étranger.

Otsuka’s fiction has been published in Granta and Harper’s and read aloud on PRI’s Selected Shorts and BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime. She lives in New York City, where she writes every afternoon in her neighbourhood café (the Hungarian Pastry Shop) which she talks about here and here. Apparently the walnut macaroons—not the cafe's famous strudel—are the must-order.

This is my last weekly blog for 2014 so I’d just like to wish everyone reading it a Happy New Year when it comes and let’s hope 2015’s a little kinder to the world than 2014’s been. Next year I’m taking a year off. I’ve enough reviews and articles stockpiled (plus a couple I’ve committed to write at the start of the year) to enable me to post one a month for the whole of 2015 and then we’ll see. The rest of the time I’m going to upload my poems, a couple a week probably so you will be kept entertained. Of course I’m not actually taking a year off; it’ll be more of a busman’s holiday. I’ve other stuff I have to do that’s more important and I’ll reassess the situation in a year’s time depending on how successful this experiment is.

So what’s this other stuff, Jim?

Glad you asked. The short answer is: Write. I, of course, write all the time, hundreds of thousands of words. But I mostly don’t write what I want to write. I write what I think I ought to be writing, blogs mostly and comments on blogs (and if you’re familiar with my comments you’ll realise they’re occasionally longer than the blogs I’m commenting on). I like writing. The thing is I don’t write much fiction these days. I don’t have the need. I don’t need to because that urge is being satisfied elsewhere. I’m cheating on my own writing. Off writing other things when I should be putting my effort into my own novels and poems. And that’s not on. Of those few of my friends who still blog most upload something once a week and it probably takes them an hour to rattle off the five- or six-hundred-word post. I can’t do that. I’m not that kind of chatty writer. I simply can’t. But as long as I keep up the schedule I have—which I’ve cut back on and cut back on over the last seven years (there was a point when I was posting a couple of three-and-a-half-thousand-word articles every week)—I’ll never have the space I need to do what matters most to me. Enough is enough.

This is true too: the fun’s gone out of it for me. Blogging (and reading blogs) is becoming less and less popular. I spend maybe three days writing an article and often no one—or his brother, hardly anyone—comments and that’s soul destroying. Readers never mattered to be before I came online. When did they become so damn important? I started blogging because that’s what those who maintained they knew about things said, at the time, you ought to do if you were a writer: set up a static website (check) and a blog (check), post on a regular basis (check) and you will build an audience (which is a euphemism for ‘fan base’ I suppose) who will buy your books and tell all their friends to buy your books. Well that never really happened. Naïve to imagine it would. I developed a few relationships, one or two of which blossomed into bona fide friendships, but that was it. Not that I’m complaining—friends are good. They make good beta readers too.

A lot of writers have moved onto other platforms, so-called microblogging sites like Twitter and, of course, everyone’s favourite, Facebook. I don’t, however, think there’s much useful that can be said in 140 characters or less apart from, “Get up! The bed’s on fire.” And Facebook’s not much better, worse at times since there’s no guarantee that even your friends will get to see what you’ve had to say. Words need space to breathe. They need time spent on them. I recently replied to a friend’s e-mail and my subject line read “9 words a minute” because it’d taken me three hours to write, edit and proofread—yes, I edit and proofread my e-mails—and I’ll let you do the sums yourself if you can be bothered. It was a considered and carefully-written e-mail. And if I’m going to devote three hours to an e-mail just imagine how I feel about my actual writing.

Starting in January I’ll be editing my novel The More Things Change. It took me seven months to edit the short story collection so I can only imagine the work involved in a 90,000-word novel but it needs to be done and there’s no way I can give it the care it deserves whilst trying to maintain two blogs (I’m also putting my McVoices blog on hold for the year). I have a book of poems which was supposed to be out at the end of 2014 but it got delayed for various reasons; mostly my work on that’s done but I still need to keep on top of things. That’ll be out early 2015 and I’ll need to devote time to promoting it too. And then we’ll see if anything else happens. I have ideas—I have ideas all the time—but they get lost in the morass that passes for my mind and half the time even when I write them down I lose them.

I’ve been reading a lot this year—160 books (okay, 160 short books)—and I’ll post something next week talking about that and then the poems’ll start to appear. Some’ve been published before, many are slight and although decent enough poems are not what editors are going to jump at. But they deserve a read and this is a good opportunity to let them see the light of day. I might append the occasional wee note if I can think of something worth adding—where the poem was first published if I can locate the magazine (I was very bad at keeping records when I was young) or where I got the idea from—but nothing that’ll take any real time to write.

Change is inevitable. At times it’s awful—much of the time it’s awful—and we resist it as if we had much choice in the matter. It would be naïve of me to imagine I could go back to being the writer I once was (that guy’s gone and when you read some of the poems next year you might wonder who wrote them but that guy’s gone too) but I would like to be a different writer than the one I’ve become; a better one would be nice but I’d settle for a… for a year off and let nature run its course.

There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter — but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer. – Vladimir Nabokov

I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions but at the start of 2014 I decided to see if I could read one hundred books over the course of that year, a modest enough goal seeing that I normally get through about fifty anyway. As an aside I decided to read a rather vague “more” books by women not because of #readwomen2014 which I only learned about about halfway through the year but simply because I was very conscious of the fact that the only books by women I tend to read are those sent to me for review and most of those are books I’d never look at normally. I’ve never set out to avoid books by women but very few I’ve looked at over the years—even by the famous and highly regarded—ever appealed (maybe it’s the covers, maybe I’m as shallow as that) which both embarrassed and puzzled me. Of course, having a goal and wanting to ensure I met my target, I found myself picking the shortest books I could lay my hands on and soon it became obvious I was going to smash my target so I upped it to a hundred and forty without telling anyone; I’ve never been very good at working with people peering over my shoulder. I also noticed another pattern emerging: I was reading more and more world literature. So I decided to add that into the mix: let’s see how many books from different countries you can read, too.

In the end I finished and reviewed 160 books (non-fiction – 4, poetry – 7, science fiction – 4, short story collections – 9, fiction (mainly literary fiction) – 139) half of which were written by women. In total I read 145 different authors from 39 different countries if I count the UK as a single country: Albania, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Britain (a representative from each of the four countries), Canada, Chile, China, Columbia, Croatia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Palestine, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain (Catalonia specifically), Sweden, Switzerland and the United States of America.

Twelve of the authors were Nobel Prize winners. The average number of pages was 187. The oldest book was written in 1899. In decades the rest were:

1900s	1
1910s	1
1920s	1
1930s	5
1940s	4
1950s	3
1960s	12
1970s	14
1980s	14
1990s	12
2000s	41
2010s	51

There was no plan but I am surprised so many books were as recent as they were. But there you go. A number of books were, I found, written later than I’d imagined. Clearly I show a marked preference for British and North American authors: 37 Americans, 1 Anglo-American, 29 English, 1 from Northern Ireland, 8 Scots, 2 Welsh, 4 Canadians, a Welsh-Canadian, a Canadian-American and two Russian-Americans. A number of authors were peripatetic and it was really hard to say what nationality they should come under. I’ve treated Ayn Rand, for example, as Russian-American since she lived in the States from February 1926 until her death in 1982 but she never lost her thick Russian accent; Beckett, on the other hand, spent most of his life in France but I’ve still treated him as Irish. Nabokov was also born in Russia but lived for extended periods in Germany, America and Switzerland but I’ve listed him as Russian. Doris Lessing was born in Iran but she’s English through and through. Herta Müller is generally referred to as a German author but I’ve listed her as Romanian; she’s as Romanian as Lessing is English.

In a number of cases I was restricted by what was available in translation but as I was trying to read as many books and as widely as possible I had to steer clear of a number of authors I would’ve liked to have had a crack at like Kenzaburō Ōe and Halldór Laxness whose works tend to be on the long side. There was also the matter of what I could lay my hand on and it’s obvious that in the UK I’m going to have an easier time finding short English language novels than I am finding the latest Iraqi bestseller although Frankenstein in Baghdad sounds like it might be worth having a look for.

One of my goals this year was to try to answer a simple question: Why do I prefer books by men to books written by women? Like most questions it’s easily framed. Not so easy to come up with a decent answer. If you asked me to list all the writers I’m keen to read (or read more of) I can give you a list an arm long and the vast majority would be male. I had to force myself to keep reading women’s books because there were so many books by males I wanted to read. Throughout the year I kept writing notes and pasting links to articles I intended to check out but the closest to an answer I came up with is this: Women tend to be storytellers and I’m not big on stories. Men can be and many are—Ron Rash, for example—but it’s much easier to list women who are great storytellers. But isn’t a storyteller the same as a writer? If they write the story down then, yes, of course; it’s semantics really. I think by ‘story’ I’m thinking ‘plot’ not that I’m saying plotters are inferior to pantsers or even that women tend to be plotters but I clearly prefer books where the structure’s buried. And I like adventurous writers. Standouts (among the women) were Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller and Julie Otsuka’s wonderful The Buddha in the Attic, but it’s worth noting that I gave five stars to The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, If I Could Tell You by Jing-Jing Lee, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Spare Room by Helen Garner, Old Filth by Jane Gardam and Latecomers by Anita Brookner, so I’m not saying that women can’t write, although maybe I was a little generous with Jing-Jing Lee as a debut novelist, but I did like the book and I’m not going to take it back.

Here’s the thing, though: the books I want to rave about were all by men despite the fact many didn’t get the full five stars. I seem to have a thing for flawed masterpieces because even though I gave What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver and Seize the Day by Saul Bellow five stars and deservedly so I was far more excited by You & Me by Padgett Powell, The H-Bomb and the Jesus Rock by John Manderino, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers and A History of Books by Gerald Murnane, although I gave some of those five stars, too, I now see.

What I didn’t see was a “woman’s voice”. Half the time I’d forgotten who the writer was I was reading. Jane Gardam and Pat Barker (in Regeneration) mimicked men perfectly. And Among Women Only by Cesare Pavese could just as easily have been written by a woman. That said, in my review of Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill I noted:

Aphorisms run shoulder to shoulder with anecdotes—the ghost of Erma Bombeck hovers—and existential angst leaks out onto every page. Fetch a mop! I’ve been thinking a lot about the female voice in literature; quite resistant to it I am and yet I have to wonder if a man could’ve written this book and not simply because the book is written from a female’s point of view.

In Elizabeth Costello (which technically I read in 2014 but as the review won’t be published until next year it doesn’t get counted) J.M. Coetzee writes:

        'But my mother has been a man,' [Elizabeth’s son] persists. 'She has also been a dog. She can think her way into other people, into other existences. I have read her; I know. It is within her powers. Isn't that what is most important about fiction: that it takes us out of ourselves, into other lives?'
        'Perhaps. But your mother remains a woman all the same. Whatever she does, she does as a woman. She inhabits her characters as a woman does, not a man.'
        'I don't see that. I find her men perfectly believable.'
        'You don't see because you wouldn't see. Only a woman would see. It is something between women. If her men are believable, good, I am glad to hear so, but finally it is just mimicry. Women are good at mimicry, better at it than men. At parody, even. Our touch is lighter.'
        She is smiling again. See how light my touch can be, her lips seem to say. Soft lips.
        'If there is parody in her,' he says, 'I confess it is too subtle for me to pick up.' There is a long silence. 'So is that what you think,' he says at last: 'that we live parallel lives, men and women, that we never really meet?'

What goes on in the mind of a dog? Was Kerstin Ekman’s dog any more or less of a dog than those imagined by Richard Adams?

I only abandoned one book last year, Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. And by ‘abandoned’ I mean I read more than a page or two before deciding I couldn’t be bothered finishing it. I actually got about fifty pages in and it was a book I really expected to enjoy having worked in offices all my life but maybe that was the problem. It bored the pants off me.

Of those I did finish that were disappointments: I Am an Emotional Creature by Eve Ensler (I guess I was hoping for another Vagina Monologues but this was tame); Anna Kavan’s Ice and Sheila Heti’s Ticknor both confused me; Voices from the Other World by Naguib Mahfouz and Out of the Dark by Patrick Modiano, both Nobel Prize winners, failed to excite me and Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf which I find I gave three stars to but can remember absolutely nothing about. Had I run into you in the street I would’ve sworn blind I’d never read anything by her.

Broadly speaking I didn’t get much out of the African and the Middle Eastern writers; I struggled to get much out of the Indian and Oriental writers; the South Americans were a little better but my favourites are all from America, the UK, the EU and Russia. I’m not saying I’ll restrict myself to… I suppose it amounts to the bulk of the North Temperate Zone (I wonder if temperature has anything to do with it? no, don’t be daft, Jim) but I won’t be picking books willy-nilly like I did last year even if they are short. Some of my choices really were quite arbitrary.

This year I’ll still be reading of course—can’t stop reading for a whole year (actually I can and I have but I’m not planning to)—but I will be focusing on longer books by authors I really want to read and skipped over in 2014 for whatever reason. And there will be some women in there too. I really ought to give The Golden Notebook a go. The list of authors, both male and female, I’ve not read and ought to have read is still far longer than it ought to be.

Here, then, is my complete list in alphabetical order by surname. Click on the book title to access my review.

		Speedboat		Adler, Renata
		Varamo		Aira, César
		The Saliva Tree		Aldiss, Brian
		The Handmaid's Tale		Atwood, Margaret
		Cold Soup		Aubury, Nic
		Oracle Night		Auster, Paul
		Winter Journal		Auster, Paul
		Stone in a Landslide		Barbal, Maria
		Regeneration		Barker, Pat
		Echo's Bones		Beckett, Samuel
		Bitter Like Orange Peel		Bell, Jessica
		White Lady		Bell, Jessica
		Seize the Day		Bellow, Saul
		Smut		Bennett, Alan
		The Laying On of Hands		Bennett, Alan
		Concrete		Bernhard, Thomas
		The End of the World		Biss, Andrew
		Hunger		Blackwell, Elise
		A Little Lumpen Novelita		Bolaño, Roberto
		Latecomers		Brookner, Anita
		Strangers		Brookner, Anita
		My Biggest Lie		Brown, Luke
		Factotum		Bukowski, Charles
		The Game		Byatt, A.S.
		If on a Winter's Night a Traveller		Calvino, Italo
		Into the War		Calvino, Italo
		Marcovaldo		Calvino, Italo
		The Fall		Camus, Albert
		What We Talk About When We Talk About Love		Carver, Raymond
		My Two Worlds		Chejfec, Sergio
		A Jew Must Die		Chessex, Jacques
		The Awakening		Chopin, Kate
		Slow Man		Coetzee, J.M.
		A Slight Trick of the Mind		Cullin, Mitch
		A River Dies of Thirst		Darwish, Mahmoud
		Reasons She Goes to the Woods		Davies, Deborah Kay
		Schoolgirl		Dazai, Osamu
		The Artist of Disappearance		Desai, Anita
		Blue Nights		Didion, Joan
		The Year of Magical Thinking		Didion, Joan
		The Tiger In The Grass		Doerr, Harriett
		Gone are the Leaves		Donovan, Anne
		The Millstone		Drabble, Margaret
		The Pure Gold Baby		Drabble, Margaret
		Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?		Eggers, Dave
		The Dog		Ekman, Kerstin
		I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World		Ensler, Eve
		Visitation		Erpenbeck, Jenny
		Under the Skin		Faber, Michel
		The Days of Abandonment		Ferrante, Elena
		The Bookshop		Fitzgerald, Penelope
		Aliss at the Fire		Fosse, Jon
		In the Memorial Room		Frame, Janet
		Au Reservoir		Fraser-Sampson, Guy
		Atmospheric Disturbances		Galchen, Rivka
		Old Filth		Gardam, Jane
		The Spare Room		Garner, Helen
		Thirst		Gelasimov, Andrey
		Get a Life		Gordimer, Nadine
		Scrawling		Gould, Jonathan
		The Ministry of Fear		Greene, Graham
		Falling Out of Time		Grossman, David
		Under the Autumn Star		Hamsun, Knut
		Sleepless Nights		Hardwick, Elizabeth
		Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War		Harris, Mark
		The Wall		Haushofer, Marlen
		People in Glass Houses		Hazzard, Shirley
		The Blind Owl		Hedayat, Sadegh
		The Book of Unknown Americans		Henriquez, Cristina
		Ticknor		Heti, Sheila
		Maybe This Time		Hotschnig, Alois
		Bed of Coals		Hutchison, Joseph
		The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly		Hwang, Sun-mi
		That Smell and Notes from Prison		Ibrahim, Sonallah
		Dogma		Iyer, Lars
		Half Life		Jackson, Shelley
		We Have Always Lived in the Castle		Jackson, Shirley
		The Listener		Jansson, Tove
		The Murder of Halland		Juul, Pia
		Twilight of the Eastern Gods		Kadare, Ismail
		Ambiguous Adventure		Kane, Cheikh Hamidou
		The Tiny Wife		Kaufman, Andrew
		The Waterproof Bible		Kaufman, Andrew
		Ice		Kavan, Anna
		Comedy in a Minor Key		Keilson, Hans
		Mo Said She Was Quirky		Kelman, James
		Guff		Kennelly, Brendan
		The Bean Trees		Kingsolver, Barbara
		Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes		Konnikova, Maria
		Diary of the Fall		Laub, Michel
		The Lathe of Heaven		Le Guin, Ursula K.
		If I Could Tell You		Lee, Jing-Jing
		Adore		Lessing, Doris
		Briefing for a Descent Into Hell		Lessing, Doris
		The Fifth Child		Lessing, Doris
		Black Vodka		Levy, Deborah
		Days in the History of Silence		Lindstrøm, Merethe
		Doppler		Loe, Erlend
		A Million Ways to Die in the West		MacFarlane, Seth
		Voices from the Other World		Mahfouz, Naguib
		An Imaginary Life		Malouf, David
		The First True Lie		Mander, Marina
		The H-Bomb and the Jesus Rock		Manderino, John
		Cocktails from the Ceiling		Mannix, Aoife
		Reader’s Block		Markson, David
		Chronicle of a Death Foretold		Márquez, Gabriel Garcí­a
		The Land of Decoration		McCleen, Grace
		Everybody lie down and no one gets hurt		McGuire, Colin
		Nekropolis		McHugh, Maureen F.
		Docherty		McIlvanney, William
		The Kiln		McIlvanney, William
		Ways of Dying		Mda, Zakes
		Screwtop Thompson and Other Tales		Mills, Magnus
		Out of the Dark		Modiano, Patrick
		He Wants		Moore, Alison
		Buddhaland Brooklyn		Morais, Richard C.
		Marcel		Mortier, Erwin
		The Hunger Angel		Müller, Herta
		An Unofficial Rose		Murdoch, Iris
		A History of Books		Murnane, Gerald
		The Eye		Nabokov, Vladimir
		Lost Paradise		Nooteboom, Cees
		Hygiene and the Assassin		Nothomb, Amélie
		The Third Policeman		O'Brien, Flann
		Dept. of Speculation		Offill, Jenny
		The Diving Pool: Three Novellas		Ogawa, Yōko
		The Housekeeper and the Professor		Ogawa, Yōko
		Beside the Sea		Olmi, Véronique
		The Buddha in the Attic		Otsuka, Julie
		After Claude		Owens, Iris
		Soumchi		Oz, Amos
		Among Women Only		Pavese, Cesare
		There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories		Petrushevskaya, Ludmilla
		The Bell Jar		Plath, Sylvia
		Next World Novella		Politycki, Matthias
		Edisto		Powell, Padgett
		You & Me		Powell, Padgett
		Anthem		Rand, Ayn
		Adam Haberberg		Reza, Yasmina
		Good Morning, Midnight		Rhys, Jean
		Pursued by Well-being		Russell, Mark
		Death with Interruptions		Saramago, José
		The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil		Saunders, George
		Rue End Street		Sexton, Sue Reid
		Pink Mist		Sheers, Owen
		Girl Meets Boy		Smith, Ali
		The Hothouse by the East River		Spark, Muriel
		Moving Parts		Tulli, Magdalena
		Noah's Compass		Tyler, Anne
		The Ministry of Pain		Ugrešić, Dubravka
		The Mussel Feast		Vanderbeke, Birgit
		My Real Children		Walton, Jo
		Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen		Weldon, Fay
		The Necrophiliac		Wittkop, Gabrielle
		Monday or Tuesday		Woolf, Virginia
		Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather		Xingjian, Gao
		Third Class Superhero		Yu, Charles
		Bonsai		Zambra, Alejandro
		Burning Secret		Zweig, Stefan
		Chess Story		Zweig, Stefan

Stray

When I decided to post mainly poems this year I had to choose a starting point and, for me, the obvious place was #453. I began numbering my poems when still at school and that’s how I’ve continued to save each new poem, under its number rather than its name. Yesterday I wrote #1087.

‘Stray’ is a significant poem for me. I’ve always regarded it as my first adult poem, the first poem in which I recognised my “voice”. It was first published in Street Games and Other Poems by the Curlew Press probably in 1978 in a slightly different layout; I was young and so pleased to see my work in print I let the editor have her way. It’s a rather sorry-looking pamphlet (the quality of some small press stuff back then left a lot to be desired) but published is published.

Family Life

‘Family Life’ was first published in Words 6. I seem to recall is was affiliated in some way with Aberdeen University but I can find no evidence in the journal to that effect. This was the first poem I ever had published. It was also the first—and for the longest time the only—poem I was ever paid for, the grand sum of £1.50, the value of two issues of the journal. As much as that delighted me I was disappointed when I received my contributor’s copy and noticed they’d omitted the poem’s title.

It’s not remotely biographical. My dad never went to the pub, not in the same ways that other dads went to the pub (I’m not suggesting that he never went inside a pub but it was a rarity), and my mum certainly never went to the bingo. They did on occasion have a drink at home but it was more likely to be martini; Christ knows why I made it sherry. I don’t think my mother ever smoked but Dad had certainly given up long before I showed any interest in having a drag. And no, I don’t have a big sister. But I think I might’ve quite liked one.

I’ve always liked Bowie and he definitely was on a roll in the seventies but he was just one of many singers I listened to. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were a Scottish band. I had their single ‘Boston Tea Party’ which I still think’s a great song but I didn’t really know them apart from that. He did play the Glasgow Apollo many times. In an article in The Glasgow Herald David Belcher recalls a famous show in 1975:

During one of those shows, Alex reached the usual dramatic denouement of the song ‘Framed’, portraying an innocent man fitted up by the polis. The band stopped playing, leaving Alex a broken figure in the spotlight, looking up pitiably to some higher power, pleading: "Ah didn't do nothin'." From the darkness, a Glaswegian voice insisted: "Aye, ye did—ye shagged ma sister."

Chains

When I posted ‘Stray’ last week my friend Marion said that is sounded “exactly like you now!” So this one’s for you, Marion. I don’t have an exact date for ‘Stray’ but it must’ve been written only a few weeks before ‘Chains’.

Now ‘Chains’ is a strange one. It’s one of those where-the-hell-did-this-one-come-from? poems. I can see myself working on it whilst walking down Buchanan Street in Glasgow but that’s as much as I can tell you about that. The only Wimpy I can recall ever eating at was the one at the side entrance to Glasgow Central station and the last one I ever remember seeing was on Ingram Street but it’s gone now too. In 1977 Wimpys were still fairly common; McDonald’ses existed in the UK (since 1974) but it wasn’t until the eighties that we really started to notice them. Now there’re apparently only 93 restaurants in the UK compared to McDonald’s’ 1300. (I wonder if Richard and Maurice McDonald had a clue how many problems they’d create for grammaticians when they included that comma? My wife spent an hour poring over The Chicago Manuel of Style trying to decide on these two and we’re still not sure what’s right.)

I’ve nothing particularly against fast food restaurants. Or fat people. So I’m pretty sure I’m using this as some kind of metaphor. The punctuation’s weird too but I’ve left it as I wrote it. For a while I did some odd things with punctuation but I’ve completely forgotten what my rules were, if, indeed, I had rules because I suspect I just went down the whatever-feels-right-must-be-right route.

That said I’m still surprisingly fond of this one; for all the differences it has a similar tone to ‘Stray’ and I get a comparable feeling when I read it today.

‘Chains’ was first published in Street Games and Other Poems and, yes, the editor “fixed” my punctuation.

Real life is sometimes boring, rarely conclusive and boy, does the dialogue need work. ― Sarah Rees Brennan

“Hope and Michael are a married couple in their thirties, living in Philadelphia, and struggling with everyday adult angst. Michael runs an ad agency with his friend Elliot, whose marriage to Nancy is beginning to show the cracks of age, as is the friendship between Hope and her best friend Ellyn. Michael's best friend, Gary, on the other hand, is trying to get on with his womanising life, and get over the mutually-destructive affair he had with Michael's cousin, Melissa.” This is not the plot of Chris Killen’s second novel although it could’ve been. It’s actually the plot summary for the nineties television series thirtysomething. I mention it because I think this was probably the first time many of us started to think about being in our thirties as a problem. Up until then it was something to aim for. We’d hit sixteen and could legally have sex (at least in Scotland we could); we’d hit eighteen and could vote and drink; we’d hit twenty-one and could drive a heavy goods vehicle; we’d hit thirty and had we converted to Judaism we could be eligible to be chosen as a cantor to lead the services on the High Holidays. The world was our oyster and oysters are aphrodisiacs. Yeah, right.

Imagine if someone decided to remake thirtysomething set in contemporary Britain and not in some place fancy like London but in Manchester or Glasgow or Nottingham. In 2013, over 3.3 million adults in the UK aged between 20 and 34 were living with a parent or parents; the so-called boomerang generation. That’s 26% of this age group. “O brave new world that has such people in it!” Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture painted a portrait of a generation of nomads, born between the early 1960s to the early 1980s. These were the Baby Busts, the kidults, as opposed to the Baby Boomers (my lot, well, the second batch). Mitch Killen’s protagonists, on the other hand, were all born in 1984 or thereabouts. What shall we dub them then? Orwell’s Babies? Generation Y? As good an imagination as Orwell had methinks he wouldn’t have imagined a future quite as drab as this.

Do people in dystopias know they’re living in dystopias or do they write novels about futures even bleaker than the one they find themselves in? It’s what you’re used to innit? (Please tell me I used that correctly.)

But back to In Real Life. In 2004 Ian and Paul were flatmates. Paul was living with Lauren but they broke up; she wrote a pros and cons list and the cons won hands down. Paul and Ian drifted apart as often happens after uni. Lauren flies off to Canada for a while to try to get her life together; it doesn’t work out. Ten years later we meet up with them—this is a few months before they run into each other again for the first time in ten years—and it’s not a pretty sight. Successes they are not.

Paul’s published a novel that went straight into bargain bins; now he’s teaching creative writing unenthusiastically to a bunch of equally unenthusiastic students and supposedly working on a second book; at least that’s what he keeps telling his agent, Julian Miechowicz, who, for some reason, hasn’t completely given up on him:

        Julian is a transplanted American, a few years older than Paul, with a thick black beard and a pained, disinterested way of speaking. Every time Paul’s met Julian, Julian has at some point or other touched his beard and squinted and said a variation on the statement, ‘The publishing industry is a sinking ship; in ten years’ time people won’t be reading books anymore.’ At their last meeting, which took place in the back room of a small pub in Soho, Paul had promised Julian that he’d start a Twitter account, even though deep down, he suspects that Twitter is for arseholes. He also promised that he’d have a draft of his novel ready for Julian to read ‘very, very soon’. That was almost two months ago, and Paul’s getting worried that Julian might drop him if he doesn’t deliver soon.

Ian’s moved in with his older sister—six and a half minutes older but, boy, does she make those six and a half minutes count:

         ‘So, what’s the plan?’ [she says]
         ‘I don’t know. Find a job? I shouldn’t need to stay here too long.’
        Please don’t make me pay rent, I think.
         ‘I could ask Martin if there’s anything going at the call centre.’ she says. ‘He gets back next week.’
         ‘Yeah, maybe.’
         (I can think of almost nothing worse than working at a call centre with Martin as my boss.)
         ‘Have you spoken to Mum yet?’ she says.
         ‘Yep,’ I say quietly.
         ‘Well, you haven’t, because I called her just before I came to collect you and she knew nothing about all this.’
         ‘I’ll give her a ring later on.’
         ‘You’re going to have to help with rent and bills, you know.’
         ‘I know.’

Lauren’s working for Cancer Research, not as a research scientist or anything cool like that; no, she’s running a charity shop:

         I could see the stack of bin bags from halfway down Bingley Road. There were even more than usual; piled up to shoulder height, glistening with raindrops, they filled almost the whole doorway, completely obscuring the ‘Please do not leave donations on the step!’ sign I’d made and tacked up on Saturday night. I had to drag the bags into the street to get the shutters open, and one of them caught on a shard of broken glass, spilled its contents into the road: Dora the Explorer pyjamas, stained soft toys, and a few cardboard baby books so damp they’d almost turned to mush.

This is a novel of bad choices, missed opportunities, lost causes and fumbled second chances.

The format took me a while to get my head around. The book is broken into three parts: ‘age sex location’, ‘first world problems’ and ‘be right back’. Each individual chapter focuses on one of the three protagonists. Mostly Lauren’s are set in 2004 and the two lads’ in 2014 although once we get into the second part of the book we get to find out what’s happening with Lauren now. The one anomaly is on p.65 which is headed ‘IAN 2004’; it’s a proofreading error but it did throw me off. As did the e-mails between Lauren and Ian. The first one appears on p.95 at the end of one of Lauren’s 2004 chapters. The next one follows (but does not appear to be a part of) the first chapter in the second part which begins ‘LAUREN 2014’ which I assumed was another mistake by an editor but, no, she’s now in 2014 but the e-mails, which appear periodically throughout the rest of this section, are all still from 2004. In the third part Lauren’s back in 2005 (and back in the UK) except where she appears in person in the book’s final chapter ‘IAN 2015’. Confused? Yeah, me too and I’ve got the book in front of me.

I was also confused by the two lads, Ian and Paul. I kept getting them mixed up in my head. There’re plenty of reasons not to but I struggled to keep them separate. I think the reason for this is I saw them both as abject failures above everything else; it didn’t really matter what they’d failed at or were currently failing at; the overbearing fact was the fact they’d reached thirty and not made anything of their lives. And they were both well into their individual quarter-life crisis. In fact on p.328 Ian does end up moving back in with his mum:

         ‘Nice to have you back,’ she says.
         ‘Nice to have me back, too,’ I say.
         ‘You know you can stay here for as long as you want.’
         ‘I know.’
        She heads down the small, creaking staircase and I hear the faint murmur of her and Carol’s voices in the living room. In the corner of the room is the single bed I slept on all through my childhood and teenage years, the one I lost my virginity on. I close the door to my room, then lie down on it, still in all my clothes.

The novel’s basic premise is simple enough: Lauren picked the wrong friend. She should’ve gone out with Ian rather than Paul—maybe she’d’ve been his salvation—but by the time she realises this she’s some four thousand miles away. Ian writes. She writes back. Things progress tentatively but peter out. Life gets in the way and, ten years on, it crosses both their minds that maybe that was their Sliding Doors moment. But what’re you going to do about it now? Answer: There’s nothing to be done. People lose touch. Chances slip through our fingertips. Shit happens. But what if Fate happened to be in a good mood one day at the start of, say, 2015? Now that would make a satisfactory ending to this book and, God, it needs it. We expect Lauren and Ian to run into each other in 2015—no spoiler there—but the real question here is: Why after rejecting Paul would she choose Ian? Is this history repeating itself?

Tao Lin, one of the authors roped in to say nice things about the book, writes:

In Real Life, is poignant, intricate, stimulating, and very funny. I wanted to stop around 30 times to show a friend a passage I'd just read. If forced to quickly describe In Real Life with names and percentages, I might say 86% Richard Yates, 14% David Lynch; or 100% Chris Killen.

Maybe he was thinking of another David Lynch because I didn’t see anything in this book that I’d describe as Lynchian, i.e. “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane.” Mundanity it has aplenty. So, maybe 7%, David Lynch. But there’s nothing remotely macabre here. And Yates, what I know of him (which is basically the film adaptation of Revolutionary Road), is too American. This felt a very British book. More Bruce Robinson (who wrote and directed Withnail and I) and Keith Waterhouse (who wrote the novel Billy Liar) than anything else though don’t ask me for percentages. And maybe a pinch of Dan Rhodes. I mention these three because it’s clear (he confirms it in this 2011 interview) the author has a fondness for cringeworthy moments. In an interview Yates said: “If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.” If that’s what Tao Lin was getting at I can maybe see his point but although Chris Killen doesn’t go so far as to give us a happy ending at least we’re left with the possibility of a happy ending. In an article on Yates in Boston Review Stewart O’Nan writes:

It’s his insistence on the blunt reality of failure that drew me to Yates. In my world at the time (and even now), failure was much more common than success, endurance the best that could be hoped for. Family and love were hard and often impossible. In the world I knew, no one was saved by luck or bailed out by coincidence; no understanding lovers or friends or parents or children made the unbearable suddenly pleasant. Fortunes didn’t change, they just followed a track into a dead end and left you there. To find a writer who understood that and didn’t gussy it up with tough-guy irony or drown it in sentimental tears was a revelation. Yates—even in the mid-’80s, when I first read Revolutionary Road—seemed to me a refreshing change from the false, cloying fiction that passed for realism. He still does.

This brings me neatly to the title, In Real Life. In the 1930’s the big new -ism on the block was escapism. During the Great Depression it gave people a way out of reality and into a world of fantasy that seemed dramatically more liveable than where they were. Somehow—amazingly—we managed to avoid the Big D. this time round (history will remember it merely as the Great Recession) but I don’t think the man in the street cares much about semantics. So why should he care about this book?

I’m not sure everyone will. (Angus Sutherland writing in The Skinny most certainly didn’t and kudos to Killen for publishing the link on his blog.) Despite the humour, despite the fact we Brits love rooting for an underdog these characters hit a bit too close to home for my tastes; this is a kitchen sink drama masquerading as escapist fiction. Like Paul my first marriage broke up in my early twenties and I ended up back at my parents’ and in my early thirties I was back there again. Like Ian my first novel disappeared without creating any ripples. I’ve never actually worked in a charity shop but I lived out of them for years. And yet here I am today twenty-odd years later and maybe everything didn’t work out as I’d planned but the important things did and, of course, there’s no guarantee that these three are going to make it or even any real reason that they deserve to make it—important point—but that’s why it’s good this book isn’t real life because even a half-decent fiction writer knows when to leave well alone and hand over the reins to his readers’ imaginations.

You can read two short excerpts from the novel here and here.

***

Chris Killen was born in 1981. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester and his debut novel, The Bird Room was published by Canongate in 2009. Wizard's Way, a film he co-wrote, produced and starred in won the Best Comedy Feature award at London Independent Film Festival, and the Discovery Award at LOCO. Remake rights have been acquired by Jack Black. He currently lives in Manchester and plays in a band called Hot Shots. I’ve no idea what they sound like but if they do cover versions of old Smiths songs I wouldn’t be too surprised.

He blogs here… occasionally. He’s also on Twitter. I guess he must listen to his agent.

The Venereologist

‘The Venereologist’ was first published in The Urbane Gorilla 8 in the autumn of 1978. It was subsequently published in three other magazines because, circa 1978, I didn’t realise that once some magazine had published you it was bad form to send the poem elsewhere without telling them where it’d first appeared. It was the editor of Trends – the Paisley College of Technology literary magazine who pointed this out to me—nicely—when he accepted my poem ‘Punks’ noting that it’d already been published elsewhere. So I stopped—reluctantly. But by this time ‘The Venereologist’ had been published four times and this is now its sixth outing because I included it in an article a while back. I actually thinkTrends might’ve published it too but as they never sent me any contributor’s copies I can’t say for sure. They took a lot of my poems in the late seventies. The last time I was in the Scottish Poetry Library I had a look for old copies but they didn’t have any from its early years.

As to where ‘The Venereologist’ came from, well, your guess is as good as mine. It was the first of a short series of doctor poems but I dried up after four and really only this one and ‘The Pathologist’ were any good. I always hated the line “turning of the handle” because in modern cars you don’t turn the handle—you depress a button and pull a handle—but I couldn’t figure out a way to say that in a way that pleased me. I suppose “press of a button” would’ve worked, sort of. If I was writing the poem today I’d not let “habitual” go either. I can see what I was getting at but it irritates whenever I read it. I’d’ve probably replaced “habitual” with “mechanical” and looked for a different way to say “mechanical thing”.

The Pathologist

Sepia was an interesting magazine that ran from 1977 until 2002 as best I can see. It was one of the many small press magazines that were kicking around in the late seventies and the quality of the early issues left a lot to be desired but it was clearly a labour of love. Each one, at least for the first few issues, arrived in the post with a sepia-tinted postcard glued to the cover which usually fell off but what the heck? He didn’t just publish poetry. He produced wee booklets about Captain Beefheart too and something called The Cropthorne Camera of Minnie Holland, 1892-1905. The photo on issue 8 was of the switch station on the Ffestiniog gauge railway circa 1880 run by Mr and Mrs Will Jones from 1929 until 1968.

As best I can tell ‘The Pathologist’ was first published in Sepia 8 in April 1979. It also appeared in Effie 5; I don’t have a date for that but I suspect it was later. What was nice about Effie is they published it alongside ‘Stray’ with the correct layout and punctuation. The tone here is very similar to ‘The Venereologist’ but I think I’ve done a better job with the metaphors especially the double meaning of ‘mortified’. I was very pleased with that and it still makes me smile. Not quite sure why the new pathologist was called Jones other than the Welsh practice of tagging on a man’s job title at the end of his name to distinguish him from all the other Joneses out there: Jones the butcher, Jones the baker, Jones the pathologist.

I’ve been thinking about the first line and I suspect I borrowed ‘strange meeting’ from Wilfred Owen’s poem of the same name but I wouldn’t read too much into that.

I only subscribed to one poetry magazine in the seventies. It was called Poetry Information and it never published poetry. By that I mean you couldn’t send your poems to it. It only published articles on poetry. And I loved it. It was exactly what I needed in my late teens and early twenties. They talked about poetry. Long essays on the likes of Pound and Basil Bunting (the whole of issue #19 was devoted to him). But the one that really got me was a 1976 article by Tom Leonard entitled ‘The Locust Tree in Flower, and why it had difficulty flowering in Britain’ which introduced me to the poetry of the American William Carlos Williams. At school all I’d been given to read was English poetry; English, not British. A visiting student teacher read us something by Ferlinghetti once—‘Sometime During Eternity’ if memory serves right—but that was it. No Whitman. No Frost. No Dickinson.

The ‘Locust Tree’ Leonard’s referring to a poem entitled ‘The Locust Tree in Flower’. Two versions exist. You can read them both here but the one Leonard focused on was the second version, the streamlined one. Having read a great deal of Williams since I can tell you it’s a one-off. And it captivated me. I’d read nothing remotely like it. So shortly after I had a go and produced two poems. This is the first one and it was published in Street Games and Other Poems. The editor also fixed a typo: in the original I had ‘insensed’ and I recall a letter from another editor wondering if it was a verb coined from insensate. It wasn’t; it was a spelling mistake.

I know a lot of young poetry struggle to find their own voice and wind up emulating their heroes. I really never did that. There’s this poem and ‘Yesterday’ and then I dropped this approach and went back to what I was doing. This is the last poem too where you can see me being affected by Wilfred Owen’s work. I don’t think I wrote a war poem again for thirty years.

The bone-white cross comes from The Exorcist.