Cassandra at the Wedding (offload 15)

'Cassandra at the Wedding' by Dorothy Baker is described as a 'classic' inside the cover. It is almost a coming of age story, though Cassandra is in her twenties and travelling home to attend her adored twin sister's wedding. It is a lovely period piece of 60s affluent middle class America, told in first person by Cassandra as she tries to make sense of her feelings of abandonment and that her unconventionality made her feel a little like an outsider in her own family. 

The girls have always done everything together but Judith's moving away has left Cassandra adrift, unable to settle and finish her thesis, her sense of self and direction collapsed. She makes multiple oblique references to suicide, that kind of hang there, almost petulantly as the days pass. I guess, as with coming of age stories, the protagonist is utterly self-absorbed, but because of the twin thing, her sister is also part of her self-absorption. She is indecisive, drifting. The plans she and Judith had made have been abandoned, and it's almost as if the apparently abrupt decision by her sister to marry has bought her lack of direction sharply into focus. They are obviously a close knit little group, their mother having dies only a few years previously, leaving the girls with their introverted father and elderly grandmother. When she arrives home with some trepidation but it received warmly and enthusiastically, and she doesn't know how to articulate what had become seething anger. 

Here she tries to rebuff her sister's care having gotten a little sunburned on her journey:

"I inhaled again, drank again, and told her that there were a lot of things I didn't know, and one of them was why women have to be the way they seem to have to be, always wanting to make somebody eat something or talk to somebody on the telephone or smear something on their sunburn. And in the winter put on a coat.

'There's probably a school for wives,' I said, 'but you don't need to go.'

I felt better, and I looked at her obliquely to see if she felt worse, but there was no way to tell. She looked very calm and thoughtful, and after a while she gave an answer. Quite good.

'Go ahead. Blister and break.'

'Good idea, I'll do it.'

'And don't eat. Drink.'

There again, I thought, say it twice and underline it. The emblem of good women is always this anxiety about drinking - other people's drinking. And I know ew why. Because alcohol releases truth and truth is something good women never care to hear. It frightens them. They only want to hear clichés about how lovely it is to be home again, and what an exciting occasion this is, not only a glad reunion but a wedding thrown in, and may I please take a peek inside the hope chest, Pandora's box? That's what they want - my sister no less than the most uxorious of them." (p.59)

So the next day Judith drives off to collect her young man, Cassandra petulantly misnaming him in the story because she resists thinking of him as a real person, and Cassandra is left to her own devices with a disconcerting selection of medications. 

"I picked up the clutch bag, and possibly from association, clutched it - held it tight against me, as if it were a doll, and rocked it a little. I don't think I sang to it or anything quite so far out as that, but I do know I had a sense of having found a lost pet or teddy bear, one I couldn't really do without. I thought how nice it was to have an inanimate friend, one that can't get in a car and go roaring off to Bakersfield and places like that. This kind may hide under the bed and give you a bad time for a while, but it doesn't really run out on you. It stays where it is and waits until you find it, or Conchita finds it, and then it's back with you, just as it was. Just as it was, but I felt I should do a little checking anyhow, so I unsnapped it, then unzipped it, and then unzipped an inner pocket and dumped three bottles out on the bedspread. The bottles were full: there was God's own plenty, all with numbers across the top, and dosage and usage overtly described: 'One every six hours as needed for sleep,' and 'One capsule no oftener than every four hours as needed.' I understood the reticence of the last one, I thought. It would be difficult for a great many pharmacists to write: 'as needed for zest', or 'as needed for zeal', or 'as needed to encourage the minimum of tolerance for the brute stupidities of this world'. It would also go against the grain to write simply 'Pep pills'. Apothecaries have their own sensitivities and some of them cannot go beyond a gentle 'as needed.'" (p.150-151)

After that the story unfolded a little predictably, but I enjoyed it because the voice was very authentic and honest. I don't think you find first person very often and I think it's hard to do because it focusses so hard on the one character and you only get the other people more obliquely, but I like the way it feels slightly more inside the story, rather than looking in on it.

Also this last week I have been listening to  'Swimming in the Monsoon Sea' by Shyam Selvadurai about a young Sri Lankan boy Amrith and a turbulent summer spent rehearsing Othello and discovering unexpected feelings as he gets to know his Canadian cousin. A lovely atmospheric book with warm lovely characters, and some mean judgy people, and the fraught clashing of the modern world with the more traditional Sri Lankan social attitudes. Amrith is beholden to his Uncle Lucky and Auntie Bundle because his parent's relationship was disapproved of (though they are the lovely warm people fortunately), and this has a huge impact on his life and the way he feels about himself. But when I thought more about it I realised that of course in western culture people are also judged for their social background, and ostracised, often for choices that their parents made, it's just that when you have more economic and social freedom it will perhaps have less of an impact on your life chances. 

Stay safe. Be kind. Get those overdue books back to the library.

Reviews in Reverse (14 days to Offload) - Okay is Underrated

 

'The Emperor of Gladness' by Ocean Vuong is already late back to the library and a queue of people are waiting impatiently to read it, so I am starting with the most recently read from the book pile. It was read mostly back and forth on the train to Devon, but not much while I was there because Claire and I were too busy pottering about and pretending to be retired (well I was pretending, she is semi-retired).

I love this kind of story; people going through some kind of crisis find each other, and go through their crisis together. It's not all neat and happy ending, just human beings muddling along and making what they can of life. Hai is at the end of his tether. He is grieving. He has lied to his mum, and not just about the little things. Grazina has spotted him on the bridge, and is pretending (it turns out) to be trying to hang out laundry. The elderly frail Lithuanian is having trouble keeping her carers and after she has offered some words of solace and advice she invites him to stay. She thinks his name is Hello, so she calls him Labas, which means hello in Lithuanian. So for a while they muddle along together, her with a meagre pension and him working at HomeMarket with his cousin Sony, and Hai creating an alternate reality where he is rescuing her from the Nazis when Grazina's dementia episodes leave her huddled and terrified. 

"He stood watching Grazina sleep under the photo of herself half a century ago, her face, the only part of her that wasn't covered, grey and compressed and smeared with strawberry jam. What did he know about her illness, after all, other than that four of the thirteen pills she took each day were supposed to 'subdue' it, like some sort of criminal in her head? How could he have known that her brain was actually collapsing slowly inside her skull, how this made little holes, which then made new neural connections and scrambled old ones? It must be like water, he thought, as the morning rose up around them. It must be like the lake she talked about. Diving under the surface until everything was muted and gauzed but still there. He listened to her wheezy breaths, and imagined a tiny fire scratching inside her. A little torch that forgot it was not supposed to burn underwater. Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering. The idea made him sick. And without knowledge of his own legs moving beneath him, he crossed the hall to his bedroom, fished the contact lens case from his jacket pocket, and , having been sober for forty-seven days, tossed the Perc and codeines back in one gulp, then returned to where Grazina lay slumped in the jeep." (p.110)

As much as he saves her, she also saves him. She is just a person with no expectations, and so he never fears disappointing her. Here he finally tells her about Noah:

"He told her of their friendship, of the days driving aimlessly in a truck through a town far, far away from Europe, from Germany, called East Gladness. How they'd walk for hours through the pines, the back lots of that rusted strip of earth, singing in adolescent voices that crackled like wartime radios. About the pools of clear water that rose over the cattails and sweetgrass in the junkyards after a storm, how once they swam in a shallow tub made from the rainwater collected in a dent in the roof of an old school bus. And the water was so clear, so sweet, your skin looked truer that it did on the surface, warped and magnified by the tiny current they made from their scavenged laughter. He told of Noah's barn, where they knew the wrong inside them was the only thing that made sense of where they grew up, where the gods, after flipping the tables from losing their bets, left them alone to make a fugitive life. That a boy beside a boy could form an island of 'okayness.' 'With him,' he said, 'it wasn't that I was happy - but that I was okay. And okay is even better than happy because I thought it had a better chance of lasting.' He turned and was startled to find her staring right at him. 'Okay is underrated...' " (p.315)

The cast of characters at HomeMarket also have their own issues but equally they provide caring for each other: the manager BJ who is a part-time wrestler, Hai's cousin Sony who is obsessed with the Civil War, Wayne, Maureen and even the unnamed washing up girl. Here, surreally, they borrow a van to go to the site of Sony's father's untimely death on a roadside in Vermont:

"Hai could tell, from the faint throb in Sony's neck, that the boy was trying hard to hold it in. BJ's shadow slid across the dried leaves and covered Sony like a cape. She cupped the boy's head with her hand, as if to hold him in place, before reaching down to hug him. He turned into her embrace as Maureen took the headrest into her arms bouncing it like a living baby. Hai came forward, his mouth partly open, and threw his arms around the huddled group, his face buried in BJ's enormous back as the branches clicked above them in a spring gale. These people, bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen that was never truly a kitchen, paid just above minimum wage, their presence known to each other mostly through muscle memory, the shape of their bodies ingrained into the psyche from hours of periphery manoeuvring through the narrow counters and back rooms of a fast-food joint designed by a corporate architect, so that they would come to know the sound of each other's coughs and exhales better that those of their kin and loved ones. They, who owe each other nothing but time, the hours collectively shouldered into a shift so that they might finish on time, now brought to their knees in a forest to gather around a half-burnt headrest of a Nissan Maxima on a Tuesday in mid-April, their bodies finally touching, a mass of labor cobbled together by a boy's hallowed loss - on the clock." (p.366)

After a visit to Lucas, Grazina's son, who turns out to be real and not imagined as Hai had wondered, their ramshackle existence is threatened by his plan to move his mother and sell her house. They try to stave off the inevitable, inevitably.

Stay safe. Be kind. Read some really good writing.

The Echoes, or Literary Responsibilities (13th)

I was about to launch into telling you how much I love Evie Wyld (reviewed here and here) when I went to her wiki page and followed the link the this article in Overland (an Australian literary magazine.) Do writers have a responsibility to address social issues? I think the article's author nitpicking about local plants or the ability to make a living making goat's cheese is irrelevant, but her assertions about Wyld's, shall we generously say, 'skating over' of the issues around, for example, the removal of aboriginal children from their families is a fair criticism. It was a thing, there in the background of their lives and the story, but it is not addressed in any specific way. But does a novel have that responsibility? I don't know. The article left me disconcerted, which I suppose it should, having to face up to the fact that we are all complicit in these wrongs but unable on a personal level to be able to atone or repair. I felt that Evie's characters were teenagers, wrapped up in their own lives without the level of awareness that would make it part of their story. A story, after all, can only be about so many things. The book is very much about a sense of belonging and the accidents of fate that make our lives the way they are, in the place they are. 

A photograph of her grandmother as a child outside a London terrace preoccupies Hannah to the extent that she takes herself back there from Australia, seeking something that I am not sure even she understands. I was not sure about the dead boyfriend, it was a device I suppose that allows you to look in on her, and to tell the back story. We hop back and forth in time, telling life in London and life in small town Australia, not quite outback, but pretty remote. Cue spiders and somewhat dysfunctional family, who muddle along together. It's all about the hidden stuff, the untold tales and the squashed dreams.

Here Uncle Tony (mum's brother, who lives in the garden), a hint of stuff unspoken:

"In bed in the camper van, Tony holds his goat and thinks about how the earth is as big as it is. There is so much weight and he should just start up the camper in the night and drive away and never see anyone again, let his sister live the rest of her life. He cannot do what Kerry has done, make a space for cotton wool under the skin, bolster the past with a new version of himself. Perhaps he doesn't have the imagination. How did his mum do it, in the naked knowledge she was one of the bad guys? The shiny patch of skin on his wrist that never goes, the way his finger ache in cold weather, become numb and creaky. The slip of the blood through the veins of his wrists. He's only understood recently why they never asked for help from a neighbour or teacher - the shame, and worse than that for him. The love for his mother.

He cannot stop himself from putting a little something away at every meal. And the ants always come. Who can blame them for following their nature? when you thought about it, everything that happened in the world was just the natural way of things - you didn't look at a termite mound and think how the termites had ruined the earth with termite-made structures. They did what they did. We're just doing what we do." (p.124-125)

Here Hannah, having had an abortion without telling Max she was pregnant:

"'Hi', I whisper, and he blinks and turns his face away. I imagine he is the product of a line of cats born here and related in some way to the one Natalia's grandfather holds in the photograph. Decades of kittens, some drowned in a bucket, others born in a drain, some wild, some loved, fat housecats, a hundred or so dead on the road, some eaten whole as babies by foxes. And this sturdy creature with a fat tom face, the spit of his ancestor, held grumpily by the old man. My hand moves to my stomach. No one will stand in front of my house in thirty years and wonder about my life inside of it. They won't stalk into the night and feel the pull of another time, another country. The cat looks quickly up the other end of the street and I look too, the end where the street lights stop. I come into myself, cold in an overcoat, in the quiet of the night, hiding in a doorway, and nobody in the world - other than this cat - knows I'm here. When I look back the cat has gone. A wind blows down the street, and I start to walk briskly towards the main road, spooked, like the safe part of the night is over, like I've accidentally swum out beyond the shark net. I try not to make ripples as I walk." (p.138) 

Here Max, looking out of the flat window, muses on our irrelevance and the transience of life (how philosophical):

"The blue and silver balloon in the tree outside the window, torn. The girl who let go of it will watch her father die of cancer; if she's lucky that will be after university. If she's really lucky it will be after she has kids and they meet him and the grief is passed on to them in a way they won't understand. And then she will die and her kids will watch that, and understand suddenly, and still this scrap of silver and blue will catch rays from the sun, be swallowed and then shat out by birds or choke them and gleam out of their rotting stomachs." (p.182)

You can critique her political awareness all you like but you can't fault her writing. Still loved it. 

Stay safe. Be kind. 

Day 12 : Rivers in the Sky

Previous book by Elif Shafak was reviewed in 2020, coincidentally during my last 100 Days to Offload. I have also very much enjoyed 'There are Rivers in the Sky'. It is a tangled tale of Arthur and Zaleekhah, by the Thames, and Narin, by the River Tigris. Arthur, born in the victorian slums, manages to pull himself from the mire, drawn by a interest in all things ancient, to a role at the British Museum translating cuneiform tablets, and a passionate desire to understand the Epic of Gilgamesh. The story delves into all sorts of historical details of ancient Mesopotamia (about which I know nothing), and a voyage for Arthur to Nineveh. Narin is a Yazidi girl who lives in Turkey, who travels with her grandmother and father to her homeland to be baptised, only to encounter violence and terror. In 2018 Zaleekhah leaves her husband and moves onto a houseboat on the Thames, with vague plan for suicide. And it is a drop of water that links them all. 

The stories are woven together across the years by the rivers and the poem: Arthur meets Leila, the great great grandmother of Narin and learns about the history of the Yazidis, and I learned that the massacre that happened in 2014 was not the first time that they had been persecuted as a group, being seen as outsiders even in their own homeland. Zaleekhah meets Nen, a woman who tattoos designs of cuneiform and is as fascinated by Mesopotamia as Arthur, and confronts the privilege afforded her by her uncle's wealth. It's way more complicated than that, Zaleekhah is a hydrologist so loads of sciency stuff about water in there too, but I was so engaged that I didn't even note any quotes down. 

Here Arthur's home is flooded, just a lovely train of thought that gives you some idea of the way she writes:

"That weeks it rains incessantly. The Thames swells up, surges forth. The frontier separating the earth and the sky blurs into a listless grey that covers everything, as a gauze would swathe a wound. the spires of the city glower like gibbets in the twilight. So forceful is the downpour that a primordial dread bestirs amongst the Londoners, a fear deep down that they may have angered God - or a river-dwelling nymph or naiad. Gushing through the gutters, pounding on the windowpanes, the water demands to be seen and heard. London shivers and shrivels, folding into itself like a rose withering under the absence of sun.

On the third morning, the family's basement floods, and they find themselves up to their knees in murky foul-smelling water. What little they have, they haul on to the street. While his father carried the mattress, his mother the stools and his younger brother the cooking utensils, Arthur rushes to save the impressions of the Mesopotamian tablets.

'Look at you, stewing over a bunch of scribbles,' says his father under his breath.

Hours later, the rains having finally relented, the ground saturated, a defeated hush falls on the neighbourhood. A full moon hangs in the sky, so bright that Arthur can make out the maria on its surface. An arrangement of light and shade. So much in life is composed of recurrent designs. The zigzags traced by bolts of lightening, the rings inside a felled tree, the threads on a cobweb, the tessellations of a honeycomb, the twists of a conch shell, the petals of a chrysanthemum ... A city also teems with fractal geometry. The catacombs beneath Campden Market, the arches of Paddington Station; the Neo-Gothic ornamentation of the Houses of Parliament ... People, no less, are formed by repeated habit and conventions. The Mesopotamian tablets, too, embody a series of patterns whose meaning Arthur is determined to discover.

Wrapped in an old blanket for warmth, he places his finger on a line of cuneiform and reads out a mysterious name he has not come across before.

Gil-ga-mesh." (p213-214)

Purely coincidentally I had also ordered from the library 'The Beekeeper of Sinjar' by Dunya Mikhail, which is a recounting of the experiences of Yazidi women captured by ISIS during 2014 and sold into slavery and a man from Sinjar who created a network of support to help many of them escape. It was very harrowing and I confess I only skim read the second half, partly because it focussed very much on the 'escape' and I found myself left with a shadow of the unspoken horror that these women, often very young girls too, who were traded as sex slaves, bought and sold repeatedly, and the casualness with which real human beings are treated as disposable. Sometimes a story reminds you too much of the horror in the world and while it is important to learn and acknowledge it, dwelling on it is neither helpful nor healthy.

Stay sane. Be kind. Remember everyone else is a human being too.

Days of audiobooks : day eleven

Listening to audiobooks in my 'office' and doing puzzles has been my relaxation for some weeks. 'Bird Life' by Anna Smaill was a delight; curious and turned into something unexpected, it tells about the friendship between a New Zealand young woman teaching english in Japan, and mourning her brother, and a Japanese woman, also a teacher and also mourning a loss. Here just a lovely moment (that I had to take down like dictation so I may have the punctuation wrong):

 "Dinah placed the carrier bag on the table, she cleared the pile of advertising circulars, the place from this morning's breakfast, the new letter that had been misdirected, sent to a different prefecture, finally redirected to the correct address, finally out the carrier bag on the cleared table and reached inside. It held a box made of thick quality cardboard, white as snow, white as bedlinen, folded along pre-scored lines. Inside the box she felt something shift, heavy and unevenly weighted, it slid. she put the box down in order to delay the moment of opening. She went to the bathroom, studied her face in the mirror, her heart was beating. she washed her hands and face, removed her makeup. She drew the curtains so she could see the light outside, then she walked back to the table and opened the lid. Inside was a pie. It was the pie from Shinjuku, the one that she had not bought. She sat down. Had anything before ever been so beautiful? It was unlikely. The pastry was crisp and fragile, like a bank of fine, sunny, buttery sand. The apples and sweet potato were so thinly sliced they were transparent, glimpses of the apple's perfect pink skin shone through the caramel glaze like flowers caught under rice. It was a fairy tale of a pie, a platonic vision of a pie, it was a pie you might find cooling on a windowsill with a red gingham cloth beneath. she folded the lid to prop up the interior so that the box sat on the table like an expensive display case. Then she took a knife from the drawer and cut herself a thin slice. She took a clean plate from the cupboard and returned top the table, placed the thin slice of pie on the middle of the plate. She sat down. Outside it had started to rain slightly and the sky was a vessel slowly filling with dark resonance. There must be a hole in it somewhere, something leaking. She thought about that bit of lore, was it true? that if you were in a car accident and the car was submerged, that you had to wait until the vehicle filled up with water, until the pressure of inside and outside equalised, then, and only then, you push the door open, and swum out.What strange beauty there must be in that darkness, she thought, the car's headlights illuminating the silt world of the water. You would not need to surface then, you would be able to swim forever. She looked at the piece of pie on the plate, then she took a fork and ate the first mouthful." 

Also 'When We Were Bad' by Charlotte Mendelson, that I may have started previously and then abandoned as it felt familiar. A lovely family saga, guaranteed to make you feel like your own family is nice and normal and well adjusted, and a wonderful window into reform Judaism. The fallout of the decision by Leo to walk away from his wedding echoes through the family and the community and seems to allow his siblings to face up to how much they are living their lives for others. I love a good story examining close family relationships.

Currently listening to 'The Way Home' by Mark Boyle, about his experiment living without money ... 

Stay safe. Be kind. Listening to audiobooks is reading.

10th (yes I know it's the eighth today) : radical honesty

You know how hard it is to tell people what you really think. So as soon as Duffy walked in to work yesterday I told him that his wedging the packets into boxes, stacking packets up and wedging everything onto the shelves was driving me round the bend ... being the person who mainly has to remove items from the shelves. I have told him this several time before. I said it was nicely as I could and made light of it. But it is very annoying. Other human beings are so annoying. I regularly walk around the office muttering to myself about the idiots that I have to work with.

A few months ago a young woman came in for her package. She apologised as she scrolled through her phone looking for her tracking number. I said 'It's ok, I just die a little every day watching people scroll through their phones', and then smiled at her. 

Stay safe. Be kind. Maybe see you tomorrow.

the ninth : work stuff

 

Couple of items at work yesterday amused me. Firstly the fact that that snails really aren't fussy and don't only wreck your spinach seedlings ... they crawl inside post boxes and quite enjoy munching on envelopes too. There was a postbox in Chastleton that was always full of snails as it was in a stone wall and was old and damp under the trees. 

The other letter, from the King, I wondered if it was a sign of the times. I delivered one only last week, presumably a 100th birthday card to a lady on Brunswick road; these letters had always previously been Special Delivery, but they seem to be economising and only sending them recorded delivery now:

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

Day Eight : Garden Stuff

Had crappy day at work, and it's a bit wet and windy but I stepped outside to say hello to the babies.

The honeysuckle is just coming into flower and is going to be lush again this year.

The purple stuff on the walls that comes back reliably every year is lush too, and the bees love it.

The sweet william survived the winter and is enjoying the damp weather:

The valerian is everywhere, but again the bees like it and it's a gorgeous colour.

I realised I don't have a name for my gnome?

He was 'rescued' (a couple of years ago now) from the garden of a deceased customer, because I knew that the council would sweep in and put everything in a skip, which they duly did the following week. He was very worn and faded and I finally got around to repainting him.

(Do not google 'good name for a gnome', that is one weird rabbit hole.)

I've decided on Benedict.

Stay safe. Be kind. Adopt a gnome.

seventh (7th): Three Days

Anne Tyler is my comfort read. I have read at least half a dozen of her twenty something novels, and they are always warm and human. They are about people and their small incidental lives, which is what most of us live, which is what makes them relatable I think. I was thinking this about 'To The Dogs', how the events it contains do not happen to most people. The storyline is escapist because it offers something more 'exciting' than most people's lives. It's not that I only like to read about lives like my own, far from it, I relish vicarious experience of other people's lives, but events do need to be part of real life. In the crime fiction it felt like so much was 'happening' that I wasn't connecting to what the characters were thinking and feeling about their experience. In fact the point of the story is for 'things' to 'happen', the people they are happening to are secondary. Having said that sometimes writers like Anne Tyler blur ... their books do not leave a strong impression, no strong emotional response, only a vague something...

On the other hand Anne Tyler often has huge things happen to her characters, things that totally disrupt their lives, but it is all about how they deal with it. Here Gail's daughter is about to get married, something she feels a little on the periphery of, the grooms parents having taken over the organisation of the event. When her ex-husband arrives on her doorstep with a rescue cat needing a place to stay (away from the allergic groom), they find themselves settling back into their former comfortable routines. They kind of potter about through three days while the momentous thing happens to their daughter. That's all really. I really related to how much she found other people stressful and annoying. 

" 'You're talking as if it would be a beach house,' I said, 'but the cost of living at the beach is astronomical.'

'No, I'm talking about my neck of the woods,' he said, 'Cornboro. They could stay with you in Cornboro and then drive to the nearest beach every day in not much more than an hour.'

'Oh, you're right,' I said. 'And the drive would be so undemanding that Kenny Junior can take the wheel as soon as he gets his learner's permit.'

Max looked confused, but only for a second. 'True enough,' he agreed.

'Max,' I said. 'I appreciate the thought. But the fact is that I believe I have only one span of life allotted to me. I don't feel I have the option of just ... trying out various random ideas and giving up if they don't work out.'

'Yes, well,' Max said with a sigh.

He himself, apparently, assumed he had an infinite number of lives.

Someday I'd like to be given credit for all the times I have not said something that I could have." (p.151)

Stay safe. Be kind. Maybe move to the beach. See you tomorrow.

Sixth day: Completely, unjustly, darkly alone

I bought 'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey and sent it to Monkey, fully intending to pinch it back when I visited. Interestingly mum did not enjoy it at all, but Monkey and I both loved it. I love a book where nothing much happens. And floating around in space nothing much happens. Is it like being dead I wonder. I mean they are almost like Schrodinger's astronauts, there is a nasty crack in the space station so potentially they are kind of alive and dead at the same time, since nobody could save them if there is a breach.

This was quite a scientific book. Much research must have gone in to understanding the flight path and also the experience of the astronauts/cosmonauts. Six people are sealed in a tiny container rushing at thousands of miles an hour around the planet. And they just wake up and get on with their routine day. The book hops from one to another of the people, telling you what they are doing, what they are thinking, what they are eating, what they are talking about. I expected it to feel claustrophobic but they spend so much time looking out that it doesn't feel confined; it's almost as if they live in the whole of space. And I loved the fact that they never seemed to lose their sense of awe at what they are getting to experience. 

Queue the quotes, so much good writing in this book:

"At first on their missions they each miss their families, sometimes so much that it seems to scrape out their insides; now, out of necessity, they've come to see that their family is this one here, these others who know the things they know and see the things they see, with whom they need no word of explanation. When they get back how will they even begin to say what happened to them, who and what they were? They want no view except this view from the window of the solar arrays as they taper into emptiness. No rivets in the entirety of the world will do except these rivets around the window frames. They want padded gangways for the rest of their lives. This continuous hum." (p.12-13)

I love her long convoluted sentences. She has so much to say each time she starts one that she just keeps going:

"This planet that's been relegated out of the centre and into the sidelines - the thing that goes around rather than is gone around, except for by its knobble of moon. This thing that harbours we humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are. And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it's a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind's ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through." (p.28)

Here Nell is on a spacewalk:

"She was outside for hours - almost seven, so she was told. You have no idea at all of the passing of time. You install or repair whatever you are tasked to install or repair; you photograph some of the hatches, the external tools, you do a litter pick of debris, plucking from space a few of those tens of thousands of remnants of jettisoned or exploded satellites and launch-vehicle stages and craft; wherever mankind goes it leaves some kind of destruction behind it, perhaps the nature of all life, to do this. Dusk steals upon you and the earth is a bruising of azure and purple and green, and you remove your sun visor and turn on your light and darkness brings out the stars and Asia passes by bejewelled and you work in your light-pool until the sun comes up once more behind you and burnishes an ocean you can't identify. Daylight spills blue on a snowy landmass moving into view and, against the black, the rim of the earth is a light bright mauve that brings a pain of elation to the gut. What might be the Gobi Desert rolls out beneath you while ground crews give soothing instructions and your partner leafs through the manual attached to the arm of his spacesuit and you can just about see his face through the sun visor, a tranquil oval of human face in the enormous anonymity of our landscape, and meanwhile the solar arrays drink the sun until dusk comes back and your partner is blackened by the sunset behind him and night creeps from the underside of the earth and engulfs it." (p.69-70)

Here Shaun and Pietro discuss a postcard. It is of a painting that, earlier in the book, we had learned was discussed in a class where Shaun and his wife first encountered each other. I liked this conversation because I like art, and I like how sometimes you have to really look. And so much of the book is just about looking. So much of science is just about looking. You have to look to understand, in both art and science. 

"Did someone send you a postcard? Pietro jokes, coming to the doorway of Shaun's quarters and nodding at the Las Meninas that's in free drift.

My wife, fifteen years ago, he says.

Pietro nods, and Shaun nips the postcard from its drift and hands it to him.

Read the back, Shaun says.

I wouldn't - 

No, go ahead.

What is the subject of the painting? his wife has written on the postcard's reverse. Who is looking at whom? the painter at the king and queen; the king and queen at themselves in a mirror; the viewer at the king and queen in the mirror; the viewer at the painter; the painter at the viewer, the viewer at the princes, the viewer at the ladies-in-waiting? Welcome to the labyrinth of mirror that is human life.

Is your wife always so obsessed with petty small-talk? Pietro asks.

And Shaun replies: I'm telling you, it's relentless.

Pietro stares for a while at the painting, and a while longer, then says, It's the dog.

Pardon?

To answer your wife's question, the subject of the painting is the dog.

He looks then - when Pietyro hands back the postcard, reaches across to squeeze the bony dome of Shaun's shoulder before diving away - at the dog in the foreground. He's never given it a second glance, but now he can't look at anything else. It has its eyes closed. In a painting that's all about looking and seeing, it's the only living thing in the scene that isn't looking anywhere, at anyone or anything. He sees now how large and handsome it is, and how prominent - and though it's dozing there's nothing slumped or dumb in that doze. Its paws are outstretched, its head erected and proud.

This can't be coincidental, he thinks, in so orchestrated and symbolic a scene, and it suddenly seems that Pietro is right, that he's understood the painting, or that his comment has made Shaun see a different painting altogether to the one he'd seen before. Now he doesn't see a painter or princess or dwarf or monarch, he sees a portrait of a dog. An animal surrounded by the strangeness of humans, all their odd cuffs and ruffles and silks and posturing, the mirrors and angles and viewpoints; all the ways they've tried not to be animals and how comical this is, when he looks at it now. And how the dog is the only thing in the painting that isn't slightly laughable or trapped within a matrix of vanities. The only thing in the painting that could be called vaguely free." (p104-105)

Las Meninas by Velazques

You could read this book in one sitting it is so short, in fact I might recommend it, for total absorption into their experience. And finally:

"Pietro doesn't dream. He has a rare night of deep and solid unthinking sleep. His breaths and heartbeats are smooth and few, his face resolves of its crease, his body a well of atom-self, an unworried sum of parts, as if he knows that outside the earth falls away in perpetual invention and leaves nothing more for him to do. Our lives here are inexpressible trivial and momentous at once, it seems he's about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere." (p.121)

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

5: Enter Ghost

I picked 'Enter Ghost' by Isabella Hammad from the Women's Fiction Prize shortlist from last year, and it sat waiting for quite a long time. It follows Sonia as she returns to her homeland of Palestine after a long time living in London, reconnecting with her sister and her country. It is set in 2017 and so very much predates the current violence but as I read you feel aware all the time of the tension between the residents of the West Bank and the occupying Israeli forces. Sonia is an actor and, lacking anything particular to spend her time on, she ends up joining a theatre group staging Hamlet in Arabic. Much of the story is taken up with the relationships within the group of actors and watching them rehearse. It was a serious read, lots of literary references, that would no doubt mean more to someone familiar with the play, I often felt I was missing something more subtle. It's very much a book about identity and sense of belonging. And yet also there is also an atmosphere of weary resignation amongst the Palestinians, of acceptance of the restrictions imposed on their lives and the pointlessness of resisting them.

Couple of long quotes, the first really struck me, an incident where they pull up at a checkpoint that bought home the tension of the whole situation:

"One foreign national with an Arab name, two Palestinian citizens of Israel and one West Bank resident with a temporary permit sit in a car with yellow Israeli plates approaching a checkpoint. The line is sluggish: the soldiers are investigating every vehicle, regardless of the number-plate colour. Near the windowless tower, a shabby Israeli flag roils on the wind, looking not at all like those forlorn fraying Palestinian flags that, once illegal but now par for the course, adorn electricity pylons across Ramallah, but rather somehow eternal and careless, a mark of the ragged outposts of empire. Part of the checkpoint itself is surrounded by scaffolding, and the red plastic webbing around the base has broken down, the stick supports in the corners pointing at odd angles. A tap on the driver's window: a slender soldier bends over wearing a very large green helmet like an upside-down basket. He has blond eyelashes. A typical rigmarole of identification cards and passports ensues, conducted in Hebrew with the driver. Then the soldier points at the youngest of the men, the West Bank resident, sitting in the back. Hebrew switches to Arabic. The soldier tells him to get out of the car.

'I have a permit,' says the young man.

'He has a permit,' repeats the woman driving.

Another soldier appears on the other side of the car. He opens the rear door and orders the young man out; the threat has materialised so quickly, unspoken, that if he does not comply they will force him out. Wael gets out. The soldiers escort him into the building at the checkpoint.

As they are passing through the doorway, the blond soldier taps him on the back of the head, and Wael's shoulders flinch into an automatic hunch. It is as though the scene is being played out on a roll of film, from which this frame onward has been bleached.

I was hardly aware of my body as I thrust my door open. I only knew my vision filled with white. And now I was outside, and the morning air was cool on my face and hands. Propelled by an alien force I marched over the uneven, untended terrain that preceded the checkpoint, the rubble and trash and random horizontal blocks of concrete, towards another soldier now standing to attention with his gun ready. Dimly conscious that Mariam and Ibrahim were shouting at me from the car windows, Come back, Sonia, come back, the crucial thought swooped through my mind that the soldier might suspect I had a knife, a suspicion I knew was grounds for shoot to kill, and although my ability to pass as a foreigner might offer me some protection I nevertheless dropped my pace and lifted my arms to make clear that my hands were empty. Rage was making me vibrate. Strangely, as I neared him, the soldier turned to one side, as if to ignore me, except that his hands were on his weapon and he looked ready to use it. He was young, probably eighteen or nineteen. Perhaps he didn't know how to respond to this situation, the approach of a possibly raving woman in white linen trousers and Converse sneakers. He spoke rapidly into his walkie-talkie. Oh god, what am I doing? I thought, and then said loudly in English: 'Where have you taken my son?' The voice came from somewhere other than my mouth, somewhere further away." (p. 153-154)

It is another feature of the book that she frequently finds herself observing, as if she is not part of the scene. And lots of theatre-y language and references, and some of the 'scenes' between the characters are written in the form of a play. It is designed to make you aware of the very fine dividing line between reality and performance; how much of the time we are all playing parts. Here they are seeing the outdoor set that has been constructed for the performance for the first time, having just heard the news that a cast member has received an interrogation order. Where earlier Sonia had been outraged and forthright, here she seems to have accepted that control over her actions is limited:

"Jenan and Wael returned to their positions to complete the dialogue. Both looked rattles, particularly Jenan, which was understandable: she'd just joined us, she was feeling out our dynamic, and now not only was a new dynamic hatching but a threat had materialised of interrogation, of danger. Of dissolution, even. As far as I was concerned, if the Israelis really made an effort to stop us it would not be worth the fight. We were mere human beings, there was only so much we could do. The only person who didn't look unnerved was Mariam, who stared at her actors as though with the force of her gaze she could make them more sturdy. I had a feeling I sometimes get when I drink too much coffee, which was that while standing still, watching Jenan and Wael, another more agitated Sonia was wriggling inside my skin, trying to get out. I was thirsty as well and I needed the loo, and in this state of physical discomfort something strange happened. My viewpoint switched, and as though I were in a dream and my perspective had been breached I moved like a surveillance drone and saw our project from above, situation fragilely in time and place, this summer, this side of the wall. Accompanying this vision was a fear, almost a premonition, that it was all foretold anyway, everything had been decided in advance, we were only acting parts that had been given to us, and now some inexorable machinery was being set in motion that would sooner or later throw our efforts out into the audience, dismantle our illusions, and leave us cowering before the faceless gods of Fate and State." (p.223-224)

Seriously thinking about making some fatet betenjan.

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

Fourth day: Bee Movie

 Some of my favourites, the furrow bees, they are not cute and fluffy, in fact they look like tiny black flies, but they are busy doing the same job as all the others.

I watered the garden ... so of course it finally rained.

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

Day 3 and a half : Book Club Books

'The Gentleman from Peru' by André Aciman was our book club book in April. I am pissed that I spent my hard earned money on it. The premise must have seemed interesting since we must have voted for it at an earlier meeting but it only took a couple of pages for me to know it was going to annoy me. A group of affluent young Americans are stranded at a hotel on the Amalfi coast by a boat breakdown and they meet a fellow resident, the gentleman from Peru. The minute he rests a hand on one of the young men's shoulders and appears to cure a nagging injury I admit I developed a bad attitude to it. I hate this kind of tosh. The use of a description for the character rather than his name to create some kind of fake 'mystery' was annoying too. His magical abilities seemed many and various and were never questioned, but mostly he had contrived their presence in order to befriend one of the women, and proceeds to tell her she is the reincarnation of his lost love. He wines and dines her and takes her to places he used to go with his former love, until she begins to remember her past life. But he is old and dying and tells her that their lives are out of synch and it will be three hundred and something years before the two of them will be reincarnated and young at the same time. Bleurgh ... I notice now, looking at the book, "Readers adore the Gentleman from Peru" it claims but that nobody has put their actual names to the 'recommendations' on the cover. We did have quite an interesting discussion about the book, the young woman leading the group had plenty of questions to keep the chat going, and I love the fact that people are there for the books and have opinions they are happy to share.

Then this month's book was 'To The Dogs' by Louise Welsh, that I fortunately ordered from the library and read in pretty much one sitting. It was a crime thriller set in Glasgow about a university professor who hasn't quite managed to escape the criminal roots of his family, as he discovers when his son is arrested for drug dealing. It was fast paced and well plotted but I hate it when characters make stupid choices and behave in irrational ways. So while I'm going to go to the meeting next week I am disappointed that this was the second book in a row that I found weak and uninteresting. I am sticking it out thanks to Irena Rey, because I do love having people who want to talk about books, and hoping that there will be other good reads in the months ahead.

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

Third day - Irena Rey

I read 'The Extinction of Irena Rey' by Jennifer Croft a couple of months ago for my book group (yes, this is how far behind the reviews are). I knew I was going to love it after the first page, and even more so when I discovered she had translated for Olga Tokarczuk. I was perturbed to discover that most people in the book group did not like it very much (more book group issues to come).

So the book is about a group of translators who are going to stay with their author, Irena Rey, to work on her next book. This is her routine, to get them all together so she can supervise ... and control. In the first part of the book they are all just referred to by their language, as the story progresses they learn each other's real names. While the book appears here in English the story is being written by the Spanish translator (presumably in Spanish), and then of course translated by the English translator, a woman who is of course a character in the story. Others in the group did not like the 'translator footnotes', but I enjoyed the light it shone on the relationship between the two women. It's all about the layers. There is lots of talk about translation, and about literature. It's a very intellectual book, lots of obscure references, and vocabulary that I was not familiar with. It starts out kind of normal but then Irena disappears, and her husband, who usually takes care of the domestic stuff, is absent. The translators don't know what to do with themselves. They flail around waiting for her to return, but she doesn't. It wasn't until weeks after the meeting (shows it was a good book because I was still thinking about it) that it occurred to me that it was a grown up version of Lord of the Flies. They are dumped in a strange, scary environment (the house is on the edge of a strange and forbidding forest) without the usual support, they forage for food in the forest, leaders emerge, they create their own rituals, they explore their environment, rivalries develop ... and someone dies falling off a cliff. The whole book had a surreal, dreamlike quality, nothing they thought they knew about Irena or each other turns out to be true.

None of the quotes I noted down seem to make any sense now so I'm just going to give you this long bit because I feel it captures the atmosphere of the book. Book club people didn't like the 'descriptive' bits either so I was left wondering what they wanted from their reading:

"Dawn was impending; already the sky was blueish grey. I took Tropinka Street out of the village, east into the national park, walking carefully so as not to crush any of the infinitesimal frogs that burst from the pine needles half a dozen at a time; like translators, perhaps, they were invisible other than in motion. I shuddered to think what bad luck it would be ifI were to crush an infinitesimal being underfoot.

Because I didn't feel confident in my ability to detect the kugans and other unmarked graves around the forest, I determined to limit my purview to the known dead. Still, I wanted to feel at least a little brave, so I set out for a place I'd never been but that I'd read about, a so-called place of national memory about three kilometres away.

As I walked, I saw that some of the trees wore more strange symbols, white lines with red between them; their paint was fading, chipped. A massive sign at a crossroads listed all the things you weren't allowed to do inside the national park part of the forest: hunt mushrooms, smoke cigarettes, stray from the official path. Yet on either side of the official path the forest floor was soft with moss, opulent, beckoning, extending an almost opiate effect.

To my left, I saw smoke rising, and I strayed a little from the path. Beams of light that were so bright they seemed opaque, almost solid, embraceable, had touched down upon a mossy stump. the rest o0f the tree lay in the grass, the exposed wood rough as though after an explosion - just as Petra had seen in her dream.

I squatted beside it, searching for the fire. But there was no fire, and the smoke must have been steam, abundant and unfurling, the metamorphosing dew the moss had gathered overnight. I watched it a while: It was beautiful, but it was also disturbing. I decided to take a picture, not to keep as a souvenir, but to study later, after I was fully awake.

When I pressed the shutter circle on the screen of my iPhone, the artificial click dispelled any lingering ease. I rose from the ground and felt wild as a hunted animal. Leshy or the archer could be anywhere, I realised - in the moss, in the mushrooms, in the trees. I thought I heard steps, or something that sounded like steps. It was a deer, I told myself. Just red deer grazing.

I remembered the path, and then I saw it, and without thinking of the tiny frogs I leaped across the moss field and retook it. I began walking quickly without allowing myself to turn around. I knew that this was happening because I lost my lucky acorn, and because I had failed to understand Irena, and most of all because none of us had acted - had ever acted - -in time. The steps got louder, and I took off at a run." (p.149-150)

Stay safe. Be kind. May see you later with more books.

Day 2 - Visitor from Japan

Well, I totally failed that. I sat down with the computer yesterday but got distracted. Whatever. 

Today the house has rarely been so clean, not in recent memory anyhow. Monkey sensei's friend Tomoya is arriving from Japan tomorrow, for, shall we say, an extended visit. It started off as perhaps a couple of weeks, but in the end he's staying till August. In Japan you do not quit your job to go off travelling. It's just not done, so it's safe to say he is taking a chance to do this. He wants to improve his English, go to gigs and spend extended periods browsing in record shops. Monkey is very worried that he is so laid back about the whole thing, he insisted I did not need to meet him at the airport so he's getting the bus on his own ... but at least he'll look the right way when he crosses the road.

His mum and dad have made Monkey very welcome when she visits so I wanted to do likewise:

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

100 Days to Offload: Day One

Way back in 2020 when the first weeks of Covid lockdown were dragging out I joined in with 100 Days to Offload. I was just looking though old blog posts for the name of a bush in the yard and was reminded of the challenge, and how it did motivate me to write more regularly, to not worry about just chatting and not having anything very significant to say. So I thought I would do it again. No pressure, and no beating myself up.

I have had a lovely couple of afternoons potting up seedling, mostly kale and salad leaves, and then doing some tidying in the yard, rejuvenating old compost with worm compost. Then I turned round and realised that the physocarpus opulifolius was humming with bees and hoverflies, and it made me happy because it's World Bee Day, and I determined to spend more time watching the bees (and other flying creatures) this summer.

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

I who have never known men

I am going to get back on track with everything, reading, reviewing, watering the garden, learning Japanese ... I know that's not going to happen but I'll make a start, because the rule says you don't beat yourself up about stuff.

(Sorry, some spoilers as the book is not really about what happens.)

So, 'I who have never known men' by Jacqueline Harpman was the most weird of reads, and seeing from Wiki that the author was a psychoanalyst explains it somewhat. We start in a bunker prison, in which forty women are held in a cage, without explanation, guarded by men who provide for and punish them but who never speak. It has been years, mostly they have forgotten the outside world. The book is narrated by the one younger woman; having been imprisoned as a child, she is the only one with some curiosity and desire to understand what is happening. She begins to measure time using her own heartbeat and becomes obsessed with watching a younger guard. Just when you begin to wonder where the story is going an alarm sounds and the guards abandon them, the keys in the lock. With some trepidation the women make their way up the stairs out of their bunker to find a strange empty world. 

The description of their existence in the cage was so unremittingly hopeless that I found it stressful and anxiety making simply to read; it was claustrophobic and terrifying in the extreme. The powerlessness and hopelessness, and yet they just lived on. And then they emerge into a world in which they are no less trapped and hopeless. The bunker is mysteriously supplied with electricity, food and water, but little else of use. And no information about the world and what became of it. After a time they decide to walk away, taking supplies. They find other bunker prisons, filled with the corpses of prisoners who had been abandoned without hope of escape. But nothing else. A world of isolated prisons. And in the end I read the book as a metaphor for the human condition, and an examination of what gives life meaning and makes us human. The young woman is almost devoid of personality as she has no experiences and no real connection to other human beings; they were forbidden to touch each other and my mind broke at the notion of such a lack of human contact. They struggle to make some kind of new existence outside but there is nothing in the world for them, so they are tied to the resources available at each of the prison bunkers that they find along the way. The young woman has a yearning to keep looking but the older women want to just settle and live, which is what they end up doing. Gradually, over years, the women die off, until she is alone, and she sets off wandering again.

So all you are left with is questions. Are they really any more free outside the prison? Are we, as people, trapped inside the society we have created, free? What is freedom? What makes a human society meaningful? It was all very existential.

Here, they discover the first of many prisons, it gives a good impression of the dispassionate nature of her telling, she is observing, with very little emotional engagement:

"It was the half-light of night-time, but I could see the cage: the floor was strewn with dead women. They seemed to be everywhere, lying across the mattresses, flung on top of each other, groups of them gripping the bars, in heaps, scattered in an appalling chaos. Some were naked, the dresses of others in tatters, they were in frightful attitudes, torments, their mouths and eyes open, their fists clenched as if they'd fought and killed one another in the madness from which death had snatched them.

Here, the siren had gone off in the middle of artificial night, the door was locked and the guards - of course! - hadn't bothered to open it. The women had tried. They'd died of grief, long before hunger killed them. Without food, furious and desperate, how many days had they spend clawing at the bars with their remaining strength, trying to prise open the lock without keys or tools, their fingers bleeding, trying to achieve the impossible - sick, crazed, lying down exhausted and then getting up again to attack there steel with their bare hands, screaming, crying, dazed, sometimes recovering their wits to contemplate their fate and flee to it in fury, and now they stank, distended, putrid and green, infested with maggots that swarmed over their decaying bodies, a grotesque image of the fate that could have been ours, had it not been for an incredible stroke of luck." (p.90-91)

Stay safe. Be kind.

Reflections on Monkey

When Monkey first went to Japan back in March 2022 she started sending us 'pyjama selfies', because the hotels provide pyjamas for guests, such a wonderful idea. This was our first pyjama selfie and Tish said we looked like we had joined a cult. 

While I had the overarching plan for our trip to Shikoku it was Monkey who worked out the details; she knew when the trains were running, she found interesting places to see and knew when they were open, she checked what the local specialities to eat were. She found the garden and the workshops and the boat trip, and shared her wisdom about life in Japan. She made the whole trip a delight. I could not have done it without her and would not have wanted to do it with anyone else.

She has struggled with anxiety and depression for much of her 20s and to see how learning Japanese and going to Japan has transformed her makes me love the place even more. She has grown in confidence and become a real grown-up, but retains her childlike enthusiasm for everything she does:

dancing on the udon dough ... don't ask me why

insisting on putting on the entire set of Samurai armour

ice-cream pretty much every day

crossing the vine bridge

and skimming stones in the river down below

We rode bikes and climbed mountains together

We managed to balance the things that I wanted to do and the things she wanted to do to create the perfect holiday ... but we hardly have any photos of the two of us together.

Stay safe. Be kind.