Scary Stories

 

I read 'Care of Wooden Floors' back in 2013 (go back and read that, I used to write proper reviews😐), and it was one of my best books of the year, probably *the best*. So 'The Anechoic Chamber' by Will Wiles is new out and I was excited to read it. While the stories are excellently clever, I don't like horror/ghost stories so some of them did not float my boat ... and they were not good for bedtime reading. I don't like being frightened, and there is a very fine line between disturbing and frightening.

While I did enjoy (just disturbing enough) the title story, and 'The Acknowledgements', that I started reading thinking it was the actual acknowledgments, the one that I enjoyed most was 'Moths', about a man sorting through family photographs after his father's death, an interesting tale of family dynamics with a hint of mystery:

"After Mum died four years ago, the photography tailed off. Everything tailed off. Had it been about her, all the time? He kept a photograph Blu-Tac'd inside the little bureau he used as a desk at home: Mum, in the mid 1970s, before any of us were born, sitting on a grassy slope with her knees up, a wide unguarded smile on her face, and a strand of brown hair blowing across her eyes, which are closed. Quite an 'arty' shot, now I think about it, but it was without a doubt Dad's favourite. By the mid 1990s, this exposure had faded quite badly, and Dad was able to find the correct negative and make a new print. That was an unanswerable vindication of his photo hoarding, and afterwards there was no question of him throwing anything away." (p.106)

Stay safe. Be kind. Don't forget it's Banned Books Week ... I did!

lots of books

I seem to have neglected the blog even longer than I thought I had.

Claire's library lends out puzzles, so we had a nice couple of evenings doing some. I also borrowed the Kate Atkinson (When Will There Be Good News) from her. I read another one while I was there as well, but the title escapes me. Enjoyed them very much, excellent holiday reading.

'The World According to Garp' by John Irving, whose style is becoming familiar, was also excellent. I have seen the film but don't recall it much. Another wonderful cast of quirky characters whose eventful lives are randomly intertwined. 

'Spoilt Creatures' by Amy Twigg was the book club book for August. Holiday time reduced the group to just three of us but we still have a lively exchange of views. It takes place in a women's 'commune', a safe place for those escaping various situations. It started out idyllic but very quickly got dark and menacing, shades of Lord of the Flies. I found it unsatisfying because people behaved in unrealistic ways and the motivations of some characters was too vague. The denouement was a little predictable and aspects of it felt lazy and clichéd. (I wanted to write something longer and considered but as usual have drifted away before I found the time) Here, the early atmosphere:

"The other women ate like carrion, tearing at the food with their dirty hands, greedy and fast and indiscriminate. I watched as Molly crammed an entire roasted onion into her mouth, the pulpy excess spilling on to the floor. Insatiable, these women. Again and again they filled their plates, squabbling over the last potato, their mouths glistening with oil. It was as if they were trying to plug something inside themselves, satisfy some unknowable need. Blythe was the only one who didn't eat. I suspected she survived in some other way, was able to sustain herself on light and air: the immaterial.

Afterwards, Sarah brought out dessert. Pears stewed in syrup, the size and colour of hearts. Lemon drizzle cake cut into uneven squares, the frosting so sweet it put stones in my cheeks. Hazel and Pearl fought over a slice, their playfulness turning mean as Hazel dug her nails into Pearl's arm and licked her tongue across the top.

I ate everything that was offered to me, eating until my stomach hurt. Ready to gorge myself on this new life I'd found." (p.74)

'Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper' by Harriet Scott Chessman was a random charity shop find and a delight. I was attracted after reading 'The Yellow House' last year; this is a novelisation about the work of Mary Cassatt and her lovely relationship with her sister Lydia. It follows a couple of years when they are living in Paris and closely involved in the Impressionist art scene. The book is actually about Lydia, her experience of watching her sister work and aware of her own impending mortality and how it felt that her only purpose in living is to contribute to her sister's work. I noted this, and wondered if this was the way it used to be to be ill, when there were so few actual treatments, you were just ill, waiting to either get better or die:

"I call to Lise, or to May if she's home. My mouth opens and my stomach pitches and heaves. Mother comes too slowly and I can't bear to ask her to clean up my messes. Lise in immature and dislikes illness; she wrinkles her nose and holds her breath, sighing and making a show of taking the basin away. May's better, because she has courage, and backbone, but she cannot disguise her distress at my condition.

Why is it that I must feel at fault for this sickness? Surely I am not at fault. In the midst of my collapse, I feel fury at my family, the way they tiptoe around me and look at me with hushed faces, as if I've already died; and yet, at the same time, they seem impatient with me. Be healthy or go, choose one or the other, I imagine them thinking, we can't bear to accompany you further into this illness." (p.65-66)

Lionel Shriver's book 'Should We Stay Or Should We Go' was a random library find on the wrong shelf. Kay and Cyril decide not to linger in mental and physical decline and agree to kill themselves at age 80. The book is a series of stories following the consequences of this decision where the event in question has different outcomes. It got a little surreal when human being end up discovering a regenerative medicine and live forever, and the story where they both get sectioned and live out a miserable existence in a mental institution is an object lesson in being careful what you plan. 

Lastly 'Beautyland' by Marie-Helene Bertino was the book club book for September. It was sold as being about an alien, but at no point did I engage with the character on that level. Adina arrives in strange circumstances and though her childhood communicates with her 'co-aliens' on the home planet via a fax machine. She experiences 'lessons' in her sleep where they teach her about stuff. I assumed the character was on the autistic spectrum and this explained her inability to fit in and understand social rules. In effect the book was very much about what it means to be a human and be accepted by other humans. Her friend Toni persuades her to publish her faxes as a book and she becomes something of a sensation as a mysterious reclusive author. I enjoyed it, it had some thoughtful observations about the human condition.

Can't promise I won't just do another one of these in six weeks time. Who knows.

Stay safe. Be kind. 

Not Offloading much (day 19)

 

Having worked the entire of July without a break I finally got the day off on Friday ... and spent it cleaning the house. I got up early, cleaned Tomoya's room (very thoroughly, even dusted the bookshelves) then hoovered my office and down the landing, bumped the tall mirror that stands against the wall and shattered it into huge lethal pointy bits and equally dangerous tiny shards. After cleaning it up very thoroughly I moved on to clean the bathroom, then hoover my room, down the stairs, the hallway, living room and kitchen. I cleaned my lovely new front door and hoovered the porch (considering repainting the blue as not sure it goes well with the red).

Then I unblocked all the drains, including removing the kitchen U-bend, ran the hot water cleaning cycle on the washing machine and cleaned the filter. I put the hall rug to soak in the bath and washed the sofa cushion covers. Finally I cleaned out the worms and gave them new 'bedding'. In between I chatted to both Monkey and my sister, handed my telly off to Curry's to fix the DVD player, went to the library and the garden centre for a washing liquid refill, then to Dunk's for afternoon cuppa. So I was pretty smug and satisfied with the result by the end of the day and am free to ignore all domestic chores for a month.

Tish came across 'The Living Sea of Waking Dreams' by Richard Flanagan (Booker prize winner, but not this novel) and recommended it to me, which is nice because it's not something she's done before, we have quite different reading tastes. More weird shit. But in a different way. I ached for Anna's mother through the whole book, and had quite a chat with Monkey about the whole 'assisted dying' thing, which is linked in with this whole notion of keeping someone alive by force rather than allowing death to come naturally, (though not the same thing of course). Anna's mother Francie has multiple health problems and one son, Tommy, (with different kinds of problems) who lives nearby and cares for her. Her other son Terzo and her daughter Anna live further afield and prefer to just throw money at 'the problem'. When the doctor tentatively suggests that keeping her 'comfortable' is the best way to go Terzo goes apeshit and uses all his money and influence to get them to keep his mother hanging on by a thread, suffering. I hated him. Anna seems to then drift in to this dreamlike existence of sitting with her dying mother, almost as an excuse to escape her stressful life. And then the weird shit starts, and bits of her body start disappearing. And people don't seem to notice. I thought at first it was her imagination, but the body parts seem to be really gone. Then other people start losing body parts, including her son, who eventually becomes just a few fingers that continue to play video games in his darkened bedroom (see what I mean ... weird shit). 

And ... then there's the social media addiction and the horror of the destruction of the natural world, wildfires and ... and ...

The chat with Monkey also veered into the value of human life. How all human life is equal, but not. Valuable but also cheap and disposable. People are dying all the time. Huge amounts of money might be spent to save one person, like a child fallen into a well, or millionaires in a submarine that might or might not have exploded, but people drowning in the Channel or dying of starvation in Gaza are somehow not saveable. This book raised all those questions as the reader watches this rich man demand that his mother is kept alive at all costs. 

One of several quotes that often read more like someone's brain racing through thoughts, loved the word, Solastalgia:

"She googled vanishings. Nothing. She posted a penguin meme she couldn't hold her thoughts she couldn't read she clicked through smoke sending people crazy it triggers anxiety a professor said it's like war the enemy is attacking the city we don't know where the enemy is. The planet's life support system may collapse flat earth believers now number millions new words for a new age, reads a meme. Pyro-cumuloniumbus giant fire-generating clouds sixteen kilometres high creating more fire through lightening, ember attacks, wind, fire tornadoes. Omnicide. Solastalgia emotion induced by the loss of everything. What is the image for nothing? Where is a language she thought she didn't she tried Insta again it loaded. So much joy! Instagram, blessed Novocaine of the soul! Foodholidayssmilinggroupsshopping. She had to get off. She knew it. She had to get off." (p.103)

A very 21st century book, all the world's modern day problems encapsulated here. Sometimes I find the stories of tiny, tiny wins against the massive destruction more depressing than uplifting. But like the anti nuclear movement previously said, Protest and Survive.

Stay safe. Be kind. Don't be a fascist.

Hiroshima Day

 

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In excess of 200,000 people were killed, in the immediate blasts, in the aftermath and of longer term radiation sickness and cancers. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remember, and so should the rest of the world.

Stay safe. Be kind. Never again.

Books

So 'The Coin' by Yasmin Zaher is due back at the library, and I am really struggling to get anything done so this is a whizz through a few books from July. This was some weird shit. Another Palestinian character (after Enter Ghost a couple of months ago), but living in New York and obsessed with cleanliness and designer labels. Note to self : try writing a note to yourself about when and why you request a book from the library; I have no idea why I ordered this. I reiterate, it was weird shit. Loved the flip book on the edges of the pages though, of a coin spinning: I tried to make a film of it but couldn't get the pages to run smoothly. 

'Your Neighbour's Table' by Gu Byeong-mo was the book club book for July. Interesting discussion was had as usual but I did not like this book. Originally in Korean, it is a strange tale of 'communal living', arranged by the government in subsidised accommodation to 'encourage' young couples to have more children. It didn't really tackle the issue of why people are not having children, nor what countries might do about low birth rates; maybe treat women with more respect springs to mind. A bunch of useless husbands and stressed wives share a block of flats and struggle to get to know each other, let alone like each other. 

'Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil' by Oliver Darkshire (who has no website) was bought for my granddaughter Aisla. A brilliant disturbing plot with magic and goblins (who appear to be a fungal based lifeform) and layabout husbands (I see a theme developing) and a pot of basil. Isabella is a heroine for our times indeed. Aspects of the humour are very Terry Pratchett but in no way a steal of his style. Particularly liked the footnotes. Totally loved it ... and hope she does too.

'Case Histories' by Kate Atkinson is my second foray into Jackson Brodie. I was rather snooty about him last time, back to 2009 but I loved this one. Engaging characters, convoluted plot that all pulled together believably. 

Little quote here:

"Julia embarked own a second cup of tea. It was too hot for tea; Jackson longed for an ice-cold beer. Julia's white teacup bore the imprint of her mouth in lipstick and Jackson experienced a sudden memory of his sister. she had worn a less strident colour, a pastel pink, and on every cup and glass she ever drank from she left behind the ghostly transfer of her lips. The thought of Niamh made his heart feel heavy in his chest, literally, not metaphorically." (p.157)

But the moment that caught my eye was this one, after a particularly grisly murder:

"If she could have one wish - if her fairy godmother (noticeably absent from her life so far) were to suddenly appear in the cold living room of the cottage and offer to grant her whatever she wanted - Michelle knew exactly what she would ask for. She would ask to go back to the beginning of her life and start all over again." (p.68)

Because this is the exact plot of 'Life After Life' that she published in 2013.

Stay safe. Be kind. 

Stop and Think it Over

I intermittently contemplate giving up the blog. I struggle to express myself because I can't think of a reason why anyone would listen to me. It all feels a little pointless and self indulgent in the face of wars, global climate change and the terrifying rise and normalisation right wing ideology. I am horrified by the state of the world, so much death and destruction in Gaza, and governments acting in the last few days as if they only just noticed it was happening. I write to my MP and donate money but the bigger it is the more insignificant your efforts feel.  What else is there to do.

How do we lead moral lives in the age of bullies?

But I am an unremitting optimist ... and so I stop and think it over.

The basil is growing well this summer. I may have another go at making pesto ... 

Stay safe. Be kind. Don't be a fascist. 

Fundamentally (unload 16)

Too much ISIS recently. 'Fundamentally' by Nussaibah Younis was a different take on the 'Isis bride' issue: the main character Nadia finds herself  in Iraq working with the UN to help return women formerly married to Isis soldiers to their home countries. It's as much about her, and the team of people around her, as about the women she is trying to help. The way she deals with the situation is far more about her own troubles and worldview, and considering the author has considerable inside knowledge of Iraq it felt rather depressing to think that people with so little real knowledge or experience might be sent into such a situation.

I am too tired to try and write about the book and it's in a long queue at the library, so there you go. Work is stressful and crappy and three more people phoned in sick today and nobody is really managing the situation. I mainly just want to go to sleep. Trying to read other less demanding books. Didn't like the book club book again ... oh well.

Stay safe. Be kind.

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.