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.