Life is short

 

Having lost several days of my holiday to the US election and its aftermath, then another day to a wasted outing when our train was returned to Piccadilly because of another train broken down on the line ahead, I have tried to find solace in reading. I have loved everything by Ann Patchett ( ... reviewed here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here!) and 'The Dutch House' was no exception. Danny and Maeve live there, with a somewhat absent father and a rather more absent mother, cared for by Fluffy the nanny, and Sandy and Jocelyn the housekeepers. After their mother leaves for good their father marries Andrea and a tense stalemate sets in. When he dies suddenly it turns out that the whole kit and caboodle, the house and his business, now belong to her. Maeve is in college and Danny in high school by this time, she promptly throws them out. 

It is a beautiful, extravagant house, built by a Dutch family who had since all expired, that was bought with contents, including all their personal possession. Once the raccoon infestation in the attic is sorted out the place is preserved in its entirety, including the portraits above the mantle of Mr and Mrs VanHoeBeek. I thought that the house would become like a character in the book, but it didn't. Although there are many description of it, it looms large in their lives but not really in the story. Danny tells the story of the two of them, finding their own paths, but bonded by the fact of just having each other ... and the house. They sit in the car outside and smoke and talk, not to spy or even to unnerve Andrea, but simply because it is their place. I just love a good sibling story, I feel for people who don't have siblings, there is something unique about these people who you have spent your childhood with. Maeve is the protective big sister and tries to push Danny into becoming a doctor, using their father's education trust fund to put him through expensive medical school, but all he wants to do is follow his father into real estate. They muddle through life until Maeve has a heart attack and their whole lives start to turn full circle. As always, it can be so hard to put my finger on what makes good writing. I engaged with all the people and their relationships, and then she broke my heart and mended it again. It left me feeling that life is short and precious.

Here, in the aftermath of their departure from the Dutch House:

"Maeve was feeling better but I told her to go upstairs and sit down while I lugged what I had up three flights of stairs to her apartment. There was only one bedroom and she told me to take it. I told her no.
'You're going to take the bed,' she said, 'because you're too long for the couch and I'm not. I sleep on the couch all the time.'
I look around her little apartment. I'd been there plenty of time but you see a place differently when you know you're going to be living there. It was small and plain and suddenly I felt bad for her, thinking it wasn't right that she should be in this place when I was living on VanHoeBeek Street, forgetting for a minute that I wasn't living there anymore. 'Why do you sleep on the couch?'
'I fall asleep watching television,' she said, then she sat down on that couch and closed her eyes. I was afraid she was going to cry but she didn't. Maeve wasn't a crier. She pushed her thick black hair away from her face and looked at me. 'I'm glad you're here.'
I nodded. For a second I wondered what I would have done if Maeve hadn't been there - gone home with Sandy or Jocelyn? Called Mr Martin the basketball coach to see if he would have me? I would never have known.
That night in my sister's bed I stared at the ceiling and felt the true loss of my father. Not his money or his house, but the man I sat next to in the car. He had protected me from the world so completely that I had no idea what the world was capable of. I had never thought about him as a child. I had never asked him about the war. I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him. There was nothing to do about that now but add it to the catalog of mistakes." (p.98-99)

Stay safe. Be kind. Love your siblings.

All the stuff

It has been a troublesome time. I have found myself obsessed with the American election, compulsively watching news reports and rallies on Youtube and pouring over the politics pages in the Guardian. The end is nigh, and all the rest of the world can do is hold its breath and wait. I could pretend I have been trying to distract myself, but no, I have just wallowed. All these books have been read weeks ago.

'The Advantages of Nearly Dying' by Michael Rosen was bought ages ago. In it he recounts through poetry the experience of nearly dying of Covid. I'm so glad he didn't die. Many of them relate to his body, and the things that nearly dying did to it, they are often witty and poignant at the same time, but the one I loved at the end has nothing to do with Covid. The rhetoric of the Republican nominee and his minions makes me afraid for the world again, so much hate and fear mongering, so much reducing people to less than human. Please, if you have a vote, vote for hope.

Sonnet for Anne Frank

Since you took us into that attic space

no room under the eaves has been the same.

Wherever we go - our homes or others

whenever we dip and duck under beams

you are in the shadows, writing pages

laughing, crying, eating, daring to love

imagining a better world than yours

How you wrote leads us to think we know you.

You compressed so much life into that loft

which we pore over and love you for it

yet the real world - not the one you imagined

didn't allow you to live and write anymore.

Each time we read, we struggle to enjoy

your love of life while knowing how it ended.

'We All Want Impossible Things' by Catherine Newman was a lovely story of friendship, put to the ultimate test as Edi is dying, and Ash focusses her life in on caring for her. We watch their day to day struggles and learn the history of their lives. It was warm and full of love, even with the inevitable ending. 

"I want to stay in the deep thrum of the profound, but I don't. Instead, I notice that Edi's nail polish is peeling - should I remove it? - and that Honey's wearing a sky-blue sweater I've never seen before, and that it looks great on him. The toasts are over, and Belle is laughing with Jonah, flashing the perfect gap between her front teeth. Jules is leaning against me, so grown-up in her tights and boots, and her hair smells like apples. Everyone is so beautiful. I'm seeing all of us surrounding Eli in this room, her bed in the middle like a raft. I'm seeing Shapeley on the grid of the town's streets and buildings, seeing the town in the state, the state in the country, the country in the globe, the earth in the boundless, endless universe, surrounded by infinity, spinning pointlessly. I slip outside into the hallway to catch my breath, and Honey follows, squats down by me. 'You okay?'

'Yeah. I think I'm having vertigo. Or, like, an existential crisis.'

Or apeirophobia, which, Jules has explained to me, is fear of eternity, which I'm definitely having. Where will Edi be? And for how long? Nowhere and forever. No." (p.155-156)

'The Garden Against Time' by Olivia Laing was bought at a Literature Festival event back in September (or maybe it was August). She tells the story of a Suffolk garden that she restores, and the history of the people who have over time impacted on its development. The whole book was so very readable, engaging, alternating between describing her own struggles with stories from the garden's past. Random quotes because she had so much thought provoking stuff to say, often at a complete tangent to gardening.

"Morris was not simply being nostalgic here. In fact, the accusation of nostalgia can be seen as part of the same Whig mindset, the belief that humanity is moving perpetually upward in its attainments, and that to pause or reverse is automatically a negative and regressive act, with correspondingly devastating social and economic consequences. What Morris believed instead was that many of the decisions around progress had been wrong, that good and simple ways of doing things had been replaces by cheaper, quicker ones, which impoverished and made ugly the lives of many while making millionaires of a very few. He didn't hesitate to inculpate himself in this dynamic, as purveyor, employer or consumer, asking in one of his lecture the still unanswerable, still troubling and turbulent question: 'how can we bear to use, how can we enjoy something that has been a pain and grief for the maker to make?'" (p.171)

"The first I came to was St Bartholomew the Great, the oldest surviving church in London. I lit a candle and went on by way of West Smithfield, pausing to look at my favourite memorial. It marks the site where King Richard II met with Wat Tyler and other representatives of the Great Revolt of 1381, to agree the political reforms that he later reneged on, killing Tyler in the process and later John Ball too; the events that inspired William Morris to write his time-travelling fantasy A Dream of John Ball. The plaque is carved with John Ball's famous words, still unfulfilled, still yearning: 'THINGS CAN NOT GO ON WELL IN ENGLAND NOR EVER WILL UNTIL EVERYTHING SHALL BE IN COMMON WHEN THERE SHALL BE NEITHER VASSAL NOR LORD AND ALL DISTINCTIONS LEVELLED.'" (P.228)

"In 1945 Hodgkin wrote to Kenneth Clark begging to be allowed to produce an official record of the plants that had established amidst the ruins of the City. Clark was chair of the War Artists Advisory Committee, established in the autumn of 1939 to commission artists to produce a documentary record of Britain at war. The best known images in the collection are those made by Henry Moore and Edward Ardizzone of people sleeping in the impromptu air-raid shelters of the Underground, mouths hanging open, bodies spectral, worn to a revelling by fear and exhaustion. But there are thousands more, by over four hundred artists, known and unknown, recording bombing raids and burning churches, first-aid posts and operating theatres; even a house in the act of collapsing. Convalescent Nurses Making Camouflage Nets; An Emergent Bridge over the River Thames; Fire in a Paper Warehouse; Escape of the Zebra from the Zoo during an Air Raid Fire: the titles attest to the uncanny and often terrible sights that were witnessed and logged for the nation." (p235-236)

'The Life of a Banana' by P.P. Wong came from Monkey's shelf and is the story of a young Chinese girl living in the UK and her experience of trying to be both, British and Chinese. It was sometimes a hard book to read alongside all the other political stuff as there are descriptions of unpleasant racist bullying. It starts with the death of her mother and goes downhill from there, with her unloving grandmother, weird uncle and wayward aunt becoming her new family. She finds little niches of support, from her brother and a kindred spirit at school but her adolescence becomes a struggle without her mother's support and guidance. 

"Mama said London is a cosmo-politican country and 'cos of that it's okay to be an 'ethnic minority' 'cos there are quite a few of us. But then it gets weird 'cos I'm neither here nor there. Like I'm not totally white and I'm not Singaporean either. I love Sunday roasts and Chinese food too, but I can't speak fluent Chinese, and the only Chinese word I can write is my name. None of my friends have ever been Chinese apart from when I met Jay, but he's half. Kilburn was where I grew up - whereas Singapore is a strange land where people sound and act different. They use words like wah lay, kena and meh. But most of the people here look like me and my name is just normal, not strange. Also, I blur into the crowds of black haired people and, if I wanted to, I could be like Where's Wally. I could disappear and people would struggle to find me. Mama said I should be proud to be a BBC - British Born Chinese (when I was little I thought it meant that Chinese people were owned by the BBC). Mama said being BBC makes me special. But I don't feel special. Most of the time I feel strange." (p.121)

Also I stopped going to the gym. That didn't help in several ways. I became one of those people who paid for a gym membership but did not go. I kept paying because I thought if I stopped then I would definitely never go again. So I finally had a late shift on Friday and I went with Tish. This lovely, huge patch of wildflowers in the park has remained unmowed all summer and still looks lovely. My body hurts now as I am back to square one, but I have been three times and will try and establish a new routine for myself.

Stay safe. Be kind. Don't beat yourself up.

... meanwhile in Japan

 

Monkey Sensei had a random day off and took herself to DisneySea and had a ten hour day queueing and riding.

Below ... much to her amusement, very expensive skittles in the konbini :

Jellyfish at the aquarium:

A shrine where you can go and pray for your canine friends:

And more magnificent views:

Counting down to my own visit now, only five months.

Stay safe. Be kind. Plan your holiday.

Garden Joy

 

Outside my kitchen window this lovely climber has been gradually intermingling with the ivy. As it started to turn with the autumn I just thought what a lovely contrast they make, the dark evergreen and the pink tinged pale green that will soon be just bare stalks.

Also Han Kang won the Nobel Prize for Literature, that gives me joy too.

We had some family excitement yesterday as my son Lewis made the news after giving Angela Rayner a fork lift truck driving lesson.

Stay safe. Be kind. Enjoy the simple things.

Cold Crematorium

'Cold Crematorium' by József Debreczeni was first published in 1950 and has only recently been translated into English. It describes the author's period of internment in Auschwitz by the Nazis. I am finding it hard to get to grips with writing about the book given the current world situation. I think (but what do I know) that understanding the depths of the Holocaust can't help but inform your understanding of current events. The Nazis tried to erase the Jewish people. The life that Debreczeni describes encapsulates absolutely Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil'. This article in the New Statesman describes how survivor testimony was not admitted at the Nuremberg Trials because they thought people would not be believed. 

As a young healthy man he was sent to a work camp, as were a constant stream of people, who were quite simply worked to death. He describes the day to day struggle for survival and how accustomed they become to death and suffering. Although the worst of the guards are talked about it is the life amongst the other prisoners that he gives in detail. The system undermined them still further from common or garden dehumanisation by setting them in a hierarchy, giving some privileges over others, control over food distribution and the allocation of sleeping space, designed presumably to create hatred amongst the inmates, to divide them from each other. It sometimes seems amazing that the people are alive at all. The cold and hunger and random violence. The book is very immediate, immersing the reader in the situation. It feels very detailed, and you wonder as his powers of recall, because how could he have possibly written anything down at the time. It is the individual incidents that make it so graphic. 

"'Schon [Nice]. Who is your best worker?'

'46514!' the kapo exclaims without hesitation.

46514 is unarguably the group's best worker. Back home he'd been a logger. Twenty-six years old. Nothing of his round sunburnt peasant's face suggests Jewish ancestry. Not at all the spindly, bookish type more familiar back home. |That variation that even Jews themselves hardly recognise. In the Carpathian Mountains, there's a healthier degree of occupational diversity among the Jews. Those doing work do it for the sake of the work itself. It's obvious from the way they hold their tools.

46514 is a premium häftling. Premiums are rare; to be recognised as one is a big deal. A premium gets a weekly bonus with two marks, which he can trade in for special jam and makhorka cigarettes.

46514 jumps out of the pit and snatches off his cap.

Half Arm casts him a glance but asks him nothing, and then steps to the side. He reaches lazily for his holster, pulls out the revolver, and presses the barrel to 46514's temple. A shot rings out. The man, who'd been standing straight as a flagpole, now teeters before crashing facedown into the pit.

The lifeless body plops with a dull thud. The officer with the Leica puts the camera into a pocket, while Half Arm smiles silently, absentmindedly.

'A little demonstration,' he says. 'An example of how even the best Jew must croak.'

Kitsch. Horror is always kitsch Even when it's real." (p.98-99)

They live for cigarettes and news of the war. They are moved to other camps, sometimes volunteering to do so since people reason that it can't possibly get worse. It is towards the end of the war so the Nazis are withdrawing the prisoners, food gets more scarce and typhoid runs rampant, until the point where they awake one day to find themselves free, the guards having abandoned them in the night fearing the advancing Soviet army. 

"Night in Dornhau

Six hundred men are pressed tightly against each other. Every third one is writhing, whimpering, groaning, gurgling, raving. Every third person is dying.

Some are whining for doctors deliriously, stubbornly - more to themselves than to anyone else. The thin tailor above me thinks he is at home, talking to his little boy. By tomorrow, he won't be around, knitting caps in exchange for soup from well-heeled bigwigs.

Above me, under me, all around me, this army of people ready to depart are crying out for God and water. Eyes turning glassy are soaking in the darkness of Hades or the foolish pinkness of heaven. Death is stepping between the bunks like a learned, confident young professor feeling quite at home.

The wailing is contagious. Like dogs howling at the moon, all six hundred of us are aimlessly whining away. A choir of raving flagellants.

The icy granary with the broken windows resounds with eerie voices and shrieks of despair, horror, and fear.

This concert of outcasts lasts until the wee small hours of the morning, when the first grey filters in. Then, silence. Without warning, without reason, just as the uproar started earlier.

Two hundred die in one block that night.

As daybreak takes hold, the bunks fall silent. The dead and the living alike doze off." (p.161)

There are moments of humanity where people offer some care to others but you sense that mostly each person is alone in his own living hell. József himself lurches between fatalism and despair, and a burning desire to survive. Human beings are capable of such terrible things and you find yourself crushed by the soul destroying inhumanity and reminded of the urgency of the message that the Holocaust must not be forgotten. 

Post script: Thinking more about what I was trying to articulate about my response to the book. The recent resurgence of far right political parties and ideology across Europe (including Germany) and coming out of the mouth of a US presidential candidate, is enough to make any normal person's blood run cold, but for Jewish people must evoke a very visceral level of threat. What is currently happening in Israel/Gaza/Lebanon is clearly not a solution to the security of the region, when all of the shooting is over the human beings still have to live alongside each other. I am left wondering what we can do. My heart cries out for the people dying on both sides, whose lives are being destroyed by ideologues.

A History Lesson

For National Poetry Day, which I would have missed had Bookshop not emailed to try and sell me poetry books, I give you Miroslav Holub (from the Czech):

A History Lesson

Kings
like golden gleams
made with a mirror on the wall.

A non-alcoholic pope,
knights without arms,
arms without knights.

The dead like so many strained noodles,
a pound of those fallen in battle,
two ounces of those who were executed,

several heads
like so many potatoes
shaken into a cap - 

Geniuses conceived
by the mating of dates
are soaked up by the ceiling into infinity

to the sound of tinny thunder,
the rumble of bellies,
shouts of hurrah,

empire rise and fall
at a wave of the pointer,
the blood is blotted out - 

And only one small boy,
who was not paying the least attention,
will ask
between two victorious wars:

and did it hurt in those days too?

(Taken from 'The Rattle Bag' edited by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney)

Highbrow and Lowbrow

'Winter' by Ali Smith is one of a quartet of 'seasonal' novels. Art is going home for Christmas, but has broken up with his girlfriend Charlotte and does not want to admit this to his mother, so he meets a random girl and offers to pay her to pretend to be Charlotte. It made me think somewhat of 'The Accidental', where a young woman invades a family holiday, really gets under their skin and causes all sorts of bother. It is quite an interesting literary device to put an outsider into a family situation to disrupt it, they are free to say and observe things without the tensions that exists between people who have a long history. I enjoyed reading it but it didn't leave a strong impression on me as when I picked it up to review I could not recall anything much about it.

I'm not sure if this is how you get to be taken seriously as a writer but putting weird stuff in your novels certain seems to work for some people. Here is Sophia (Art's mother) interacting with the disembodied head that has been floating around with her for a few days (no explanation given) (and the notion of a 'handkerchief drawer' is so wonderful, I know my parents had one in their dressing table):

"Then it had given her a singular thank-you glance, after which it removed, as if by magic, all expression whatsoever from itself, dimmed into a colourless statue like the blank-eyes face of an ancient stone Roman.

More of its hair had come loose on the pillow in a semicircle around it. She'd gathered up the hair and put it in its substantial clumps on the bedside table. The newly visible top of the head's head, which the hair had covered till now, was very pale, fragile looking as a child's fontanelle. So she'd got up and found a large handkerchief at the back of the handkerchief drawer. She wrapped it round the top of the head in case the head was cold without its hair. She got back into bed and put the bedside light out. The near-bald head had smiled at her and glowed in the dark in its new turban as if lit by Rembrandt, as if Rembrandt had painted the child Simone de Beauvoir." (p.108)

'The Husbands' by Holly Gramazio (who naturally has her own website) was surreal in a totally different way. Lauren does not seem that interested in being married, but her attic has other ideas. She comes home from her friend's hen night to find a 'husband' in her flat. All the photographic evidence on her phone seems to indicate that she is indeed married to this person. But when he pops up into the attic a different husband comes back down. And so it goes... Men arrive, if she doesn't like the look of them, or they have an annoying habit, she sends them back up. Then she gets attached to one ... only for him to go hunting for wedding photographs and get swapped out. As opposed to the notion of there being one special person out there who will complete you, the book is trying to make the case for the idea that actually there are endless people who you could potentially fall in love with and spend your life with, but I ended up feeling that the magic attic dehumanised the potential husbands, and Lauren treated them as disposable. In some alternate universes other people's lives were different too and she was often more upset about that than the person who she was with. So, then she goes in search of the one who got away (the men all exist in real life and have their own lives apart from her), only to be rebuffed. Then ... one of them breaks his ankle climbing down the ladder and she is stuck with him. Not only that he is not keen on going back up. Lauren is forced to take drastic action. I read this book in about three sittings and enjoyed it immensely, it was so silly. 

"She wants Carter back.

She sends Pete away and gets a husband with weird-shaped elbows. The one after that has an accent that reminds her of Carter's and that seems like a bad idea. Then a man who is red-eyed and hung over and attempting to resolve the issue by having two different beers at once. Then a man who is maybe ten years older than her and the house is too clean, honestly, and the shelves are empty, where are her books? Where's the little cactus pot she made with Elena?

She is aware she's being unfair.

Okay. She tells the too clean husband that she's going out for a walk, and heads away from the railway station and up the hill to the park, where she dodges happy families and dog-walkers, heads to the lake, looks at ducks. She's vague on the details of duck mating but she knows it's unpleasant and involves a corkscrew-shapes penis, so arguably things could be worse.

Under a tree, out of the drizzle, she tries to talk herself out of feeling bad: she barely knew Carter, this isn't a divorce, this is like a third date with someone who never replies to your message. But even if she didn't know him well they were still married, the third date became a thirtieth and a three hundredth, became a life." (p.110)

Stay safe. Be kind. Read for fun sometimes.