Doing nothing

'Seven Steeples' by Sara Baume has been as engaging and weird as her other books. In it two young people meet and bond, and go to live at the foot of a remote mountain in a tatty little cottage. And there they stay, never venturing further than the village and the beach, their routines forming such a deep groove in their existence that there can be no diverting from them. I don't feel like I got to know them well, felt more like a fly on the wall, or an alien, watching but not understanding their behaviour. There was no crisis to break them out. I kept expecting one of the dogs to die or a calamitous fire or something. But as I have reflected before books where nothing much happens are ok too. It is a quiet mediation on life. And in some places read like poetry, with disruptive line breaks. Conversations are reported but neither of them speaks aloud, and the house, slowly, disintegrates around them. 

It's all about the writing. I love authors who are all about the writing. 

"Although it surpassed the full spread of its surroundings, the high, rocky land was not strictly the right shape to be called a mountain. From sea level it appeared mountain-like, but the house itself had been built on a sharp hill above the scabrous shoreline. From the perspective of the driveway where they stood, the facing outcrop appeared to be more a ridge or bluff - blunt but tall, inhospitable.

Gently and unspectacularly it ascended from the Atlantic, as if it had accumulated its stature over centuries. As if, over centuries, it had steadily flattened itself upwards.

It was the shape of a prehistoric bank,

a drove of smoke,                 an obliterating wave,

a mud and rock and foliage barrier,

                                 impeding,         protecting." (p.11)

Here the scene is set for the general atmosphere of the place:

"For seven decades, the mountain had watched as new tenants moved in and out again, leaving behind the props and shrapnel of their passing. There was a laundry pole, a breeze block, a tyre swing, a partially rotted pallet. There was the orphaned fixture of an old satellite dish, and a marginally newer satellite dish.

The house had always remained unpainted - raw grey plaster except for the sea-facing gable, which was smattered with mustard-coloured lichen - an abstract mural painted by

                         fungal hyphae,               airborne nitrates,

                                            and time." (p.16)

On arrival they announce an intention to climb the mountain, but ...

"It remained unclimbed as the batteries inside the carbon-monoxide detector ran flat, and then the smoke alarm - as the former ceased to blink, and the latter commenced to chirp,

        once every sixty second,             out in the dark hall -

        like a supermarket checkout,      or an orphaned chick." (p.64)

They don't just leave behind their old lives, they separate themselves utterly, turning inwards towards each other:

"They talked about the bits and pieces of family they left behind, back in their autonomous lives. They wondered aloud, in intricate detail, whether or not to face down the embarrassment of having lost touch in the first place,          and get in touch again.

They settled it, as had become their habit, by doing nothing." (p.84)

As time goes on their lives become smaller, they walk the same path, eat the same food, have the same conversations, play the same games:

"During the overlong evenings, they played Connect 4.

Their set was missing several of the yellow counters and two of the red. When they first started playing, the absent counters made no difference, but as they practices and improved, the games started to drag on and exhaust the supply of the set's parts, and so they cut duplicate counters out of thick card, painted them yellow and red, but still there came a point at which no game could ever be finished; at which they were both able to foresee every coming move. The blue board, standing erect, would fill up until there wasn't a single slot left empty, even though neither of them had won." (p.224)

"Indoors they tackled the potted plant situation for the second time in six years. They laid old newspapers down across the oriental rug. Laboriously they uprooted and rehomed the descendants of their first generation of succulents, cacti, geraniums and spider ivies.

At last they were forced to abandon the idea that each pot should be mounted upon a pedestal of some form. There wasn't a square inch of vacant surface left inside the rooms of the house - not the narrow ledges jointing bathtub to wall, not the flat heaps of book heaps, not a sliver of windowsill. They resorted to the floor, plugging the gaps of bare lino between the rug islands with the chipped dishes and bowls that cupped the homemade pots. Almost immediately the plants drifted from their allotted spots, encroaching upon the islands themselves.

What once had been empty space was then root, leaf, stem and prickles.

What had once been lifeless floor           undulated. (p.196-7)

"Many reusable shopping bags - of canvas, jute and hessian, of recycled plastic bottles, tyres and string - had been hung on the hooks on the back of the kitchen door, so many that, by then, it would only open wide enough to admit a single body at a time.

They would queue to enter the kitchen from the living room, the living room from the kitchen.

Every item of food, with the exception of their own potatoes, had been carried into the house in one of those reusable bags, mostly the several closest to the front. The layer of bags at the very back, squashed against the timber of the door, remained untouched. There was still a flake of the skin of a red onion inside one, some dry earth inside another, a few strands of hair from an ear of corn." (p.234)

I found myself frustrated by their passivity, but that is the point. They choose not to not make choices. They lean in to each other. There are lots of lovely descriptions of the natural environment too. A book heavy on atmosphere, weather, tiny details of life. A book to be absorbed by.

It is due back at the library and I fear they may issue fines ... but also, someone else wants this book.

Stay safe. Be kind.

A little reading

 

Mostly I have been doing puzzles, but also a little reading. 'The Rest of Our Lives' by Ben Markovits: strangely another book about someone possibly dying of cancer, and like Panenka he is very much in denial. Tom is planning to drive away from his marriage, but when he does it doesn't feel quite as he anticipated. It's a very 'blokey' book (if that's a word?). Liked this little bit, not the only time he mentioned a 'power dynamic', which feels like something that men are often concerned with, and cars, and the notion that women are impressed by them:

"We took his car. It's a funny thing to be driven around by your son, you feel the power dynamic shifting. He had an old Acura Legend, which he'd bought secondhand and still smelled of cigarettes. But it was a nice-looking car and I thought, Betty wouldn't mind driving around in this. The air-conditioning stank though, at least at first, so he turned it on and kept the windows open until we got to the highway. After that the road was too loud." (p.195)

Then on the next page, this lovely sentence: "All of this makes it look like we were having a conversation, but it was more like, sometimes one of us spoke." So beautifully observed, made the book worth reading.

'Man With a Seagull on his Head' by Harriet Page was requested after the others from Bluemoose Books so impressed me. Quirkiness will always win me over and this one ticks all the boxes. Raymond is hit on the head by a dying seagull, an event witnessed by Jennifer. It has a huge impact on his life, and very little on hers. A copy of the local paper plays a significant role and in the end Mira transports an entire bungalow to the Tate Modern. How's that for a teaser trailer. 

"Jennifer looked up. Here she was, in her shop. The silence was heavy; the street seemed emptied out in a way that made her wonder if she'd missed something, some catastrophe. But then a lone car drove slowly past and, as the sound of the engine receded, she caught the distant judder-judder of machinery making holes in the road somewhere, and now a woman walking past, a child running on behind, and she breathed again, relieved, and a little disappointed too, that the world was carrying on. The day she'd seen the seagull fall on the head of the man called Ray Eccles seemed impossibly remote, the memory a mist around her mind in which she flailed about for a moment trying to grab at least some recollection of his face." (p.53)

Caring for my sister leaves a lot of time for reflection and introspection. So I wrote a poem. My life has become small, focused on the happenings in the living room, but hers, swiftly and unimaginably, has become tiny.

Such a little life A little eye open A little drink A little bite A little wash A little teeth clean A little hair brush A little foot rub A little roll over A little blanket But not a little sleep A long long sleep Everything else gets smaller but not the sleep

Stay safe. Be kind.

Panenka

It turns out that libraries are everywhere, and Torquay does not insist I prove I live here before it will let me borrow books (and puzzles).

I read Leonard and Hungry Paul back in January and so loved it that when I came across Panenka by Ronan Hession I ordered it right away. It is coincidentally about a man with a brain tumour, though it does not feature significantly in the story. Panenka is a man who's life has been blighted by a mistake in his youth during a football match, for which the whole town continues to blame him, for the loss of the match and the subsequent decline of the team's fortunes. But rather like Leonard and Hungry Paul it is a book all about the people and their relationships. While I did not feel it was such a strong book because there was too much people-talking-about-their-relationships rather than those relationships being revealed by events, it had some lovely moments which made it a lovely book.

Two little moments, description, then something else. Firstly Panenka is looking for somewhere to get his hair cut when his usual barber is closed:

"As he stood there in his indecision, an elderly woman approached him slowly on the narrow, uneven path. She was smoking a cigarillo and exhaled lazily from the side of her mouth, her expression conveying the general impression that she was too old to give a damn. Her look was moneyed and eccentric, and she was walking a ratter on an extendable lead. Though it was warm, she wore a nicotine-yellow fake fur coat and a red beret with a white bobble, like a pimple. She made no concession to him as he stood sideways to let her pass, but he didn't take offence, momentarily hypnotised by the weird charisma unique people have. Panenka watched her disappear around the elbow of the road, taking her colour with her like a departing parade and leaving him alone again with the morning melancholy. The street was less alive without her." (p.62-63)

Then his first meeting with Esther, watching her with another customer, and then after she has coped so graciously with his existential crisis (joined in to one quote because they are on subsequent pages):

"She showed him the back of his head in a hand mirror. He had a thin comb-over that she had managed to trim without exposing the lost cause.
'How's that for you?' she asked.
'Perfect. I don't like taking too much off. It's hard to know which will go first: me or the hair.'
She handed him his hat - one of those old-man jobs - and an anorak with a lavender scarf tucked into the sleeve. Panenka wondered whether it had been his wife's.
'That's perfect. I look beautiful again,' he said, leaving a tip in small coins that was more generous in intent and amount. 'I'll see you next time, please God.'
'Bye now,' she said, with a smile that seemed to transfer from her face to his. 

...

When she turned back to face him, he noticed that a stray hair had come out from behind her ear and was caught on the side of her mouth. He considered for a moment what it would be like to be the one who could reach out and return that hair to its place." (p. 78 and 81)

I couldn't return it without a record because it was such a wonderful book. I have also read in the last few weeks Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, which was quite hard going but so well written (of course, I would never have expected otherwise), it did quite inspire me to read David Copperfield, not a Dickens I have tackled before. 

Stay safe. Be kind. 

Hiatus

So, there has been something of a hiatus, not so much in the reading as in life. 'Mere' by Danielle Giles and 'Awake in the Floating City' by Susanna Kwan were both book club books, which, as the year has mostly gone so far, I felt ambivalent about. Both suffered from the same thing in a way, that the author was not sure what kind of book they wanted to write. Especially Floating City; it is sold as some kind of post-apocalypse but that is barely mentioned and morphs into a relationship book with a sideline in artistic expression. Loved Louise Doughty's 'A Bird in Winter', a fast paced drama about a woman agent who goes on the run on discovering high level double agents, excellent escapism. Eurotrash by Christian Kracht was pressed on my by mum, a slightly surreal tale of a mother/son relationship as they trail around Europe with a pile of cash and a colostomy bag. Also listened to 'Cold Enough for Snow' by Jessica Au on the train to Devon, which was a delight. A story of a mother and daughter travelling in Japan.

So, it feels a little as if life came to a halt, several months ago, the day before my birthday, when I phoned mum and she told me my sister has a brain tumour. Very little else has been occupying my thoughts. It is surreal to watch people around you carrying on as normal. So, it has become a thing that is not just happening to her, but to our whole family, and we are closing in around her to take care of her. 

Christopher Hitchens book Mortality, written as he was dying of cancer was not designed to be comforting, but I found it to be, because the temptation is to pretend that this is not happening and it helped to find someone unafraid.

So, there will be something of a hiatus.

Stay safe. Be kind.

The new routine

So it seems that once a month-ish will be all I can manage for the time being, brain space being occupied with other stuff. 

'Come to the Edge' by Joanna Kavenna, was excellent fun, it had something of 'Spoiled Creatures' about it, rural idyll that is not so idyllic and populated by crazy people. An unnamed narrator leaves her husband and heads off into the wild north in search of maybe the meaning of life. Instead she finds Cassandra and mud. I found it depressing in the end because the woman does not change; she is bland and biddable at the beginning, and bland and biddable at the end. There is no epiphany where she finds true inner strength, she survives the events and returns to what she left behind. 

Here just an amusing description. I liked that the story plainly did not take itself too seriously and the writer did not hold back from the chaos that ensues from Cassandra's plans:

"Mandy has long straight hair and the atmosphere of the village fete hanging off her, and she would be outraged if she knew what was really happening. She's something of a hippy but not one who wants to get slammed in prison. A peaceable, authority-respecting organic-food-buying type of hippy, not a man-the-barricades and smash-the-pigs type." (p.184)

'The Last Sane Woman' by Hannah Regel (who has no website) was also excellent. It charts the lives of two young women artists. I was endeared to it immediately because Donna has recently graduated from North Staffordshire Polytechnic in the same era that I did. She is a ceramicist with a bright future but of course the world is a tough place for struggling artists. In the 2020s is Nicola, also a struggling ceramicist, who finds a feminist arts archive that contain a collection of letters that Donna wrote to her childhood friend Susan. So we just follow the lives of them both as they try to make their way in the world.

Here Susan reflecting on their friendship:

"If she's interrogated the matter further, she might have said that this dislike came from how her friend now appeared: as letters, addressed to her, and therefore secret. Donna was not the kind of friend they had over for dinner on a regular basis. Even when she was with Dev and they could have done the whole couples thing, the idea had never occurred to her. It was not that she didn't want to share her friend, but that she didn't know how. Not without losing the sense of herself she had build without her; without tripping that self over and falling back into being sixteen, eleven, four." (p.89)

Lovely metaphors:
"As instructed, Donna dries her face and the three of them step out into the blizzard. The snow lands on her head like a cat's paw, padding her hair into a wet white ball and squeaking underfoot." (p.114)

"She pulled a fitted sheet over her own stupidity and smoothed it out, waiting patiently for her accident to dry and for Marcella to finish." (p.159)

And, just how you imagine an artist would exist:
"Nicola surveyed the worktops surrounding her. Every inch was crammed with stuff: anagram fired bowls stacked with ripening plums, their sangria skin waxy with storm clouds, dusty kilner jars full of muesli and dried flageolet beans, piles and piles of rhubarb, freshly pulled with the dirt at the tip, scrunching bags of dried figs." (p.171)

The whole book was a delight of such descriptions. But Donna remains something of an enigma, and when Nicola steals the letters I hoped for a dramatic denouement but was left hanging ...

'The Beautiful Atlantic Waltz' by Malachy Tallack was the book club book for February, about three generations of a crofting family on Shetland. It focusses on Jack, who in the present has withdrawn more into his own quiet existence, keeping to himself, until new neighbours and a cat upset his carefully organised routine and give him a reason to care about others. It was not my sort of thing, a little predictable, but I enjoyed the story and the characters and sense of community. 

The world is going to hell in a handcart but we will soldier on. Green Party win in the by-election was so encouraging; I even participated and so felt permitted to share the glory. 

Stay safe. Be kind.

 

What is real?

I have had Ruth Ozeki's 'The Book of Form and Emptiness' from the library before, it's long and I ended up returning it barely started, and for once I actually got around to borrowing it again. I confess it has been difficult. I read 'Tale for the Time Being' a decade ago, so I was determined to like this too. Like the previous book it also asks the question about reality. Benny and the Book take turns to tell us what is happening, and a lot is happening. I initially thought that Benny was experiencing something supernatural and was a bit suspicious of where the book was going, and I struggled watching Annabelle be overwhelmed and unable to have much agency in her life. The whole set up was quite frightening, how easily an apparently ordinary life can slip out from under you, and how much they had depended on Kenji, even though he seems to have been less than dependable. 

Kenji is killed in a stupid accident and Annabelle and Benny are left with grief and just each other. When object around him start talking to Benny he finds it annoying, to begin with. As the talk gets louder and more intrusive he has nowhere to escape it. He is sectioned the first time after the scissor incident and on the children's psyche ward he meets the Aleph. She has struggles of her own but she becomes someone who helps him make sense of things that are happening. 

"Is it odd to see a book within a book? It shouldn't be. Books like each other. We understand each other. You could even say we are all related, enjoy a kinship that stretches like a rhizomatic network beneath the human consciousness and knits the world of thought together. Think of us as a mycelium, a vast, unconscious fungal mat beneath the forest floor, and each book a fruiting body. Like mushrooms we are a collectivity. Our pronouns are we, our, us.

Because we're all connected, we communicate all the time - agreeing, disagreeing, gossiping about other books, name-dropping, and quoting each other - and we have our preferences and prejudices too. Of course, we do! Biases abound on library shelves. The scholarly tomes disparage the more commercial books. Literary novels look down on romance and pulp fiction, and there's an almost universal disregard for certain genres, like self-help." (p.94)

The Book as a character in the book is Benny's book. It is said we all have a book inside us, the story of our own life. Benny's book starts talking to him and as he spirals into his breakdown he feels that the book is the one in charge, the one making the bad things happen, and he wants to shut it out. The book tries to explain that it is just a narrator but Benny is struggling to see what is real. The other book that appears in the book is 'Tidy Magic', a decluttering self-help book written by a Japanese Buddhist monk.

While the book is about so many things, it centres on Benny's mental health crisis; we watch as he falls off the edge, it is vivid and frightening, and Annabelle is powerless to help him. He escapes school and finds a safe place in the local library that he visited as a child, reading voraciously and randomly to quiet the voices in his head. But then Annabelle has an accident trying to clear some of the accumulated junk from the house and things all fall further apart. The library becomes however a place where they both find help and a community of people who catch them before they hit the bottom. 

Sometimes a story does try to do too much, and there is a lot going on in this story; the sense of belonging and family, the disconnectedness of society, consumerism as a replacement for the lost connection, grief and friendship, and several references to the earthquake and tsunami of 2011 (that feature also in Tale for the Time Being). But it is all pulled together in this mother and son who need each other, but who cant weather their storm alone. 

Sometimes you get to the end of a book and are just glad to be there. 

Stay safe. Be kind.

Existential Disarray

'A Field Guide to Reality' by Joanna Kavenna, is reviewed on the front cover as 'hallucinogenic', and that is definitely a word I might have come up with. Fever dream might be another description. Another book with a young woman narrator. And a book with pictures. More grown-up books should have pictures.

Eliade Jencks works in a cafe, but she has a somewhat mysterious connection to Professor Solete who has just died. When a philosophy professor leaves his magnum opus, The Field Guide to Reality, to a waitress his colleagues are understandably confused. When the box he has left her turns out to be empty things get weird. What follows is somewhat like a treasure hunt, Eliade and Anthony Yorke following clues that take them across Oxford, meeting with old friends and obscure secret societies. The story flipped between the mundanity of her everyday life and these academicians who live almost in another world. 

Whole stream of quotes, because the whole book is pretty much quotable. Here they arrive at Cassavetes' narrowboat:

"An oil lamp was swinging above our heads. The place was rammed with books and detritus. If books are detritus too, then the place was simply rammed with detritus. Every surface, every region, was full of papers, books, pencils, drawings of the river, tastefully executed, musical instruments, compasses, maps, pot plants, plates, cups, teapots. A cat mewed from below; Cassavetes leaned down and stroked it. There was a pan steaming on the stove, and Cassavetes dished out bean stew. We ate on tin plates." (p.104)

They spend a lot of the book tromping around in the cold and wet. Here they have just had an argument over her use of the phrase 'I lost my father' as a euphemism for death:

"That produced a pause. For a while we walked inside the pause, which spread as the darkness spread across the meadow. Animals punctuated the silence, as if they were trying to help - a last flurry of birdsong and unknown beasts rustling through the hedgerows. All nature chorused and then, suddenly, fell silent. The pause swept across the darkening fields.

Yorke was hastening along again, shuddering and occasionally stumbling on the hard ground.

The treacherous moon rose above the houses, filling the mist with injurious light." (p.114-115)

I just love that 'walked inside the pause'. It captures so perfectly how it feels to be with someone and not talking, feeling the tension of things unsaid. 

Here, later, things are becoming unreal (but also loved 'sartorial philosophy'):

"Anthony walked faster and faster. There was something relentless about his pace. Of course, the cold, his general hypothesis that coats were evil, or whatever his theory of the coat. It wasn't quite the time for sartorial philosophy. I understood. I didn't understand at all. Anything. Even coats were becoming strange and controversial. I carried on, and on, and I felt something like - resistance? My own? Or, the mist was becoming turgid? We were approaching the centre of the old earthworks, the place of maximum power. If you believed that sort of thing, which I didn't. And I assumed, neither did Anthony. But we were desperate. Everything else was increasingly intangible. Trees rustled as we walked, and the clouds moved slowly above the towers of the city. Electricity hummed, or some other force I couldn't begin to understand. The moon slid through the mist, staining it silver. Another shadow leered towards me - I recoiled! But it was nothing, of course. Another frill, a tendril, and then I moved into another region of shadow, I stepped into it, felt the cold air grip me. Reality came in and out as if I were receiving it on an ancient radio. Crackling on the wires. Intermissions of static." (p.172-173)

The book lurches into mysticism and magic and science and mathematics before drawing us back to philosophy. At one point the book reminded me of Sophie's World, that I have actually only read part of, but it's as if Solete has left Eliade a puzzle to solve, rather than his own answer. And all the people she encounters tell her parts of a story that she has to make sense of:

"I thought for a moment that I would just keep walking around the rivers and around the city until something occurred to me. But what would occur to me? The sun shone, as if some fetid branch of fate was trying to convince me it was all OK. I didn't believe the symbolic urgings of the weather. I kept thinking, surely if I just try one more time, I'll manage to solve the thing. I was completely convinced for a moment that I could still find this single final thing, and even the Field Guide, if I just made more of an effort. I had to find something, and put it in the box. Solete had left me alluring emptiness - and of course, what else do you do with emptiness? You fill it!" (p.207)

The black and white drawings punctuate the book, sometimes of places they go, sometimes more abstract ideas. Here Eliade is in the canal, after Cassavetes pushes her in. It is almost as if the dunking breaks the spell and returns her to the real world. I had to let go of some stuff that I didn't understand but that did not lessen for me how much I enjoyed the book. There is a denouement, but I felt the exploration was the point of the story. Definitely a writer I will seek out again.

Stay safe. Be kind. Read something challenging.