Tuesday, 17 September 2024

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.

Tuesday, 3 September 2024

More Japan ...

Tish and Jun have had a packed fortnight of doing a lot of very Japanese stuff ... and some not necessarily very Japanese stuff.
Below ... the 'Otter Café':
Meeting Kanoshizu, who is a Maiko or trainee Geisha, to learn about that tradition:
Becoming Samurai:
And at last, some capybara, in their own onsen:
A disturbing encounter with an ostrich (at the zoo not just wandering randomly):
And, more worryingly, walking a suspension bridge with an a typhoon on the way:
Looking down from the Tokyo Skytree:
Monkey had to go back to work yesterday and Tish and Jun come home tomorrow.
It has been an amazing adventure for them.

Monday, 2 September 2024

Books in Devon

Claire and I did a leisurely charity shop trawl round Paignton this morning and I came home with a lovely little haul, mainly people I had not previously encountered apart from Julian Barnes, having watched the film of 'Sense of an Ending' on Netflix the other day.

'The Magician's Assistant' by Ann Patchett was picked up from the pile the day Dunk and I went to Edinburgh, because I knew he wouldn't particularly want to chat on the train for four hours (there and back again), and what a delight it was. Sabine is in love with Parsifal, who is in love with Phan. Sadly both Phan and Parsifal are dead, and the bereft Sabine finds that what she thought she knew about her magician's life was not the case after all. Enter the fray, Dot, Kitty and Bertie, Parsifal's mother and sisters, and they draw Sabine into their lives and their world, from sunny Los Angeles to snowy Nebraska. They bond over their devotion to him and their shared devastation. She thinks she is going to try and understand better this man she spent her life with, but finds that she comes to love these women who welcome her into their family without reserve. The story is punctuated by a series of vivid dreams that Sabine has, which brings to life the love and life she shared with Parsifal and Phan.

So many scenes I could quote. Here she is arriving in Nebraska:
"Even when the plane was parked, Sabine still felt the ground moving. A man in blue zip-up coveralls held her hand as she walked down the movable staircase into the snow. Immediately snow blew down the neck of her sweater and dampened the bare skin of her wrists between the ends of her coat sleeves and the tops of her gloves. Snow filled her pockets and pressed into her mouth. She had to stop and lean against the jumpsuited man.
'Not much farther,' he yelled over the wind, and put his hand beneath her arm in a professional manner. As they walked across the tarmac, sheets of snow pooled and vanished beneath her feet. It was like walking on something boiling. In every direction the snow was banked into high hills. Plows worked on either side, nervously rearranging what could not be made right. the flat, smooth place they were walking across now had been carved out like a swimming pool. The man worked hard to open the heavy metal door, and the wind made a sucking and then howling sound when it, with Sabine, was let into the warm building.
Dot and Bertie Fetters were waiting.
They looked different in Nebraska. Even at the first sight of them in the hallway, Sabine could tell they looked better here. Instead of seeming merely bulky, the heavy coats with toggles made them look confident, prepared. Sabine wondered if she too could buy high boots with rubber covering the feet. When they saw her, they called her name with a kind of joyful wonder that she had never heard in the word Sabine before. They threw themselves together onto her neck. What was lost is now found." (p.143-44)

And here, just thinking about Parsifal's childhood:
"In Dot Fetter's tiny ranch house, which in this blanket of heavy snow, and probably without it as well, appeared to be exactly like every other tiny ranch house in every direction, Sabine was finding a part of the husband she had lost. Guy the alter ego, the younger self. She imagined him flying down the street in the bracing cold, stomach to sled. She saw him at the kitchen table spooning through a bowl of cereal before school, his eyes fixed to the back of the box. Guy, who would some day be Parsifal, lying on the floor in the living room, reading library books on magic, frustrating books that never gave the information you needed to have. She imagined him popular, tight with the neighbourhood boys, good to his sister. At night she saw him asleep in the bed next to her bed, not the man he would be later on, the one that was gone, but this slighter, very present version of himself. She saw him in Kitty and Bertie, sometimes in Dot and How and Guy. She saw him at six years old and nine and twelve, because she needed to, every minute. Missing him was the dark and endless space she had stumbled into." (p.217-18)

And this, Sabine waking from a dream to find she has fallen asleep with Kitty:
"Sabine closed her eyes and tried to slip back. She had been dreaming, it had left a taste in her mouth. Her pillow was damp from crying. She wanted not to remember but to sleep, to be inside again. Where was she now? Nebraska. Parsifal's room. This should be the dream. The place she had been a minute ago was more familiar. She dug herself into the pillow and took the regular breaths of sleep, but there was no going back. Bit by bit the real world surrounded her. Dot and Bertie were home now, and the boys? She could hear their faint noise down the hall. Dot was laughing. They would wonder what she was doing sleeping in the middle of the day. Sabine felt guilty whenever she was caught napping. Not like Parsifal, who flaunted his naps, stretching out over the sofa in the middle of the day, the ringer on the phone turned off in anticipation of a long voyage. Sabine shifted her weight slightly, rolled forward on her hip, and that was when she noticed the warm breathing on the back of her neck, the weight of an arm across her waist. She was in Parsifal's bed. She had fallen asleep. Kitty had been telling a story, another horrible story. Kitty was in the twin bed, both of them on their sides, Sabine facing the window, Kitty facing Sabine. Of course she could hear her now, the nearly undetectable sounds another person makes when she is at her quietest. She could feel the warmth on her back, warm enough to fall asleep without a blanket. Though she would have been embarrassed if Kitty was awake, for this one minute she was grateful for the luxury of having someone to lie next to. Sabine tried to remember the last time she had slept with another person." (247-48)

As you might imagine, I loved this book. It was so full of warmth and love. It was like a blanket on a cold evening. 
The jasmine and the passion flower are still looking lovely at Claire's house. 
Stay safe. Be kind. Relish the end of the summer.