crazy old ladies

Strangely Lewis and Rachel invited a crazy bus lady to lunch and let her cuddle their baby ... and then posted the most unflattering photo on the family photo album so all the other grannies can feel normal. I had a lovely afternoon with Jacob and Aisla; it was like a blast from the past, first wandering round the toy shop (where to be honest she picked something really fast compared to my lot) then getting to know Aisla while Jake chatted for ages to the guys in Games Workshop. Then I spent a lovely 24 hours cuddling the babe. I was worried that she would not like strange new people but she smiled up at me and we got along like a house on fire.

I had a very long trek home, but not because of the weather. The snow cancelled the trains going on to Edinburgh but ours going south was stymied by a broken down train between Northallerton and York. So I read my book in a cold waiting room for an hour and a half, then on a very slow train to York that missed the connection for Manchester. About a dozen of us were ferried by taxi and I finally got home about 1am. I was so buzzed I just sat up and finished it.

'Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead' by Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk (linking to wiki as her website is in Polish) is translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. I knew I was going to love it straight away. It tells the story of Janina Duszejko (who hates the name Janina) and her grumpy neighbour Oddball, Good News who runs the local second hand shop, a former student Dizzy and wandering entomologist Boros. (People's names in the story are mostly invented by Janina, allocated according to her impression of them). It begins with the death of Big Foot (their only other near neighbour), and progresses though the deaths of several other local men, which Janina is convinced are being masterminded as revenge by the local wildlife. She and Oddball don't actually have much to do with each other prior to the murders but circumstances conspire to force them to get to know each other better.

I liked her here, because although she is a crotchety old woman and avoids her two neighbours as much as possible, she has moments of just ordinary humanity and being a decent human being:
"As I looked at Big Foot's poor, twisted body I found it hard to believe that only yesterday I'd been afraid of this Person. I disliked him. To say I disliked him might be putting it too mildly. Instead I should say that I found him repulsive, horrible. In fact I didn't even regard him as a human Being. Now he was lying on the stained floor in his dirty underwear, small and skinny, limp and harmless. Just a piece of matter, which some unimaginable process had reduced to a fragile object, separated from everything else. It made me feel sad, horrified, for even someone as foul as he did not deserve death. Who on earth does? The same fact awaits me too, and Oddball, and the Deer outside; one day we shall all be nothing more than corpses." (p.18)

Liked this description of his house, and how much Janina admires it:
"Oddball's fondness for order is plain to see in his small front yard: the firewood for the winter lies piled in ingenious cords arranged in a spiral. The result is a neat stack of golden proportions. These cords of his could be regarded as a local work of art. I find it hard to resist their beautiful spiral order. whenever I pass that way, I always stop and admire the constructive cooperation of hands and mind, which in such a trivial thing as firewood expresses the most perfect motion of the universe.
The path in front of Oddball's house is so very neatly gravelled that it looks like a special kind of gravel, a collection of identical pebbles, hand-picked in a rocky underground factory run by hobgoblins. Every fold of the clean curtains hanging in the windows is exactly the same width; he must use a special device for that. And the flowers in his garden are neat and tidy, standing straight and slender, as if they'd been to the gym." (p.34)

As the story progresses you get a glimpse of her feelings about the natural world, and her growing anger at people who defile it:
"Then, if I went beyond our bounds, the landscape changed. Here and there exclamation marks stuck out of the ground, sharp needles piercing the scenery. Whenever my gaze caught them, my eyelids began to quiver; the eye cut itself on those wooden structures erected in the fields, on their boundaries, or at the edge of the forest. In total there were eight of them in the Plateau, I knew the exact figure, for I'd had dealings with them in the past, like Don Quixote with the windmills. They were knocked together out of wooden beams, set crosswise; they consisted entirely of crosses. These grotesque figures had four legs and a cabin with embrasures on top. Pulpits for hunting. This name has always amazed and angered me. For what on earth was taught from that sort of pulpit? What sort of gospel was preached? Isn't it the height of arrogance, isn't it a diabolical idea to call a place from which one kills a pulpit?" (p.64)

She is a weird mixture of ideas. She is obsessed with astrology, and has a theory about astrological charts predicting the death of the individual, and also the means of death, and she regularly writes to the police with this theory as the murders multiply. She is an engineer by trade, but her 'Ailments' (random capital letters are applied to important words) caused her retirement and she now teaches English in the local school and cares for several holiday homes during the off-season. But she is curious and scientific too. Here she is conducting a experiment:
"I was working in my garden patch, testing one of my Theories. I think I can find proof for the fact that we inherit phenotypes, which flies in the face of modern genetics. I had noticed that certain acquired features make irregular appearances in subsequent generations. So three years ago I set about repeating Mendel's experiment with sweet peas. I am now in the middle of it. I notched the petals of the flowers, through five generations in a row (two a year), and then checked to see if the seeds would produce flowers with damaged petals. I must say that the results of this experiment were looking very encouraging." (p.171-2)

So the story was excellent, the characters were excellent and the atmosphere of the place. I was going to give you a long quote with another astrological theory but I need to just give you a little touch of her writing that had moments like this (and all credit to the translator who captured the writing so well):
"The Samurai's windows were coated with hoar frost, still young, very fine and delicate, like a cosmic mycelium." (p.229)

It is a spoiler to say she did it. I am not sure how much I suspected her, but it was not a surprise. The back story emerges gradually, explaining all. And with the help of her trusty band of friends she escapes across the border to the sunny Czech Republic. And I cheered. 

Stay safe. Be kind. Ponder some morally ambiguous summary justice.

Klara and the Sun

I am ambivalent about 'Klara and the Sun' by Kazuo Ishiguro. It left me feeling sad, rather I feel, on reflection, like I felt sad at the end of 'Never Let Me Go'. It is told from the perspective of Klara, an Artificial Friend. I grew to like her, but it was strange, because Klara does not think of herself as a 'person', appears to have few desires of her own, and little understanding of the world, and I wondered how this rather hollow human shaped thing was supposed to make a good 'friend'. All the futuristic aspects of the story are left ambiguous, unexplained; there is some kind of genetic enhancement, making better babies, and only the better ones get advantages, but it is never made explicit. Why does this supposedly sophisticated robot not know anything? She is solar powered and has these weird ideas about the magical power of the sun. She seems to spend much of her time just standing around like a piece of furniture until someone feels like interacting with her. The style is rather stilted, because Klara has such limited life experience she doesn't have much of interest to say and her observations are mostly superficial. It gradually emerges that Klara's role is to learn to replace her owner Josie, who may be dying of some vague wasting condition, raising the question of course of whether there is more to a human being than their physical presence, their way of interacting with the world, their ways of talking. Klara thinks she could learn to imitate Josie, but is not sure that will make her an adequate substitute. In some ways it did remind me of 'Machines Like Me' by Ian McEwan, because nobody is really accepting that the artificial creation is actually the equivalent of a human being, in neither book are they treated as anything other than a thing, a possession. Klara has no autonomy, she is unsure about making choices for herself, does not go places without permission, does not initiate anything, accepts that her role is to be a thing for Josie, not that Josie owes her anything in return. Now while, in some ways, that might be seen as the definition of love, to selflessly sacrifice for someone else, it's rather more akin to slavery, since she is not doing it voluntarily, she has no notion of living a life for herself. She ends up in a junk yard, which was just a huge waste in my opinion; why create this supposedly amazing (and presumable expensive) thing, and then just discard it. So, in the end, I was left profoundly dissatisfied. When I imagine artificial intelligence I think of 'Ex Machina', a robot who wants a life for herself, and will stop at nothing to attain it. Here Klara beats herself up over a trip that she takes alone with the Mother:

"Naturally then, in the days that followed, I thought often about why the interaction meeting should cast no shadows at all, but Morgan's Falls, despite my complying with Josie's and the Mother's wishes, had produced such consequences. Again, the possibility came into my mind that my limitations, in comparison to the B3's, has somehow made themselves obvious that day, causing both Josie and the Mother to regret the choice they'd made. If this were so, I knew my best course was to work harder than ever to be a good AF to Josie until the shadows receded. At the same time, what was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made manoeuvres that were very complex and hard to fathom, and I saw it was possible that the consequences of Morgan's Falls had at no stage been within my control." (p.113)

Stay safe. Be kind. Love the real humans around you.

Love again

'Love, again' by Doris Lessing is ostensibly about an older woman falling in love with two young men, but I found I was much more drawn to the background story of the wayward Julie Viaron, around who's life The Green Bird theatre company are devising a production. It traces also the friendship between Sarah and Stephen, their wealthy backer who had also developed a tragic fascination with the character of Julie. So poor Sarah must contend with a painful crush on the tantalising Bill, replaced by a deep burning passion for Henry, the director, and fending off the outrageous advances of Andrew, another of the young actors with a 'thing' for older women. As she dances back and forth amongst all this male attention there is hardly a mention of her relationships with the women that she is working alongside, women who she would plainly have been very close to. She lives with all this turmoil inside her head, she confides it to no one, so although the story is supposed to be some kind of celebration of love you end up feeling that Sarah is ashamed of what she is experiencing, as if her maturity means she should be beyond all this and it is somehow a little inappropriate.

What I really enjoyed about the story was the growing bond between the theatre company as they work on their play, that has been written by Sarah based on Julie's diaries and some very hypnotic music that she wrote and has recently been rediscovered. All the players are drawn into the story of her life and working to create something they all feel worthwhile:

"They were already a group, a family, partly because if their real interest in this piece, partly because of the infectious energies of Henry. Already they were inside the feeling of conspiracy, faint but unmistakeable, the we-against-the-world born out of the vulnerability of actors in the face of criticism  so often arbitrary, or lazy, or ignorant, or spiteful - against the world outside, which was them and not we, the world which they would conquer. It was because if Julie Varion's special atmosphere." (p.81)

The production is an artistic and critical success, which of course becomes its downfall. The local community, wanting to capitalise on the popularity, ends up destroying the woods and the ruin of Julie's house to build car parks and hotels, removing all sense of place and history that had been so integral to the original production. Another member of the production company takes the story and turns it into a rather tacky musical. Life, and the Green Bird, moves on to other things, but Sarah is left with this hopeless passion for Henry. She and Stephen console each other in the absence of anyone else who understands, and so it becomes more a story about that friendship, which is much the most interesting relationship in the book:

"He would ask her about what she had done that day, and tell her what he had, the the careful, meticulous way that she recognised - though she did not want to - as a prophylactic against the absent-mindedness of grief. He asked what she had been reading, and told her what books were pled up on his night table, for he was not sleeping much.
They might talk for an hour or more, while he looked from his window over darkening fields. He could hear the horses moving about, he said. As for her, she had a plane tree outside her window, its middle regions at eye level, and through it she watched the lights of the windows opposite." (p.209-10)

I have become much more interested in Doris Lessing the person than the writer, having followed a series of articles by Jenny Diski in The London Review of Books, about the period that she spent living with Doris as a young woman. I went through a bit of a Doris Lessing phase in my twenties, reading the Children of Violence series, and The Golden Notebook is on my 101 books list for later this year.

S is for Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska is a Polish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, one of only twelve women to receive it. I first discovered her in 'Staying Alive' and went on to buy her first collection translated into english, 'View with a Grain of Sand'. 

The End and The Beginning

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides 
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by,

Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall
someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.

No sound bites, no photo opportunities
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves wil be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listening, nodding
his unsheltered head.
But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who'll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.


And then Brainpickings presented me with this lovely reading just recently and so I thought I would give you a multi-sensory post today.



(Linking back to the A to Z Challenge)

H is for Heaney

Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize in 1995, and was a widely respected and well loved poet. He had been due to read at the Manchester Literature Festival in 2013 but unfortunately passed away only days before the reading. I reviewed his collection 'District and Circle' two years ago. This poem, however, comes, once again, from 'Staying Alive'. There is something essential about this poem, about the insignificance of the human being in the face of nature; he makes me want to go and experience it.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong- looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

(Linking back to the A to Z Challenge)

Hunger

'Hunger' by Knut Hamsun was first published back in 1890 and is considered one of the first modernist novels. What they mean by this is a book in which nothing happens, and the entire novel is made up of the internal monologue of the main character as he struggles to make sense of his experiences. I should have read the 'afterword' first as it explains quite a bit about the writer and what he was trying to do in the novel. There are also pages and pages of notes about the translation, since the subtleties of the language is what makes such a book interesting and therefore getting the nuances as close to the original as possible is important. I confess I did not read them. It's not that I dislike books in which nothing happens. I was recently rereading my review of Austerlitz, which is similarly a tale in which nothing much happens, and I was totally engaged by it. 

I came to the conclusion that the book should have been entitled 'Pride' rather than 'Hunger', because it is more about him being proud than being hungry, in fact he is mostly hungry because he is too proud. A nameless young man is scraping a living writing articles, but gradually, inexorably, drifting into destitution, and rather than get a job that he considers beneath him he struggles on, living from hand to mouth, being hungry most of the time, pawning all his possessions until he has only the clothes he stands up in. He gives money away randomly when he has some, or fritters it extravagantly. Much of the time he is too ashamed to ask for help, but then he will randomly approach people on the flimsiest of acquaintance. As he gets more hungry his behaviour becomes erratic and chaotic; he makes up lies to cover for his weird behaviour and sometimes actively rejects offers of assistance. The shame of being poor consumes him and he goes to extraordinary lengths to pretend that he is somehow respectable, everything about the way he is forced to live leaves him crushed by humiliation. Here he gives in and shows up at the police station to get a bed for the night:

" 'Name?' the officer on duty asked.
'Tangen - Andreas Tangen.'
I don't know why I lied. My thoughts fluttered about in disarray and gave me more fanciful notions that I could handle. I hit upon this far-fetched name on the spur of the moment and tossed it out without any ulterior motive. I lied unnecessarily.
'Occupation?'
Now he was forcing me to the wall. Hmmm! I thought first of turning myself into a tinsmith but didn't dare; I had given myself a name not borne by each and every tinsmith, and besides I was wearing glasses. Then it came into my head to be foolhardy - I took a step forward and said, firmly and solemnly, 'Journalist.'
The officer on duty gave a start before writing it down, and I stood before the counter with the lofty air of a homeless cabinet minister." (p.70)

But the night in the cells is so disturbing that he never repeats it:

"My nervous state had got out of hand, and however hard I tried to fight it, it was no use. A prey to the quirkiest fantasies, there I sat shushing myself, humming lullabies, perspiring with the effort to calm myself down. I stared out into the darkness - and never in my born days had I seen such a darkness. There was no doubt that here I found myself before a special kind of darkness, a desperate element with no one had previously been aware of. The most ludicrous ideas filled my mind, and every little thing frightened me. I am greatly absorbed by the tiny hole in the wall by my bed, a nail hole I came across, a mark in the masonry. I feel it, blow into it, and try to guess its depth. That was no innocent hole, not by any means; it was a very intricate and mysterious hole that I had to beware of. Obsessed by the thought of this hole, quite beside myself with curiosity and fear, I finally had to get out of bed and find my half-penknife to measure its depth, so I could assure myself that it didn't go all the way into the next cell." (p.72)

It sometimes feels as if it is as much the social isolation as the hunger that sends him crazy. When you live too long inside your own head things take on a disproportionate significance. Here is the office of the local newspaper editor:

"I looked about me in the small office: busts, lithographs, clippings, and an immense wastebasket that looked as though it could swallow a man whole. I felt sad at the sight of this huge maw, these dragon's jaws which were always open, always ready to receive fresh scrapped writings - fresh blasted hopes." (p.110)

All the time he pretends to people that everything is fine, both friends and random strangers. He gets his foot run over and crushed, but he is too proud and just pretends that he is fine. He feels ashamed when he has nothing to give when he sees other people in need, but seems unable to accept that he is in the same position. He lurches from crisis to crisis, never taking any real decisions but allowing himself to be carried on the tide of random events. He appears to have a quite fatalistic attitude, arguing to himself that there is nothing else he can do but accept his inevitable demise. But at the same time you can see that the shame is not imaginary, people around him are judging him for his poverty, blaming him, no wonder he thinks so poorly of himself. I found myself just so irritated with him, and now realise that I was doing just that, blaming his poverty on his poor decisions, while having read  the book you could see how his hunger and deprivation made him almost literally incapable of making rational decisions. I have never been that poor but it is not such a huge leap of the imagination to understand how poverty becomes a downward spiral; he realises that his appearance is now so scruffy and neglected that he will find it hard to persuade anyone to give him a job, and he has no resources to fall back on, no possessions and then not even a place to live. With stories filling the newspapers today about people forced into destitution by benefit sanctions you are left feeling that rather than being an in depth psychological study of human misery this book instead foreshadows the social divide that is currently affecting our society. Not much food, but lots of food for thought. 

Writing a Résumé for National Poetry Day

An e-mail arriving from Faber & Faber informed me that today is National Poetry Day and so I went off on a hunt for a poem to post. There is a lot of poetry out there, so it could take a while. Browsing Horoscopes for the Dead by Bill Collins I found a poem that began with a quote from Wislawa Szymborska and I remembered that I had a book of her poetry from long ago. 
So here, from 'View with a Grain of Sand', is the one I chose. Enjoy.




Writing a Résumé

What needs to be done?
Fill out the application
and enclose the résumé.

Regardless of the length of life,
a résumé is best kept short.

Concise, well-chosen facts are de rigueur.
Landscapes are replaced with addresses,
shaky memories give way to unshakeable dates.

Of all your loves, mention only the marriage;
of all your children, only those who were born.

Who knows you matters more than whom you know.
Trips only if taken abroad.
Memberships in what but without why.
Honours, but not how they were earned.

Write as if you'd never talked to yourself
and always kept yourself at arm's length.

Pass over in silence your dogs, cats, birds,
dusty keepsakes, friends, and dreams.

Price, not worth,
and title, not what's inside.
His shoe size, not where he's off to,
that one you pass off as yourself.
In addition, a photograph with one ear showing.
What matters is its shape, not what it hears.
What is there to hear, anyway?
The clatter of paper shredders.

Books wot I have read recently

Before we went away I joined 99 day of freedom and have been staying away from the notorious time-suck that is Facebook. I got a bit twitchy the first few days but since then it seems, by the regular and increasingly desperate e-mails, that Facebook has been missing me more than I have been missing it. However I have been in a bit of a post-holiday slump, feeling tired and not wanting to do much. The pile of read-and-not-reviewed books has grown and the obsessive compulsive in me can't just ignore them; I tried not caring but I *like* having this catalogue of my reading, I get immense satisfaction out of the end of year list and the sense that I have used at least some of my time productively. So just in the interests of good housekeeping this will be a very quick skim through the books that have passed through my hands in the last few weeks. I will do proper reviews of a couple of others I enjoyed more, hopefully in the next day or so.

'Death at Intervals' by José Saramago is on my TBR Pile challenge and was the third book I took to Costa Rica; it has been my breakfast read for the last month so it only progresses by a page or so every day. Mum skim read it on the plane and said she thought it was dull and predictable, but once we got through the first half and the character of death appeared I enjoyed it. The first half is about a country where people stop dying and how they reacted, individually and culturally and politically. Then death decides to start again, but giving people notice of their impending demise. It all goes well until one of her letters is returned and she goes off to see this person who refuses to accept death.
Saramago has a very particular, and peculiar, writing style which takes a bit of getting used to and his books are very much about ideas rather than characters and plots. Not for everyone but if you are into european avant-garde then give him a try.
Little quote, because I always like references to the postal system in literature:
"She eyes the violet envelope suspiciously, studies it to see if it bears any of the comments postmen usually write on envelopes in such cases, for example, returned, not known at this address, addressee gone away leaving no forwarding address or date of return, or simply dead. How stupid of me, she muttered, how could he have died if the letter that should have killed him came back unopened." (p125)

'The First True Lie' by Marina Mander (an italian author who has no website or wiki page) was a really curious and fascinating book. I know some people are put off by novels with child narrators but when well written I think they make for excellent reads. In this tale a young boy with a depressed mother has his worst fear realised when she commits suicide (either deliberately or accidentally, it's not really relevant) and he tries to carry on by himself so that he won't be a 'complete orphan' and have to be taken into care. While he has quite a mature voice it is heartrending in the way it captures the insecurities of childhood, and how children make sense of the chaotic and unfathomable adult world.
Before she dies:
"Mama feels lonely even though she's never alone, because I'm aways here with her, but it must not be enough. In order not to feel so lonely she went to talk to a man with a beard, who listens to her once a week in a house full of books full of complicated thoughts. I flipped through a few of them while I waited in the lobby. I wonder though, what do you get out of paying someone to listen to you, to care for you?
I care for her for free, but it must not be enough.
It may be that she doesn't want to confess her darkest thoughts to me directly. Sometimes she writes them down using tiny, tiny letters, then forgets the pieces of paper on the kitchen table; or else she talks about them to somebody in a low voice. she talks slowly and she moves slowly." (p.63)
And after:
"I stretch out beside her as if we have all kinds of time ahead of us. An entire weekend. As if we have all the time in the world just to lie here side by side. As if my time was the same as hers.
I know that she's probably not interested in other people's progress any more, but then I'm not interested in her being dead either, in the strange blotches on her face, in how even with my stuffed-up nose I think I can tell she's started to smell. If everything wasn't becoming so complicated I'd say it's all the same to me, that in some ways I understand her, that I understand if she was sick of living." (p112)

'The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year' by Sue Townsend does exactly what it says on the tin. Isn't it funny how when men have mid-life crises they go out and buy motorbikes but when women do it they are more likely to hide from the world. I did laugh out loud several time reading this book, and that was the only thing that made it a good read, because otherwise it wasn't really. The characters are all *so* irritating and unlikeable and somewhat clichéd. It reminded me a little of Harold Fry, that I read two summers ago. He has a bit of a mid-life crisis and goes on a long walk, and people hear his story and try to hijack his life. The same thing happens to Eva, that some loonies camp outside her house putting their own interpretation on her actions and trying to make it into something else. Nobody's behaviour in this story is in any way rational and the whole thing just felt contrived. And a dreadfully unsatisfying ending.

'Overheard' edited by Jonathan Taylor is a wonderful collection of short stories that really runs the gamut of styles and voices. I didn't try reading any of them out loud, but there wasn't really anyone there to read them to. I like reading aloud, and being read to, it is a whole different experience from reading. It's hard to write about a short story collection, particularly one that is an anthology rather than by one author, but certainly this would be a great introduction to the world of short stories for people who usually read novels, and a good way to uncover new writers. Two I particularly liked were adjacent to each other, and reflecting the same problem: 'Estranged and unanticipated' by Kate Pullinger and 'What's the weather like?' by Ailsa Cox (who's neglected blog I find I am already a follower of), both discuss the thorny issue of telephoning your parents and in a few brief pages give some subtle insights into the parent child relationship. I got this from the library but it is probably more one to keep on the bedside table for a few years to enjoy it properly.

the human condition is private

District and Circle by Seamus Heaney was number 2 in my TBR Pile Challenge 2013. I have read it in bits and pieces over the last couple of weeks, but it often not until you read them a second time that poems really sink in. While (in my relatively mediocre opinion) good poetry touches on universal themes, allowing readers to link with it via their own experience, much of this book is very personal, referring to memories and events from Heaney's life, essentially private to his own experience. He drops in clues and hints but often leaves you feeling a little bemused, as if he hasn't wanted to tell you the whole story. Also, keep a dictionary handy. 

Even when he was being obscure I still could appreciate the language and craft that went in to these poems. For example, in the first, 'The Turnip-Snedder' (whatever the hell a 'snedder' is), the last two lines: "as it dropped it's raw sliced mess/ bucketful by glistering bucketful"; why use the word 'glistering', it basically means 'glistening', and yet has this wonderful slightly old fashioned sound to it. In 'A Clip': "We'd go not for a haircut but 'a clip'/ Cold smooth creeping steel and snicking scissors"; 'snicking' has an onomatopoeic quality, not just the action but the noise of the scissors behind your ear as you sit. And in a blizzard in 'In Iowa': "Through the sleet-glit pelting hard against the windscreen/ And a wiper's strong absolving slumps and flits"; 'sleet-glit' is just one of many hyphenated made up words that he scatters liberally through his poems, but it seems to capture something, and again you have this lovely onomatopoeia with 'slumps and flits'. But I was completely stumped by "quid-spurt fulgent" (from 'Senior Infants'), your guess is as good as mine.

Many many of the poems are childhood memories, some of the war, like 'The Aerodrome':
"Wherever the world was, we were somewhere else,
Had been, would be. Sparrow might fall,
B-26 Marauders not return, but the sky above
That land usurped by a compulsory order
Watched and waited - like me and her that day."
And 'To Mick Joyce in Heaven', about a man coming home and having to readjust:
"A demobbed Achilles
Who was never a killer,
The strongest instead 
Of the world's stretcher-bearers,
Turning your hand
To the bricklaying trade."
Many others about Ireland, referring to places or events specific, that leave you with only part of the story. I liked this from 'The Nod', seen from a child's perspective and yet saying something perceptive about the relations between adults:
"Saturday evenings too the local B-Men,
Unbuttoned but on duty, thronged the town,
Neighbours with guns, parading up and down,
Some nodding at my father almost past him
As if deliberately they'd aimed and missed him
Or couldn't seem to place him, not just then."
(I'm just guessing with the link there as to what he means by B-Men.)
And others still are imagined stories, like 'Moyulla', tale of the river Moyola, or 'The Tollund Man in Springtime', imagining the thoughts of a ancient  preserved bog man after he has been dug up from the bog:
"... Late as it was,
The early bird still sang, the meadow hay
Still buttercupped and daisied, the sky was new.
I smelled the air, exhaust fumes, silage reek,
I heard from my heather bed the thickened traffic
Swarm at a roundabout five fields away
And transatlantic flights stacked in the blue."

Brief nostalgia moment for me was 'To Pablo Neruda from Tamlaghtduff', which strangely tells him about crab-apple jelly. Now while I don't remember ever making crab-apple jelly we did have crab-apple trees in our garden in Neston, and this description is just perfect (several more of those evocative hyphenated words here too):
"Contrary, unflowery
sky-whisk and brittle, more
twig-fret that fruit-fort,
crabbed
as crabbed could be - 
that was the tree
I remembered."

This is quickly becoming a stream of quotes as the more I flick through the book I come to each one and recall why I liked it. Heaney just has this knack of quiet observation, the little things. This is just a perfect example, in 'Quitting Time', about a man just standing and admiring the quiet tidiness of the yard before he turns out the light and goes home, the notion of satisfaction at an ordinary job well done:
"And switches off, a home-based man at home
In the end with little. Except this same
Night after nightness, redding up the work,
The song of the tubular steel gate in the dark
As he pulls it to and starts his uphill trek."
And (yet more), in 'Home Help', an old woman, elderly housebound relative who spends all day just sitting and has to be carried up to bed:
"Heavy, helpless, carefully manhandled
Upstairs every night in a wooden chair,
She sat all day as the sun sundialled
Window-splays across the quiet floor..."
Another of his created words, 'window-splays', creates this image in my head of the shadows from the window frame travelling slowly across the floor as the day progresses. 
And (last one I promise) from 'The Blackbird of Glanmore', just because it captures something lovely about blackbirds, and the imagined relationships that humans create with the wildlife they encounter:
"Hedge-hop, I am absolute
For you, your ready talkback,
Your each stand-offish comeback,
Your picky, nervy goldbeak - 
On the grass when I arrive,

In the ivy when I leave."

I ummed and aahed about which one to quote in full because there were so many exquisite poems, in fact the more I read it the more I like the whole book. I touches on so many things, human experience, admiration for nature ('Planting the Alder' is just perfect tree appreciation) but I came down to this one because it has a bit of Irishness in it (which is so essential to his poems) but also for the understated descriptions and how the whole story is just hinted at, you have a future history in the first two stanzas and then it takes you back to the beginning, but leaves most to your imagination:

Tate's Avenue

Not the brown and fawn car rug, that first one
Spread on the sand by the sea but breathing land-breaths,
Its vestal folds unfolded, its comfort zone
edged with a fringe of sepia-coloured wool tails.

Not the one scraggy with crusts and eggshells
And olive stones and cheese and salami rinds
Laid out by the torrents of the Guadalquivir
Where we got drunk before the corrida.

Instead, again, it's locked-park Sunday Belfast,
A walled back yard, the dust-bins high and silent
As a page is turned, a finger twirls warm hair
And nothing gives on the rug or the ground beneath it.

I lay at my length and felt the lumpy earth,
Keen-sensed more than ever through discomfort,
But never shifted off the plaid square once.
When we moved I had your measure and you had mine.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa.

I requested this from the library after reading a blog review somewhere and it was an excellent, if slightly confusing read. Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian writer now living mostly in Spain who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. I had noticed that the main character in the story shares his name but it did not occur to me to think, as the wikipedia page tells me, that the book is based on his own early life experiences and first marriage.

It is an initially very confusing read because the chapters lurch from story to story without any explanation of what the writer is doing. So half the chapters are actually story-lines from radio soap operas that are being written by the scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho, and the alternate chapters are the ongoing (real life) saga of Mario and his Aunt Julia. Mario is an 18 year old law student who lives with his grandparents and works at a local radio station preparing news bulletins, but who's dream is to be a writer. At lunch one day with one of his many and various aunts and uncles he meets the glamorous Aunt Julia, 32 and recently divorced, arrived from Bolivia to find herself a new husband. They venture to the cinema together after she uses him as an excuse to escape the unwanted attentions of another suitor, and their relationship, starting with amicable friendship, soon blossoms into romance.

In the other part of his life Mario is developing a friendship with Pedro Camacho, also arrived from Bolivia, to save the fortunes of the radio station. He is incredibly dedicated, working 18 hour days, writing, directing and performing in several serials every day, which quickly becomes the talk of the whole city. The plots are very involved and torturous: a wedding where the bride is in an incestuous relationship with her brother; a man obsessed with annihilating the city's rats after his own baby sister is eaten alive while under his care; an elderly couple appear to try and marry off their daughter to her supposed rapist, a man who offers to castrate himself to prove his own innocence.

Meanwhile in spite of their attempts to keep it secret the relationship between Mario and Aunt Julia (always referred to in this way, even after the marriage!) becomes more complicated in the face of family and societal disapproval, and they make very convoluted plans to marry, without his parents permission. The two halves of the plot kind of come together in a totally insane and hysterical climax. Pedro Camacho begins to go crazy from overwork, can no longer remember which character is in which soap and begins to get very confused, and so in a desperate attempt to save the situation creates a series of increasingly bizarre violent catastrophes in each story so that he can begin again from scratch. At the same time Mario and his friends pawn most of their possessions to raise money, and there ensues a farcical chase across the countryside trying to find a local mayor corrupt or negligent enough to marry them without the proper documents.

I am not sure how much I liked it, but I stuck it out to the end. It makes an interesting contrast to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the few other Latin American writers I have read. It is apparently supposed to be mocking the plots of radio soap operas, and since I am not familiar with what they are like the joke was lost on me. I think that maybe the humour is very culturally specific, having a dig at family relationships, social pressure and other aspect of modern Peruvian culture. I found it didn't flow as a novel because of the interruptions of the soap opera chapters, which initially I though were separate parts of the same story, and these chapters in themselves were just plain weird, little snippets of totally surreal characters and situations without any story resolution. I might well be tempted to try something else by the same writer, he was apparently very politically radical in his early career.

Banned Books Week

It is Banned Books Week this week, the purpose of which is to highlight the freedom to read what you want without restriction. It is based in the US and came about because of the number of books that are being 'challenged' and removed from use in schools and libraries all over America. I decided to read 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch' by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn which was banned in the Soviet Union in 1964 for it's portrayal of labour camps under Stalin's rule. I partly chose it as it is a stark contrast in environment and social class to 'War and Peace', which is set 150 years earlier and written about 100 years earlier, they both contains a strikingly similar attention to detail.

Where 'War and Peace' is a cumbersome 1400 pages, 'One day in the life' is a mere 143 and covers one single day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch Shukhov who is serving a ten year sentence for unspecified crimes in one of Stalin's 'special' camps, where inmates endure the harshest of regimes; extreme cold, deprivation, hunger and hard labour. The writing draws you in right from the first page with the minute by minute exposition of his existence. Everything about the prisoners lives is designed to grind them down, to destroy their sense of humanity, and yet you get this spark of determination within Shukhov, to work the system, to get any little advantage he can to help keep himself alive. Firstly there is the complex system of rules governing their every waking moment; their movement about the camp, their food allocation, their access to privileges or allocation of punishment, and then there is the way the camp really functions, by bribery and corruption, with the 'teams' having a bond of loyalty that puts them at odds with each other as well as the guards. Although it is written third person you get right inside his head because it describes his decision making all the way through, how he weighs up each situation and tries to find the best outcome for himself. Sometimes this involves appearing to do favours for others, but these are contrived to ensure some comeback, which although not guaranteed, within the give and take of the life that the prisoners share the interdependence between them creates a system that, if you work with it, ensures mutual survival. The third person style however also gives a measure of distance from the situation, as if the reader is looking in, not forcing you to experience it first hand, because of course what these men go through it so extreme it is beyond the true comprehension of people outside. There are moments of real camaraderie where you feel that the men are bound together by their shared experience, but then in the end you know that they are all isolated inside their own heads, shutting themselves off to present an invulnerable front to the outside. The sense of injustice pervades the book; there have been no trials and sentences are arbitrary, and can be increased on a whim by some anonymous official. Their lack of contact with the outside world increases their collective and individual isolation. Their institutionalisation is so complete you wonder that anyone who experienced this could ever go back to a normal life.

I am going to quote from both books to highlight the contrast, firstly 'War and Peace':

"Entering the drawing room where the princesses spent most of their time, he greeted the ladies, two of whom were sitting at their embroidery frames, while the third read aloud from a book. It was the eldest - the one who had come out to Anna Mihalovna - who was reading: a neat, prim, long-waisted maiden lady. The two younger ones, both rosy-cheeked pretty little creates exactly alike except that one had a little mole on her lip which made her much prettier, were busy with embroidery. Pierre was received like a man risen from the dead or stricken with the plague. The eldest paused in her reading and stared at him in silence with eyes of dismay; the younger one without the mole assumed precisely the same expression; while the youngest - with the mole - who had a gay and lively disposition bent over her frame to hide a smile evoked, no doubt, by the amusing scene she saw coming. She drew her embroidery wool down through the canvas and lent over, pretending to study the pattern, scarcely able to suppress her laughter." (p.58-9)

Secondly from 'One day in the life', where Shukhov is observing a fellow prisoner eating his skilly (cabbage soup):

"Now Shukhov looked closely at the man. He held himself straight - the other zeks sat all hunched up - and looked as if he'd put something extra on the bench to sit on. There was nothing left to crop on his head: his hair had all dropped out long since - the result of high living, no doubt. His eyes didn't dart after everything going on in the mess hall. He kept them fixed in an unseeing gaze at some spot over Shukhov's head. His worn wooden spoon dipped rhythmically into the thin skilly, but instead of lowering his head to the bowl like everybody else, he raised the spoon high to his lips. He'd lost all his teeth and chewed his bread with iron gums. All life had drained out of his face, but it had been left, not sickly or feeble, but hard and dark like carved stone. And by his hands, big and cracked and blackened, you could see that he'd had little opportunity of doing cushy jobs. But he wasn't going to give in, oh no! He wasn't going to put his three hundred grammes on the dirty bespattered table - he put it on a well-washed bit of rag." (p122-3)

This quote near the end of the book kind of summed it up for me, that the prisoners were powerless to prevent what was happening to them, that all that remained for them was to stay alive and preserve what little integrity was left to them. The book has this slightly strange upbeat ending, that Shukhov reaches the end of the day and sums it up thus:

"He'd had many strokes of luck that day: they hadn't put him in the cells; they hadn't sent the team to the settlement; he'd pinched a bowl of kasha at dinner; the team-leader had fixed the rates well; he'd built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he'd smuggled a bit of hacksaw-blade through; he'd earned something from Tsezar in the evening; he'd bought that tobacco. And he hadn't fallen ill. He'd got over it.

A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day." (p.142-3)

You are left with the feeling that for Solzhenitsyn, in spite of the terrible experience that he endured, he felt that the human spirit could survive.

W.B. Yeats

W.B. Yeats

I like this photograph, he looks such a serious, intense young man. I have always been very fond of a quotation commonly attributed to Yeats; "Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire", it encapsulates quite neatly a completely alternative view of what real learning is, and something central to the way I raised my children.

Looking at the site Poem Du Jour and clicking on the 'random' button, it gave me this one, entitled 'He wishes for the cloth of heaven':

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with gold and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths,

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

Boris Pasternak

Over the last few months I have been reading 'Letters to Georgian Friends' by Boris Pasternak. It's not the kind of book that you can write a review of as such. It is quite simply a collection of letters, most of them to literary friends and poets in Georgia. Many of them are quite ordinary, sending greetings and good wishes, asking after their health and wellbeing, discussing domestic arrangements and holiday plans, but in quiet subtle ways I feel like I have had an intimate glimpse of the life of a great writer. I should own up to not having read Doctor Zhivago (his only full length novel), thought I do feel quite inspired to at some point. I guess this book dominated his reputation to such an extent that I was not even aware that poetry was the more significant part of his literary output.

His career covered the time from the revolution until his death in 1960, but this book includes letters from the early 30's, the time of his first visit to Georgia and his initial acquaintance with many of the Georgian poets who were to become significant friends. Surprisingly, in spite of his prominence, he was never subject to imprisonment or expulsion during the Stalinist years, a period when when literary figures, as well as political ones, were subject to both literary controls and arbitrary arrest and detention. He does seem to have adapted his writing somewhat in order to fit in with the 'Socialist Realism' that was approved by the Communist Party, though he became increasingly disenchanted with the regime. As time went on he supported himself mostly by translating rather than his own writing, which was subject to official hostility and frequent bans.

It was his friendships with Titsian Tabidze and Paolo Iashvili (both influential Georgian poets) that make this collection so interesting. In amongst the everyday there is the background of a horrific, repressive political regime. Tabidze was arrested and executed during the purges of 1936, though his wife and friends lived for many years with the hope of his imprisonment, not learning officially until 1955 that he had been executed within two months of arrest. Iashvili tried to save himself by renouncing his work and avowing loyalty to Stalin and the revolution but faced with being forced to denounce his friend he committed suicide. Many of the letters in the book are to Nina, Tabidze's wife, with whom Boris and his family remained in close contact for the rest of his life. The letters show how closely linked their literary world was, how people knew each other, worked together, Boris translating works for many of the Georgians to make them accessible to a wider russian audience. The endnotes give a brief biography of the people mentioned in the book, and could be an interesting starting point for an exploration of some pretty obscure poetry.

It is hard to pin down why I persevered with this book. Maybe it was the chat and personal anecdotes, although they were written long ago and far away, that showed life was pretty much the same for literary geniuses as it is for us mere mortals. The background details of his ordinary life make him so very real. I grew very fond of him, he was very self depreciating, unassuming, and a loyal devoted friend. He mostly signs himself "your Borya" and is always warm and affectionate. In spite of bouts of ill health and the worsening political situation he was very positive, sometimes almost naively so, and frequently expresses his gratitude for the life he had been privileged to lead:

"I am very satisfied with my life, with the chance of earning an honest living, and with the serenity of my state of mind. I have never considered myself in any way offended or passed over. If anyone thinks that to a detached observer I may appear to be a 'martyr', then let me say that, first, I am not responsible for anyone's crazy ideas or ridiculous fancies and secondly, it is sufficient that they who may be interested in such a theory should life the ban on my books and let me mount the rostrum and this 'semblance of martyrdom', which does not exist as far as I am concerned, will disappear by itself." (letter to Nina, 1950)

The Double Tongue

I am including this in my Women Unbound Reading Challenge, almost because it is by a man and I find it interesting to discover male authors who can write convincingly about women's experience.

So The Double Tongue by William Golding is that strangest of literary artefacts, the posthumous novel. This book was put together by his editors from several completed drafts after the author's death in 1993. It is set in ancient Greece and concerns the central character Arieka, who lives a privileged but neglected childhood until she is plucked from obscurity to take on the role of the Oracle at Delphi.

I have struggled to write more about this book, with the draft started over a week ago, feeling I have to say something thoughtful about such a well respected author, but I wasn't that impressed. Although the book centres on Arieka she is merely this figurehead and the more interesting character is Ionides, who is in charge of the Oracle and the public's contact with it and becomes her guardian and also her friend. Arieka takes on the role of maid to the Second Lady, but following the somewhat precipitous deaths of both the First and Second Ladies she finds herself elevated to the position of First Lady and is initiated into the realities of prophesy. Arieka herself really does believe in the gods, while Ionides most definitely does not and his role in the proceedings is about political manipulation, and is certainly where all the power resides. While she is left to give answers to the questions of the 'ordinary people', he acts as intermediary, and when important people come with important questions it is he who gives the answers. And she discovers that there is high speed communication (messenger pigeons) carrying information between the oracles at different religious sites ensuring a consistent response.

To be fair the book does have much to say on the position of women. Women are not free, even though Arieka considers herself above the slaves. When her periods start she in thrown abruptly into the world of seclusion and ritual that accompanies menstruation and comments "They were just enough to remind me that women aren't free. not even the free ones." (p.17) When she refuses to marry, tries to run away and is then returned under inauspicious circumstances she is practically sold to the Foundation at Delphi. Not that Arieka minds because it offers her the chance to educate herself from the extensive library in a way that was just not available to women then. But then later when she first encounters the cave where she must prophesy and is mortally afraid, "The fear was still there but mixed, I do not know how or why, with grief. It was grief about women I think. Grief for them as instruments to be played on by gods or men." (p.68) Later still when they travel to try and get money to restore the Foundations buildings another woman is much more accepting of her position: "We women are never free,' murmured the Phoenician's lady. 'It's rather nice really.'" (p.107). But during the same conversation Ionides then describes the First Lady as "the only really free person in the world".

The book gives you a portrait, though you cannot be sure how true, of a very narrow aspect of ancient culture. It was all very interesting but the novel itself did not go anywhere or say anything very enlightening about the people or their situation. My favourite quote was just something that amused me, "Latin .... a language with too much grammar and no literature." And I learned the word 'apotropaic' which means averting evil, and it referred to little superstitious hand gestures that were supposed to ward off bad things. All in all if I were to recommend any William Golding it would have to remain 'Lord of the Flies'.