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. 

Like and Unlike

I know the monkey blanket is finished, but my obsession continues apace and I now have 181 puffs towards a total of 600 that I am doing for my next Beekeeper Quilt. My sister Claire visited this week and we balled up some homespun and home-dyed yarn that has been lying around for several years and knitted a couple. I have been making lots of stripey ones recently so this variegated yarn is great, it saves me having to change the colours all the time. Hexipuffs will always be a 'like' post.

Also liking that I have finally made some progress on my Bute sweater. It has been in the pipeline for more than six months. The front and back are done!!! The first sleeve is underway and it feels like I might get it done just in time for the warmer weather.







On the not so 'like' side of the post is 'The hen who dreamed she could fly' by Sun-Mi Hwang. I nearly didn't bother mentioning it I was so disappointed. I picked up this book almost at random because of lovely things written about it on the cover. I paid real money for it, which is most annoying because I don't buy books that often. Lots of people seem to think it's wonderful. Sorry, not me. I realise it is an extended allegory but I did not find this to be a heartwarming tale of motherhood. I wonder if it is a cultural thing, that in Korea it is expected that mothers sacrifice themselves for their children. It was also the weird mixtures of behaviours and relationships between the 'characters'. We are back I suppose to the anthropomorphism again, if you are going to make your animals behave like people then make them behave like people, don't make it a mixture of animal and human. It's The Animals of Farthing Wood all over again (the kids loved this, I hated it!). The whole book just seemed like a vastly over extended children's story; it should have been 20 pages long and pitched at 5-7 year olds. 

Superpowers

There seems to have been a lot of hubbub around Karen Joy Fowler's 'We are All Completely Beside Ourselves', even the audiobook is in a queue and the librarian said I could only have it for a week. I used my day off to knit and listen.

SPOILER ALERT
I loved this story. I had not read any spoilers so had no idea what to expect. It is about the complexities of family bonds, but made oh so much more complicated by the presence of another species. It elicits some very profound and mixed emotional responses, because of the nature of anthropomorphism, and how people feel and react to animals that we perceive as being 'almost' human. So in a family that is raising a chimpanzee alongside their infant daughter you can imagine it is not going to be a normal childhood. The story tells a back and forth tale of the various periods of her life and her coming to terms with the disappearance of her 'twin' Fern. To add to the trauma her brother Lowell also disappears as soon as he is able, leaving Rosemary to deal with her parent's silence as best she can. As readers we are left, like Rosemary, trusting at first in the 'gone to a farm' story, and then assuming the worst of her father when she finally learns what became of Fern. 
Science has long been fascinated by the ways in which we are the same as the other apes, and the ways in which we are different. Rosemary's childhood is an experiment in observing the development of the two species side by side, where Fern grows from infancy, learns some sign language and becomes a member of the family, and comes inevitably to think of herself as a human being. When the experiment if brought abruptly to an end the consequences are both traumatic and long term for everyone involved. Having been the centre of much focussed attention for the first five years of her life Rosemary then has to adjust to being just an ordinary kid. She discovers that "kindergarten is all about learning which bits of you are welcome at school and which bits aren't": the other children sense her 'otherness' and name her 'monkey girl', a term that sticks, in her own head as much as anywhere, to define her ongoing relationship with the rest of the human race.
The book raises far more questions than it ever answers; about the use of such species in human 'experiments', about how different we are, about when humans bond with animals do animals really feel the same thing towards us. I was left slightly disconcerted. A good reaction I felt. If you have to wait in a queue for this book I promise it will be worth it.

"For years I imagined Fern's life as a Tarzan reversal, raised among humans and returned now to her own kind. I liked to think of her bringing sign language to the other apes. I liked to think that maybe she was solving crimes or something. I liked to think we had given her superpowers."

A Month of Letters

They say that the art of letter writing is dead. I can certainly attest to the fact that very few 'real' letters come through the system. Having said that I don't think that e-cards have replaced the traditional birthday greeting, a gif of dancing penguins is just not the same as something that clutters up the kitchen table for a fortnight. In the spirit of increased connectivity (the current buzzword it seems), and also supporting our most valuable postal system, I decided to join in with 'A Month of Letters' that someone posted on the Manchester NaNoWriMo facebook page. The idea is to send something though the post every day during February (excluding Sundays of course, since we no longer collect then ... though our 'Customer Service Point' is open for the collection of parcels, 12-4pm). It doesn't have to be a lengthy missive, it can be a note or just a postcard. The Month of Letters website allows for people to connect and exchange addresses and become temporary penpals, but I think even my limited social sphere will give me enough people to write to over the next month. I wonder if anyone will write back.

The Sleeper and the Spindle

There seems to have been a glut recently of people re-writing classic fairy tales and 'The Sleeper and the Spindle' is Neil Gaiman's contribution. It is a concoction of ideas from Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, with a very clever twist, and beautiful, subtle illustrations by Chris Riddell that bring a real fairytale feel to the book. 

Our main protagonists are a group of three dwarfs who discover a sleep plague spreading across a neighbouring kingdom and so seek the assistance of their queen to break the enchantment; it turns out she has some experience with these matters. We are not told who they are, but details emerge as the story progresses:

"They had names, the dwarfs, but human beings weren't permitted to know what they were, such things being sacred.

The queen had a name, but nowadays people only ever called her Your Majesty. Names are in short supply in this telling." (p.23)

Meanwhile in the castle at the centre of the enchantment a wizened old hag wanders alone and angry amongst the sleepers.

But when the princess is awoken things are not as they might at first appear, and the tables have to be turned before the spell is broken.

The whole experience gives our queen a taste for life and instead of returning for her wedding she sets out with the dwarfs in search of something else.

 A book that can easily be read in one sitting, as a bedtime story or on a wet Wednesday afternoon. A tale without the neat happy-ever-after cliché and some wonderful subversion of traditional expectations.

Whale Hunting for Beginners

I had an image in my head of what Moby Dick would be like. It was nothing like that. I am at a loss to know quite how to review such a strange book. Perhaps it might have helped to read the wiki page first. It is 500 pages of Whaling Encyclopaedia and then 50 pages of denouement. I kept wondering when the story was going to take over and Captain Ahab was going to come out of his cabin.  I was left mostly with a desire to go to sea, for real, in a ship with sails, and to see a whale.

So Ishmael, our hero, is feeling a bit out-of-sorts and so decides to go to sea for a few years, and takes himself off to Nantucket to join a whaling ship:

"Look at it - a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canadian thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that bits of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snowshoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravagances only show that Nantucket is no Illinois." (p.76)

To be honest we don't learn much else about him; he recounts the events but never gives his own opinions on the venture upon which they are engaged. Over the course of a couple of hundred pages we get to know the crew and the workings of the ship and the nature of seafaring and the principles of the business of whale hunting, but we see hardly a glimpse of Ahab. But then when he does emerge it is to rally the crew to his crazy cause; he gives a speech that must be the inspiration for the one that occurs in all good disaster films, where the leading man inspires the remnants of the human race to engage the enemy in spite of overwhelming odds against them. And at sea what else is there for them to do but cheer him on, he is their captain, despite any misgivings, obeyed to the bitter end:

"Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals - morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge."  (p.188)

Because of the amount of detailed information about the voyage and its purpose, both folklore and serious study about whales and whaling, you find yourself drawn into their remote and isolated little world. Although their former lives, and wives and children at home, are mentioned in passing it's as if the rest of the world ceases to exist. All there is is the water that surrounds and engulfs them. They meet other whaling ships, each time Ahab seeking information on the white whale, but you come to wonder if maybe he is a figment of the imagination. Time passes, but how much time, and how far they travel is very vague. 

Some things about life on board ship, major and minor that struck me in reading. Of course, the postal system:
"Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, 'Captain, I have just bethought me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for one of thy officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag.'
Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships, whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon the mere chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus, most letters never reach their mark; and many are only received after attaining the age of two or three years or more.
Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely tumbled, damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in consequence of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter, Death himself might well have been the post-boy." (p.308)

The slightly gut-wrenching process of rendering whale blubber:
"Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works had to be fed for a time with wood. After that no wood was used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contained considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in ti for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgement; it is an argument for the pit." (p.402-3)

But it is passages like this that left me a little mystified, there are words, and I know what most of them mean, but this description leaves me with little idea of what is going on; I am left wondering what were the bits that were supposedly 'too tedious to detail'? :
"Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man's oar, so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing; and also passing between the men, as they alternately sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp - the rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon; and previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail." (p.275)

In the run up to the final encounter Moby Dick the atmosphere becomes wild and tempestuous, with Ahab's madness reaching fever pitch. It reminded me of the storm scene from King Lear, and he even has his 'poor Tom' in the shape of the traumatised Pip, who has become something of a mascot for him in his madness. A typhoon strikes the boat and Starbuck tries to reason with Ahab:
" 'We must send down the main-top-sail yard, Sir. The band is working loose, and the lee lift is stranded. Shall I strike it, Sir?' 
'Strike nothing; lash it. If I had sky-sail poles, I'd sway them up now.'
'Sir? - in God's name! - Sir?'
'Well.'
'The anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard?'
'Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind rises, but it has not got up to my table-lands yet. Quick, and see to it - By masts and keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of some coasting smack. Send down my main-top-sail yard! Ho, gullets! Loftiest trucks were made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of mine now sails amid the cloud-scud. Shall I strike that? Oh, none but cowards send down their brain-trucks in tempest time. What a hooroosh aloft there! I would e'en take it for sublime, did I not know that the colic is a noisy malady. Oh, take medicine, take medicine!' " (p.478-9)

And in the lull before the final storm, we find him bowed down with the weight of his challenge, I even felt some pity for him:
"Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cantankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel - forbidding - now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that wee drop." (p.506)

It's kind of a good thing that the book is so long because it does take a little while to get used to the verbose language and the dated feel of everything about their lives and understanding of the world. I have not read much except modern literature for quite a while so it felt a little jarring. Having said that once I allowed myself to get immersed it was a fascinating book. I expected it to be about Ahab, and it wasn't. I thought it might be about Ishmael and it wasn't. I got quite attached to Queequeg, but it wasn't so much about him either. It is a novel about whales and the men who hunt them. As Ishmael points out it is a much maligned profession but you are left to wonder how would the world have been a different place without them.

Reliable people don't drink fruit juice

Usually I read books and suggest them to other people. Monkey has been reading 'The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared' by Jonas Jonasson for a couple of weeks, and has been telling me how crazy it is and that I have to read it. Sending her copy is apparently too complicated for her busy life so after work on Saturday I checked the catalogue and finding an available copy in Chorlton library I went to pick it up. I plonked myself on the sofa and started reading at about 3.30pm, and finished it about 12.30am on Sunday. It is crazy. My evening was punctuated by texting her with random quotes and updates on where I was in the story. I had intended to go to bed much earlier, but by the time I was thinking of doing so I was too far into the book to give up.

Allan, as it turns out, is not your average crotchety old geezer, and his reaction to the idea of a birthday party without vodka is utterly understandable. He sets off on an adventure, and as we discover, it's not his first; Allan has had quite an eventful life already. One part of the story follows the hundred year old Allan as he boards a bus with someone else's suitcase, meeting up along the way with Julius, Benny, Gunilla aka The Beauty, and Sonya the elephant. The other interspersed chapters tell us the rest of Allan's life story that led up to the day of the birthday party escape. He starts out just an ordinary kid who's dad ran off to join the communists (and gave him an intense dislike for politics) but he becomes a major player in international relations of the twentieth century. It was like some kind of comedy version of Any Human Heart, it is uses the same technique of integrating the character's life into real, well known historical events, although unlike Logan Mountstuart, who remains on the periphery, Allan takes on a much more proactive role. So he bounces round the world, rubbing shoulders with pretty much every major political figure of the century. He escapes almost certain death at least a dozen times, sometimes by talking his way out, sometimes by making himself useful, but mostly because he does good turns for people as he goes along ... and good karma always pays off. 

Allan is a lovely complex character. He is clever, resourceful and self-reliant. Allan is very much a people person, he makes friends easily wherever he goes, even though they frequently end up dead. He is ultimately reliable but also has his own agenda and won't allow himself to be used by stupid people. But in some ways you could see him as a bit of an idiot; he is very impulsive, acting 99% of the time without considering the consequences of his actions. He seems to like a quiet life, but unwittingly allows himself to be sucked in to all sorts of dangerous situations. His life philosophy, handed down from his mother seems to be 'que sera, sera', he doesn't have high expectation and just gets on with the disasters when they happen. The five years in a soviet labour camp just fly by with that attitude, and it's only the lack of vodka that really spurs him to risk an escape plan. Along with Einstein's illegitimate brother (not a real person) he blows up Vladivostok (possibly not a real event, but who knows) and ends up in North Korea, and only makes it back to civilization because of the occasion when he saved the life of Mao's wife Jiang Qing when she was in the hands of Soong May-ling (not a real event from what I can find). It is precisely his naive trust of human nature that both gets him in to, and out of, most of the sticky situations. And vodka of course. Vodka is a very useful tool. 

"The little boy grew up and added his own opinions to those he had acquired from his parents. Priests and politicians  were equally bad, Allan thought, and it didn't make the slightest difference if they were communists, fascists, capitalists or any other political persuasion. But he did agree with his father that reliable people didn't drink fruit juice. And he agreed with his mother that you had to make sure you behaved, even if you had drunk a bit more than was wise.
In practical terms, that meant that during the course of the river journey Allan had lost interest in helping Soong May-ling and her twenty drunken soldiers (in fact there were only nineteen left since one had fallen overboard and drowned). Nor did he want to be around when the soldiers raped the prisoner who was now locked up below deck, regardless of whether she was a communist or not, and of who her husband was.
...
Allan sat down with the guard and suggested that they should have a drink.
...
'Never try to out drink a Swede, unless you happen to be a Finn or at least a Russian.'
...
The bomb expert, Allan Karlsson, the mess boy Ah Ming, and the eternally grateful communist leader's wife, Jiang Qing, slipped away from the riverboat under cover of darkness and were soon in the mountains where Jiang Qing had already spent much time together with her husband's troops. The Tibetan nomads in the area knew her and the fugitives had no problems eating their fill even after the supplies carried by Ah Ming had run out. The Tibetans had good reason, or so they thought, for being on friendly terms with the People's Liberation Army. It was generally assumed that if the communists won the struggle for China, Tibet would immediately gain its independence." (p. 135-7)

I liked this quote because it sums up both Allan's attitude, and the attitude of the author. He helps other people just because they need it, without reservation or expectation of repayment. And then you get the not-so-subtle comment about the fate of Tibet, that shows the author tends to share Allan's approach to politics.

"The solution, said Allan, was often to down a bottle of vodka together and then look ahead. But now there was an unfortunate problem in that Benny was a teetotaller. Allan could, of course, look after Benny's share of the vodka, but he didn't think it would be quite the same thing.
'So a bottle of vodka would solve the Israel-Palestine conflict?' asked Bosse. 'That stretches all the way back to the Bible.'
'For that particular conflict you mention, it is not impossible that you would need more than one bottle,' Allan answered. 'But the principle is the same.' " (p.197)

In the other half of the tale there is a small gang of gangsters who want their suitcase back, and the police detective who is heading the hunt for the missing elderly gentleman (believed possibly an abductee, but then subsequently a murder suspect), all of whom are in hot pursuit of the newly formed tribe of miscreants; going on the run with an elephant is definitely something only the truly desperate would contemplate. 

Ok, I really don't want to give away anything else about plot, and anyway it's far to complicated to explain. From getting drunk with Harry Truman, to suggesting Stalin shave his moustache and comforting the very young Kim Jong Il Allan certainly has an eventful time of it. And so, as the story comes full circle, you can fully appreciate why he climbed out of the window at the prospect of a birthday party in an old people's home. Highly recommended.