dovegreyreader scribbles

On diamonds...

Is it me or is tempus fugiting at a bit of a cracking pace this year?
There seems to have been a mere nanosecond since the Lost Booker shortlist was announced and I had really wanted to read these, but it's final public voting day already and I've only read one and that was pure chance and before the list was announced...grumble grumble...four weeks ago. Two of the books had 400 plus pages and one 600 plus, honestly what do they think we are... fast readers or something?
It would have been good to have been given a little more time to make an informed choice.
That said the recent reading past seems to have slightly more allure than the reading present at the moment. Spark, Nabakov, Maxwell, P.Fitzgerald & Co are all cutting the reading mustard right now...Stegner will be joining the pack any minute.

Last week's enforced reading of a book I didn't enjoy was personal proof positive, were any required, for just about everything I hold true and sure about my reading life and what I share of it here, and this philosophy of Wendy Lesser's suits me well,

 '...what we read is an aspect of the life we have lived, and shapes our subsequent life, and becomes part of our memory of the past - to that extent, we should be willing to allow our personal and historical responses to flood in and out of the books we read.'

That's what Wendy does, that's what I do and I wonder if any of you can identify with that too. I would hate to leave all that behind when I read and write my thoughts about a book

'...our responses won't, after all, hurt the books; they won't change the essential, inalterable words on the page, or damage anyone else's readings of those books. So there's no harm in it. And there may be a great deal of benefit.'

Reading last week's mini-disaster of my own choosing for the NTTVBG was sadly pure torture on a daily basis.
I was miserable, it was all enough to kill anyone's reading mojo, let alone mine which is usually unassailable, so it is not something to be repeated willingly.
If I was clever enough to truly know and be very sure about what 'good writing' is I'd tell you, but I'm an emotionally engaged reader, it's about what I feel inside as I read that matters most to me and somehow conveying that to you, and there's a book coming up on here next week that will demonstrate exactly that.
In the end I have a feeling I did last week's book and author a great disservice because I think on another day and given a different reading mood and context, that book may well have worked.
I can think of a zillion books I have set aside and picked up months even years later and how surprised I am to find that diamond (yes, sorry , we're there, you must have been wondering when that subject line was coming) nestling in there where previously I had only spotted coal.
It's odd how age is making me increasingly tolerant and unwilling to shut the door on a book and dismiss it for ever, I had quite thought it would be the opposite.
I've mined and slightly rejigged that diamond/coal analogy from Wendy Lesser's book Nothing Remains the Same which is my current vade mecum and Wendy my new best reading friend (she doesn't know this and may want to discuss the dilemma with Anne Fadiman who was my last one...and she didn't know about it either.)
So reader heal thyself and taking my cue from Wendy, and several of you in comments, I set aside everything else and becalmed myself with a few restorative old faithfuls for company, mining a few 24 carat diamonds of my own whilst I waited for my reading mojo to reappear, because very worryingly it was gone, kaput, nada for about six hours.

Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, that did the trick and Isabel Archer's defining moment of stream of consciousness awareness about her life, her marriage and that intuition surmised from the merest glance, that Madame Merle meant far more to Gilbert than Isabel had hitherto realised.

Middlemarch by George Eliot, bless George for pulling me up short with the ' But why always Dorothea? ' moment when she rounds on her reader and makes them feel a complete heel for being so judgemental about Casaubon...

'was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?'

Nothing to compare with being put in your place by George Eliot I find.

And then that wonderful emotional father-son moment in A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry, (surely my best book not to win the Booker)  when Willie Dunne comes home on furlough from the trenches of the Great War  stinking and riddled with lice...

'So James Patrick, a man of six foot six, stood his son William, a man of five foot six, into the steaming zinc bath, as indeed Willie's mother had done a thousand times while Willie was a boy. And it was a strange enough thing to see the policeman throwing on the accustomed moleskin apron ...and he lathered the sponge up mightily, and he started to lave his son from head to foot...'

Or what about that hilarious moment in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford when Miss Matty confesses her fear of  being startled by a man under her bed who may grab her leg as she is about to climb in, and thus for the purposes of discovery she keeps a penny ball to hand to roll from one side of the floor to the other.

And so I have whiled away many a happy hour this week in reading rehab, settling down with some diamonds of my own, and I'd love to know yours.

Penelope stayed here...

It is ten years today since the death of one of my most favourite writers, Penelope Fitzgerald  so it seems fitting  to remember her here and my thanks to Peter, a reader here, who is visiting her grave in London sometime this week and leaving some flowers there on behalf of all lovers of her writing, a really lovely gesture.
My thanks also to Terry Dooley, Penelope Fitzgerald's son-in law and literary executor, for directions to his old family home in our nearest village and the place that Penelope adored so much. I had often wondered which one it was so I wandered up there late in the afternoon in glorious sunshine and took a few pictures.
Everywhere looking very sleepy around the newly-mown churchyard and I hope this is the right cottage, I tried to be a bit discreet about snapping someone's family home...

...and not difficult to see why Penelope loved this spot as much as she did.

'They live in a cottage with honeysuckle at one side of the front door and a rose at the other...the kitchen built out at the back looks over green pastures...'

From there Penelope Fitzgerald would have certainly enjoyed this view across to the Church of St Constantine and St Aegedius, we do like our saints to be a bit out of the ordinary here in Devon.

And the tiled church floor surely begs a quilt

And there, Penelope's timeless view across the Village Green and those gracefully hipped Lutyens' roofs again and the squat chimneys that she felt sure mirrored the scale of the church tower. This is where the workers for the Duke of Bedford's Endsleigh Estate lived and from where they would walk the two miles across the fields to work.

Perhaps saddest of all on this wander, I espied a newer grave with carefully placed memorial seat alongside and overlooking the Green; one of the Kayaker's school friends (and namesake, both Christian and middle name) who was tragically killed in a terrible car accident just outside the village a while ago. His grave looks almost longingly across to his old family home, next door to the Dooley's home, and he would doubtless have been one of those children Penelope watched playing there, as ours did on long summer evenings all those years ago...

 
'At the end of the churchyard there is a steep drop, with a flight of stone steps, down to the Green, the centre of all things for Milton Abbot's not very many young children. This is an echoing green, as in Blake's vision, and when it darkens the last game of three-a-side football trails into silence.'

... and quite unexpected tears pricked my eyes as I read the simple engraving on his headstone ...

'Sadly not indestructible'

From time immemorial anyone who has raised adventurous sons will understand the truth and the fear behind those incredibly poignant words and I sat for a moment and thought about his family and mine, and  the joy of having lived and raised our children here, and of course I thought about Penelope Fitzgerald and what inspiration she may have gathered from this special place, and I was thankful.

Nothing Remains the Same Rereading and Remembering ~ Wendy Lesser

I know I said I was going to read Innocence next, my only remaining unread novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, but I changed my mind because I've also been reading a book by Wendy Lesser recommended in comments here (and my thanks to the recommender) Nothing Remains the Same Rereading and Remembering.
How you can buy books this good for £1 plus £2.75 postage all the way from the US defeats me, but I did, a brand new hardback copy arrived and I had yet another lovely book to add to the Books About Reading shelf but with a little added extra,

'...it is a book about time, with rereading as a special sort of time travel.'

As Wendy Lesser revisits books she first read twenty or thirty years ago she explores what books can mean to our lives and the changes that happen along the way, and in her forties at a time when she feels

'the journey matters more than the arrival.'

But I was so grateful to Wendy Lesser for defining something else

'Time is a gift, but it can be a suspect one, especially in a culture that values frenzy. When I began this book everyone I knew seemed to be busier than I was. I supported myself, contributed my share to the upkeep of the household and engaged in all the useful wifely and motherly duties and pleasures. But I still had time left to read.... I had constructed a life in which I could be energetic but also lazy; I could rush but I would never be rushed. It was a perfect situation for someone who loved to read.'

It's the first question people interested in dovegreyreader usually ask me...

' How  do you manage to read so much?'

and I end up waffling my way through some poorly argued justification for being a besotted reader (if you've asked me you'll know this) which always sounds a bit lame, when in fact I don't think I do read 'so much',  probably no more than very many of you, perhaps writing this gives the impression that I do. But unless you are a reader too, people are often very suspect at the whole idea of devoting so much time to something so seemingly inactive and passive.
I can see them thinking it's all a bit lazy isn't it, whereas if I played 18 holes of golf four days a week (as some people I know do) they wouldn't bat an eyelid...how lovely...what's your handicap (can someone explain that to me...what exactly is a golf handicap?)

I'm always up for a good nostalge but I have no illusions about the dangers of it or the need to keep it in perspective, and whilst Wendy Lesser identifies that danger of escapism... fleeing into the past because we can no longer tolerate the present, I  wanted to reread The Bookshop as a bit of a test run because I rarely allocate time to reread. There are too many new books to explore but having pledged a complete Penelope Fitzgerald reread I wondered if I could or would recreate that first read of my first book of hers. I'm also going to be exploring Nabakov, and Lolita features in The Bookshop so I thought it was all a nice reading plait to weave and now that I have reread perhaps it features much more than I had realised.

I remember it so clearly, December 2003, someone had recommended The Bookshop and I settled down with it in front of a cracking winter fire and didn't move a muscle until I'd finished it. Forget golf, this was a literary hole in one, something I couldn't quite pin down had struck very deep and permanently into my reading psyche, I'd read a book that had a quiet power and knew I'd hit a personal mother lode, would rapidly be able to bore for England on the subject of Penelope and had ordered everything else she'd written within hours.

Being a bit of a geeky reader I also set up a Penelope Fitzgerald file (several of my favourite authors have these, I haven't quite been able to surrender everything to the depths of the laptop, paper still has its place) and in those days when printer ink cartridges didn't cost as much as a tank of petrol (do they have us over a barrel? Yes they do)  I set to, made it a nice cover and scoured the internet for every reference and interview I could find. As I recall I wrote to Wendy Lesser because I kept finding mentions of pieces she had written and she kindly helped me track those down.
So I've just gone back over that file and found the essay Penelope wherein Wendy Lesser examines why the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald had such a profound effect on her, and if you're interested you'll find it in On Modern British Fiction edited by Zachary Leader and published by OUP.

' There is a kind of rereading in which you go over and over a piece of writing (a paragraph, a page,a few stanzas) to try to figure out why it has the effect on you it does. This kind of rereading is obsessive and a bit tedious; it may be especially dull for the onlooker who does not share the obsession...it has in it something of Penelope's nightly unweaving of her daily work as she waits for Ulysses uncertain return. She is trying to keep time still and at the same time move it forward. Something similar may be said of the obsessive reader.'

So I settled down with The Bookshop again, six and a bit years on, and I had an almost identical reading experience. The book and I could not be parted but this time because I was close reading and discovering what lay beneath. Penelope Fitzgerald is legendary for writing a book double the size of the one in your hand and ruthlessly cutting out half of it to avoid insulting her reader thus allowing them to do the work.
Wendy Lesser finds likewise,

'I find it somehow perfect that the key moment of the climactic scene in a Penelope Fitzgerald novel should be a moment of spontaneous silence. It is in these wordless moments - the ones between the lines, or before the lines begin, or after they end - that her stories have their secret life.'

I was transfixed but noticing differently if that makes sense and one little paragraph jumped right out and bit me and whisked me back forty something years to when I was ten and a half, more of that  when I post about the book and I'll also be remembering Penelope Fitzgerald again on Wednesday, the tenth anniversary of her death.
But I wonder how many of you are re-readers and whether it has this effect on you too, and I'd love to know those books you re-read often.

Cruise ship conversation...

So the Tinker is on board his cruise ship, having a fabulous time and it's land ahoy as he approaches Antigua (and to be exact, because someone's sure to notice, I took this picture two years ago and it's Jamaica) and who knows, perhaps he's got his copy of Wolf Hall to hand which he's really enjoying, so he strikes up a conversation with the woman sitting next to him and it went something like this...

'Do you like reading? ' he says (great chat up line Dad!)

'Oh yes,' she says, 'I love books.'

'My daughter writes a blog about books' he says

'Oh really' comes the reply 'What's it called?'

'dovegreyreader scribbles' he says.

Silence....

'Don't tell me you're the Tinker!'

NTTVBG The Boys in the Trees ~ Mary Swan

Welcome back to Devon and as the weather's nearly warm and the word 'trees' features in the title of today's NTTVBG selection, I've moved us out to the summerhouse in the millenium apple orchard.

'Orchard' is actually rather a pretentious term for a hotch-potch of about twelve gnarly old apple trees doubtless nursing between them every blight known to pomiculture, but the blossom's on the way so they are about to look very pretty and we've cleared the straw and the mice out of the summerhouse.
Plus the setting is quite uplifting and joyous and the view across to Cornwall will soon be looking this glorious

and I think we might be needing all the glorious and uplifting we can find today.
So pull up a deckchair, pour yourself a drink and yes, that's the bacon sarnies cooking on the barbecue that you can smell...none of this wasting four hours waiting for the charcoal to warm up, we thought we'd just have the thing flaming along all day and apologies now for the noisy neighbours.

It's the BBQ...for some reason it makes them nervous.
Ahem, well now I can't procrastinate any longer, The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan, a Canadian writer whose book was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2008.
Do you just want to shoot me right away and be done with it for choosing such a bleak, dark and seemingly miserable read because I'll admit that I've struggled with this one.
I think I've emerged feeling a bit curate's egg about it, there is no question in my mind that it is, in many ways, undoubtedly a brilliant and very assured book and I was full of hope as I started to read. There is much I have admired in the quality of the prose and the inner lives revealed, but as I approached the end I have had my share of possibly self-inflicted difficulties with it too.
I have a feeling we may have much to talk about today which is all to the good and I'm feeling of an open mind and quite prepared to turn around my thinking about this one.

To summarise very quickly, and as usual beware of spoilers.

William and Naomi Heath, 1870s England and with three children lost to diphtheria (and how pleased I was to win Guess That Disease from the descriptions of the symptoms and treatments), the couple emigrate to Canada where a further two children are born.
The family settles in to an established community but seems to remain detached and distant. Inexplicably William buys a gun and shoots his family but not himself. Arrested soon afterwards, accusations of embezzlement emerge from William's employer and William is sentenced to death for the murders. He is finally executed in a seriously botched hanging watched by local people. but also by Eaton, the doctor's son and friend of William's daughter, and it is the detailed imagery of that hanging that has lingered on in my mind ever since.
The emphasis is on revealing the impact of the horror on various members of this small and seemingly close-knit community whilst also exposing the divisions and guilty secrets that such an event reveals, both at the time and many years ahead.
The writing is seriously elliptical, the story frequently told at a slant, much is alluded to, much is left unsaid. The narrative is non-linear and it was often quite difficult to know where I was in the whole which would normally make a book like this my ideal read. I love a writer to trust me enough to be able to make those connections for myself and to weave those disparate threads together. I'm usually happy to feel in a bit of a muddle on the way whilst also feeling that I'm trusting the author to get me to the end, I thrive on a bit of work to do as I read and I usually enjoy a book like this immensely.
After all Hilary Mantel and I usually agree on everything and she said this of The Boys in the Trees,

' After finishing it, I feel as if I am still listening for it. It has the compelling logic of a lingering powerful dream.'

So why didn't I feel that too?
Why is my dream akin to an ongoing nightmare about those final pages and the detailed description of the botched hanging?
Why didn't my heart bleed copiously when I read how Dr Robinson went and held Heath's bound hands as he writhed his way towards an agonising death on the end of that misplaced noose?
Surely there was enough warp here through which to weave my weft, yet somehow this book just gradually stopped working for me. I felt emotionally disengaged, slightly detached from all this... or perhaps setting me up as the objective observer was Mary Swan's intention?
I'm really interested to know how others have emerged from this.
I found myself sighing with reading exhaustion after about twenty pages and then setting it aside after thirty, the day I racked up fifty pages I wasn't sure I knew where I was.
But I'm still not sure why this book has ultimately not been the satisfying read I had thought it would be (ask me in about two weeks when reading mists have cleared and I may know) because there were moments when Mary Swan's writing felt like a pure descendant of Virginia Woolf's. Yet characters I warmed to disappeared without trace (Abby), others of less interest were suddenly given undue prominence (Eaton) and even more seemed to fade into obscurity with just a brief reference to their demise.
Did someone drown whilst under the influence of laudanum?
Dr Robinson of fulminating septicemia with undertones of willful suicide by neglect?
But did I care?
For some reason I felt Mary Swan didn't want me to know them well, just slightly and to be honest I didn't care and rightly or wrongly I do like to care about characters as I read.
Even Dr Robinson remained tantalisingly remote to me despite all his soul-searching revelations.
I mentioned self-inflicted difficulties and I lay the blame squarely at the feet of William Maxwell.
Having recently read several of his books, So Long, See You Tomorrow slightly mirrors the plot here, whilst Time Will Darken It has similarly named characters, but sadly to this book's disadvantage perhaps William Maxwell currently feels like the unassailable master of the small town American drama to me. 

There is much to be said for not criticising a writer for not doing what they had never intended to do in the first place (sorry triple negatives can't possibly be allowed) and it's clear that Mary Swan never intended me to have the chapter I desperately craved (and still crave but have had to try and 'write' for myself) and perhaps you did too...William Heath's?
Because if I cared about anyone I cared about William.
I can cope with loose ends aplenty if I'm given enough to tie them up with eventually and I'm hoping that is something we can talk about too.
I suspect the answer to that may lie here (p168)

'And if you went back as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues were there, the clues you'd missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward.'

I still feel sure Mary Swan is too good a writer not to have left those clues and whilst I seem to be full of negatives and feel as if I am doing her a great disservice, I'm really hoping against hope that you all have some answers, so I'm going to stop there and can't wait to hear your thoughts.
I was reading Sara Paretsky's blog yesterday and this thought of hers struck me.

'At the same time, I do believe like Kushner that “your only obligation as a writer is to tell the truth,” to perform surgery on yourself so that you’re exposing your bone–if you can bear to cut that deep you will write the truth and then it will speak truly to other readers.  It sounds so noble, and yet so many petty fears and angers get in the way of diving deep into the soul that I sometimes wonder how I even write a coherent sentence.'

And I feel sure that Mary Swan has poured her heart and soul into The Boys in the Trees and somehow I've failed to see that truth.
Funnily enough this now feels like a real live book group dilemma / blues and twos emergency.
In walks the person who chose the book looking a bit apologetic and muttering,

'Well, really sorry, this one didn't work for me.' 
to be met either by a chorus of
'Oh I loved it'
or
'That's the last time we let you choose the book.'

I wanted to love it too and somehow I haven't yet...but I'm not above trying harder, so over to you.

All at sea...

We've had several relaxed and contented phone calls from the Tinker on board ship as he traverses the Atlantic and all seems to be going full steam ahead as he sails south into warmer climes, Having been to Madeira the next port of call is Antigua and the trip on the submarine. Mostly he seems to be watching the ocean go by from the confines of the sauna, followed by the pool and the jacuzzi, a bite to eat, a bit of shut-eye on deck, another bite to eat, a few pages of Wolf Hall on his balcony, more of the sauna, the jacuzzi and so on and forth.
This is the life well-deserved at 85 I say.
Meanwhile my reading week has been sporadically invaded as always by that thing called Life.

Lovely friends, lunches and evenings out plus racking up the performance standard at choir practice as the Vocal Harem Annual Gala Concert approaches.
 
If I had to choose the songs I have always wanted to sing in a big choir, America from West Side Story and Rhythm of Life from Sweet Charity would be two of them and...well who knows, we might.
And just take a look at our rather special guest soloist.
Bookishly, I'm revving up for this Sunday's NTTVBG choice to be hosted here, The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan, so not another word about that until then.
Now I hope Rev Cheryl won't mind me mentioning that we had a delightfully cheery and very long phone conversation this week that proved dangerous all round.
Ostensibly it was about the possibility of giving a new home to a typewriter for Bookhound after the Norwegian Blue Imperial episode, which he was thrilled about, but I take no responsibility for the fact that Cheryl was online as we spoke and thus in a ready-steady-go position to buy almost the entire William Maxwell oeuvre as I was enthusing.
It works both ways though because I was frantically scribbling down Cheryl's recommends and dashed off to purchase the minute I'd put the phone down, in particular Writing in an Age of Silence by Sara Paretsky, which has since arrived.

Whilst I seem to be reading the US chaps at the moment, I'm also finding books on reading, writers and writing hold great allure and a book tracing a writer's journey from 'silence to speech' was going to be a winner. Rev Cheryl has also been impressing upon me for some time that there is a huge gap called "Sara Paretsky" in my reading life, so I aim to fill.
I also gather Richard Mabey may be another omission to be remedied.
I  read news last weekend of the latest Sylvia Plath recording to be made available by The British Library and ordered the CD immediately.
I find there is something beguiling about listening to Sylvia Plath reading her own poetry. An indefinable accent and ever the performance artist, structuring her presentation with precision and modulating the timbre of her voice with great care, Sylvia Plath left nothing to chance as she read, and as my collection of Plath readings are on old cassettes the CD seemed in order.
It goes without saying that I wasn't in the least bit interested in the recording of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in conversation, the only known recording of them speaking together about their work, their marriage, their lives, and the impact of the arrival of baby Frieda, plus Sylvia's growing interest in bee-keeping and bee imagery ...no of course I wouldn't buy the CD just for that...
Other reading has seen me finally finishing Time Will Darken It by WillIam Maxwell, after a four week-long very slow and deliberate read.
Also that re-read of The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Two beautiful books I want to think about carefully before I rush my thoughts out on here.
And on the subject of William Maxwell, my heartfelt thanks to Kamala, a U.S. reader who very kindly offered me a copy of The Element of Lavishness Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell and then so generously included I'll Stand By You The Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland in the package, thus diverting the books from their fate at her local library sale.

With apologies to potential purchasers in New Jersey they really do belong in Devon and Devon will treasure them. Do you know that feeling when a book parcel arrives and you almost want to cry with happiness...it can't just be me, and whoever said in comments that neither William nor Sylvia ever wrote a bad sentence was spot on.
Cornflower and I have postponed our Persephone Tea this coming week but will be back at the end of May with The Children Who Lived in a Barn by Eleanor Graham, but exciting news which I knew of some time ago and now officially announced, Persephone Books will be launching their own online forum on June 1st. Anyone is most welcome to join in a regular discussion of the books there starting with Number One, William - An Englishman by Cicely Hamilton.
So that's my week, how about yours?

Why Translation Matters ~ Edith Grossman

With those European classics in mind, I've been trying to pin down the moment when I made that knowing connection with a translated book, which might seem a bit dense of me but I know I'd taken it for granted until I read The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun.
Admittedly it was all helped along by holding the beautiful little shrink-wrapped US Other Press hardback edition, with its dusky pink cover, in my hand.
Shrink-wrappers on books always make me feel a bit special, as if the publisher has treasured the books enough to want them to reach me in pristine condition. I feel a sort of daft but deep reverence for the contents before I even open it, but at the time I had some reservations about Kathie von Ankum's translation which I've read several times since that first read in March 2005.
It was a single word that just wouldn't sit right... 'gotten'.
A great big Americanism in the midst of a sentence and it stopped me in my tracks.
That 'gotten' has irritated me ever since...would Doris really have said that in 1920s Berlin?
That was until last week when I read what Edith Grossman had to say in her fascinating series of essays Why Translation Matters and I discover that Edith is not one to mince her words so brace yourselves..

'I have discovered to my horror, that far too many British publishers insist on Anglicizing texts that have been translated by those of us who, to their minds, are little more than semi-literate American ex-colonials who flatter ourselves into thinking that the yawp we speak and write is actually English.'

Yes, it made me sit up a bit straight too.
It had never occurred to me that I was making such a value judgement about that single word 'gotten', but on reflection of course I was and embarrassingly I rather prissily said so back in 2005, in those pre-blog days when I wrote a few Amazon reviews...which thankfully I don't now.
It wasn't Queen's English but why on earth should Queen's English be deemed so right and surely I can cope?

'Translation expands our ability to explore through literature the thoughts and feelings of people from another society or another time.'

So my thanks to Edith for sorting out that little dilemma.
Interesting to note that Edith Grossman now has clauses written into any contracts with UK publishers giving her final lexical control over her work, and how essential that now seems. It's a bit like a doctor writing a prescription and the pharmacist being allowed to change it to something different, unthinkable.

New York based Edith Grossman perhaps the foremost translator of Spanish language writers, among them Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlo Fuentes, whilst her translation of Don Quixote is 'widely considered a masterpiece', details quite what life would be like without translation. And whilst bewailing the abysmal record of publishers to embrace and invest in translated works, flags up the frustrations and lack of appreciation for the translators profession (and no I hadn't noticed it either, but the translator's name hardly ever features on the cover of the book) taking reviewers squarely to task for so rarely referencing the translator or the translation.
Well thank heavens I'm not a reviewer, and perhaps Edith doesn't read the blogs, but reflecting back I do know we consistently recognise the endeavours of the translator on here, the Literature in Translation tag when I remember to use it, groups many of those posts together and we've had some interesting discussions about it.
I said as much recently about Adriana Hunter's translation of Beside the Sea by Veronica Olmi. 

"I have to applaud Adriana Hunter's translation of the mother's narrative voice which I feel sure has been captured and preserved in perfect pitch; it's remarkable and I feel sure very close to the original French because it works, maintains the vernacular, nothing incongruous or out of keeping with the characters on the page..."

and how interesting this reading trail might be because those thoughts fly in the face of something I quoted from Susan Sontag back in 2007

"The translator's primary duty is to stay as close as possible to the original text with the understanding that the result will, precisely, read as a translation.To naturalise a foreign book is to lose what is most valuable about it: the spirit of the language, the mental ethos out of which the text emerges."

I shall be reading these texts closely.

Googling Queen's English proved interesting as I roamed this list of traditional Queen's English sayings, which seem to have come some way since the Sovereign had anything to do with it, so I regretfully passed over the canine appendages description for reasons of impropriety and a dread of spam and have settled on spiffing to describe Edith Grossman's very forthright and informative book for which I thank her.

'Imagine how bereft we would be if the only fictional worlds we could explore, the only vicarious literary experiences we could have, were those written in languages we could read easily. The deprivation would be indescribable.'

On Translation...

For reasons best known to himself, Bookhound had been looking to buy an old-fashioned typewriter and preferably for about a fiver.
He found a pristine specimen in a charity shop the other day; immaculate condition, hardly used, lovely keys, ribbon in place and he was just about to buy it when fortunately he put his glasses on for the final close scrutiny and spotted something out of the ordinary.
The keys were Norwegian which probably explains why it was called a Norwegian Blue Imperial, and though he could probably have jumped his way around it and made it type English, that's obviously why it was in a charity shop in Devon.
With sincere apologies to Norwegian visitors I'm afraid there was only one course of action open to us...

...and we proceeded to have one of our ridiculous exchanges wondering if it was dead and pining for the fjords, which will only make sense if you watched Monty Python as religiously as we did, and with further apologies to those who weren't there back in 1969, it won't seem in the least bit amusing.

Clearly we don't get out much and that's apropos of only a very tenuous connection to what now follows.

Among recent book arrivals a plethora of translation (no Norwegian), a set of Central European Classics about to be re-published by Penguin and there I realised was a potential reading trail sitting before me on the kitchen table and a route that I'm not sure I would have known sufficient about to compile for myself.
So whilst I do like to be an independent reading traveller, sometimes I'm quite happy if the navigation is plotted for me and I can always digress if I want to.
I took a more purposeful shine to mittel-European literature when I discovered Joseph Roth a few years ago and I've strolled along the more familiar roads...  Antal Szerb, Sandor Marai, Jaroslav Hasek, but I still feel I know next to nothing of any substance about it, yet I love it for that seemingly lost, other-worldly rather melancholy atmosphere it invokes in me.
It's all a terribly misguided muddle that could do with a bit of organisation and some grounding in reality, especially when through all the mists of that romantic folly you realise that

'These books all come from a culture which has suffered hideously throughout much of the twentieth century - it has been invaded, despoiled and mutilated in a way which is hard for outsiders to appreciate.'

Well, I'm most certainly an outsider who wants to know more and this series promises to take me on

'a political, social and cultural journey from the optimism of pre-1914 Central Europe to the horrors of the Cold War.'

The Penguin collection is one you surely won't miss on the bookshelves in early May with these refreshingly bright and rather eye-catching cover designs.

Mixed-media, part - photo, part - graphics, which thinking back to the recent Margaret Atwood re-issues from Virago seems to be the current trend. There's a quilt in there somewhere, with all those geometrics Kaffe Fasset would have something whipped up in a jiffy that fitted the colour palette perfectly.
A selection of very arresting titles and authors (sorry to make you all twist your necks 90 degrees...be careful) that have certainly made me look twice and investigate, and perhaps from a range of lesser know literary countries for me, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Hungary, Transylvania before it became part of Romania.

I've dug deep and think I've at least heard of Karel Capek and Czeslaw Milosz but I'm going to plead terrible ignorance on the rest and so all information and suggestions about which to read soonest would be very welcome, along with any ideas for background reading for someone whose history of that invasion, despoilation and mutilation is intermittent, verging on non-existent.
The books will need to be available and accessible, nothing to dry and dusty. I somehow want this to come to life because I'd like to discover more by and about these writers along the way too.
I shall be wading in slowly with How I Came to Know Fish by Czech writer Ota Pavel, because I'm a bit nervous and it's the skinniest one, and, with quite a few other reading commitments to fulfill, slender suits my reading mood right now; but it's also a childhood memoir and that suits my current remit too.
Moreover I really like the sound of it.

'Fishing with his father and his Uncle Prosek - the two finest fishermen in the world - he takes a peaceful pleasure from the rivers and ponds of his country.'

Well by osmosis I've forgotten more than most people might ever want to know about fishing in the first place, so I'm interested, but more so for this...

' When the Nazis invade, Pavel must steal their confiscated fish back from under the noses of the SS to feed his family. With tales of his father's battles to provide for his family both in freedom and in persecution, this is one boy's passionate and affecting tale of life, love and fishing.'

From the book I know this.
Oto Pavel was born in Prague in 1930, the son of a Jewish travelling salesman, much of his family was arrested and imprisoned during the war. He became a sport's journalist and was a great enthusiast of ice hockey and fishing, though whilst covering the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck in 1964 he became severely ill and spent much of the rest of his life in various mental hospitals. During that time he wrote this book which was finally published in 1990.

I'm now incredibly intrigued by this journey, but, ever the hasty reading traveller once I've been inspired, I decided to take some time to read Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman before I hit the road and what a good thing I did, more soon.

After the Fire a Still Small Voice ~ Evie Wyld

So I think I made it as far as telling you that I'd met Evie Wyld at the David Vann reading in London and was kicking myself for not having persevered with her first novel After the Fire a Still Small Voice so had then waffled my way through a quagmire, dug myself a deeper hole and jumped right in.
It was with some relief that I found the book patiently waiting for me when I arrived home and I now recall that I was reading Alistair Morgan's Sleeper's Wake at the same time. Both books entail emotionally traumatised men fleeing to an isolated cabin to try and face down their demons and I ended up in a state of utter confusion about both books and with rapidly dissipating sympathy for the pair of them, so put Evie's book on hold until now.
In fact sometimes a book needs its right moment and I was ready to meet Frank & Co this time around.
Frank has headed from Canberra to his grandparents' shack on the east coast of Australia after the breakdown of a relationship. His childhood has been marred by violence leaving Frank emotionally shot to pieces and it's clear he has taken few emotional coping strategies or any degree of resilience into adulthood with him.
Running alongside is the dual narrative of Leon, child of immigrant parents who run a baker's shop in Sydney.
Leon's father is drafted to fight in the Korean war, an experience that will understandably leave him a changed man, and not for the better, so it's little wonder that I held my breath when Leon was called up for service in Vietnam.
The structure is intricate and intriguing because Evie Wyld makes her reader work, doesn't quite spell it out but instead offers tantalising moments of knowing, drops subtle hints at those little crossroads when the stories interlock and work towards the slow revelation of how the lives of these men mesh together.
I won't spell it out either, though others may have done so because it does open up a wealth of discussion, but for me it was the uncertainties of this that made this novel such a good read. I like those moments of retrospective understanding, those eureka moments and I like those 'I wonder if...' thoughts along the way so I won't deprive you of them.
This is that harsh world where the men fight and the women suffer (and I've written that in my copy but can't now decide whether it's an original thought or I read it elsewhere) so sympathies fly all over the place and as the back story fills in, the mists clear and with it the emotional fall-out for these three men becomes evident. Men in a state of mental extremis who exhibit all those inhibitions that some have for displaying or expressing emotions, there is a hefty, leaden silence about the past surrounding them all and eventually they all have to seek redemption somewhere.
You somehow know that if any of them are going to take the lid off it's going to be impressive and messy and heart-wrenching and it was,

'He drove home in a vacuum, shallow breathing, and when he got to his house he sat in his truck and cried. Strings of spit and snot attached to the steering wheel and every time he wiped his face to try and calm himself down it got worse, and waves of something terrible crashed down over him, and he bawled like he was the last man on earth.'

Salvation comes in various guises for all of them, for Frank...

'When he was finished with crying he went inside and drank himself to sleep. It was the only possible solution and he thanked it as it went down his throat, thank God, thank God.'

Leon finds his elsewhere,

'There was a needlework embroidery on the wall - in fact there were several. They said things like CHRIST IS BEYOND OUT UNDERSTANDING and GLORY IN THY NAME. The one that was the most impressive, that was decorated with hearts and flowers, roses and poppies, vines and oranges, read AFTER THE FIRE A STILL SMALL VOICE.'

You'd think, from the stunning title of the book, I'd have thought more about its significance as I read. It's a Biblical quote from 1 Kings 19: 12 (I had to look it up)  concerning Elijah who had fled into the desert, but I was so caught up in the immaculate sense of place and time that I didn't, and I now wish I'd started to note the fire references much sooner. When I did they seemed to increase the significance of the setting in a dry, hot country where fire is such a perilous and all-consuming fear.
I dug around in a few Bible commentaries to find this

"The wind, and earthquake, and fire, did not make him cover his face, but the still voice did. Gracious souls are more affected by the tender mercies of the Lord, than by his terrors."

And in the end perhaps this is a book about mercy, about mercy for others and for the self and there's something about forgiveness woven into the bigger picture here too because the multiple atrocities of war feature powerfully and with that the inevitable and lasting impact of what war can make a man do.
Having now read it I was mortified not to see After the Fire a Still Small Voice at least long listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction (and it's shortlist day tomorrow). It really is an assured and astonishing debut novel and I will look forward to anything else that Evie writes, but I was then delighted to see it nominated for The Orange First Novel Award so I'm placated and can only wish Evie Wyld much deserved good fortune at the awards ceremony on June 9th.

dovegreydiary...

It's been a bit of a hectic week chez dovegreyreader, what with the Kayaker in New Zealand getting bitten by a white-tailed spider (possibly) leading to a subsequent Icelandic Eyjafjallajokull-like abscess on his neck (definitely). The NZ docs have been ace but there's me feeling I must offer sage advice from my store of nursing experience and across several thousand miles via a webcam...

' Don't drink or you won't know if you're ill with septicemia.'

And him actually agreeing not to (!) and saying

'There's a gaping hole in my neck, what if my windpipe falls out?'

and me saying

'Of course it won't,'

in that comforting and reassuring motherly way that you do whilst not being entirely sure it wouldn't.
It didn't.
His whale pics have been in the local paper this week too so that's made a change from all the usual pictures of people in pantomimes (which are very nice but, still...) and we've had lovely phone calls from friends.
We also waved the Tinker off on his travels.
Bless him, he looked very smart and chipper as he set off for his ship and the Caribbean and thankfully nothing that was going to be delayed by a deluge of volcanic ash.
I do feel huge sympathy for those inconvenienced and losing time, work and money as a result of nature doing what it does best in Iceland, i.e. tipping us the wink that it will invariably have the upper hand, and I seriously hope no one has any health issues as a result of all this, but what a novelty the plane-free sky is here in the Western Approaches.

Here's the very hazy view from us about an hour ago and we automatically assume that any high altitude plane we see heading this way >>>>> is America-bound because there's nowhere else to go after us really, but for anyone living near an airport this sky-silence must all feel very strange.
Being a white house planted very visibly in the midst of acres of green I'm sure we're a sort of marker for passing low-flying aircraft and helicopters too ,

'OK lads, aim for the white house and hang a left for Cornwall  '

And is this ash on our car all the way from a volcano in Iceland or hasn't it reached us yet?
It's very out of the ordinary whatever it is.

Girl's Night In round at mine this week and one of our number is paying vast amounts of money to go to Weight Watchers at the moment and has shed a creditable 9lbs, which the rest of us are only jealous about and should be doing too because we have all owned up to acquiring a bit of  wintery excess. It's just that we're all too mean and scared to spend out on the public humiliation of stepping on scales in front of other people.
So we spent the evening wheedling it all out of her because I think they must take a vow of secrecy or something.
Anyway it's all done on points not calories so we set to.
How many points a day?
How many points in  fish and chips?
How many points in a bowl of cereal...pint of milk...jaffa cake...

By about 11pm she'd cracked completely and we'd got the lot, plus even seen her very top secret Instant Calories-to-Points Calculator in the flowery case.
The most sensible thing to do after all this excitement was to sit down, put on a bit more weight and knit calmly because I'm approaching completion of the chunky Hebridean wool cardigan and need my wits about me to ensure I don't stitch the left front to the right side or forget buttonholes again.

 
I'm delighted with the Noro Kureyon accents around the edges, they've lifted it out of the ordinary and no wonder these sheep stay warm, this is likely to be the snuggest thing I've knitted next to the Alafoss Lopi Pink Elephant, and if you type Pink Elephant into my new 'Search' box up the top over here >>>>> you'll see what I mean.
Thank you Typepad, that little box is going to save my bacon because sometimes it feels like an online version of the cupboard under our stairs on here.
So that's my week, how about yours?

Team Ulysses - Camp Ten

Are you still there Team Ulysses?
Despite the cloud of Icelandic volcanic ash currently shrouding UK airspace we have the summit in our sights, and trying to be very efficient I read this month's chunk of Ulysses on my e reader whilst travelling on the train up to London about three weeks ago. The journey flew by and I was sufficiently engrossed and interested to be worried between Reading and Paddington that I wouldn't have time to finish the chapter, and I definitely wanted to.
One heck of a lot of reading water has travelled under the bridge since then, so coming back to it now felt like quite a challenge until I opened the book again, and this time not the electronic version but my much-loved and now very well-read paper version.
I remember thinking as I read and paused for the occasional gaze across the scenery flying by, how few people may have read this section of the book compared to the number that start reading Ulysses, and how sad to miss out on Eumaeus, and I suspect Ithaca and the final chapter Penelope to follow, and what I think may turn out to be the crowning glory and among the very best chapters in the book.
Best in that they are certainly among the most readable, defined in the notes in my copy (yes, I've looked at them occasionally this month) as 'narratively normal', but also for the content which suddenly seems to transform  the book I've read and imbibed so far, and often through that great cloud of unknowing.
Suddenly I think it might all start to fall into place though I have to own up I still feel like the most naive reader James Joyce may ever have had.
Stephen Dedalus, by now legless from the demon drink, is in need of a father figure, and here I felt Leopold Bloom came into his own. I think I understood something about the pain of this man who continues to come across as consistently likeable... or have I got that wrong?
Is anyone else a fan of Poldy's?
Nothing has yet given me any cause to truly dislike any character I've come across in Ulysses, that can't be right, who have I forgotten that I should be hating...even Blazes Boylan doesn't seem the sleaze that he's supposed to be to me.
But caveat lector say those notes and imagine my surprise when they proceed to suggest that I should be frantically confused about whose narrative voice I might be listening to...an ominiscient one...or was is Stephen's or Bloom's, whilst I was also supposed to be deeply anxious about the dissolution of these boundaries.
In fact I just sank into Eumaeus with a sense of huge relief at the ease of the reading after so many readerly challenges to get there. Whilst knowing (well, not knowing actually but thank you to the notes for telling me) that Eumaeus was a good and loyal swineherd who gets Odysseus out of a spot of bother I couldn't help allowing the word to slip into Emmaus with its biblical connotations of companionship along the road.
That worked in two ways, both from the Stephen-Bloom meeting but also from knowing that some of you have been reading this at the same time as me.
Yet whilst busily thinking about all the Odysseyian connections I was missing, which incidentally I would really love to rectify after this with some Homeric reading, I had completely forgotten that Hamlet features powerfully here too. I've done Hamlet to death over the years so I'm surprised not to have clocked that one sooner.
So have I been seduced by the ease of reading not to be prompted by the 'vigilance' and 'scepticism' the notes suggest?
Lisa in Oz explains it all so well here , and I think she may have forged on in her summit attempt, gone ahead to get the pitons knocked in for us to hang on to. In travelling with us Lisa has written the most incredibly comprehensive reader guide to Ulysses which will stand as a wonderful record of this amazing journey, because Team Ulysses we are but one Ithaca camp away from our final Penelope attempt on the summit on June 16th 2010.

dovegreyquietdays

There....I've gone and spoilt it now.

If you were wondering where today is, dovegreyreader scribbles is going to have the occasional Quiet Day(s) in the weeks and months to come, some space and time for  me to reflect and for you to draw your collective readerly breath.

Nor on those days will I stoop to posting a picture of a sleeping cat or a flower for the sake of the 'anything's better than nothing' approach because I'm not sure my photography's that brilliant....except for today. I did something 'helpful' for a friend which was a complete pleasure to do and as thanks she sent me the biggest box of freesias I have ever seen, enough to fill four vases like this and I can't possibly keep the scent to myself.

Before imaginations run riot and decide I've self-combusted (well actually who do I think I am...you might not even notice) this isn't anything like that, or an excuse for not having anything to post about either, or even a sort of veiled hint at a disguised wind down, in fact it's quite the opposite.

I've posted daily for the last four years and though I never run out of writing and reading ideas (not once...it's a bit scary) recently I've begun to sense that perhaps sometimes I say too much. So though I have a stack of bookish posts ready and waiting to go 'live' I think it's about being sensibly in control of this thing called a blog and its material, reading the vibes and not letting it run away with itself , and not inundating or overwhelming to excess those who take the time and trouble to read it.

Apart from a project on the impact of stillbirth which I'm researching and writing about for my day job through the summer, I have some deliciously pleasurable reading trails lined up to share and am also exploring some other exciting future possibilities for which I need to carve out a little extra time and energy to read around and think through carefully. To this end I plan to drop that 12.15am posting slot as well ...with sincere apologies to those for whom it has become familiar, in future you may knoweth not the hour nor the moment with quite such accuracy, but I'll still be here on a very regular basis.

So I hope you will all stick around enjoy and benefit from dovegreyquiet days as much as I will and forgive me but for the first time ever comments are closed on this post, because really I had taken a vow of silence on behalf of everyone today and I feel a bit naughty for breaking it....so as you were, hopefully see you for Team Ulysses tomorrow.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye ~ Muriel Spark

'A bewitching storyteller and, however unreflectingly, the first tribute readers pay to her art is surrender to the engrossing tales she tells. Storytellers are in slight evidence as our century lengthens,and the novelist who aims to entertain, nearly extinct.'

I'm still revelling in Spark Season and according to William McBrien, one time editor of the scholarly journal Twentieth Century Literature, that's how good Muriel Spark was, and how seemingly dire things were considered to be in the early 1980s. This according to his essay Muriel Spark, the novelist as dandy which I came across whilst reading about Jennifer Johnston in that £1 find, Twentieth Century Women Novelists edited by Thomas Staley.
Nothing I've read by Muriel has disappointed me in the slightest, but I think reading a Muriel Spark novel is a bit of an act of faith for me because I can't pretend complete understanding or total comfort as I turn the pages, I just have to dive in from the high board and forget any elegant and well-practiced piked triple twist somersault entries with a stack of Sparkian expertise to assist, this feels like a clumsy, feet first plunge and one that  relies heavily on Muriel's all-seeing authorial eye to get me to the end with a modicum of enlightenment.
Bless her, Muriel always comes good and just look, Rocky gets about a bit doesn't he.

I find it helps to keep Muriel Spark's own words in mind,

'Fiction to me is a kind of parable, you have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.'

The Driver's Seat was a classic example, a seat of the pants read and I had no idea where I might end up, but end up there I did and barely able to draw breath when I arrived. How good to see it on the Lost Booker shortlist, a prize list which somehow holds more allure for me right now than anything else currently on my radar. In fact I'm letting Kirsty at Other Stories soldier on valiantly through the Orange Prize long list and perhaps I'll pitch up at the shortlist stage.
So to The Ballad of Peckham Rye publised in 1960 and I'll own up, I chose it because it was old, short and compact because, with the exception of Hilary Mantel and Woofle, I'm a bit over-cooked on sprawling eight hundred page contemporary literary canvasses right now.
I'll be over it any day soon.
It was also Endsleigh Salon last night and, having missed a couple  because of choir practice (Gala Concert approaches) and then London, I was looking forward to the evening with its theme of London and this was my choice.
The inimitable Stevie 'waving not drowning ' Smith (and why haven't I read more of her?) reviewing The Ballad of Peckham Rye in the Observer in 1960 suggested

'Muriel Spark has a real genius for being gruesome and hilarious in practical circumstances, gay in city graveyards, gothic in factories.'

and that is exactly what you get in this little 143 page novel and then to discover that Muriel herself had decided

'I wanted to give my mind a holiday and write something light and lyrical - as near a poem as a novel could get, and in as few words as possible.'

and I'm inclined to think hallelujah for you Muriel.

The eccentric and enigmatic Dougal Douglas, the hump-backed, lop-shouldered young man who has two lumps on his head which he explains are the remains of a set of surgically removed horns, arrives in the south London suburb of Peckham Rye in the 1950s. Apparently famed for being the site of Boadicea's suicide, it's not long before this normally staid working-class community is thinking about following her example as young Dougal proceeds to create turmoil, because as well as ghosting the biography of a retired actress, he's also conducting research into the factory working environment and meeting some wonderful Sparkian characters along the way.

Muriel Spark does real, normal, ordinary people so well...

'Here they were, kneeling at the altar. The vicar was reading from the prayer book...
    The Vicar said to Humphrey, 'Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife?'
  'No,' Humphrey said, ' to be quite frank I won't.'
   He got to his feet and walked straight up the aisle...got to the door and into his Fiat, and drove off by himself to Folkestone. It was there they had planned to spend their honeymoon.'

So I had a smile on my face by page eight and I don't think it left me through to the end.
In amongst it all there is of course the inevitable moment of Sparkian comic- tragedy and that horror when I was caught with the smile on my face as someone was being murdered, and all I could think was 'Muriel, how could you do that to me.'
It's almost impossible for me to explain or define with any clarity, in fact I don't feel like I'm saying much in depth about the book at all, but on entering Muriel Spark's world I happily leave disbelief and sensibilities at the door, throw myself into the spirit of the game and I know I love going there.
William Boyd in his excellent introduction to my new Penguin edition suggests that Muriel Spark

'hovers over her fictional world like a Dickens or a Trollope,happily telling us first what this character is thinking and then that one.'

and perhaps this is how Muriel gets me so successfully to the other end of the book in one piece, but could anything be truer than this assertion,

'It is worth remembering that life actually inclines to be this weird and this confusing - and that human beings are, on the whole, extremely odd....the Sparkian world in full-throated and exuberant splendour.''

and the winners are...

Ninety one seemed like enough entries to give the number generator some choice, so with apologies to anyone who missed it, comments are now closed and the signed copies of Alberto Manguel's book A Reader on Reading will be heading to 

10 Deborah

86 Kris W

If you could send your addresses to me at dovegreyreader at gmail.com nice things will happen soon and thanks to everyone for a wonderfully bookish day.

On the ideal reader...

'A famous children's book programme on the BBC always started with the host asking, "Are you sitting comfortably? Then we shall begin." The ideal reader is also the ideal sitter,'

Could this mean us because that's me alright and I'll bet it's you too.
Or how about

'The ideal reader is a cumulative reader: every reading of a book adds new layers of memory to the narrative.'

Well that's us too isn't it.

'The ideal reader judges a book by its cover.'

'Every book, good or bad, has its ideal reader.'

'The ideal reader wishes both to get to the end of the book and to know that the book will never end.'

You see how well Alberto Manguel knows us all... it's as if he's been round for tea and we've chatted it all through with him and it's all in his stunning new book which has arrived from Yale University Press and which has required my undivided attention for a while now, A Reader on Reading.
It was The Library At Night, Alberto Manguel's last book which really tuned me into his writing, and perhaps because it was a book in which he shared so much of himself and his passion for books and reading. If only I'd though to cite Alberto Manguel on 'that' radio programme on Criticism when Toby Young questioned the existence of such a thing as a passion for reading.
As I recall it was the little things that helped me identify with Alberto Manguel and that precious sanctity of a room in which to enjoy books that he wrote about and which I too am very fortunate enough to have, but which can equally be that 'reading space, it doesn't have to be a room with books floor to ceiling.What matters more is that the space allows for the experience that books offer,

'...books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination...'

I was also heartened to read in The Library at Night

'My library consists half of books I remember and half of books I have forgotten. Now that my memory is not as keen as it used to be, pages fade as I attempt to conjure them up. Some vanish from my experience entirely, unrecalled and invisible. Others haunt me temptingly with a title or an image, or a few words out of context.'

Or the fact that Alberto Manguel also has some clutter on his desk that would mean nothing to anyone else

'...talismans that have washed onto my desk over the years.'

I have little huddles of 'talismans' which is what I shall now call them.
In amongst it all my Jane Austen figure standing next to my world-in-a-bowl containing a stone from every river across the world that the Kayaker has paddled. It's becoming a sort of fount of all rivers so the Zambezi and the White Nile sit comfortably with the Fraser and the Dart.
A Reader on Reading is a collection of Alberto Manguel's essays on both reading and writing, and as I browsed through (and even a browse took me a couple of hours)  I was transfixed by one piece in particular from which I have quoted above, Notes Towards a Definition of the Ideal Reader.
The piece comprises a series of statements and though they only extend to four pages I still haven't finished reading them, because each time I try I grind to a halt at one which digs so deep that I have to think about it, read it over again and, in thinking how it relates to my own reading life, let my mind wander off on a frivol of readerly insight.
The scope and depth of the essays is both broad and profound; as you'd expect there is intellectual gravitas here so this will be no quick read and it will open up many reading trails. Early indications suggest that some are anecdotal and experiential, others speak of reading and books in more general terms, several with precision and specialist knowledge, as when Alberto Manguel writes about Homer or Jorge Luis Borges or Cervantes.
I've barely scraped the surface of a book that seems to ask for really slow and careful deliberate reading of me and that is exactly what I shall offer it.
Underpinning it all the continuous thread of Alberto Manguel's favoured childhood reading, in particular Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as if acknowledging the book that launched him on his life's reading journey.
So heaven knows how long it will take me to get to the end of  Notes Towards a Definition of the Ideal Reader piece for a start, especially when Alberto Manguel quotes Goethe,

'There are three kinds of readers: one, who enjoys reading without judging; a third, who judges without enjoying ; another in the middle, who judges while enjoying and enjoys while judging. The last class truly reproduces a work of art anew; its member are not numerous.'

I was tangled up thinking about that for an age.
But my favourite by far...and fellow marginalia fiends, after hearing about Penelope Fitzgerald last week and now this, well the evidence is really stacking up in our favour...

...and my response?

Now scroll down for gifts which I think all you 'ideal readers' might be very excited about.

**SIGNED** prize draw copies of A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel

Being an avid reader himself Rocky is particularly excited about this prize draw as you can see, having recently taken it upon himself to challenge Tess's unassailable position as Cat in Residence on the book room footstool. I'm not sure if Alberto Manguel has such talismans in his library but Tess is a permanent feature in ours.
Bless her. she doesn't complain, just gets nudged further and further to the edge until she falls off and then he sprawls...but heaven help her if she then sneaks onto his vacated Aga mat.
Two signed (you lucky, lucky people) copies of Alberto Manguel's new book, A Reader on Reading and these can go worldwide.
Names in comments as usual.

Living In the Maniototo ~ Janet Frame

'A word which is exciting to look at and say and doesn't slop its meaning over the side is good; a word which comes up from the well is good; a word which clusters like last year's bee around last year's flower is bad if the flower is already dead, but good if the flower is surviving, beautiful, and alone in a place where flowers have not been known to grow and where bees have never swarmed before nor gathered nectar.'

Haberdashery....harbinger... I've been trying to think of them, words which don't slop their meaning over the side, though who can know which words Janet Frame had in mind when she wrote that.
Pamela Gordon, Janet Frame's niece and literary executor, made contact when I first mentioned Janet Frame on here last year and it was a lovely and unexpected e mail from Pamela recently which sent me scooting off to the Janet shelf to pick up another of her books to add to the Easter reading pile.
Pamela had seen coverage of the Kayaker's whale moment on New Zealand TV and kindly wrote to let me know. The upshot of that whale meeting that dolphin might be that I think I have just read my best Janet Frame novel to date, even if I do love Owls Do Cry as much as...as.. a lot.
Living in the Maniototo is probably the perfect book to read right after a Muriel Spark, not only for its wonderfully quirky sense of humour but also for the way that Janet Frame, like Muriel Spark, playfully exposes the art of the writer.
In fact if you are a writer and happen to be reading this...well thank you kindly and very much for visiting (but don't you think you really should be knuckling down to that latest book that we're all waiting for...and you've already spent a while on Twitter and Facebook today) and far be it from me to teach you to suck eggs because you're all probably brilliant at this novel-writing lark already and don't need any help from me who wouldn't have the first clue, but can I suggest that Living in the Maniototo might be well worth the read.
The Maniototo is Maori for 'plain of blood' and does exist, a hot, dry plain in the very south of New Zealand's South Island and could equally be hobbled into the Latin for 'total madness', but thanks to Linda Grant's preface I know it's also,

'the place where the novelist writes. It is the faraway look in a writer's eyes... the place inside the novelist's head to which she retreats.'

Janet Frame does something so clever here, choreographs something so complex and does it so capably that I had to keep stopping to figure out exactly what she had done and quite how she'd done it.
This is a book about the life of the novelist and the writing process; the power and control the writer has at their fingertips to create people and situations, combined with that canny knack Janet Frame has of blurring the boundaries of fiction and reality, as her narrator teasingly tells us

' commuting between 'real life' and 'fiction!' '

And my thanks to Pamela Gordon for permission to use this wonderful picture of Janet Frame, taken in Baltimore by John Money...and Pamela also tells me Janet made no secret of the fact that her friend John was the inspiration for 'Brian' in this novel.
Eventually I was so deeply tangled up in Living in the Maniototo that  I hardly knew where I was and it became the most amazing reading experience.
A bit like sitting in a bookish version of the hairdressers and looking into an infinity of mirrors, a constant repetition of self but slightly further removed and more distant each time...sorry that probably doesn't make sense, it's quite a difficult reading sensation to cut and blow-dry into words...perhaps I'll stop that analogy now.

The narrator reveals that she is a woman in possession of several identities who, having buried two husbands  and published two novels is travelling from New Zealand to the United States to stay with friends whilst she writes her third novel. You don't need to know any more than that, what will be will be and somehow this is a novel that you have to feel your own way around and decide for yourself what you think is happening. I suspect there as many interpretations as readers...no rights, no wrongs because by the final page I was brimming with unanswered questions, and how refreshing that can be in amongst so much fiction that feels it must top and tail itself neatly.
Linda Grant in her introduction to the new Virago edition writes a wonderful homage to the experimental novel and its power to either enthrall or depress. As readers we naturally seek obvious plot, and when it doesn't emerge quite as readily as we'd like, books can fly across the room.
All I can suggest is please don't cast this one aside, it's worth persevering or you'll miss some of the most wonderful words in the most perfect order,

'...a prose sentence which touches like a branding iron is good. A sentence which keeps its feet clean from beginning to end is good. A sentence which, travelling, looks out of portholes as far as horizons and beyond is good. A sentence which goes to sleep is good, if the season is winter; bad if it is early spring...'

or this on the art of writing,

'I'd imagined that it would be like watching a fire running along a fuse, against time and life, to explode a once-buried seam of meaning along a disused word-face...'

Janet Frame says this much and then reveals it over and again in so many different ways, 

'I have to cry out here that language is all we have for the delicacy and truth of telling, that words are the sole heroes and heroines of fiction.'

People indulge in 'vacuuming glances' and are at risk of losing 'life's parcel of prestige and confidence' when illness strikes. Their talk 'darns a hole in the silence' and page after page had me stopping and glorying in  Janet Frame's exquisite word mastery.
Gina Mercer writing in Janet Frame - Subversive Fictions picks up on the word 'manifold' which features frequently, suggesting that Living in the Maniototo is a 'maze of many folds' , a maze full of pitfalls designed to subvert expectations, mirrors which will distort the smooth reading path (Gina's obviously been to Vaughan's hairdressers too) which is suddenly littered with obstacles, this is circus reading with Janet Frame as the ring mistress, completely in control of her material and her reader.

'She plays a marvellous ring-mistress, out to show that her fiction, all fiction, is an elaborate game performance where the author pits her wits against those of the reader. She puts all the fictional devices through their paces in the ring, revealing the masks, the greasepaint, the tricks of lighting, the costumes and the stilts - all the equipment needed to create illusion and still she manages to create illusions. While teasing and wickedly playing with the reader, she still provides entertainment and delight.'

Loved every word.

That was the week that was...

...and a strange one too, things pencilled into the diary for almost a year are suddenly aren't there any more so a bit of unexpected time gained  and it means I can join in with the NTTVBG over at Simon's today...or will be able to when I've finished the book.
Just in case you missed the Wikio excitement, I'm flagging this link up for you to see too and appreciate now while it's there. Please don't ask me to explain how these things happen but I'm naturally very excited and honoured that we are there for this month at least, and in amongst such esteemed company.
Except, to be very honest that sort of thing terrifies me slightly too. In fact I think it might be best to forget all about it after today and carry on as usual, but my sincere and grateful thanks to all of you for getting us there. Please share the moment and have a little jump up and down where ever you are and
help yourself to some celebratory Tinker birthday profiteroles (go on, a bit more chocolate won't hurt) and there might be a drizzle of champers left....or I'll put the kettle on and we'll have a nice pot of tea instead.
I hope you all had a lovely Easter and feel rested and refreshed . We had a fine day with the Tinker celebrating his 85th birthday and thank you for all your kind comments and good wishes, he was very touched and is now packed and raring to set sail on his adventure.

We have a bit more housekeeping to do because the gold envelope has arrived and there are two more first places to report for one of you. We have a double quiz winner... Mary Greene was the name in the gold envelope as the winner of Rhys's last quiz and here are the answers


and Mary also the only person to score 9/10 in Erika's quiz and get two of those three last few very tricky questions right....here are the answers for anyone still tearing their hair out over those.

The Secret Garden,  Frances Hodgson Burnett
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,  Lewis Carroll
The Little White Horse,  Elizabeth Goudge
The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin,  Beatrix Potter
The Wind in The Willows,  Kenneth Grahame
Swallows and Amazons,, Arthur Ransome
Little Women,  Louisa M. Alcott
Gub Gub's Book,  Hugh Lofting
The Little Duke,  Charlotte M. Yonge
The Black Riders,  Violet Needham

So congratulations to Mary, a little prize package on its way to you very soon.

On harbingers...

We look for them every year and time's ticking on so we've been extra observant in our quest this week and have had a few harbingers of spring of the animal variety to report.
It's a sign that things are waking up when the yaffers (heifers for any non-Devonians and there are probably bullocks in amongst them, but they're yaffers for naming purposes) are put out into the front field for the first time.

After a winter in the cow shed they go completely crazy-loopy for the first hour or so, circling madly around the field and kicking their back legs in the air...can yaffers gambol? They certainly try and it's lovely to watch. Then they dash up to the gate the minute you set foot near it.
Should, by chance, their mums be put in the field behind the house we'll be in for a noisy few nights. Somehow they know each other and strike up a mournful bass line of constant bovine lament that just makes me want to put them all back in together, especially when they plead with me through the gate with those big brown eyes.

 
The novelty will wear off the attraction of us humans soon and likewise the feeling will be mutual and we'll probably start dripping on about the incessant flies and, with apologies to all veggies out there, we'll happily cook roast beef again.
We hear swallows have arrived in Cornwall though no sightings in this bit of Devon yet, but to be honest  forget the clocks going forward and birds flying in from Africa, that's all rubbish and very unreliable...there's really only one sure and certain sign that the world is turning on its axis and the seasons are happening for sure and until we see it we are never entirely convinced...


So spring arrived in the Tamar Valley on Friday April 9th this year but I have no immediate plans to be casting any clouts.

NTTVBG - The Illusionist by Jennifer Johnston

It's been a very long time since I've read a book by Jennifer Johnston.
Looking back I see I read The Christmas Tree in 1989, just after I'd read Incidental Music by Francoise Sagan and I followed it with To Have and To Hold by Deborah Moggach and then This is Not a Novel in 2003 preceded by In a Dark Wood by Amanda Craig and followed by The Element of Water by Stevie Davies.
That feels like a really wonderful reading selection and just seeing those titles reminds of where I was and what I was doing as I read, because context and surrounding reads both seem to be increasingly significant in my reading life right now.
Quite a few books haven't worked recently because of what's gone before, it's that reading of a brilliant book that somehow spoils me for what's next, the bar is high and books need to match up.
The minute I started The Illusionist I knew I was going to be alright because Jennifer Johnston is the consummate story-weaver and my thanks to Kimbofo of Reading Matters for choosing this one for the NTTVBG  (even if it did unwittingly break our 'written in the last 5 years rule) and reminding me how quietly brilliant Jennifer Johnstone's writing is. This isn't brash, showy razzle-dazzle, much more like quiet introspection with space for a reader to expand their own thoughts, time to immerse and let their own feelings and emotions enter the arena and play with the plot, interact with it.
So Stella McNamara finds herself wed to Martyn (with a 'y' please) Glover, the enigmatic illusionist ...not a conjurer and definitely not a magician in his own eyes, but in mine as a reader a complete form of low-life as he proceeds to disempower and manipulate the hapless Stella with emotional abuse of the worst kind. It's subtle in the first instance as this illusion of a relationship develops, becoming increasingly overt as Martyn moves Stella to an isolated country home and creates his mysterious world behind the locked doors of a barn  gathering in two hundred doves to help him do it.
Martyn, with a group of equally enigmatic friends, is secretly developing an illusionist act that will tour the stages of the world and be unsurpassed for its sleight of hand and deception of the eye, yet Stella knows nothing about him or his past

'I have invented myself, he once said to me. 'There is no need for you to pry into how I achieved this trick'

The structure of the story feels innovative, told in the first person from Stella's point of view, alternating between past and present, as if told from opposite ends and with that sense of increasing tension as you wait for the plots to meet. Plus all those delicious questions I asked myself about Stella's reliability as a narrator and those little moments of uncertainty that always surface when I only know one side of the story.
For me the significance of the 1995 date of publication was important.
Emotional abuse then still seriously underrated as of any importance or considered with the same degree of seriousness as domestic violence. Violence meant physical abuse and it is only in recent years that emotional abuse has been recognised as equally damaging and on a par with violence and we had some good debate around all this and a great deal more.
Stella's ultimate decision and action made all the more poignant and brave given the social setting in which she found herself.
The locked forbidden room of course had me dashing off to read up on Bluebeard and also an essay on Jennifer Johnston by Shari Benstock in one of those £1 finds in the market, Twentieth Century Women Novelists edited by Thomas Staley (published by Macmillan in 1982). Essays on  Margaret Drabble, Susan Hill, P.D.James, Doris Lessing, Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark and more make this a book that is constantly off the shelf. It may be dated in its theory but the observations are of the time and very astute. Exploring Jennifer Johnstone's earlier novels Shari Benstock identifies the frequently closed, suffocated, lonely and inward-turning world that is portrayed and nothing could be truer of The Illusionist.
If you read it prepare to try and stay calm whilst you watch Stella steadily crushed and folded into an empty shell.
Try and stop yourself wagging that finger disapprovingly at the ghastly child until you realise that it is not just Stella who has been manipulated.
Expect to want to strangle Martin or at least hope that his doves will turn raptor and peck him to bits... seriously, Jennifer Johnstone offers not a single note of charm or appeal to his character.
And notice that you may even have your toes crossed that Stella will ... well that Stella will survive.
Except you know that, because this is a book that gives you the answer to the sum at the beginning and then very slowly reveals all the working out, nothing more guaranteed to hold my attention and I still can't figure out why knowing the ending at the beginning doesn't spoil the book...

Next NTTVBG will be Skin Lane by Neil Bennett over at Savidge Reads this Sunday.

With apologies...

Sadly I've had to cancel my trip to the Wenlock Poetry Festival  this weekend.
I'm desperately disappointed but daren't risk a lower back that is creaking a bit too precariously this week and needs to be kept moving. Taking on two 6 - 7 hr coach trips (can it really take as long to get from Plymouth to Birmingham as to fly to New York? ) plus the associated onward travel and carting of luggage, and all in two days, didn't seem like a good idea. It's been too late to organise affordable train tickets either and I suddenly had a vision of being 'stuck' in Birmingham bus station without a pack of frozen peas to hand and nowhere to lie down and do my curl ups and cobras, and unusually for me (who learned her lesson at Fibrefest 2009...the wool show, not a laxative exhibition ) I realised I had to be sensible.
My sincere apologies to the organisers at Much Wenlock and to anyone who was hoping to meet up there, I hope and feel sure you'll all have a wonderful time and I'll just have to make do with seeing the Poet Laureate on TV presenting the University Challenge trophy to the Mighty Guttenplan and his team from Emmanuel, Cambridge earlier this week.

Children First and Always...

I wonder whether anyone else watched the programme on Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital on BBC 2 on Tuesday evening?
Children First and Always the hospital motto and the old Alma Mater didn't disappoint as the cameras, with their unrivalled access to the work of the cardiac surgeons, created a programme that I personally thought was superb for so much, but especially for its demonstration of the moral and ethical dilemmas that medicine faces in the 21st century.
I think I will carry with me for ever the words of the surgeon who said 'Living is a gift', and paused, holding the camera's gaze from behind his mask; that gaze investing those words with deep and manifold meanings as he was about to operate on Blessings, a beautiful newborn baby with a complex cardiac anomaly. There were real risks and uncertainties about survival and long-term prognosis if this tiny baby made it through what would be the first of many operations.
For her parents this was their only hope.
Sadly Blessings didn't make it.
We witnessed the cardiac team at those usually closed meetings where peer group discussions and supervision allow for evidence-based, informed decisions to be made; harsh-light- of-day, life and death decisions made with consummate technical skill and expertise, but also with honesty and humility.
I was seriously impressed with the open acknowledgment and acceptance of the existence of the emotional attachment between the surgeons and their young patients and their families...

'Without it we have lost out humanity'

said Professor Martin Elliott.
The transparent recognition that this is an attachment that could so readily cloud good judgement and the trust between colleagues to be able to admit to that takes years to build, as do the recognised pathways in place for seeking other opinions from around the world in order to decide what is really in the best interests of the child and the family and their future quality of life.
The family who have clearly stated they will sell everything to seek surgery in the US in a final attempt to save their child's life if Great Ormond Street won't reconsider their decision not to operate...this self-induced poverty brought into the debate but not allowed to compromise any decision about whether to operate or to allow for a natural progression.
But who can forget little eight year old Brian, wide eyed behind his oxygen mask, sitting down and listening to consultant Philip Rees (who was there in my day I'm sure) as he gently explained the logistics of performing a heart transplant and answered Brian's questions so appropriately and kindly, and above all honestly...
'Will I be asleep?'
'Where will you get a heart from?'
'Why won't that person need their heart?'
'What will you do with my old heart?'

It was some of the most moving television I have watched in a very long time and how well I remember, even back in the 1970's and perhaps the trickier days of cardio-pulmonary bypass, being on night duty when the whole hospital would know that there was child undergoing lengthy open heart surgery. Often a child who had been an in-patient for months, and so one with whom many who had worked on the ward had formed an attachment and usually got to know the parents well too. By that unique form of hospital osmosis, the chat over meal breaks, we all knew their name and a particular sort of hush would descend... as of one all holding our breath during those hours of darkness through to dawn and collectively willing that the surgeons would be able to get the baby off the by-pass.
We'd go to dinner at midnight... baby still in theatre.
To tea at 3am...still trying to get the baby off the by-pass.
The phones would ring around the wards through the night...have you heard anything yet?
If you worked on Cohen ward (Infectious Diseases and Dermatology) on the ground floor you had in your line of vision the vase of white flowers that were ever-present in the front hall of the Southwood building of the old hospital. It was to this vase that the nurses laying out the body of any child who had died always went to collect a white flower to place between their crossed hands.
You did not want to see anyone coming down from Ward 1A (Cardiac) on the floor above you and going to that vase during that night.
Then going to breakfast after that interminably long night shift and hearing that the child was back on the ward and all of us heaving an enormous sigh of relief as we fell asleep exhausted over our cornflakes.
Sadly eight-year old Brian's new heart failed to work properly and he died two weeks after his surgery, and I suspect as those bleak words came up on the screen, the nation as of one was heartbroken and hopefully vowing to carry donor cards, but had also come away with a real understanding of the work and the dilemmas and difficult decisions that face the medical profession today.
There is always a price to pay for progress and the surgeons made the difficulties of that abundantly clear, but how amazed Charles Dickens, one of the hospital's founding fathers, would have been to know that his rather flowery sentiments in Our Mutual Friend continue to hold true, there may not always be 'cures' but it is still Children First and Always.

“[A] place where there are none but children; a place set up on purpose for sick children; where the good doctors and nurses pass their lives with children, talk to none but children, comfort and cure none but children.”

The Authors' Club Best First Novel Award

You may recall that I met and chatted to Evie Wyld author of After the Fire a Still Small Voice at the David Vann reading that I squeezed into while I was in London. Moving around on a sixpence as we were, Evie and I had no choice but to talk really, and meeting a writer is always a bit of a tricky moment, because ideally you want to be able to say how much you have loved their book.
So I was squirming a bit because I knew that I had started Evie's book last year and given up after eighty pages because I was reading something else that clashed with it for subject matter, and I was getting both books hopelessly and completely confused.
For some reason I had never returned to it...drat.
Anyway I sort of sheepishly waffled my way through, thinking I was probably at least a glorious shade of red and resembling the hair of the famous singer who I'd never heard of, but who I had been reliably informed was the person standing on the sixpence immediately in front of me.
So then I plant both feet firmly in it by talking to Evie about the author of another book that's made a prize list...and the name of the prize list escapes me and Evie smiles genuinely and sweetly and nods very politely but must have been wincing inside, and inside my head alarm bells are ringing and I'm thinking....wait ....wait...surely Evie's book is on that short list too...or is it?
Think woman...think...you should know this and by now the alarm bells are at full blues and twos siren pitch and I'm trying not to let it show and think I'd better just shut up.
And bless her, Evie is the soul of tact and discretion and doesn't say a word.
Now me, I'd have been saying 'You know I'm shortlisted for that too don't you?'
So I get home and check out the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award short list and there among the six is Evie's book...

After the Fire a Still Small Voice - Evie Wyld
Choke Chain – Jason Donald

Designs for a Happy Home – Matthew Reynolds
The Earth Hums in B Flat  - Mari Strachan
The Finest Type of English Womanhood – Rachel Heath
The Rescue Man – Anthony Quinn

The prize is being judged by Amanda Craig who debates the whole literary prize judging process very astutely here, and the winner is to be announced this evening. The two that I've read alone would make this an incredibly difficult choice and now I'm thinking I must pay more attention to these lesser-known shortlists... except a prize that has been in existence since 1954 should hardly be lesser known. Perhaps I mean the ones that may lack the attention-seeking bells and whistles of the Booker/Orange but which nevertheless hold the promise of some fantastic reading.
And then I discover that Evie's book has already won The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
So I laid hands on my copy with a sense of blessed relief that I hadn't sent it in those twenty-eight bags that went to the charity shop last year...well I wouldn't have done, the cover is much too striking, there's got to be something worth investigating with a cover like that, plus I'd heard consistently good things about the book through last year.  Nor was it that I hadn't enjoyed those first eighty pages, it's just that sometimes I'm reading the right book at the wrong time.
Stephanie Cross who came to do the interview for The Lady had loved it and by the time she arrived with the top tulip tip I'd read enough to be loving it too, so we shared an After the Fire a Still Small Voice moment of eulogy.
Philip Hensher had Evie Wyld down as an author to watch.
In fact everyone was talking about the book, so how delighted I am to have finally read it and by now you will have guessed that had I hated it you'd all be none the wiser about any of this.
I've only just turned the final page so it's much to soon to share my thoughts on here, it's a book that has so much to say it will take me a couple of weeks to cogitate over it and clarify my thinking, plus I do think it's one of those reads that will say even more after a week or so. But this much I can confirm, it is most certainly every inch the assured and stunning debut that everyone suggests and I do wish Evie Wyld and everyone else on that shortlist the very best of luck this evening.

Hermione on Penelope

I was almost weeping with joy over last Saturday's Guardian Review.
I mean I usually get quite excited about it, always good to know down here in the sticks what is attracting attention in the big wide literary world, but not usually to the point where I am all overcome.
Bookhound bought it up at the village shop, had a sneak look on the way home and told me to read the front page because I'd love it.

The news is good and I'm possibly the last to hear it but Hermione Lee is writing the official biography of Penelope Fitzgerald.
You see, that's enough to make anyone leap about isn't it...well it's enough for me, and a wonderful piece by Hermione Lee on Penelope Fitzgerald and the access she has been given to a 'biographer's dream', the  family archive. Not the 'immaculately sorted and catalogued' one housed at a Texas university but the seemingly humdrum day to day stuff of a writer's life which proves to be the mother lode, notes written on letters from British Telecom, lists of students Penelope Fitzgerald was teaching...where are you Katherine Weld, Stella Donner, Celyn Wickham, surely they'll come forward, old teaching notebooks but best of all...and I feel vindicated over this bit, Penelope Fitzgerald's library, her books. Not a pristine and priceless collection but a working library of her reading, all annotated throughout, written in copiously, marginalia to die for with newspaper clippings dropping out all over the place.

I now feel so much better about my signed first edition of Wolf Hall, supposedly fetching £500 now in mint condition, probably 3s/6d written overall as mine is...but who knows, perhaps one day someone will inherit and be interested in those scribbles.
If ever there's a writer whose ethos and outlook chimes in harmony with one I can only aspire to, it is that of Penelope Fitzgerald when she said to Hermione Lee,

'I have remained true to my deepest convictions - I mean to the courage of those who are born defeated, the weaknesses of the strong and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it.'

As Hermione Lee goes on to say of Penelope Fitzgerald's writing in her introduction to A House of Air , the Collected Writings of Penelope Fitzgerald

'So conscious of how cruel life can be to its victims, she is generally kind herself ...In any life-story she is alert to cruelty, tyranny, or unfairness, and she has no time for horrible beahviour...an acute feeling for - and memory of - the vulnerability of children...she is very alert to ' the bewilderment of children growing up without love...'

I have to say it again because you may just be the one person visiting dovegreyreader who is unaware of this, and that would be terrible...in a piece in A House of Air entitled The Moors, Penelope Fitzgerald says

'It can't be a favourite place unless you have been happy there. The place I want to describe is the village of Milton Abbot...a village that guidebooks neglect..'

Penelope Fitzgerald's family lived in our village for a while, and having lived in the parish ourselves for the last fifteen years I think we'd have to agree.

Some of you may recall I set out with my camera to see Milton Abbot through the eyes of Penelope Fitzgerald a while ago and the results are here. How lovely it was to walk around the village I thought I knew so well but actually I didn't.
Had I ever noticed the 'moral truth' in Lutyen's architecture and the cottages he designed around the village green...the slope of the hipped roofs 'exactly suited to the plunging sweep of the Green' ?
Had I ever really paid attention to that shade of green in the local Hurdwick stone used in the Parish Church?

Or had I ever really looked upwards and noticed that we still have English elm trees in the village, competing for the skyline with the chimneys of the Old Vicarage, and which house the noisiest rookery in Christendom ...'the rooks, whose voices are much louder than the children's.'

I have read all Penelope Fitzgerald's novels bar one over the years since I first read The Bookshop and knew I had discovered a writer who said something to me, (and this was long before I knew of her very local connections, or that our children had been in the same classes at school as her grandchildren) and I had left that one novel unread. For some strange reason, when I know that all I have by a writer is what I see, I gorge and then I ration as stocks run low to make that first-read experience last, and so Innocence has been waiting for a special moment which I've decided is now. Then I shall start over again where I started before, The Bookshop, Gate of Angels, The Golden Child, Human Voices, At Freddies (imagine my excitement when the 15p copy  I bought off Amazon arrived and had been signed) Offshore, The Beginning of Spring, and lastly The Blue Flower. Then I'll revisit her biographies, Edward Burne Jones, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends and The Knox Brothers about her esteemed and very gifted family. Perhaps in between I'll be dipping into The Collected Letters and The House of Air (my copy so well used it's falling apart) which should all help pass the time while I wait for what, for me at least, is likely to be the most eagerly anticipated book of the century.

Happy Birthday to...

...the Tinker (father of dgr and seen here holding his village show cup, the year his tapestry beat my knitted socks...huh) who is eighty-five today and we'll be feeding him up because he's off on a big adventure next week... three weeks of luxury cruising around the Caribbean, where he'll have to eat every twenty minutes, so we must get him trained up for the task.
Those who have been visiting here for a while may remember that I went along with the Tinker and his friend last time when the third friend dropped out at the last minute.
I saw Louis XIV poodle clouds on the flight out...

and had any pre-conceptions about cruise holidays well and truly re-shaped to the good as I wallowed in my state room and sat out on my balcony watching the flying fish leaping out of the Caribbean, whilst trying to imagine just how exactly the sea bed beneath could be six miles deep and forcing myself to eat a disgraceful amount of food which just kept appearing....it seemed ungrateful not to somehow.


The Tinker has (we always touch wood) been very fit and well since he had his pacemaker done last year so in the company of some lovely friends, and with no long-haul flights to Galveston to meet the ship this time, he should start the cruise feeling relaxed and ready for lifeboat practice as long as we get him on his way to Southampton on time.
At his request we are sending him off with a copy of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall for balcony reading as he's read so much about it here plus a full e reader and at my suggestion we've also bought him a travel journal to write in while he's away.
He'll be heading from Southampton to Madeira and thence to Antigua, Tortola, St Maarten, St Kitts and St Lucia so if you bump into him please say hello. Fearing that his grandchildren were having all the fun, and that all the excursions might be booked up, he has already reserved his helicopter flight over the volcano on Montserrat and the submarine trip around Antigua.

Easter Sunday

Wishing you all a happy and peaceful Easter day.

Easter Saturday

As I wandered into Exeter Cathedral and along the nave I was hard-pushed to draw my eye away from the vaulted ceiling, it really is something magnificent and at ninety-six metres apparently the longest continuous medieval vault in the world.

...and to save that crick in the neck a very clever mirror on wheels which I discover on the way out.

There seem to be surprises around every corner, quite startling to bump into the Earl and Countess of Devon around this one, and as you can see, not the most peaceful of resting placea and I was so overcome by the enormity of those organ pipes I don't seem to have a better shot of the resting pair than this.

 But there I was catapulted back to summer 1972, opening my A Level English paper and wondering what on earth the unseen poem might be and it was this,

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred
The earl and countess lie in stone
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet...

                                    Philip Larkin

Except instead of dogs this earl and countess have the most wonderfully expressive and doleful pair of  mourning swans.

Good Friday

So I paid my £5 and went into Exeter Cathedral through the west front of a building constantly at the mercy of the Devon weather since its completion in the late 1340s.

but seen from within it's obvious what has to be preserved.

The beautifully crafted Exeter Rondels

...a cushion, many metres long, depicting the history of England and Exeter and harnessing all those vibrant colours of the stained glass.

Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday and the Queen will be distributing the Maundy money at Derby Cathedral today, to as many elderly people as there are years in her reign, so Easter begins for this lapsed Anglican (me not the Queen) for whom old habits die hard.
I know for some of you Holy Week will be very special and though I won't be spending hours in church that doesn't mean I don't love wandering around them and sometimes it feels like God's own cathedral to be living in that white dot in the middle there...

Easter always seems like a good time to seek out some peace and quiet along with some well-chosen reading, so I shall be doing exactly that.
Especially after the excitement of yesterday's interview with The Lady.
The Lady came all the way from London to me so I'm recovering from the stress of polishing the floors and finding something Lady-like to wear, but we had a lovely day, Rocky answered one or two questions too and my thanks to Stephanie for the tip about how to stop my tulips drooping. It's the pin through the neck of the stem trick which has worked like a dream and far better than the old penny or the aspirin in the water trick....more of all that soon I'm sure.
Meanwhile I've sorted out a nice pile of books for the next week or so which will include Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, and my thanks to all of you who recommended it. It will suit my reading mood to perfection this weekend, so does anyone else have a good read lined up?
I also paid the £5 entry fee and took myself off around Exeter Cathedral a few weeks ago, so we'll just drift quietly around there over Easter on dovegreyreader and perhaps hither and yonder into next week ...apart from Monday that is when we have a very great big birthday to celebrate.
The Tinker will be eighty-five, and if you think the Kayaker has all the adventures wait until you hear what the Tinker has coming up...honestly, give a pensioner a new set of batteries in his ticker and there's no stopping him.