dovegreyreader scribbles

The Trouble With Tolstoy

Did anyone else watch The Trouble With Tolstoy - BBC 1 last Sunday evening at 10.25pm?

I have to say Alan Yentob gets all the best jobs doesn't he, I can think of nothing better than sitting on a train travelling across Russia, with a notebook and novels to hand, gazing out of the window and just being able to think, look and read of nothing but Tolstoy (and whether I've brought the right coat with me...more of that in a minute) but I really did enjoy the programme and have bonded even more closely with my copy of War and Peace in the Professor Anthony Briggs translation (along with my Maudes) now that I've heard him talk.

I have purposely not done too much delving into Tolstoy's life whilst we've been Team Tolstoying preferring to get the book well in progress first, and just to explain for anyone who has been on Mars, we are doing a year-long shared read of War & Peace here at dovegreyreader in the centenary year of Tolstoy's death,starting on November 9th 2010, convening to discuss in comments on the 9th of each month, so it was good to get some background on the man.

So there he is our awkward, brooding but brilliantly clever anti-establishment literary hero and Alan Yentob following in his tracks, criss-crossing Russia by train, so fitting given Tolstoy's frequent use of railways in his fiction, those 'rich, complex, profoundly moral stories.'

I especially loved the original, juddery film footage of that rather bandy-legged old man (Leo not Alan) with the long white beard, the shots of Yasnaya Polyana, the samovar and there was even the barest glimpse of the ride from on board a galloping troika and all surrounding the moving account of Tolstoy's scarred childhood, the loss of both parents (his mother when her was two, his father when he was nine) and how often he may have imagined or yearned for that loving family life when he was sent off to live with his aunt in Kazan.

Then how much more in later life might be explained by the disastrous and guilt-ridden trip to the brothel when he was fourteen and at this point the lovely Professor Briggs came in to talk about the 'raging, uncontrollable spirit' that was our Tolstoy. My only concern was the sight of Professor Briggs's double stacked shelves of upright books over his right shoulder...the spines will be ... oh well, Professors must know best.

Of course Team Tolstoy have passed that point in War & Peace, the gambling exploits but no generous family around to bail out Tolstoy when, at the point of possibly losing his life on the brink of going into battle during the Crimean War and thus with a slightly devil-may-care attitude about him, Tolstoy squandered his birthright and gambled away the home that he had loved so dearly.

By this time Alan's in Sebastopol and outlining how Tolstoy's disillusionment with war is setting in.

Next thing Alan's in St Petersburg (I told you this has to have been the best job going at the BBC last year) and referring to Tolstoy's diaries... in fact I swear I caught a glimpse of turquoise, if so Faber Finds have very kindly sent me the same editions and I am now dipping into them. The early diaries, as Alan Yentob explained, reminiscent of something akin to Adrian Mole as Tolstoy writes lists of rules, things to be accomplished and, on achieving precisely none of them, writes another list with just one rule, to do things on last list and doesn't do that either. It's reassuring to know I'm in good company with my diary efforts.

There were accounts of meetings with Turgenev who referred to Tolstoy's 'buffalo-like obstinacy', Tolstoy's easy admittance into St Petersburg high society given his privileged status as a Count, the emancipation of the serfs and then the meeting and marriage to Sofia Behrs (also known as Sonia) The shocking wedding night which left Sonia feeling she had been raped whilst Tolstoy remained emotionally cold and unaffected and Anthony Briggs confirming that Tolstoy had frequently been given the benefit of the doubt when in fact there was no doubt... he was brutal and treated Sonia very badly indeed.

But Tolstoy was always going to write the epic for which it seems all bad behaviour could be forgiven, and War and Peace would become the gold standard, the bench mark by which all other novels would be judged. There was some lovely footage of the annual re-enactment of the Battle of Borodino, and I really don't want to cast any clouds of gloom but this takes up 250 pages in the book according to Professor Briggs, we have much girding of the loins to come.

At this point I'm also getting a bit worried about Alan Yentob's coat, a sort of grey parka-like affair (unless this is the Tolstoy look) which only needed a Lambretta to match, and which didn't look very BBC nor well suited to the Russian steppes, but I still managed to concentrate on the detail about the seeds of pacifism growing in Tolstoy's mind, and the voice that was about to get ever-louder in its proclamation of the vile evils of war.

The programme ended with Tolstoy's mid-life crisis, the inexplicable nightmare, the tormenting voice of death that took him to the brink of a form of existential madness, an encounter with his own mortality and an experience that was to remain with him and shape the rest of his life so now we've had the Tolstoy, next episode we're in for the trouble.

As the programme ended I'd got over Anthony's double stacked books and Alan's coat sufficiently to feel a rush of love and enthusiasm for War & Peace, for this extraordinary writer and for the community reading spirit that this year's Team Tolstoy adventure is generating here, I'm so glad we decided to read it and thank you all for reading it too.

Second episode of The Trouble With Tolstoy :: Sunday April 2nd BBC 1 - 10.25pm
Next Team Tolstoy gathering :: Saturday April 9th - all weekend

Lucky Break ~ Esther Freud

Now how do I make this comparison without in any way devaluing what has been a really good read, because I wouldn't wish to do that, but after my tussle with Nicole Krauss's Great House and sensing a mismatch, timing all wrong etc I needed some straightforward reading that didn't leave me led blindfold and led along in the dark by a complex authorial hand. Lucky Break by Esther Freud, with its foray into the world of acting, proved to be a fine example of that literary juxtaposition and saved my reading bacon.

Looking back I see that I first read Esther Freud and her semi-autobiographical novel Hideous Kinky in early 1994, in fact my second book of that year according to the journal. It was preceded by Mr Wroe's Virgins by Jane Rogers and followed by ...and here I am a little embarrassed to admit it in company but in the interests of transparency will have to, Fire on Ice Torvill and Dean's autobiography, for which I hope I can be forgiven. Back on track next with The Book of Guys by Garrison Keillor then No Other Life by Brian Moore and The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan. So Torvill and Dean a brief aberration no doubt encouraged by the fact that Offspringette and I had bought into the craze and went to see them perform.

I'd feel a bit better if a few more people owned up to sharing that craze too.

Oh go on, I'm sure we can be forgiven an indulgence, we haven't had a T&D moment for a while and it's all acting anyway, just with a bit of ice and some different shoes on.. Mack & Mabel, one of my mum's favourites.

Gorgeous aren't they... I always love that train bit...

So where were we.

Right, Esther Freud, so then quite a gap before I read Gaglow in 1998 and then nothing since which is surprising because somehow a writer I enjoyed immensely had fallen off my radar, so when Lucky Break arrived I was definitely ready to reacquaint.

A group of students meet for their first day at Drama Arts and with nerves jangling and embryonic stage-fright clearly in evidence they meet their tutors

Esther Freud draws on her own experiences at drama school for this one having trained as an actor (being PC I don't think we are allowed to call them actresses any more are we?)  and is now married to one, David Morrissey (most recently of South Riding fame...Robert Carne) so plenty of primary source luvvie-land experience to fall back on. Nor does Esther Freud stint on the wry-eyed look at a profession that to many of us out here flogging ourselves to death at the sharp end may seem just a little tinged with vanity and self-delusion. Given that a proportion of an actor's life is spent pretending to be someone else it's a profession ripe for all that stereo-typing, yet somehow Esther Freud manages to sidestep, dig beneath the surface articulating the lives of ...well real and normal people. In fact I've met an actor recently, fellow blogger Will Rycroft currently performing in War Horse, and he seemed very normal to me too:-),

Well who knew there was this much to it all as the silky-voiced Silvio, in his woollen trousers and black top, puts his students through their paces as they learn to Inhabit Their Characters after the fiercely aggressive Patrick has done the warm welcome...

'I'm going to start today with the first baby steps of your education, by initiating you into the marvels and sophistication of the earliest documented era of theatre. The reason for this, and I know it's not usually considered polite to mention it, but young people who drift towards acting as a profession usually do so because you're Goddamn F*****g Useless at anything else.'

Well we're under no illusions now are we, Esther Freud has dispelled my preconceptions with one hefty swipe. There will be 'no prancing around in fancy dress, no public shows until the third year' if they make it that far and lots of Sensing, Thinking, Intuiting, Feeling...Weight, Space, Time, Flow. And, well, that was me in and enjoying drama school, who'd have thought it, and thence completely involved in the lives of young Nell and Charlie, Jemma and Dan et al and their mixed rises and falls in fortune.

In fact with Nell (plump and plain, kicked out at the end of her second year but finds work in rep and touring theatre), Dan (the adonis, the rising star somewhat held back by his wife Jemma, another failed student) and Charlie (stunningly beautiful and whose meteoric rise to fame the moment she graduates is bound to come with an emotional price tag) Esther Freud seems to cover the three possible options for the stereotypical image of an actor that I would have in my mind were I ever to have given it any thought... which I don't think I may have done until I read Lucky Break.

There are moments of genuine pathos that would have been hilarious to me as the outsider I am, had Esther Freud not taken the trouble to draw me in and explain things a little. Poor Nell and her encounter with the famous director whose intentions in calling her to his home for a chat about a film role are less than honourable. Or rather than thinking perhaps 'oh for goodness' sake how shallow can people be' I was genuinely as mortified as Charlie when her normally lustrous complexion spouted an outbreak of pimples in the midst of filming... and I'm wanting to pass her the tea tree oil and advise against slapping on more pore-clogging Leichner.

Heck Leichner, that takes me back to school plays at primary school and insisting on wearing the make-up on the 118 bus home, in fact who knows what dormant vocation could lay here untapped...

'Babette's method acting class took place in the large oval hall. A stage had been set up at one end ...one by one the students were expected to step up on to it and present their understanding of Stanislavsky's Action and Three Activities for her discerning eye....'

Hmm, no on second thoughts...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great House ~ Nicole Krauss (Orange longlist 2011)

'He burned the house of God, the king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem; even every great house he burned with fire.'

2 Kings 25:9 is the source for the title of Nicole Krauss's latest novel Great House and the depth and significance of that meaning rests in the final pages of the book, but when Great House first arrived in proof copy I wasn't at all sure I wanted to read it. I had dipped into the first few pages and clearly we were a mismatch, it was one of those days when I needed straightforward, uncomplicated reading.

I wonder if you know the sort of books I mean, and the nature of those reading times?

I needed clear guidance about plot and character, well-defined tracks to move along and to know what was happening and this book was giving me none, and that might be a caveat to add for anyone who is about to pick up Great House... perhaps leave it until you are in the mood for one of those cloud-of-unknowing reading experiences. Feeling completely at sea very quickly I stopped, put the book back on the shelf and may not have come back to it but for its Orange Prize longlisting, but how glad I am now to have taken the time to read it.

This is the book about a desk that I mentioned on Saturday and if I show you my traditional scribbles page inside the front cover you will see how complicated things became... look away now all book purists to whom marginalia is a heinous crime. I tend to write single words, fleeting thoughts as I read and, as I think I have mentioned before, I often start a genogram . We used them frequently back in the days of NHS health visiting in order to try and unravel complex family situations, and I find them equally useful when I'm reading a book and want to keep track of family connections and character traits. My genogram drafts and arrows and general mess whilst reading Great House would have involved a severe slapping for lack of clarity from my child protection supervisor and sent me back to the drawing board in the old days that's for sure.

And this is one of those books where I almost wanted to start with a ball of wool so that I could follow the trail back whenever I needed to, because Nicole Krauss scatters the tiniest of tantalizing clues. A name I had read before  would crop up again, I'd know it had previously had a glancing and seemingly insignificant mention and suddenly it seemed crucially important that I remembered it, and I couldn't. That thread of connections at times felt gossamer fine and yes, not unlike a spider's web, to the point where I was almost fearful to put the book down in case I couldn't get my narrative bearings back again, but I was loving it.

Meanwhile the desk is the object that knots those threads together, like a trojan horse freighted not with warring humans but with warring emotional baggage and with much more than memories. It is laden with ambitions and aspiration, lies and secrets too and with links to not only the holocaust but Pinochet's regime in Chile, as it falls into the ownership or gift of Nicola Krauss's characters. From the Chilean poet Daniel Varsky to Nadia the writer living in New York whose story opens the book... and Nicole Krauss skilfully sustains the mystery of who Nadia is telling her story too and under what circumstances right to the end of the novel. Whilst the plot also shifts sideways to the ageing author Lotte Berg, living in England and now stricken with Alzheimers  and thence to Israel and a father reflecting on his thorny and difficult relationship with his son.

But who is his son?

And meanwhile the desk stays in the spotlight as it is tracked down by the widowed antiques dealer George Weisz who is obsessively recreating his father's study plundered by the Nazis in 1944, and Nicole Krauss invests the desk with a varying power, sometimes benign, occasionally almost malevolent,

'It struck me, the gift of that desk, as an act of cruel genius - a way to stake his claim, to insinuate himself into the unreachable world of her imagination, so that he might possess her, so that every time she sat down to write it would be in the presence of his bestowal.'

Themes of memory and legacy, loss and possession emerge in Great House as Nicole Krauss's disparate array of seemingly unreachable, unknowable and unconnected characters, all initially charged with a sense of real enigma, slowly build up their stories; not unlike those layers of patina and polish on the old desk. No one seems to be quite true to themselves, lies and deceit prevail, self-deceipt especially evident until finally confessions reveal all and I heaved a sigh knowing that having trusted Nicole Krauss to lead me out of the other end of this book she had done so in exemplary literary style.

Digressions abound in the lives that have been touched by the desk and from the minute I opened the book until I turned the final page I had to read with patience, with diligence and in complete and undistracted quiet. Had I been in the entertainments carriage of the 7.52 Plymouth to Paddington this book would have been a dismal Kindle fail by Dawlish Warren. But as I emerged blinking into the sunlight after the final page I knew I'd read a brilliant book, that Nicole Krauss hadn't faltered or missed a beat and that the most enjoyable thing, had time permitted, would have been to turn back to the beginning and read it again.

And who'd have thought it but when Lotte's elderly husband dons his rucksack and sets out on a walking trip, well where do you think he goes?

'A month later I went to Devon. From the village of Tavistock, I set out across Dartmoor, losing my way until at last I saw the chimneys of the prison rise up in the distance...'

I bet authors hate it when this happens, some know-all reader thousands of miles away who happens to live there, so I'll make light of the demoting of our nearest bustling and sizeable market town with a population of 11,000 to a village (our village on the other hand home to just over 700) because I can quite understand how confusing that whole distinction can seem from several thousand miles away, but if Lotte's ageing husband walks up to Princetown from Tavistock, the man's a good deal fitter than I am, but then that's not hard and this is fiction after all.

But as I turned the final page another thought drifted uppermost into my mind...

Fortunate and lucky indeed the Orange prize judge who may have to read Great House two if not three times more in order to make those all-important short listing decisions.

 

 

 

Knit Your Own Royal Wedding ~ Fiona Goble

Alright, I'll own up since someone has asked... of course I have a copy of Knit Your Own Royal Wedding on order, though I am a bit worried about the timing. The book isn't published until later this week so that leaves just four weeks, probably sufficient unto a corgi or two, though I may cast on the Queen for good measure and I do think a knitted Archbishop of Canterbury could be just the thing.

The only way I can see to get good mileage out of all this effort in the years to come is for it double as a Nativity set so I may have to add in a knitted tea towel for Her Majesty and lamb substitutes for corgis, and then there's the headache of deciding who should double as the Three Wise Men. Archbishop Rowan's in, and possibly William and perhaps Philip.

In fact I am a sea of indecision with my knitting at the moment. All jumpers finished, socks chugging along as always and having visited a friend and sat amongst her knitted mermaids, border collies and mice I opted to knit some 'things' for a change and sent for a few books.

Books with patterns for flowers, fruit, vegetables and cakes arrived and so the dilemma was between knitted cup cakes, victoria sponge or a pumpkin, but then Knit and Purl Pets by Claire Garland turned up. Twenty  patterns for "little pets with big personalities" and now I'm torn between Itty the guinea pig or Socks the lop-eared rabbit, but then the knitted chickens look really must have too.

Please don't ask why, or of what use, because I have no idea but have no fear the minute I cast on Rowan Williams you will be the first to know.

 

Team Tolstoy alert...

Many thanks to everyone who has reminded me about tonight's TV programme The Trouble With Tolstoy on BBC1 at 22.25 episode one of two.

The hours seem to be galloping away with me today but it's also quite a relief to have reached British Summer Time at last. I am very much looking forward to this programme and good to know we are reading a book that is 'the gold standard by which all novels are judged.'

"Alan Yentob takes an epic train ride through Tolstoy's Russia, examining how Russia's great novelist became her great troublemaker.

In this programme, he reveals a difficult and troubled youth, obsessed with sex and gambling, who turned writer while serving as a soldier in Chechnya and the Crimea. His experiences on the frontline eventually fed into War and Peace, a book now recognised as, 'the gold standard by which all other novels are judged'. They also triggered his conversion to outspoken pacifist.

Alan's expedition takes him to the Tatar city of Kazan, where Tolstoy was a teenager, the siege of Sevastopol on the Black Sea and Imperial St Petersburg, as well as the idyllic Tolstoy country estate, the writer's cradle and grave, and home throughout his passionate but brutal 48-year marriage to Sofya - a marriage that began with rape, produced 13 children and ended with desertion and denial.

Contributors include Tolstoy's great great grandson Vladimir Tolstoy, AN Wilson and author of a new Tolstoy biography, Rosamund Bartlett."

A desk of one's own...

We live in a house of many desks.

Everyone has one even if they don't live here anymore, and if they happen to be in New Zealand, their desk is back here awaiting return and a reclaiming. None of the desks are of any particular value to anyone but us, in fact quite a motley selection given that my day to day desk was being thrown out of the council offices and I stepped in and saved its life because of its capacious filing drawer. But somehow Bookhound just can't stop himself buying another one when he sees it, in the way that he also can't stop buying bookshelves, so we have a selection.

I only mention this because having just finished the Orange longlisted Great House by Nicole Krauss, desks and their meaning are much on my mind. If it's possible for a desk to assume the role of a character in a book then this one does as it travels around the world and links Nicole Krauss's disparate array of people to each other.

I have loved Great House on so many levels, not only for all the desk thinking but for the complexities of a book that led me on a trail of unknowing, that reading in the dark feeling that had me frowning and concentrating hard because Nicole Krauss doesn't make it easy, the clues are slight and scattered, much is left for the reader to make the links, so much more about it when I've gathered my thoughts, but it all set me thinking about a lifetime of desks.

And thinking not only of home desks but work ones too. Having had my own desk in my own or a shared office for almost thirty years, and one with all my 'bits and pieces' on it and my own methods of organising my paper work accordingly, my own place and space to sit and think and make phone calls and write up notes and reports, well perhaps I sensed the writing was on the wall (rather than the desk) with my NHS career that day I knew I would be losing it. Progress and modernisation was seemingly a move into a tiny office no more than twelve feet square with six others and six filing cabinets at least, and just two small 'surfaces' (not even proper desks) shared between us... well call me old fashioned but that felt like a retrograde step that my brain just wouldn't cope with, hot-desking was not for me.

Of the desks we have now perhaps there are several I really love apart from my own in the Book Room... this one in the sitting room window, (and please note that the Escallonia hedge outside still looks very deceased but dare I whisper that tiny green shoots suddenly seem to be appearing) very much a plain utility desk, drawers on the left and inherited with an array of stiletto heel marks on the top, so your guess is as good as ours as to what life this one may have seen...

Or my special very tiny one in the bedroom window, just about the size that Emily Dickinson used to work on, two tiny drawers and perfect for writing with no frills or other books around, just me, the pen, the paper and the distraction of the view...

And then the battered old roll top desk, the household business corner with its non-matching chair and all its lovely cubby holes and paper shelves and drawers. The second greatest harbourer of dust after the piano, because the only place it will fit is in the corner of the sitting room, next to the woodburner and its ash cloud. These the sort of desks I used to see around the farms when I visited, stacked high with paperwork that looked as if it had sat there for years

And this corner always the mecca for what we call summer spiders, the ones with round bodies and wispy fine legs but capable of producing industrial scale cobwebs that the sun seems to shine on just as you have sat down for tea with a visitor... and then I can never decide whether to confess I've spotted it too and dash off for the feather duster, or hope no one else has seen it. The roll top quite brilliant for an instant concealing of the mayhem when ours also piles high too.

Perhaps this was the type of desk Nicole Krauss had in mind in Great House, or perhaps not, hers had nineteen drawers, ours just ten, but the joy of the book was imagining that desk for myself and thinking quite what our desks mean to us.

Any more special desks out there?

The Poet Laureate gets a make-over...

No not in the Gok Wan way as mentioned earlier this week but talking of poetry as I was yesterday, and since it is now a regular component of my reading schedule, I thought I'd just share this beautiful little collection of newly-attired Carol Ann Duffys that have arrived from Picador.

Having fallen in love with The World's Wife all over again after re-reading it again recently it's much more Carol Ann Duffy for me... remember this one, I've heard it so many times in so many different settings and it was wonderful to remind myself of it again. 

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

 

I've been having a little e mail reminisce with Camilla at Picador this week as she reminded me about that first Bookerthon when dovegreyreader was but a few months hatched back in 2006, and how I had stumbled over a longlist read of Mother's Milk by Edward St Aubyn. Camilla offered to send me a copy of Some Hope, the previous title in the series and thus became the first publisher to offer to send me a book. But five years later, and now a confirmed St Aubyn-ite, I have the next in the series At Last, to be published in May and can't wait to read it.

Incidentally isn't St Aubyn pronounced Stubbs by the aristocracy?  One of those eccentrically odd Cholmondeley- Chumley or Featherstonehaugh - Fanshaw examples? 

And in these days when the challenge for book designers must be about getting the book noticed in amongst the zillions out there, whilst also perhaps adding something unspoken but essential about the beauty and excitement of the book in the hand versus the book in the Kindle (much as I love my Kindle)  I have to say, though it behoves me to say nice things about Picador anyway, they are actually coming up with some great book design innovations...

Stuart Evers short story collection Ten Stories About Smoking comes in a flip top replica cigarette box...

Whilst Ellen Bryson's The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno, a novel about P.T.Barnum's museum of human oddities, comes with a clever dust jacket that opens out into a circus poster. Gimmicks they may be but they both caught my eye in amongst the many that arrive and made me look twice. I'll let you know about the all-important contents eventually.

 

 

 

 

A Scattering ~ Christopher Reid

I write now in the cumbersome
retrospective mood;
you lived in the present-future
a tense of your own invention....

Can't you now somehow contrive
to be both dead and alive?

Two little extracts from Christopher Reid's 2009 Costa Prize-winning collection of poetry A Scattering, which I have been reading on and off for months, but much more intently in recent weeks. I wonder if it's possible to write a post about death and dying and somehow not put everyone off in the first sentence because I have declared the subject? I always feel I need to offer a warning because I know for many of you it can be too much to read about for whatever reason, so please do wander away now and give this one a miss if you want to ...we'll all understand, but if you can hang on in please do because here is a book with real value.

In connection with the day job I subscribe to the really excellent journal Bereavement Care edited by Colin Murray Parkes. This is published in association with Cruse, the UK-based voluntary organisation who offer support and counselling to those who have been bereaved. The journal keeps me in touch with current research and contains a wealth of really useful articles, so as I idly leafed through the latest edition I was delighted to find a piece entitled Bereavement in the Arts, a conversation between William Radice and Christopher Reid, author of  A Scattering and a name better known to me as the editor of The Collected Letters of Ted Hughes.

A Scattering, like another old favourite of mine Elegies by Douglas Dunn, is written in memory of the poet's wife, in this case Christopher Reid's wife Lucinda who died of cancer in 2005, and records in the most understated, straightforward and unsentimental yet deeply moving way, the mourning of a beloved partner.

There is so much to find here I'm not even going to start dissecting the book because I think that would be inappropriate. The power of this collection lies in the way that every reader may take a different direction on opening the first page and be able to identify with different aspects of the poetry, interpreting in the light of their own experience and finding their own level with it. But I am interested in some of Christopher Reid's reveals about it all in this article... about his choice to try and keep the language 'tightly buttoned' and keeping the lines short, even terse rather than to a strict metre and how, on reflection, he can now see that the gaps between writing took him into the different stages of grieving. The poems becoming a product of those gaps, those periods of 'silence and confused contemplation.' The moment within which he describe Lucinda's last moments of life is profoundly moving in that 'tightly buttoned' method which serves so well here...what more is there to say beyond

Sparse breaths, then none -
and it was done.

What follows is a deeply moving description of what Christopher Reid does in those immediate moments afterwards.

Asked if he had any awareness that the book may help others, which it clearly has and I can see exactly how, Christopher Reid denies any thought for his potential audience, rather a clear focus as a spectator watching and sharing the unique life of his own wife, always a stern judge of his poetry and intolerant of 'poor or dishonest work.' And keeping in mind the 'communication of feeling' which, when I had turned the final page for the second or maybe even the third time, I knew that Christopher Reid had achieved in a very unique yet also universal way, and often with real simplicity.

Alongside this I have been following Badaude's remarkable drawings from Sobell House, the hospice in Oxford coupled with her artist in residence spot at the Wellcome Collection in London

Joanna Walsh’s Ars Moriendi opens at Wellcome Collection. A large-scale drawing in the Collection lobby, it will deal with the process of dying in a medicalised culture, and what our hopes for a ‘good death’ are.

 In a culture where death is taboo and art about dying is scarce or considered morbid, there are few continuing visual traditions surrounding ‘a good death’. I investigated art from the past in the Wellcome Collection’s library and was impressed with the delicacy and beauty of the object created in response to such a dark and difficult subject....

It is a dark and difficult subject, often a taboo subject for discussion, let alone writing blog posts about but Badaude and Christopher Reid have addressed something important and in tandem with both my reading and looking recently.

The title poem in A Scattering concerns elephants ...

        I expect you've seen the footage: elephants
finding the bones of one of their own kind
dropped by the wayside, picked clean by scavengers
and the sun, then untidily left there,
        decide to do something about it.

The poem written after recalling some film footage seen of elephants scattering the bones of their dead

        But what exactly? They can't of course
reassemble the old elephant magnificence;
they can't even make a tidier heap...

and slowly as the poem progresses Christopher Reid's use of the metaphor gains deeper significance in relation to the much wider spectrum of mourning, but as I read I couldn't help but think of Badaude's project and how often do we now call that unspoken taboo topic the elephant in the room?

Except in Christopher Reid's case this is a metaphor of a different ilk as he recounts in the article I have been reading

'What appealed to me...as the mixture of clumsiness and grace in the elephant's behaviour. My grief was clumsy, but I hoped that grace would come of it.'

I think there is little doubt about that...

...elephants at their abstracted lamentations -
may their spirit guide me as I place
        my own sad thoughts in new, hopeful arrangements.

A Scattering is a truly inspiring and very beautiful collection of poetry and one I would recommend unreservedly to anyone, but especially those either currently in that often directionless mire of loss and grief or to others who may have been there and waded out the other side.

 

Endsleigh Salon ~ Fashion

Sartorial elegance should have been our dress code for the night but it was March and we doth not cast clouts so foolishly early in the year for the Endsleigh Salon, so as I recall we all turned up in our usual comfortable array of woolly jumpers and woollier boots, because I for one can never be quite sure whether I will boil of fry in this beautiful early nineteenth century setting. Thus attired we set to with our evening's theme of Fashion but in fact we quickly peeled layers because our lovely friends at the hotel had given us the gorgeously stylish sitting room complete with log fire, so we were mildly blissed out by our surroundings...they really are very good to us and for that we thank them.

There's always a brief silence when we call to order after a quick catch up over the teapots...who's been on holiday... who's going in for surgery...who's fallen over on the ice and fractured their arm... and then someone asks 'Right, who's going first?' and there's complete silence until eventually somone pipes up and off we go.

Linda launched us on our way with The Way We Wore A Life in Threads by Robert Elms, a local library cast off and after a bit of a dodgy start the book came good as Robert Elms recounted his love affair with clothes, and those up-to-the-minute fashions that signalled membership of certain social groups which most of us could remember quite clearly. The tonic mohair suit, the Levis, the Ben Sherman shirt and the Cherry Reds all had us nodding at mention of skinheads and mods.

Jane (you will see there are a lot of other Js to come) took us into Linda Grant's world of The Thoughtful Dresser, a third time read for her before confessing that she worked in a clothes shop in town that the majority of us had never had the courage to go in because nothing in the window was priced (= expensive.) Only the rich can afford cheap shoes apparently and at all cost we must avoid the decline into beige as we age, but a fascinating account of how Linda's Jewish immigrant family dressed to assimilate.

Rebecca had read Elegance by Kathleen Tessaro and had been sufficiently impressed with the book to order the book on which the novel is based and uses extracts from as a means of taking the heroine's life whilst advancing the plot alphabetically through a lifetime of fashion...A Guide to Elegance for Every Woman Who Wants to be Well and Properly Dressed On All Occasions by Genevieve Antoine Dariaux, who with a name like that has to be the epitome of grooming I feel sure.

Then it was me and I had taken along Coco Chanel by Justine Picardie and probably gave a rather garbled account of an excellent book because it is a while since I had read it, but hopefully the gist was there.

Judith had read Cleopatra A Life by Stacy Schiff citing the idea of the fashionable woman of her time and was very impressed with the book, meticulously researched and a great read... we did of course stray into some debate about all those myths about Cleopatra and blamed Shakespeare for a great deal including the whole asp thing. No asp.

Jeannie had chosen The Clothes in the Wardrobe by Alice Thomas Ellis before discovering that the book wasn't really about clothes as much as the central theme of a wedding and a mis-matched couple. However the book was so good she carried on knowing there were bound to be some references to dresses which, with group latitude allowing for interpretation of themes, was fine with us. Interestingly several of us had read Alice Thomas Ellis voraciously back in the 1980s and wondered quite how she seemed to have gone out of fashion now (forgive the pun.)

Jane had endured sterling toil on our behalf, having done a last minute dash to the library and grabbed the only book she could see on fashion which happened to be Through Thick and Thin My Autobiography by TV fashion celeb Gok Wan. Jane then proceeded to soldier on through the life of a man who she couldn't help feeling quite sorry for but truthfully didn't really warm to. Perhaps it all epitomises the cult of celebrity, that craving of approval, the hatred of criticism and a man who only really revealed what he wanted in the book (autobiography so his perogative we all agreed) including the fact that originally weighing in at eighteen stone severe anorexia followed; a diet of honey and fifty laxative pills a day leading to the loss of  ten stone in a year. Much discussion followed about Gok's TV series and how so much of what he does is about self-esteem and making women feel good about themselves when much of the time he seems quite fragile himself... all fascinating.

Chris had opted for the fashion of architecture (clever eh, and why we love our themed reading approach) and had read and loved The Glass Room by Simon Mawer and as quite a few of us had read it we had some interesting discussion about the way that the book had left us all feeling we wanted to see the house, and had then all dashed off to google it.

Karen had acquired her book after an unfortunate incident in a charity shop wherein her son had toppled a great pile of books and she thus felt obliged to at least buy one to make amends. In fact it was 99p well spent because Things My Mother Should Have Told Me proved to be hilarious. One of those 1920s and 30s handbooks full of little epithets of the moment about sweeping your house daily and dressing nicely to go to the shops, so much hilarity ensued.

Almost as desperate for something to fit the theme, and also drawing a blank at the library, Jean had discovered In Vogue - Six Decades of Fashion by Georgina Howell on her shelves and took us on a wonderful tour of fashions we have known. Much debate about the present-day value of what we may all have thrown away in our time, and how years ago many of us would happily trek off to buy the Butterick pattern (do you remember the fuss the shop assistant used to make about stamping "Cannot Be Exchanged " on the envelope?) and a few yards of fabric to make our own clothes. Jean very versatile in this respect though her son still hasn't forgiven her for the crochet fig leaves that she knocked up so that he could enter a Pontin's Holiday Camp fancy dress competition.

And lastly but never leastly (if there can be such a word) Angela having just returned from a two week pre-earthquake holiday in Japan had taken along The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal as her reading for its netsuke connections (yes, we all said netski) and having reached the end, turned right back to the beginning and read the book again. Advancing the suggestion that this book is about a fashionable lifestyle, we were all entranced, and of course it is about fashion and much more besides. I'm reading this one very very slowly at the moment, rationing myself to a chapter a day and then indulging the thinking and other bookish trails that it opens and I'm thinking I will hardly be able to leave the company of the Ephrussi family when it ends.

April's theme is The 1950s... all suggestions welcome. So much choice I don't quite know where to start.

 

 

Anatomy of a Disappearance ~ Hisham Matar

Back in 2006, the first year I started writing dovegreyreader, and the year I dreamt up the whole shennanigans that has become the Bookerthon around the blogosphere, I read my first Booker longlist and proceeded to write about each book on here. Those were the days of twenty or more books on an unwieldy list and it was definitely a torture of my own invention.

I'm almost embarrassed to add the link to Bookerthon 2006 but it was a pleasant reminder of some really great reads that year...The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud, The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson, Mother's Milk by Edward St Aubyn (and surely he will be there again this year) The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, The Perfect Man by Naeem Murr, Kate Grenville's The Secret River  and my own favourite Carry Me Down by M.J Hyland.

Typically the winner was the one book I hadn't read, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai but it was also the year that Libyan author, Hisham Matar's debut novel In the Country of Men was shortlisted. Even googling it on my own blog drew a blank until I remembered that this was also in the days when Booker reading meant library reservations and the book had been recalled when I was only half way through, so I have nothing to show for it bar a rather presumptious comment about a book that went on to win a fistful of prizes...

“We all seem to be agreed on The Country of Men by Hisham Matar, that was the half read one here and then the library called it back so I haven't reviewed it, not a winner for anyone but a choice for more than one of the big Lit Eds apparently. (N.B. that could be significant)”

Memo to self at the time, never comment on a half-read book.

Revised Man Booker submission rules this year seem to suggest that previous short-listing, no matter how long ago, guarantees entry so I am assuming that Hisham Matar’s second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, may be a much-talked about book. So when a proof copy arrived from Penguin I idly picked it up for a quick first twenty pages and didn’t shift until I’d finished it several hours later. Then I turned back to the beginning and read the first half again, and I can’t wait to hear what the critics make of this one because for me it felt flawless.

Bookish perfection means many different things for me these days, but one is the book successfully written through the eyes of a child, and at fourteen years old Nuri is on the cusp of adolescence but still very much that child as his older self reflects on this tumultuous period of his life when, some time after his mother's death, his father takes him to an Egyptian holiday resort. It is here that Nuri falls in love with a woman wearing 'an outrageously bright yellow swimsuit' though in fact it is Nuri's father who subsequently marries Mona, a much younger woman, and for reasons that become apparent later in the novel. I am giving nothing away by revealing that Nuri's father soon mysteriously 'disappears' without trace because Hisham Matar reveals all this by page four.

What follows seems to be an incredibly prescient and politically relevant book given the tumultuous times in process in the Middle East right now, and also given that I since learn that Hisham Matar's own father, a leading Libyan dissident, was also abducted by the Egyptian secret service in 1990 and handed over to Libya, since when only two letters have been received from him in prison and his whereabouts remain unknown.

'There are times when my father's absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest.'

This is the opening line of the book, the older Nuri bearing the weight of the younger Nuri, and in that knowledge it's almost impossible to seperate the two lives, for Nuri I couldn't help but read Hisham,

There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places...'

and perhaps I have read this book as an essential element of Hisham Matar's own personal journey, because it is a brilliant exploration of a young adolescent's coping strategies in the face of deep love and profound and excruciatingly painful loss.

The impact for Nuri of the loss of both parents is clearly devastating, but Anatomy of a Disappearance, with its title hinting at a dissection down to the very bones and sinews of this adolescent sadness, is a novel conveyed in the first person narrative. Thus reader awareness of the impact often precedes any overt display of grief in the book... any hints at the effects of that grief are subtle and blended, mediated through the consciousness of a boy trying desperately to become a man. When they slip through his guard I found them simple but deeply moving,

'more than anything else I wanted to be expected, waited for, welcomed.'

There are some interesting twists in the book which, could I reveal them, would offer a great deal more for me to write about so I am omitting a great deal of detail about the events of Nuri's life to arrive at the point where, eventually older and released from the constraints of being parented, he becomes a shaper of his own destiny but with that unerring eye that a child has for observation along the way. Some of the fine details are exquisitely placed, those little extras that create something much bigger, and they abound in this book; meld those together with an opening paragraph that somehow encapsulates Hisham Matar's purpose with his novel and I feel I have read something incredibly worthwhile.

Is it possible to say 'worthwile' without making a book sound 'worthy' or 'good for you' ?

I don't mean to suggest that at all but it seems the only way to convey that precious and privileged, long and undisturbed evening of reading that I spent in Nuri's and perhaps Hisham Matar's company.

Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy.'

 

 

 

 

Oh alright then...

...here we are...

My lustrous locks defeated me very quickly, how do you manage not to sit on hair that long?
As you'd expect, the usually follicularly challenged Bookhound took quite a shine to his, nearly crashed the car en route because he couldn't see where he was going with so much hair around, managed to eat his way through a bowl of chilli with no hair included and wore it all the way home again too.... and is so enchanted with his long hair he may now go shopping in it.

Orange progress...

I have decided I will tackle some Orange long-listers this year for several simple reasons. Not only do I already seem to have quite a few on the shelves but I am ready for a bout of women's fiction too and  the list has highlighted some interesting looking novels that I might otherwise have missed. And Orange reading does now traditionally seem to herald the end of winter and the arrival of spring in that very Persephone-like way.

First off the stack, Great House by Nicole Krauss and I am enjoying it immensely because it's a while since a book has insisted that I concentrate quite so hard even if we have had a huge distraction this weekend.

A friend's 50th birthday party last night, dress code 1960s and the village may just never have seen the like. Perhaps, just perhaps I will share the pictures of me in my waist-length blond wig and a rather lukewarm attempt to emulate Mary Hopkin (apparently now living in a French chateau where she can only be reached by carrier pigeon) but really just an excuse to have long blond hair for once in my life. In fact I ended up looking more like our school French teacher. But no matter, because I was very happy to be completely outdone by Bookhound warming to his role as a composite of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, John Lennon and Ozzy Osbourne in his very fetching shoulder length wig.

 

dovegreyreader walks to Swiss Cottage...

No not the London one because Devon has a Swiss Cottage of its own, and some of you are not experiencing deja vue, this post did go up a little embryonically and too soon last week and I quickly retrieved it for a bit more tweaking.

Setting off on my weekly Archers podcast Amble I decided to head across from home to the Endsleigh estate because it really is my summer daylight plan to walk there on Endsleigh Salon book group evenings and I wanted a rough idea of how long it might take me.... note I only said 'there', the plan also includes Part B which entails Bookhound meeting me at the end of the drive for a lift home at 10pm.

Well suffice to say if I leave home at 6.30pm I'll be there for about 7.15pm though probably in need of a shower because yet another long uphill slog, which seems so easy in the car but needed three breathers, before descending down into the dip into which Endsleigh nestles. Looking across towards Endsleigh, one of the visible features is Fisheries Cottage and nearby I knew was a property owned by The Landmark Trust, Swiss Cottage which I have seen pictures of but had never actually walked to, so I made that my destination.

The Landmark Trust a treasure trove of wonderful properties around the UK...

...... a building preservation charity, founded in 1965 by the late Sir John Smith and Lady Smith. It was established to rescue historic and architecturally interesting buildings and their surroundings from neglect and, when restored, to give them new life by letting them as places to experience for holidays.

No signs that said Private so I walked up the track, past Fisheries Cottage and met two people coming out of Swiss Cottage. Heck , I thought, holiday makers here for a bit of peace and quiet, won't want a rambler spoiling their solitude, better turn around, but it was my lucky day. Lou works for The Landmark Trust and was staying for the weekend with her husband Tony and doing an appraisal of the property.


Landmark Trust you have a treasure in Lou. You know what it's like when you live near somewhere and have always wanted to have a look inside... well Tony and Lou invited me in and showed me round the immaculately furnished, tiny rooms, all with fireplaces and all just oozing that 1800's atmosphere.

Swiss Cottage was built by the Bedfords in about 1815 as a spot for shooting lunches and picnics, and of course those of us who have read Mistress of the Arts by Rachel Trethewey will know that this place holds even more significance.... so there I was imagining Georgiana and the artist Landseer and their romantic trysts, conducting their probably not so secret affair in this idyllic little spot far away from the prying eyes of the Big House. I'd have given my eye teeth to have had the time to sit down and read the little book of local history and relevant articles that The Landmark Trust place in all their properties, along with a shelf full of even more relevant books that caught my eye.

The views from that balcony must be some of the most stunning in the county, if not the country...

and the view from the bedroom window up under the eaves looking down high above the River Tamar enough to make your soul sing even on an overcast day.

As always at Endsleigh, looking at what's underfoot bears its own reward...

and then I look up again and somehow I can't take in enough of this view...

But Lou and Tony had their weekend to get on with so I took my leave and set off for home with glad heart. I was back in the door in what seemed a thrice, didn't notice the hills, just happy to have had such a lovely and very unexpected morning and what a lucky chance meeting that was... thanks again Lou and Tony.

 

Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun ~ Janet Frame

In a week when I happen to be reading and very much enjoying the new novel by Edward Docx, The Devil's Garden, which as well as some wonderfully Conradian Heart of Darkness themes also contains as its main character a myrmecologist (an ant expert...no I didn't know either) who seems to be, amongst others things,  studying the sociological structure of the ant world (at least I think that's what's happening, don't quote me it is early days) who'd have thought there would be a tenuous link to the writing of Janet Frame.

Janet was also into the sociology of the ant world (who knows whether Edward Docx's research took him as far as Janet's book) and to round off Janet Frame week I wanted to share one more little book which I suspect is often less-talked about because it is considered to be for children, and indeed Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun is a lovely children's read, (I have it in this exquisite little Bloomsbury Classics edition) and was dedicated by Janet to Pamela Gordon who has so kindly shared her memories of her aunt this week,

But this is a book that rightly deserves the adult readership I feel sure it has garnered too. I first read it several years ago and immediately realised this is about far more than a little ant who strays away from home and finds herself having to change to fit into her new surroundings.

It's a book about discovery and bravery in adversity, about fear and courage, about making your face fit where it may not usually do so, about the expectations of others, about being uncomfortable in new surroundings, about pretending to be something you are not and then about being true to yourself, about the constant search for something unknowable, dreaming and imagining, about close shaves, challenges, disappointments and happy moments, staying and leaving, celebrations and family, love, loyalty and friendship and doesn't that all seem so redolent of much that Pamela has shared about Janet this week.

It's also a book about home... and home is something I have been thinking about a great deal this week too in the context of Japan, the destruction of all those homes and a tragedy that sometimes feels overwhelming and leaves me feeling a little helpless... I mean just how on earth can anyone help.

Our Vocal Harem choir concert two weeks ago raised enough money for a Shelterbox and a bit for the Cornish-based charity  and, knowing that Shelterbox are on the ground in Japan as well as many other countries around the world, I can think of no more practical cause in the face of disasters like this which leave so many people homeless. I can't even begin to imagine how I would cope given those circumstances, but I do know that if I had lost everything and someone gave me a box that contained the wherewithal to create a semblance of a home... and the box even contains a woodburning stove, then I think I would probably be grateful to the point of bended knee and tears.

In the end Mona determines that she has had enough of pretending to be something she is not, she will set off for home and she will do things 'her way'...

'Mona's thinking was morning-thinking and not the night-thinking that comes when you are tired and sick. She felt happy.'

I think Janet Frame knew exactly what she was writing about in this lovely little book.

 

 

 

 

dovegreyeader asks... Janet Frame even more

Janet's favourite books /writers and who would she be pressing on us to read and telling us we mustn't miss...

She was a voracious reader. You have to be, of course, if you want to write. She would tell you to read the classics, and the best writers of your own time too (you know who they are!). And the Russians! And the French! I remember her insisting I read Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Antoine de St Exupéry, Patrick White, Rilke, Kafka, Camus. Some of her other favourites were: Walt Whitman, John Updike, Pepys, Chekhov, Dickens, Tolstoy, Poe, Chaucer, Shakespeare.  She liked the perfection of the short form, and would reread the great short stories. She loved reading well-turned essays. She also read a lot of non-fiction and poetry, and always read the latest work of her friends who were writers. Just too many to name. And she would read the junk mail and the cereal packet too.

So now I hope everyone has a sense of the real Janet Frame and my sincere thanks to Pamela Gordon for answering the questions for me and for allowing me to use the photographs.

If you are thinking you might like to pick up a Janet but may not know where to start I have linked to some previous thoughts on her books here over the years. It was thanks to Stella Duffy and Linda Grant at that memorable event at the Du Maurier Festival in Fowey that I found an author I have really grown to love, respect and cherish and I really hope some of you will discover her too if you haven't already.

The Lagoon & Other Stories

'This story came last night. Everything is always a story, but the loveliest ones are those that get written and are not torn up and are taken to a friend as payment for listening, for putting a wise keyhole to the ear of my mind.'

The Lagoon is the book that saved Janet Frame's mind and most probably her life given that prior to its publication and subsequent garnering of literary accolades Janet was scheduled to undergo a lobotomy having been admitted to a mental hospital for depression.
This knowledge alone ensures that I will probably always read Janet Frame with that sort of reverence for a prodigious talent that could have been so tragically wiped out, lost forever and with utter gratitude for what still awaits for me to read, and the tears consequently well up in my eyes especially over stories like The Bedjacket.

'It was almost Christmas time and everybody in the mental hospital was wanting to go home.Some had homes and some didn't but that made not much difference, they all wanted to go to a place that could be called home where there were no locked doors... more

Living in the Maniototo

'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... 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.... more

 

Owls Do Cry

The ethereal sense of the world of the child mediated through the child's stream of consciousness is remarkable in so many ways, but mostly because I effectively moved into this childhood world and lived alongside Francie, Daphne, Toby and Chicks and saw through their eyes all those childlike things that an adult misses but Janet doesn't. Fears, hopes, dreams and that interpretation of the world all piercingly accurate.

This is a book of two halves, childhood and adult life, and woven in amongst it all I spotted the lightly disguised events of Janet's life, and whilst she may have been beset by that ever-present sense of doubt in her own personal worth and the attendant inadequacy and low self-esteem, there is no question that on the page Janet Frame shapes up as one of the most superlatively adequate and exceptional writers that I have come across...more

Towards Another Summer

Writer Grace Cleave is thirty, unmarried, a native New Zealander, exiled and homesick, living in a cold wintery London and sees herself as a migratory bird 'it is time for me to fly towards another summer',

'How had she ever become used to living in Great Britain, she wondered. How had she ever been able to exchange the sun, the beach, the shimmering tent of light, the dramatic landscape, mountains, rivers, gullies, glaciers, for the brick bleeding wound that seemed so much part of this country.'

Not a difficult sentiment to identify with when you realize this book was written in 1963, the year of Sylvia Plath's death; London hasn't been as cold and wintery since and surely the presence of a Sylvia in the book no coincidence? A bout of writer's block prompts Grace unusually to accept an invitation to stay with friends for the weekend.... more

 

 

Orange Longlist Surprises

Don't you just love a longlist full of surprises and this bowl of Oranges may insist on closer inspection in the weeks to come because I seem to be so far off the pace here that I have read precisely two, The London Train and Whatever You Love.

Have given up twice on another, Room. 

Gave a spare copy of The Invisible Bridge to a friend and she sat up all night reading it.

Have Jamrach's Menagerie ready to open next

and several others lurking here somewhere...

How about you?

Can someone persuade me why I should try and get past page fifty of Room for a third time?

Any here that should rush to the top of my reading pile?

Leila Aboulela - Lyrics Alley

Carol Birch - Jamrach's Menagerie

Emma Donoghue - Room

Tishani Doshi - The Pleasure Seekers

Louise Doughty - Whatever You Love

Jennifer Egan - A Visit from the Goon Squad

Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

Tessa Hadley - The London Train

Emma Henderson - Grace Williams Says it Loud

Samantha Hunt - The Seas

Joanna Kavenna - The Birth of Love

Nicole Krauss - Great House

Wendy Law-Yone - The Road to Wanting

Téa Obreht - The Tiger's Wife

Julie Orringer - The Invisible Bridge

Anne Peile - Repeat it Today with Tears

Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

Lola Shoneyin - The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives

Roma Tearne - The Swimmer

Kathleen Winter - Annabel

dovegreyeader asks... Janet Frame some more

Janet's writing day? Favourite places to write, pen or typed, solitude or company etc, how did she care for her manuscripts etc, her hobbies..

Janet used a typewriter. She only ever wrote by hand if she was travelling. But first, she did a lot of the composing in her head. I think that's why she needed silence when she was working. Sometimes she would go quiet and you could almost hear the thoughts whirring around in her brain. You could see something had been triggered. She would excuse herself and rush away to find the necessary solitude so she could concentrate. At the end of her life, when she was too weak to write any more, sometimes she would just talk about the idea, and how it would have made a good story.

She organised each project carefully - drawing it up in a notebook with suggested names of characters, and a few characteristics of each one, chapter headings, a synopsis and some key ideas, and working titles. Her plan included her goal for how many words she would write per day and per week, time off, and how long the book would take. She would then tick it all off day by day, or make excuses if she hadn't reached a particular goal.

She had a private study nobody else was ever allowed into. But she also had a work station in almost every other room in her house, even her living rooms and kitchen. There would be a desk or table, a typewriter, and plenty of blank paper. She could then work on several things at the same time. She hid her work behind screens so eyes couldn't pry when she had guests.

She had high standards and typed several drafts of her work - some of which are peppered with the exhortation to herself to "By God improve!" I remember she had a horror of being caught out inadvertently using the same word more than once. She usually cut her final manuscripts back quite severely. Once she was happy with the work, she strongly resisted any editing on the part of the publisher. When her manuscript was finished her ritual was to hole punch the pages and bind it inside cardboard covers, and write the title on the front.

She was very disciplined. She got up before dawn (it was quieter then) and had her first small breakfast, worked for a few hours, and then had her second breakfast, a cooked one. She was a coffee drinker - I never knew her to have a cup of tea. Then she worked until midday, which was the end of her writing day. She would emerge for lunch, and that was often shared with friends or family or out downtown somewhere. She was shaking off the internal world and her work was a forbidden topic from then on. There was no quicker way to alienate her than to try to press her on the topic of "what are you working on now?" We all knew that was taboo.

The afternoons were for shopping, chores, meeting friends, going for long walks, reading, and writing letters. She carried out multiple correspondences. Her letters were delightful: erudite, spontaneous, joking, wise, and beautifully written. She sometimes included satirical collages, and drew cartoons, and was a prolific sender of postcards.

She was not a fanatical gardener, but she had gardener's attention to plants. She always planted fruit and ornamental trees (lemon trees, gooseberry bushes, flowering currant) and grew a few vegetables and flowers. Some of her favourites were: lilac, sunflowers, peonies, geraniums, tomatoes, silver beet, asparagus. She was a good cook. She was famous for her light and fluffy scones (she used buttermilk) and her whitebait patties were divine. (Whitebait is a NZ seafood delicacy that was probably her favourite food.) She always had a beloved cat, but this conflicted with her love of the wild birds that she fed in winter with mutton fat and sugar water.

She loved music, especially classical music, although she had a soft spot for Johnny Cash ("I walk the line') and Frank Sinatra ("I did it my way'). She played the mouth organ and would bring it along to family gatherings if there was likely to be a singsong. She learned to play the piano just well enough to attempt some favourite pieces by Schubert or Mozart or Beethoven. She enjoyed concerts and film festivals and liked popular culture too - she was a fan of The Young and the Restless (she had a crush on Victor) and the Friday Fright movies on TV - horror, vampires and science fiction. Entertainment or research? I don't know. She often said it was marvellous to be a writer because absolutely everything was "grist to the mill".

She would lock her door before dark and close the outside world away again. She would read, watch TV, talk on the phone, surf the internet. If she was working on a book, she might do some more typing. But the usual story was "early to bed, early to rise."

Janet was very fond of handcrafts. She knitted, sewed, crocheted, wove, and made patchwork quilts. She loved chess and scrabble and almost any word game. She relished the freedom of her anonymous life. When I first saw the Disney TV programme Hannah Montana I was struck by the similarity of the plot to the way Janet lived. Just as rock star Hannah has a double identity (the public doesn't recognise her when she is plain everyday 'Mylie'), so Janet, by living under an invented name, was able to have a relatively ordinary life. At other times she was feted in literary circles and so she had "the best of both worlds".

 

dovegreyeader asks... Janet Frame

As Offspringette heads off for her New Zealand adventure my thoughts are very much there again and,as I said yesterday, it all seemed like a good opportunity to have a little New Zealand litfest of our own on here and celebrate that dovegrey favourite, Janet Frame.

Well may you wonder quite how I've managed this one, dovegreyreader asks... Janet Frame, but last year I put this project to Pamela Gordon, Janet's neice and asked whether she would be able to answer some questions that might give us the chance to get to know the real Janet Frame. We didn't set a deadline, I was happy to wait as long as it took and for Pamela to do this in her own time because I was just so grateful that she agreed to do it.

I think you will all agree this has been worth the wait and I am honoured and delighted to be placing Pamela's personal account of her aunt on the record here.

Pamela, firstly we'd love to know about the real Janet because I suspect the one we think we know from books and films may bear little resemblance to the one that you know.

The myth of her as a 'recluse', especially in New Zealand, is so deeply culturally ingrained that even if strangers met her in person, they interpreted everything they saw in terms of the stereotype. She could see through these people, and sometimes played up to their expectations. Her theory was, why bother when they had so clearly made their minds up. She could be very obstinate in unwelcome company, just shutting up completely until people gave up and went away. She liked to preserve her own creative space from rude interruptions. Writers have to spend much time alone. That doesn't mean they don't like company. She did, but she was discerning. And she did crave the intimacy of marriage and family, but she knowingly sacrificed it for the sake of her art.

Janet would occasionally behave like a Zen master. I remember an anecdote her US publisher George Braziller tells of their first meeting - they were having a meal at a restaurant and the communication was awkward. She was ever on the alert for patronising behaviour. So she upended the salad bowl onto the table. She probably muttered something like, "Are you happy now?" She had done the 'mad' thing, could they now get on with their meeting? That was quite instructive (she was studying Buddhism at the time). George got the message. And they did become close friends.

She was very funny. She was quick with her wit, and there was much laughter in her company. But she was also comfortable with silence, too. Aren't the conversations that incorporate pauses, deeper and more enriching? That's my opinion, and I feel very lucky to have been her friend, and to have shared quiet times with her. She loved to just watch people, animals, or landscape, and you can tell if you know her work, that she took in what she observed and turned it into literature. She had a photographic memory.

I loved her dearly and the feeling was mutual, and I was one of her closest confidantes. I know I can't claim to define any 'real' Janet, but I can say with some authority that there was a real Janet, and she was no disembodied cipher, and she didn't have any disability or disorder; she merely sensitively embraced her own humanity with courage and humour.

Janet had a lot of friends, although she did tend to compartmentalise them - some of them apparently didn't know about all the others. Or maybe she made everyone feel unique. I think she didn't like people getting together and comparing notes. She really hated being talked about behind her back because she had suffered from malicious gossip early in her life. So she expected loyalty and discretion from her inner circle. I used to think that was for her own protection, but now I realise she was also guarding her loved ones from the negative side of fame. Fame truly can be a curse.

She had a gift for making a wide range of friends, including with her neighbours. She often became close to her neighbours. She moved house frequently, partly in the search for a quiet environment or to be near loved ones, or because her address became too well-known and she was being harassed. Or because she needed some new material for the next book. Or to get away from the scene of the last one. Or just for the thrill of it. There was always a good reason.

She was an exciting person to know. She loved novelty and adventure and travel. She was an early adopter of just about anything new, including computers, but also slang, and she was fascinated by whatever was "the latest thing". But she was no slave to the current fad: she was original, and unconventional. She wore comfortable clothing in striking colours like orange or red or bright blue, whether that was fashionable at the time or not. She wore coloured stockings and patterned socks, and multi-coloured hats. She deliberately chose not to conform; she really didn't care what people thought. If they cared about such things, they were not her kind of person anyway. She did tend to test people, maybe because she had been betrayed in the past, and one of the first hoops she put a potential friend through was to expect them not to judge by appearances. I was lucky because she trained me up as a child, by giving me Le Petit Prince and pointing out the message explicitly: "The things that are important are invisible to the eye".

In saying all this I haven't even scratched the surface of a wonderful, lovable, complicated person who was full of contradictions, and who was so accepting of the mystery of herself and of other people.

Coming up next ::

Can you tell us about Janet's writing day? Favourite places to write, pen or typewriter, solitude or company etc, how did she care for her manuscripts etc, her hobbies..

 

 

 

 

 

Tsunami reflections and Framing the Orange.

I feel sure hearts and minds are with the people of Japan right now, how can they not be, and having sat and watched events unfold as the earthquake happened on Friday I can't help but sense, as I'm sure many of you will have done, that we were watching one of those phenomenal natural disasters that just a hundred years ago would have been largely unknown until travellers returned or letters arrived.

But then who could have managed to describe even a fraction of the sheer scale of that tsunami that looked so eerily low from the aerial vantage point and yet at 33 feet high would have certainly overpowered our house.

...or the whirlpool, how often is that seen so vividly?

We found it hard to credit what our eyes were seeing, and, as with Christchurch, to even begin to imagine the scale of the devastation or where on earth you begin with a clear up and a rebuild, but in the end it felt like a strangely historic and important day to which we needed to pay attention.

Initial tsunami alerts for New Zealand thankfully very quickly proved unfounded and were downgraded, but we were in touch with Offspringette via skype video (is it not amazing to talk for free to someone halfway around the world as if they were there with you? ) at her current home in Napier on the east coast of North Island.

Napier was completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1931 and as a consequence of that quake areas of land previously unseen were raised above sea level, but the date also explains the wonderful Art Deco architecture for which the town is famous.

It's quite something to be living within that Ring of Fire at the moment, with its increasing potential for the known and expected event but never quite knowing the day nor the hour, but Offspringette's a good container of anxiety, cool, a calm and collected person in a crisis (unless it's the day before she leaves the UK and suddenly realises her insurance isn't right) especially if those around her are distressed, so we feel sure she'll have her wits about her.

So apropos of all that and with my thoughts so readily set in an antipodean direction at the moment, I have set up a few New Zealand author-related posts here this week in the shape of dovegreyreader asks... Janet Frame.

And yes, well may you wonder quite how I've managed this one, so you'll have to come back tomorrow to find out, but I can promise you something very special and my thanks to Janet's neice Pamela Gordon for her assistance.

And we have the Orange Prize long list to look forward to on March 16th this week as well, and my thanks to the right PR agency (M&C Saatchi) for e mailing me all the details after last year's Colman Getty gaffe. I'm not sure I'm in the mood for any predictions this year but I think some of you might be, so do leave some suggestions in comments and let's see how many we can manage. And when the list is announced on Wednesday I'll run round and see what I have on my shelves and do the traditional pic....

Oh alright then just one to get the Orange rolling ... We Had it So Good by Linda Grant.

 

Quilts 4 London

No sooner was World Book Night up and running than a friend with Olympian family connections (thank you Family Allenby) contacted me about Quilts4London and I feel another wave of enthusiasm surging up from nowhere.

Having been fervent Olympians since forever ... well Rome 1960 is the first we can truly recall, Tokyo is when the scrapbooks started, and we have watched every games since, so Bookhound and I are all set to apply for our 2012 tickets when the shenanigans begin on March 15th. We can only hope for a robust website that can cope with the traffic and of course there is no rush, applications won't be processed or tickets allocated for 45 days or so I think, and we feel we have as much chance as anyone else of success.

Top of the list is at least a day at the Athletics, but this being the Olympics I can get enthused about anything really... if we only get tickets for the Archery or the Synchronised Swimming that'll have to do. Bookhound hints that he'd be happy with the velodrome but what's the betting we end up sitting on a cliff at Weymouth in the pouring rain with a thermos and soggy sandwiches watching the Women's One Person Dinghy - Laser Radial about which we know nothing. But we do know we have to be there and be part of it if we possibly can.

And I love the Quilts4London idea of making a pennant for every competitor, all 14,000 of them. I am a great lover of the the gift of a quilted item, witness these four little 6" square pieces I made for our Canadian visitors last year using the fabric bought at the V&A Quilt exhibition.

There are dire warnings about not using official London 2012 Olympic logos etc and to be honest, have you seen it?

Would you even try to copy it?

But there doesn't seem to be a problem with doves, and as the deadline for submission is December 2011 I have some time to plan my contribution and applique some on it somewhere somehow.

 

She is Too Fond of Books and The Reader magazine...

How we all love that quote from Louisa May Alcott and it seemed to fit so well that I omitted the bit about 'and it has turned her brain',  for obvious reasons of credibility and seriousness, and used it as the title for a piece that was commissioned by The Reader magazine for their Health issue which was published this week. The editors wanted my take on a life spent with books and reading and how that may have seeped into my life as a nurse, so it was really good to reflect on that and ponder all those influences.

You may recall this was the piece of the lost first 1000 words which were somehow eaten by the Sony Vaio over Christmas, then soundly digested never to be regurgitated, and over which I may well have wept had it not been for the fact that I recognised I had actually got off on the wrong writing foot anyway so they were best abandoned.

Whilst I am mentioning The Reader I must also mention their recent publication of A Little Aloud, An anthology of prose and poetry for reading aloud to someone you care for  and which seems really apt given my hopes for reading aloud surrounding my World Book Night gift of The World's Wife.

Blake Morrison, in his foreword, highlights the capacity of literature to 'make us feel better - better in ourselves and better about ourselves' something with which I feel sure we might all concur. He goes on to talk about the inclusivity of books and the way they invite us in and to belong and nothing could feel more relevant this week after such a wonderful Team Tolstoy troika stop... goodness me how much more I know I am gaining from sharing this read with so many of you. I think we may really exemplify Blake Morrison's assertion that literature can be communal and collaborative here.

The Reader Organisation now running over 200 Get Into Reading groups across the UK and utilising the lost art of shared reading aloud to get books and reading into those dark corners where they may have been little experienced.

Reading Jane Davis's introduction again now I see that my little essay also segues nicely into the concepts explored in A Little Aloud... about us all being the tellers of our own story, the owners of our own narratives, something you will see if you read She is Too Fond of Books that became increasingly clear to me in my working life once I realised I was listening daily to those narratives of other people's lives, and what a privilege that was.

So a book that champions reading aloud and I'm remembering George Eliot's letters and diaries, and how often she and George Henry Lewes would sit and read aloud to each other and I used to think how quaint and how unfashionable that had become for adults, and doubtless for obvious technological reasons perhaps... but what a fine revival The Reader is spearheading with this book.

The collection is wide-ranging and full of little surprises, some familiar, some less so, all timed and with the suggestion from Jane Davis that the book is used as a 'tool' with plenty of scope for matching the reading to the situation...from a family sitting around the fire at Christmas who want to be entertained, to the group that may need to grapple with a problem or feel cheered, to the patient in the hospital bed

In the end, having recovered from The Lost Words, I enjoyed writing She is Too Fond of Books immensely and it was a real pleasure to work with Sarah Coley who edited my offerings into the space available and conferred so sensitively and thoughtfully with me over it all. So my sincere thanks to The Reader magazine for asking, accepting and publishing the finished essay, and for anyone who is interested The Reader have very kindly allowed me to publish it on here. As it is 2000 words I have uploaded it as a file which you should find on the side bar over here >>>>  titled 'Publishing...' and the link is here too if you should want to read.

 

 

Team Tolstoy - Troika Stop Six

'And there in the middle, high above Prechistensky Boulevard, amidst a scattering of stars on every side but catching the eye through its closeness to the earth, its pure white light and the long uplift of its tail, shone the comet, the huge brilliant comet of 1812, that popular harbinger of untold horrors and the end of the world.'

More about Pierre and the magical sleigh ride in a moment, but first an opening quote from this months's section seems a bit nearer the mark

'...our sense of morality will not allow us to be both idle and at ease. Whenever we are idle a secret voice keeps telling us to feel guilty.'

Not that I have that exact problem, I've hardly been idle as such, but where on earth did February go Team Tolstoy?

The reading has been to the wire this month, made it by the thickness of the ice on the runners and it would seem as usual the only way to really settle down properly with War and Peace, no matter how reluctant I may feel,  is to light the fire, see the flames flickering and the sofa beckoning... so that was Sunday afternoon sorted and please think of me sweltering here through the summer months won't you.

Reluctance and procrastination a combination of recent bookish events combined with the fact that I have three really excellent books in progress which I couldn't bear to be parted from, plus the lingering sense that I hadn't been over-enamoured with last month's War and Peace section.  I had felt a little lack lustre and unenthused by Pierre's existential meanderings, though of course you all convinced me otherwise in comments, which is one of the real bonuses of all this. To make things a little gentler on myself this month I also swapped to the more 'modern' Anthony Briggs translation, because I do think is an 'easier' read than my beloved Maudes, which is after all contemporaneous to Tolstoy's era, so whilst doubtless being closer to the original it does have complexities of it's own.

So for anyone who may have dropped off the troika my sympathies, because I can see how easily it happens and had I not had to be here today with 'something' I might just have dropped off too. But I can also say that if you think you'd like to get back on board but feel you've missed a stop or two, it's not too late and this last month's read would be a great place to rejoin because it has been riveting stuff.  Just gen up on what's gone before ... Pierre and Helene are back together, Natasha and Andrei are engaged but he has delayed the nuptials for a year and gone off to do a bit of sight seeing around Europe in the wake of Count Bolkonsky's disapprobation, whilst poor Natasha, bored out of her skull, must sit and wait chastely and patiently for his return. You could then pick up at Volume 2 Part IV (round about p530 ish) and catch up with yet another fabulous month's reading because did you notice I said 'poor Natasha' ?

My sympathies for Natasha have turned as I felt sure they would and perhaps this month I really do feel completely immersed and know there will now be no turning back, because I actually do want to know what happens next, and may not be able to wait until the eve of the next 9th of the month looms in order to find out. I am now deeply moved by the whole Natasha situation and with her mother's words ringing in my ears which of course I now can't find... but along the lines that she needs to live life so much to the full that she may never be happy with the lot that is hers in nineteenth century Russia.

And of course this section contains Natasha's iconic dance from which much meaning has been extrapolated about the instinctive nature of Russian culture, and one which Orlando Figes explores in his book Natasha's Dance A Cultural History of Russia

'Are we to suppose, as Tolstoy asks us to in this romantic scene, that a nation such as Russia may be held together by the unseen threads of a native sensibility?'

So much to talk about this month and here are a few starters for ten

• The hunting of the wolf... so what did we all make of that? I'm quite used to what the Gamekeeper calls ' a question of balance' when he wants to warn me that there is a dispatched deer out on the verandah, but I was a mess of complete sentiment and sadness over the fate of Tolstoy's wolf, and that fact it hadn't been killed fairly and squarely but was suffering.
• The 'unhappy Rostov household'...oh dear, with all the resident hangers-on... what a heap big mess seemed to be piling up here and for a family for whom everything had seemed so right and perfect in the beginning, now it's all going decidedly pear-shaped.
• Pierre is now back on the scene and yet another side to his character develops and I'm liking him again.
• Maria is still having a miserable time of it isn't she, no change there then.
• And poor Natasha, her plight emphasising the restricted lives led by the women, and for a free spirit like her it was always going to end in tears...who let that wretch Anatole in the back door?

Moments I loved...

• The hunt supper, the food, the dancing and the balaliakas teemed with an atmosphere.
• Fashion -  sleeves are out according to Anna Mikhaylovna and thus Princess Irina looking as if she'd put two barrels on her arms.
• The Mummers at Christmas and the sledge race.
• Pierre's sleigh ride ... oh that was magical, I was there.

 Moments I loved slightly less...

• That the happiest moment of Nikolai's life was the sight of that wolf's head gasping in terror.
• The Rostov family's treatment of Sonia now that she and Nikolai are in love... in light of the wolf episode I'd be worried about him if I were her.
• That a woman needs to be married pronto because her looks have all but gone by twenty seven.

Things I have learned that I didn't know before....

• A knout, as in 'the deserter died under the knout' I discover is a particularly vicious weapon of punishment involving a rawhide lash with rings and knots.
• Boston is a card game of some complexity played everywhere but Britain, where we can obviously only cope with Rummy.
• Ecossaise is, as I expected, a Scottish-style dance.
• Bout rimes, all the rage at the Karagin's, are lists of words that rhyme with one another, drawn up by another hand, and given to a poet, who has to then create a poem to the rhymes in the same order that they were placed upon the list.

And while you are all having a think here's a nice Borzoi to stroke ... Nikolai's hunting dog, and this pedigree one probably far removed from Nikolai's mangy, flea-ridden native original, but a sort of a lurcher - border collie cross by the looks of it. A comparison that will probably send shudders down the spine of any Crufts judges reading...sorry.

Now over to you and for anyone on the reading schedule -

Next month :: Volume III Part 1 Chs 1 - 23 (about 100 pages beginning ' The latter part of 1811 saw a new build-up in the concentration and arming of troops in Western Europe.)

 

 

The Summer Without Men ~ Siri Hustvedt

'..there is no subject outside the purview of literature...there are NO RULES in art, and there is no ground under the feet of the Nitwits and Buffoons who think that there are rules and laws and forbidden territories, and no reason for a hierarchy that declares "broad" superior to "narrow" or "masculine" more desirable than "feminine"

Siri Hustvedt's narrator talking but I heart the sentiment entirely.

So Rev Cheryl came to visit last year...or was it the year before?? and brought with her some book gifts...or perhaps this was when I went to Rev Cheryl's for that Margaret Atwood event in Ely Cathedral and we exchanged more book gifts?? Tempus seems to have fugited so very fast that I can't quite remember, but it seems apt to mention bookish gifts and exchanges in general in the wake of what has turned out to be a wonderful weekend of book giving, because among the books that Rev Cheryl gave me and was most insistent I should read were a couple by Siri Hustvedt.

I had heard of Siri Hustvedt and knew she was married to the novelist Paul Auster but I had still not read the books, What I Loved and Sorrows of an American when the latest novel The Summer Without Men arrived a few weeks ago. Feeling chastened that I still hadn't read the gifts I decided that Suri's moment had come. and so I set about the latest novel, quickly realising that in many ways the book segued with my recent in-depth re-reading of Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife.

There are in fact real similarities of themes between the two with Siri Hustvedt's exploration of the arc of women's lives in The Summer Without Men whilst giving a voice to the silenced woman via the 'Pause' that is initiated in Mia Fredrickson's life when her husband of thirty years informs that he'd like a bit of a break in their marriage in order to 'indulge his infatuation with a young Frenchwoman.' Given little choice with Boris's decision but to accept it, Mia quite literally breaks and falls apart at the seams and after a sojourn in a psychiatric clinic she upsticks and moves to spend the summer in the prairie town of her childhood.

Slowly the benefits of the 'Pause' become apparent to Mia ...and I would add meno to pause because I think Siri Hustvedt is certainly exploring that time in a woman's life here. Having always been a 'scribbler of the stolen interval' whilst she raised a child, worked, ran the home and generally pandered to husband Boris's needs, Mia realises that there could be benefits to this holiday from him indoors...

'But then I hadn't fought for myself, or, rather, I hadn't fought in the right way. Some people just take the room they need, elbowing out intruders to take possession of a space. Boris could do it without moving a muscle...'

There has to be much to read into what may seem like, and indeed is, a regression into the safe spaces of childhood when the adult going gets tough; the loss of her known world is like a bereavement for the depleted Mia, so a retreat to safety, and perhaps renewed access to the source of the resilience she has temporarily lost makes complete sense. Mia reintegrates into the town via the life of her mother, now living in a retirement community and starts work as a creative writing teacher with a group of adolescent girls, and it is in her exploration of these two groups that Siri Hustvedt held my attention and excelled for me.

One group with the world at their feet and everything to look forward to but awash with insecurities, the other, the fiesty widows, with much to reflect on with the joys of hindsight and only one insecurity, the unknown one...when will death happen. As Mia moves between the two groups her experiences with each contributed both to her slow recovery and to my complete enjoyment of this book and via some wonderfully subversive moments along the way. Like ninety-four year old Abigail's revelation about her domestic needlecrafts... on the surface a teacosy or an apron, flip it inside out and there's the reveal, Abigail's 'private arsenal' her 'secret amusements' the subversive stitching that tells the real story of a woman's life and imagination, so you can perhaps see how this wove its way into my thinking about Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife.

As to whether Mia's recovery may embrace some mercy and forgiveness in Boris's direction should the French fancy depart... well as if I'm going to give that one away, but I was interested in my own reactions as I read because there is certainly an element of injecting your own feelings into a book like this, so astutely does it track women's lives and emotions.

Am I allowed to suggest that I doubt it's impossible for two authors to live together and not share some common ground on the subject of clever literary conceits and deceits, surely they talk about this sort of thing over the cornflakes?  I have become used to these in my reading of Paul Auster and so I was delighted to find them in Siri Hustvedt's writing too, those little unexpected twists in the narrative, moments of authorial intervention...or is it done under the guise of the first person narrator, you can't be quite sure but those boundaries of uncertaintly feel seamless when they are crossed and I was completely engrossed.

'The fictive is an enormous territory, it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.'

says Suri Hustvedts's narrator which leads me to believe there is a great deal to miss in The Summer Without Men, and I think I may have missed plenty by focusing on those aspects that interested me most, mainly the ways that Suri Hustvedt so adroitly introduced, established and then seperately juggled her groups. I felt I had something clever in my hands the surface of which I was barely scratching.

'Except by prejudice there is no sentiment in the arts banned from expression and no story that cannot be told. The enchantment is in the feeling and in the telling, and that is all

An intriguing book and one that would reveal much with a second read I feel sure, so beyond turning back to page one and starting over, where next with my Siri Hustvedt reading?

and the World Book Night winners are...

What an amazing book-laden weekend the UK has just had, booktalk everywhere including my little corner of  the sopranos where we talked about our favourite reads, rather than fret as we usually do about not being the one to mess up the five beat rest (or is it seven?) in All That Jazz. We had a wonderful World Book Night singing at our long pre-arranged concert in aid of Cornish-based charity Shelterbox and Vocal Harem was in fine voice.

The last 'set' of the concert, before we sang our final song which was the Howard Goodall arrangement of The Lord is My Shepherd, saw the Sultans (about a dozen partners of Harem members including Bookhound in the basses) singing a brilliant and very funny rendition of There is Nothing Like a Dame, Vocal Harem replying with gusto with one of our favourites Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair, then we all sang Some Enchanted Evening, and afterwards my lovely World Book Night copies of The World's Wife went around the choir in a flash. It was such a lovely feeling to be giving that many books away when I usually manage it in ones or twos to friends, or to some of you by post, or when we meet, or twenty bags full to the charity shop.

And what fun we have had reading your suggestions for more invisible wives, thank you so much for entering into the spirit of the moment and with so much imagination. It's only when you really think about it that you realise quite how clever Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife is...  such an original idea.

So WBN editions of this wonderful collection will be going to  ::

m - Mrs James Watt

Trish - Mrs Earnshaw

Jenny Ryan - Mrs Churchill

Tracey - Mrs Picasso

Maggie Wallace - Lizzie Siddal

Bet - Mrs Peter the Apostle

If you can e mail addresses to me at dovegreyreader at gmail dot com and put something like WBN- TWW WINNER in the subject line which will help the clerical department no end, and we will get the books in the post. If you live in far flung lands just to remind you that they will be coming surface mail so may take several weeks to arrive.

World Book Night :: The World's Wife ~ Carol Ann Duffy

World Book Night is here at last and my choice of a book to give and made after a great deal of deliberation, The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy. I've bought enough copies of this one over the years for friends so I'm quite pleased to now have forty eight to give away. I've collected my box of books and was mightily relieved to find them safe and sensibly sealed in plastic inside the box, so any left out to the mercy of the weather around the country should be fine.

Thank you for all your kind words about the radio programme and forgive any repetition but I did want to record my thoughts on The World's Wife for posterity here too because my mind was teeming with them.

As I know I've mentioned here before, I'm back with poetry big-time again now after a few years of a bit of an indifferent slouchy sloth-like approach induced by too much in-depth study. Whilst the studying revealed many poets to me in a new and enlightened way and I felt sure I would come to love them one day, all that sitting on the edge of my chair at 2am trying to write an essay, frantically searching out meaning and metaphor, rhyme, half rhyme etc, and knowing I had to be up early for work the next day, was all the kiss of death for poetry pleasure for me. But there were exceptions and The World's Wife was a notable one.

If, as Seamus Heaney suggests, poetry is about glimpses of the alternatives and re-dressing the balance then I can think of no better assessment of The World's Wife, because over the years I have come to appreciate the nuances of each poem in this little book since I first bought it in 1999. It is the invisible woman made visible, history told through the eyes of the women who were most certainly looking on, and how many times have I wandered around an art gallery taking in those great big murals of significant historical events and wondered how a woman artist may have painted them differently? Of course they were busy painting flowers, a historical narrative painting considered far too difficult and demanding, but in a way to read this collection is to partially assuage that need. And how much I am enjoying Carol Ann Duffy's tenure as our first female Laureate in 314 years already; knowing that whilst she won't be feeling compelled to write to order but as the spirit moves her, but that when it does we will get a woman's point of view, witness David Beckham's achilles injury... we should probably be thankful it wasn't his metatarsal again... Carol Ann Duffy wouldn't have baulked at the obvious rhymes there I'll bet.

The poems here are fearlessly wry and witty, playfully subversive, deeply intelligent, emotional and so much more. Ostensibly this is the arc of women's lives told using fairy tale, myth, biblical allusions, literature and film, and as Tom Watt said on the programme (I wanted to hug him at this point but microphones in the way) it is much more than feminism or a diatribe against men, it is, as Carol Ann Duffy says, about ways of being human. These are poems about jealousy, joy, grief and loss,(Mrs Lazarus) love that heals (Delilah) love that transcends all barriers ( Mrs Tiresias) about abuse and boredom (Mrs Aesop) about falling in love with the wrong person, about protecting our children,(Queen Herod) about being careful what you wish for,(Mrs Midas)  ageing,(Mrs Rip Van Winkle) or creativity (Penelope).

Reading The World's Wife again in readiness for the programme I was struck by the gift that poetry has now become for me, how much I enjoy fewer words telling me more... and telling me even more every time I revisit them, and what a great choice this was for me to be giving on World Book Night. There is an element of The Gift involved in this whole scheme and whilst the plan is also for the receivers to pass the book on, I'm hoping that this will be a book people will want to keep a copy of and perhaps buy copies for friends, because I know it has taken me years to unwrap it all and there are still a few poems here that I have yet to really appreciate fully. I think it might also be an age thing, these poems say different things to me at different times in my life and clearly Carol Ann Duffy sees them as a personal progression reflecting her own life path too.

There is a really excellent transcript of a conversation with Carol Ann Duffy here which has offered me welcome insights into the poems including that sense of a notorious event seeping into childhood consciousness and somehow betraying the innocence that once was. Reading The Devil's Wife in that light, and knowing that it is a sequence of poems about the Moors Murders and quite how Myra Hindley became possessed by Ian Brady, makes for very salutory reading indeed. 

But as I said on the programme, for all that I love the poems like Elvis's Sister ...did you know Elvis was one of twins boys, the other, Jessie, died at birth, but Carol Ann Duffy reinvents that twin as a sister, now a nun living in a 'Graceland' of her own ...or The Kray Sisters busy patrolling their manor and keeping things in nice order until finally it's time for Sinatra to sing for them...except don't expect it to be Frank singing My Way...no indeed Nancy had a song much better suited to the sisters....

....for all that I love those, I still love to turn the final page of this book and read Demeter , the poem I was fortunate enough to be able to read out on the programme. So much mythology and poetic depth to interpret here, this poem could go in as many directions as there are readers but isn't that the joy of poetry?

I read it and am always reminded of that moment when I too looked down on my newborn daughter's 'small shy mouth of a new moon'.

Where I lived – winter and hard earth.
I sat in my cold stone room
choosing tough words, granite, flint,

to break the ice. My broken heart –
I tried that, but it skimmed,
flat, over the frozen lake.

She came from a long, long way,
but I saw her at last, walking,
my daughter, my girl, across the fields,

in bare feet, bringing all spring’s flowers
to her mother’s house. I swear
the air softened and warmed as she moved,

the blue sky smiling, none too soon
with the small shy mouth of a new moon

Please scroll down for World Book Night gifts... as if I'd forget all of you on such a special day of bookish celebration.

World Book Night Competition :: The World's Wife ~ Carol Ann Duffy

Happy World Book Night and as if I'd forget all of you.

I have kept back six copies of The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate, in this lovely special edition and each with it's own unique number which you can enter, Bookcrossing style, on the World Book Night website if you so choose. Thus the book's journey can be tracked and I will happily send these worldwide, though the far flung ones may have to go surface mail, but that's all to the good, something to look forward to in April. But read on because you have work to do in order to enter.

If you'd like to be in with a chance of winning a gift of poetry to treasure that I hope will make you laugh, reflect and wonder, then here's the deal, please do leave your name in comments but I've added a little degree of difficulty...

Imagine if you would for a moment that the Poet Laureate has asked for our help (!) and wants ideas for The World's Wife Volume Two... and to be honest who else should she sensibly turn to but us.

So can you suggest some more wives?

Who else would you like to see in receipt of the Carol Ann Duffy treatment?

Of which man in history would you most like to hear the point of view of the more silent woman alongside and why?

Me, I'd quite like to know what Mrs Nelson really thought of Admiral Horatio when he bunked off with Emma Hamilton... and what poor Fanny made of the black lace Horatio and Emma chose as a placatory gift for her after their very public romantic sojourn in Naples. Estranged and then shunned by the lovestruck Horatio, yet still devoted to him, I wonder if it might all have been bitter and barbed... she'd gone through all that losing the arm stuff with him after all and that's the thanks she gets, or else terribly sad as Fanny realised her place had been usurped by the beautiful and beguiling Emma. Goodness me, how emotional and, having just read back over the posts I wrote in 2006 after reading Kate Williams's brilliant book England's Mistress, I'm almost thinking I'll have a stab at writing the poem myself if Carol Ann doesn't fancy it.

So over to you, name those wives and why.

You have a little time to think about it too, we'll do a completely subjective choosing of the six winners (based on the ones that delight us the most) tomorrow night when recovered from this evening's Vocal Harem choir concert and the giving of my World Book Night books.

I've had far too much excitement for one week, please don't expect high calibre content for Team Tolstoy this coming Wednesday will you.... just be ready to bail me out with your thoughts in comments.

 

Happy Birthday to...

...everyone because dovegreyreader scribbles is five years old today and it would be nought without 'you lot' as dear old Rocky would have said.

I can hardly believe it.

Five years since March 4th 2006 and that first post about my best friend Peggy (Margaret Atwood, who wouldn't know me if she trod on me) after I had just read all her books in chronological order and wondered if anyone else might have done the same and might like to talk about it. I quite thought I'd stick this for about a week, two at the most... and now here we are 5 years, 2,607 posts, 1,249,375 hits and a few radio programmes later.

Grown up enough to start school and hopefully able to tie my own shoelaces, find the toilets and cope with the dinner queue. I  will probably be very ratty when I get home and pronounce constantly  "But my teacher says it's alright to do that" to which I will doubtless hear the reply "Well in that case you can go and live in her house." After a week I will make it very plain that I've had enough of education and don't want to go to school any more thank you very much, at which point one of the harsh realities of life will dawn.

But a very great big THANK YOU to every single one of you for visiting, reading and commenting for the last five years and helping to create exactly the sort of  internet space I had envisaged, you cannot know how much pleasure this all gives me and mine and how much I love writing it.

General update on the 'Interesting Week' while I sit and draw in some deeeeeeep breaths...

:: A Good Read has been and gone, thank you for all your kind words. I can now heave a sigh and the BBC kindly sent me a copy of the programme and a lovely thank you note.

:: Offspringette landed safely in Auckland yesterday evening GMT but actually Friday morning NZ time. She travelled via Los Angeles and crossed the International Date Line so we have pondered at length where that 'time' may actually have gone. But we have chatted on video Skype so it's as if she's sitting next door and I've shared the sunshine and the cicadas already.

:: Yes, I did shed a tear out on the lane in my pyjamas at 7am, and sporadically thereafter, as I waved her  off to the airport.

:: Yes, the house is now 'bottomed' as a consquence of assimilating that little pang of 'letting go', and will look nice for about 48hrs I expect. But I'm fine now because Offspringette is off on one of her great lifetime adventure challenges which she loves doing so we are bigtime happy for her, and I'm also fine because ...

:: Predictably I threw myself into a stack of books and am back in the "Three Great Reads On The Go At Once" groove and know I will have very good things to say about Lasting Damage by Sophie Hannah, The London Train by Tessa Hadley and Half of the Human Race by Anthony Quinn. Great big all-absorbing reads... isn't it for weeks like this that books were invented?

:: I am having much trouble keeping my hands off  Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch purely because A.S.Byatt says "One of the best stories I've ever read. Completely original."

:: World Book Day quiz night at the library saw Team Endsleigh in sparkling form yesterday evening. Of course we know it's the taking part that counts... as long as we win that is, and it was a convincing victory with our 87.5 pts to nearest rivals in the 60s. As always fiendishly difficult questions but we knew our luck was in when Q3 asked for the name of the prince saved by Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz in Tolstoy's War & Peace. All eyes on the two Team Tolstoy members, Rebecca and I gulped and plumped for Andrei Bolkonsky and that was Team E up and running.

:: World Book Night fun on here tomorrow and a prize draw with a degree of innovation required on your part which I'm really looking forward to and I think you will enjoy too. I am sorry not to have been able to get up to London for the organisers reception or the big WBN launch event in Trafalgar Square this evening with Margaret Atwood (who wouldn't have known me anyway)  Alan Bennett, Philip Pullman and Co in attendance, but if anyone is going please do report back.

and lastly but of great importance because I must contain anxieties knowing how you have all been having sleepless nights about this...

:: The puckers miraculously disappeared from the jumper with a first wash, and as one of you very helpfully suggested, letting the thing know who was in charge.

But really, all I wanted to say on 5th birthday day today was...

(Book Font by by Hanna Nilsson and Sofia Østerhus.)

World Book Night :: Half of a Yellow Sun ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (redux)

This might seem a little like cheating but in the run up to World Book Night I have dusted the cobwebs off a very old post from the dovegreyreader scribbles' archives about Half of A Yellow Sun just re-read and enjoyed as much second sitting as I did first. This post dates from November 2006, so dovegreyreader was still a babyblog of about seven months old, sitting unsupported, reaching, grasping, transferring things from hand to hand and putting them in its mouth and babbling copiously. Not yet mobile but was also starting to suffer from separation anxiety and able to recognise familiar faces with whom it had developed attachments, whilst being quietly watchful and reluctant to smile in the presence of strangers. It had started to cut a few teeth and was taking an interest in its surroundings... see we never lose it us health visitors:-)

In the end I have decided to let the babble stand as I wrote it then, so you may need to make some allowances for the olden days when I see I belonged to more book groups and was doing more challenges than was good for me, or sustainable.

It would seem more and more often these days, that I am reading books which I just feel so fortunate to have found. Last year I read and was completely awestruck by Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, it's etched in my memory, so I have been on the look out for her second novel ever since. Half of a Yellow Sun was published here in September, I bought it immediately and there it has sat on the shelf waiting for the right moment to read it. Scouring my shelves to come up with a choice for my book group I settled on this one and in fact the group took it a step further and we included Purple Hibiscus as an 'either' or 'as well as' choice for our evening this week.

It's a bit of a trepidatious thing this choosing for everyone else so I was a bit nervous to hear another friend say she'd given up on the book halfway through.Who ever wants to choose the book group "turkey of the year"? Not me that's for sure. I'm assured it's impossible to out-turkey a book before my time about singing fish but I'd hate to do it all the same.

To doubly ensure that I read Half of a Yellow Sun, I added it to my "From the Stacks" challenge, 5 books you already have, to be read before the end of January. Any fears I may have had quickly dissolved as I made a start (in good time after my On Beauty failure to progress for last month's meet up) on this book and how can there have been any doubt when the book is so firmly endorsed by the likes of Chinua Achebe,

" We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of the ancient storytellers".

What an honour and, not surprisingly, one that Adichie treasures.

I read Achebe's Things Fall Apart years ago and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is certainly carrying the baton for excellent post-colonial writing with Half of a Yellow Sun. Biafra happened in the 1960's and has entered our consciousness and our language as a byword for starvation. We were all acutely aware of what was happening "Eat your dinner, children in Biafra would make that last a week"
but until now I must confess I didn't really know the background. From Christine Patterson's interview with Adichie,

"In May 1967 the military governor, Colonel Ojukwe, renamed the region Biafra and declared it an independent state. Three bloody years later he was forced to back down"

Adichie's parents lost everything in the conflict and both her grandfathers died.
As often happens, the core message of a book emerges in one succinct statement that leaps off the page and resonates through to the last page. Adichie touched the heart of the matter for me as Odenigbo a radical university lecturer remarks,

"The real tragedy of our post-colonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world"

The rest of the book is witness to his observations as we follow Ugwu the house boy, Olanna the teacher and Richard the Englishman and a wealth of other characters as they struggle to cope with the new order.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie achieves the same deep sense of place that she established in Purple Hibiscus.The gradual decline in food supplies in Biafra and the increasing hunger is dealt with in such a subtle way that it creeps up on you as a reader, much as it must do for any nation facing a famine. It was gradual but inevitable. The sense of fear, chaos and violence is handled as well as it was in Purple Hibiscus, you read it and yes, it horrifies you but you still read it and somehow Adichie offers a redemption that enables you to assimilate it all safely. It's not disturbing or gratuitous, it all has a clear purpose.
Final words to Adichie

"My responsibility is to be truthful. I love Nigeria, but I want to be clear-eyed about it. It's so imperfect. But, we don't choose where we are born"

Oh not quite, final final words to me. As is my preference, I've now read the reviews after the book and it would seem we are all of one accord, here's a powerful second novel and a book that I just feel very privileged to have read. Let's see what the others think later this week.

A Good Read - World Book Night :: Agent Zigzag ~ Ben McIntyre

Phew, well that's over and is there anything worse than hearing your own voice played back to you?? Yes very probably but that's enough to be going on with.

So many fantastic books in progress and so many waiting for me to pick up, but I had to put everything on hold in order to read some of the World Book Night titles for that edition of A Good Read which all left me  looking a little wistfully at my neglected book pile.

So the books that were dragging me away had better be good ones was all I could say, except I knew that two of them were...one my book giver's choice The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy and the other one Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Safe territory, a second read of one has been nothing but pleasure and the other a book I have to hand and pick up frequently anyway because you don't really read poetry in that way, the third a first time read for me of Agent Zigzag by Ben McIntyre. Having read it, and now talked about it I didn't want to miss recording those thoughts here either, so this may or may not feel like a reprise of the radio programme...

When this book first arrived back in 2007 I passed it straight onto the Tinker for the war-veteran's scrutiny. It's handy having a primary source for WWII at your behest and I do like to see if a book will get through his radar first. In which case he'll be looking for some veracity and a bit of excitement too because when the Tinker joined the Royal Marines as a boy bugler in May 1939 at the age of fourteen (sorry for the repetition, I know you all know that) is was a bit like a Boy's Own adventure until it dawned that the country was at war and they were going to be sent to the battleships. It was the gradual realisation as friends started to die that this might be a little more serious than first thought.

Well Agent ZigZag passed the Tinker Test with flying colours and I didn't see the book for months as it made its way around all his octogenarian friends who had also 'been there'. Here's something I wrote earlier about their thoughts at the time, Nov 2007, to be precise and bear in mind the Tinker will be 86 in a few week's time ...

Occasionally a book arrives for review and I send it off to The Tinker for a first read because it's right up his street. As the world now knows, he's 82, going on 83 and a very discerning and avid reader so the book will either receive a resounding seal of approval and make its way off around the octogenarian circuit, or be handed back to me with the whataloadofoldcodswallop epithet.

Does anyone ever ask octogenarians to review books?

Are they an audience who are consulted and considered regularly by publishers?

I suspect not but they are here. Think of the lifetime of reading and experience they bring to a book and let me tell you they have no truck with political correctness either.If these books make it through the fiery furnace of the Octos then they are truly worth reading.

Agent ZigZag, The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman Lover, Betrayer, Hero, Spy by Ben Macintyre and published by Bloomsbury came back basking in not stellar but galactic praise and The Tinker was mightily impressed with it.Thought it was going to be as dry and dust but couldn't put it down by page ten. One of those where you just have to know what happens next and I suspect one of those that would be loved by all fans of dangerous books for boys.
I haven't read the book but I gather Eddie Chapman, World War Two espionage maestro, might have been working for both the Germans and the British at the same time and was therefore a man of many contradictions.

"Inside the traitor lay a patriot, inside the villain a man of conscience. The problem for Chapman, his spymasters and his many lovers was to know where one ended and the other began."

By all accounts Eddie struck The Tinker as a likeable villain, no ethics, no morals, would steal from his own mother and yet there was an honesty and faithfulness to a friend or a cause even while he was double crossing them. The Tinker was intrigued, was Eddie's criss-crossing one side to the other about courage or a desire for adventure and a bit of complexity to his life?
He certainly received no financial reward and clearly the Germans valued him more than the British, they awarded Eddie the Iron Cross, the British didn't see fit to offer anything. Eddie a spy until his final days and this book apparently very moving in the last pages when he finally meets up again with his German spy master.

A gripping and fascinating account of a very complex man and with it came the realisation for me that WWII didn't only need the likes of men in power, or the brilliant cryptographers like Dilwyn Knox or the upper class Oxbridge strategists, they absolutely needed men who could practice the art of deception and who could steal, because what is spying but theft of information. Eddie Chapman so practiced that he couldn't be in a room without casing the joint or the talk for useful items no matter which side he was working for and which he then squirreled away in what must have been one of the most prodigious memories known to mankind.

So I am delighted that the fear of broadcasting my thoughts on Agent Zigzag to the nation was all the prompt I needed, with just a week's notice, to settle down and read it for myself and goodness me, if you stand a chance of getting this one from a World Book Night 'giver' push your way to the front of the queue, or reserve it at the library, or even buy one because it really is an excellent read.