… that made darkness itself appear a thing of comfort. (Robert Southey)
I dislike and fear the dark winter months, but luckily, working from home means I can go out for a brisk walk at lunchtime and actually see some light outdoors. For my escapist images, I chose the wonderful play of light and shadow inside houses.
Once again, I am jumping the gun a little with my September reading summary, as I don’t think I’ll have time to squeeze anything more in that isn’t intended for next month.
My reading got a little aimless and desultory during September, after a few really good months with very high-quality books. I struggled to really immerse myself in these books, which might explain why I’ve judged them more harshly than usual. There were two that really stood out for me, however, and for very different reasons. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year was stark, gripping and revelatory, while Alison Anderson’s The Summer Guest was wistful, dreamy and transported me to a better time and place.
On paper, I have read ten books, but two of those were very short indeed: a children’s book (Little Old Mrs Pepperpot, which I’m reading for the #1956Club) and a book of cartoons about the challenges of wearing a hijab in a Western country Yes, I’m Hot in This by Huda Fahmy. So, in reality, I have read eight books, of which two in translation. The Englightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar was interesting in its ‘stories within stories’ structure and truly beautifully written in parts, but rather hard reading in terms of subject matter. Also, I’ve never been a huge fan of magical realism, but I can certainly see the point of it to describe – and make bearable – the atrocities perpetuated here. Book burning, rape, torture, death and ghosts everywhere you look.
I was searching for comfort reads this month above all, but in truth found even the tried and tested categories of crime/suspense fiction a bit hard to click with. Stina Jackson’s The Silver Road seemed to howl with dreary loneliness and isolation. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters had far too many pages about that boring English class system to make up for the few genuine moments of ghostly frisson. Even Doug Johnstone, who’s proved a reliable writer for me in the past, did not quite win me over with A Dark Matter – probably because I was expecting it to be black comedy in the style of Antti Tuomainen. While I enjoyed Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land probably far more than Jonathan Coe’s Middle England as a depiction of current English society (it was stuffed to the gills with sharp, witty observations of gender relations and family tensions), it did all go unnecessarily bonkers towards the end with the murder mystery part of it.
So that leaves Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession, which so many assured me was the perfect sweet, gentle book for these troubled times. I have to admit I was reading it the weekend Barney died, and it was probably the only book I could possibly have read during that time. It was indeed a placid, even-tempered book with decent characters and touching interactions, people being kind and helpful, or at the very least apologising when they get things wrong. A little too sweet for my taste, perhaps, as I was constantly expecting someone to go amok, commit fraud or murder someone, but I liked its humour and the non-judgemental relationship between the two friends. It almost makes you believe in a nicer world – and don’t we all need a hope like that?
So I apologise for my general grumpiness this month. It’s been a very busy one at work, an emotionally gruelling one, an anxious one with the boys going back to school and no seeming respite from grim news worldwide. Next month, with Penelope Fitzgerald and Romain Gary to steady my ship, I hope to have a more pleasant tale to tell.
One of my favourite bookish Twitter people Alok Ranjan said: ‘Sometimes just the anticipation of books to come is even more pleasing than the actual reading of them’. And in times of uncertainty, with no doubt a tough autumn and winter ahead, you take your small pleasures where you can. So I’ve been spending a few joyful hours luxuriating in planning my reading and joining in with some like-minded online friends.
October
There are two reading challenges in October that I cannot resist. First, Paper Pills is planning a group read of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels starting on the 1st of October, which got me looking through my shelves for other Fitzgerald books, so I’ll also be attempting her short story collection The Means of Escape and rereading The Bookshop and The Blue Flower.
Secondly, the week of 5-11 October is also the #1956Club organised by Simon Thomas and Karen aka Kaggsy. I have bought books in anticipation of that year and will be reading: Romain Gary’s Les racines du ciel, plus two books I remember fondly from my childhood Little Old Mrs Pepperpot by Alf Pryosen and The Silver Sword by Ian Seraillier. If I have time after all of the above, I may also attempt Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz, but might not make it in time for the 1956 week, lucky if I squeeze it in before the end of October.
November
It’s been quite a few years now that November has been equivalent with German Literature Month for me, so this year will be no different. I’m in the mood for rereading Kafka’s Das Schloss (especially since my son recently read The Trial and I didn’t have my German language edition to read it in parallel with him). I was so enamoured of Marlen Haushofer that I will read another of her novels, a very short one this time Die Tapetentür (which I’ve seen translated as The Jib Door, an English expression I am unfamiliar with). I can’t stay away from Berlin, so I’ll be reading Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm (Käsebier takes Berlin). I’m also planning to read a book of essays about Vienna and its very dualistic nature: Joachim Riedl’s Das Geniale. Das Gemeine (Genius and Filth/Rottenness) and another non-fiction book, a sort of memoir of studying in England by Nele Pollatscheck entitled Dear Oxbridge (it’s in German, despite the title).
Since taking the picture above, I’ve also decided to reread the book I borrowed from my university library just before lockdown in March, namely Remarque’s Nothing New on the Western Front.
December
Alok is once again to blame for his persuasive skills, as he’s managed to convince a group of us, including Chekhov obsessive Yelena Furman to read Sakhalin Island in December. Of course, winter seems to lend itself to lengthy Russians, so I’ll also be attempting The Brothers Karamazov (my fifth attempt, despite the fact that I am a huge Dostoevsky fan, so fingers crossed!). If I have any brain or time left over at all after these two massive adventures, I’d also like to read the memoir of living with Dostoevsky written by his wife and the memoir about Marina Tsvetaeva written by her daughter.
I also have a rather nice bilingual edition of Eugene Onegin by Pushkin from Alma Press, so I might put that into the mix as well, let’s see how it goes.
January
Meredith, another Twitter friend, has been organising January in Japan reading events for years now, and I always try to get at least 1-2 books in. This coming January I might focus exclusively on Japanese authors or books about Japan, as I have a lot of newly bought ones that are crying out loud for a read.I have a new translation of Dazai Osamu’s Ningen Shikkaku (A Shameful Life instead of No Longer Human) by Mark Gibeau, I’d also like to read more by Tsushima Yuko (who, coincidentally was Dazai Osamu’s daughter), the short story collection The Shooting Gallery. Inspired by Kawakami Mieko (who mentioned her name as one of the writers who most influenced her), I will be reading In the Shade of the Spring Leaves, a biography of Highuchi Ichiyo which also contains nine of her best short stories. Last but not least, I’m planning to read about Yosano Akiko (one of my favourite Japanese poets) and her lifelong obsession with The Tale of Genji, an academic study written by G. G. Rowley and published by the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan. (Once upon a time, I dreamt of studying there for my Ph.D.)
Saving the best for last, I have a beautiful volume of The Passenger: Japan edition, which is something like a hybrid between a magazine and a book, focusing on writing and photography from a different country with each issue. While I’d have liked more essays by Japanese writers themselves (there are only 3 Japanese writers among the 11 long-form pieces represented here), there is nevertheless much to admire here.
Ambitious plans for the next few months, but they feel right after a month or so of aimless meandering in my reading. Let’s just hope the weather, i.e. news, outside isn’t too frightful!
Don’t have much room for words right now, but here are some houses with views that make me dream of escape.
Written and published half a century after the events it describes – namely the plague decimating London in 1665, one year before the Great Fire – much has been made about just how fictional the book is. As far as I can tell, it is a judicious mix of facts and figures (Defoe is quite scrupulous about sharing statistics), but the author livens them up with the rumours and personal stories of the times. Like some of the best journalists of today, he gives us both the overall picture, noting patterns and tendencies, but also allows us to hear individual voices and compelling anecdotes.
It is also remarkably easy and quick to read – much closer to the language of our time than Chaucer or Shakespeare, although the meanings of some words and expressions have changed or got lost. A good husband, for example, is someone who is thrifty, careful about handling money. And you may not have heard of ‘higlers’ – travelling salesmen. On the whole, however, it is amazingly, almost frighteningly modern.
If I’d read this at any other time before this year, I’d have enjoyed it as a good piece of ‘reportage’. Reading it in 2020 is almost too close to present-day reality. What he says about the start of the plague, the growing number of cases, the dodgy accounting of causes of death so as not to panic the public, the spats and quarrels breaking out in the streets and markets, individuals resisting public orders etc. mirror so much what we are going through currently. Perhaps it demonstrates that neither human society nor human nature have evolved as much as we’d like to think, that our progress has been but a thin veneer that is liable to get dented at the first sign of hardship.
Here’s Defoe on social media (or so it seems):
I could fill this account with the strange relations such people gave every day of what they had seen; and everyone was so positive of their having seen what they pretended to see, that there was no contradicting them without breach of friendship, or being accounted rude and unmannerly…
On breaking self-isolation while waiting for test results:
In this interval, between their being taken sick and the examiners coming, the master of the house had leisure and liberty to remove himself or all his family, if he knew whither to go, and many did so. But the great disaster was that many did thus after they were really infected themselves, and so carried the disease into the houses of those who were so hospitable as to receive them; which, it must be confessed, was very cruel and ungrateful.
Defoe on frontline workers and the social categories hardest hit by the plague:
It must be confessed that though the plague was chiefly among the poor, yet were the poor the most venturous and fearless of it, and went about their employment with a sort of brutal courage…
And here he waxes ‘lyrically’ about how well-prepared those ruling London were for the pandemic, how confused their messaging was, and where their priorities lay:
Surely never city, at least of this bulk and magnitude, was taken in a condition so perfectly unprepared for such a dreadful visitation, whether I am to speak of the civil preparations or religious. They were, indeed, as if they had had no warning, no expectation, no apprehensions, and consequently the least provision imaginable was made for it in a public way. For example, the Lord Mayor and sheriffs had made no provisions as magistrates for the regulations which were to be observed. They had gone into no measures for the relief of the poor. The citizens had no public magazines or store-houses for corn or meal for the subsistence of the poor… The Chamber of London was said to be exceedingly rich, and it may be concluded that they were so, by the vast sums of money issued from thence in the public rebuilding of the public edifices after the fire of London… But possibly the managers of the city’s credit at that time made more conscience of breaking in upon the orhpan’s money to show charity to the distressed citizens than the managers in the following years did to beautify the city and re-edify the buildings…
I wonder what Defoe would have written about the present time, but he was certainly sharp-tongued back then (and at a distance sufficiently removed from events that he could criticise freely):
I often reflected… how it was for want of timely entering into measures and managements, as well public as private, that all the confusions that followed were brought upon us, and that such a prodigious number of people sank in that disaster, which, if proper steps had been taken, might, Providence concurring, have been avoided, and which, if posterity think fit, they may take a caution and warning from.
Clearly, we humans are not great at learning the lessons from history – or else we are highly selective with the history we choose to teach and glorify. As we head into another uncertain and dangerous period here in the UK, without even the comfort of sunshine, long days and the outdoors to sustain us, Defoe’s Journal can provide you with much despair if you allow it to, but also some comfort. Big cities have always been prone to destruction, epidemics, sieges, occupation… but they (and their people) have usually survived and even learnt new ways in which to flourish.
If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;
If not, why, then this parting was well made. (Julius Caesar)
This Sunday we had to say goodbye to our dear Barney, the most sweet-natured and dignified of elderly gentlemen cats. I knew our time together might not be very long, but he seemed so alert, so lively, that we had hoped to get a few years at least. Sadly, it was not to be.
He was diagnosed with diabetes in August, and didn’t seem to mind the injections I was giving him twice daily. But then he stopped eating, his fur started getting scraggly, his urinary tract infection just wouldn’t go away. I was taking him to the vet every few days, adjusting his dosage, having him checked out, but towards the end of last week he barely had the energy to do anything other than sit under his favourite bush in the garden. Even Zoe, who has not been his greatest fan, was gentle towards him in his last few days.
It only takes a few seconds to fall in love, they say, and I fell in love with Barney’s sweet expression as soon as I saw it on Twitter. But it takes months and years to get to really know someone – and I wish we’d had that time to get to know each other fully. However, this is what we found out about him during the six months we had together.
He was a Zen master. Every couple of days, Zoe would make a run at him, and he never retaliated, merely lifted his paw on occasion in the gesture of a benign and wise Buddha.
He was a great helper for any cook. He would follow my every move in the kitchen with bright, intelligent eyes, as if asking: ‘What else can I do?’ (He would also search the floor very thoroughly for any fallen pieces of food.)
He didn’t come upstairs at all until the very last week before he got really ill. He had a deep miaow which he learnt to use most expressively when he wanted to be let out or some attention.
He was one of life’s natural philosophers. He loved sitting in the garden, breathing in the fresh air, stretching out in the shade.
He was a gentle giant, tall and thin, with big, manly back legs. He had a loping gait and was extremely agile for his age.
His favourite spots were: just in front of the fridge door or on the back of the sofa when we were all watching TV. Or sleeping on the sofa when we all wanted to sit on it.
He was extremely good at guilting you into giving him extra treats (although we desisted because of his health problems).
He had his favourite human: my younger son, who was 15, just like him.
He was not a lap cat, which made it all the more special when he honoured me with his presence.
He had the most beautiful, profound eyes, a gaze that you could just drown in.
The house is just not the same without his quiet presence.
The nights are drawing in, even though I’m still in denial. So it’s time to start thinking of creating cosy spaces around the house where you can read, gather all your books and forget about the rest of the world.
In order to spare you book-length blog posts, I will do my summaries of films watched every month in two sessions: halfway through the month and at the end of the month. The first part of September saw us going out to the cinema (once), transfixed by the saddest season of The Wire and also debating some classics of world cinema. We have now set up a ‘film bowl’, i.e. a mixing bowl in which we’ve put pieces of paper with all of the films we have available to watch (on DVD or on various TV streaming services) and we pick them out of the bowl at the weekend.
Tenet
I have to admit I went to see this one more as a test run for the cinema experience than for the film itself. The concept of time moving clockwise and anti-clockwise was interesting, but the film was too big, too loud (you couldn’t even hear important conversations above the explosive bangs) and too much of a cross between James Bond and The Night Manager to truly appeal. A lot was made of the locations, but the characters were just not given sufficient depth.
Memento
I was saying to my older son that Christopher Nolan had been much more creative on a smaller budget in his earlier work, Memento, and we had the opportunity to watch it on BBC2 a couple of nights ago. It certainly holds up in terms of clever storytelling, without feeling gimmicky, and still raises questions around the slipperiness of memory, small mistakes which can pass unnoticed but lead to much bigger mistakes, as well as lack of trust.
Fantastic Planet
Older son, the film buff, unearthed this one – an animated film for grown-ups from the 1970s, called La Planète sauvage in the original French, directed by Rene Laloux and co-written by Roland Topor. On a planet called Tgan, the gargantuan blue humanoid Draags keep the relatively tiny humans called Oms as pets. However, some Oms remain undomesticated, live in the wilderness and rebel on occasion, so they are periodically slaughtered by the Draags. As you can imagine, this is a powerful allegory about slavery, exploitation and repression. The hand-drawn animation and inventive hybrid plants and animals on their island are like something out of Claude Ponti books, while the music is reminiscent of Pink Floyd. Truly psychedelic effect!
Fantastic Mr Fox
I have mixed feelings about Wes Anderson films – I love the meticulous attention to detail and that slightly old-fashioned, arts-and-crafts look and feel of his films, but sometimes it feels like this is done at the expense of the content. However, in this instance, form and function blend together well, Anderson even added what might be called an existential twist to it regarding family relationships and creating your own identity (via the rivalry between Mr and Mrs Fox’s son Ash and the cousin who comes to visit).
Schindler’s List
Although the boys were moved by the film, they were not as shaken by it as I was when I first saw it. I don’t know if this is because the subject is now well-known, or if the memory of the Second World War and the pogrom is starting to recede. OS went to Auschwitz on a class trip and had visited Schindler’s factory in Krakow, so he recognised some of the places, but complained that Amon Goeth was too much of a cartoon villain. I had to gently explain that he was, if anything, even worse than depicted in the film, according to eyewitness accounts.
Rashomon
This was a bit of a disappointment – both to my sons and to me (I hadn’t seen it since the age of twenty, when I was studying Japanese). My sons thought it lacked pacing and was overacted. I tried to explain about the stylised acting of the Kabuki theatre, as well as the silent era of cinema in the West. Kurosawa certainly seems to be saying:’ Why should I explain things in words when facial expressions or music or a shadow flitting across a face can say so much more?’ It does feel as if the people are all acting ‘at’ each other, which I guess is the point in a film that is so much about lies, interpretation and, once again, reliability of memory.
The Wire Season 4
This was the season I expected would appeal most to the boys, and indeed they laughed at some of the classroom scenes. I’m not sure if they felt the indictment of poor parenting as deeply as I did. But the emphasis on testing and stats instead of actual learning, the lack of budgets for schools and the political manoeuvring around education sounded all too familiar. And it was so sad to see most of the boys unable to escape from their social environment and almost preordained career paths as criminals.
I read two books with summer in their title to ease me into autumn. I’m not quite ready for autumn yet, when I feel I haven’t really had a summer (or at least the nice bits of summer, only the heat). Luckily, we have a few summer days to look forward to this coming week. Both of these books were both fun, but also thoughtful, lyrical, filled with characters I wanted to get to know better,and very evocative in their setting.
Sarah Moss: Summerwater
Sarah Moss is one of the authors I will read without questioning: her work is always interesting and tries to push the boundaries, even if it’s not always 100% successful. This latest book is more in the vein of what one might call the ‘exasperated humour’ of contemporary family life of Night Waking rather than her historical fiction, such as Bodies of Light or Signs for Lost Children.
A random assortment of families or couples are spending their summer cooped up in log cabins in a Scottish holiday park. Of course it is raining. ‘It can’t keep up like that all day, there can’t be that much water up there’, people are reassuring themselves, but for most of the day it does. The author seems to be having fun finding different ways to describe the relentless, never-ending downpour. ‘Rain is God’s way of stopping Scots having sinful levels of fun’. Or ”the Scottish sky is better at obscenity than any human voice’.
Understandably, tempers are frayed, especially since there is a foreign family having parties until late at night in one of the cabins (they are variously – and carelessly – described as Romanians, Bulgarians, Polish, although in fact they are from the Ukraine, with that typical lack of curiosity about geographical precision that comes from people who would be very miffed if you confused their Yorkshire accent with a Brummie one, or Minnesota with Michigan).
We get to see fitness fanatic Justine, bored of her rather judgemental husband, using running as an excuse to escape the children for a couple of hours and despising anyone who isn’t as driven as she is. Elderly David, a retired doctor, and his wife Mary – the chapter from her point of view, being one of the most moving portrayals of gradual sinking into dementia, grasping at notions and words. Young couple Josh and Milly, who are planning to get married and are doing a test run of domestic life with sex-fuelled days, and some lacklustre cooking and conversation. Lola and Jack, young kids bored with their parents – an overly anxious mother and a father who’s taken his work with him on holiday, so they wander around looking for someone to play with – or bully. A family with utterly fed up teenagers, each embarking on potentially dangerous activities. A family with even younger children, struggling so much to find ways to keep them entertained that they forget to look after themselves.
There are a lot of amusing and recognisable vignettes of family life, across a range of ages and political beliefs, but I believe the author intends to do more than that. This is designed to be a ‘state of the nation’ novel, albeit on a small scale, and that’s why she also brings in descriptions of nature, of the environment, the climate and how humans link to it, what will stay behind once the humans have left. I accept all that and found it worked for me on the whole, really enjoyed the book most of the way through. But then, for some reason, it seems to stop abruptly, with a sudden dramatic event. It felt too rushed: I’d have liked to hear more from each of the different voices, perhaps their reactions to the event, or some kind of conclusion.
Alison Anderson: The Summer Guest
I’ve known Alison Anderson as a translator from French into English (Muriel Barbery, Le Clézio, Amélie Nothomb), but she also speaks excellent Russian, and she uses her knowledge of the country, its literature and culture, to evoke the late 19th century in the Ukraine, as well as the present (the novel was published in 2016 and is set in 2014). In the modern day we have Katya, a London publisher of Russian origin, who is hoping that the recently unearthed diary of Zinaida Lintvaryova will resurrect her fortunes, as well as the translator Ana, who falls in love with Zinaida’s voice and of course with her famous guest.
Who is the famous summer guest? Well, Zinaida kept a diary of the three years in the late 1880s, during which she and her family hosted on their rural estate in north-eastern Ukraine the writer Chekhov and his family for the summer. Zinaida had qualified as a doctor, but had to stop practising, as she was blinded by a fatal illness. Chekhov forms a great bond with her, based partly on their shared profession, but above all on her great listening skills and unsentimental, uncomplaining approach to life. He ends up entrusting her with the manuscript of a novel that he has been trying to write. Ana gets overexcited at the thought that there might be a lost Chekhov novel and that she might be the one to translate it.
Not only do we have lush descriptions of country life and family squabbles, love interests and disappointments, but also what Chekhov describes as ‘living well, inspecting each moment for honesty and fullness and awareness’. I just loved the fascinating discussions about literature and human psychology between Anton Pavlovich (who was just starting to gain fame as a writer at that time) and Zinaida. For instance, this revealing passage about Anna Karenina, in which Chekhov states:
… if we all had Anna’s desperate soul, the world would descend into a chaos of tragedy. That was Tolstoy’s vision for the novel, based on a true incident – so such things do happen. But most often… banality. Which is why I prefer to err on the side of comedy. Otherwise life would be altogether too hard to bear, don’t you think? If love always led to train platforms? All this passion tearing people apart, sending decent women out into the night without so much as a bonnet on their head?
But the present-day story also has its merits, with thoughts on translation and mediating between cultures, and displacement more generally, as well as love and its loss, and even the protests on the Maidan in Kiev in 2014. There is even a bit of a mystery attached to it. Overall, an enchanting, dreamy book, one I wish I’d read much sooner.
Some of the interior design sites or magazines show me rooms which seem really attractive at first sight, until I think about how uncomfortable or downright dangerous it might be to live there and use them daily. Still, these Friday Fun posts are all about dreaming and escapism, so let’s not be too rational, shall we?
