Joanna Biggs: A Life of One’s Own

Joanna Biggs: A Life of One’s Own. Nine Women Writers Begin Again, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2023.

It is reassuring to see that other readers examine the lives and works of certain favourite authors as a sort of guide or inspiration for their own lives – or perhaps as a constant conversation with their own lives. Perhaps there is also solace to be found that in this day and age we have more opportunities as a woman than many of our forebears did, and also anger and sadness on their behalf – and perhaps a little for our own sake, that things have not progressed more since.

I was not surprised to see a blurb on the cover of this book from Francesca Wade, whose Square Haunting treads similar ground, exploring women’s aspiration to be financially and creatively independent. However, while that one was linked to a particular place (Mecklenburgh Square in London), this one is linked by Biggs’ own life. When her mother started suffering from early-onset dementia and her marriage fell apart, Biggs reassessed her life and revisited some of the most influential women writers as she was growing up. This was always going to be a personal, idiosyncratic selection; while I share some of her favourites (Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir and Sylvia Plath), I can’t help wishing she’d included some less widely-known authors, although I suppose Mary Wollstonecraft is nowadays mostly known as Mary Shelley’s mother. The other chapters include George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante, so there’s an attempt to introduce some diversity in terms of language, race and class.

Having said that I too mine other women writers’ works and lives for comparisons with my own life, I don’t think I’d have written a book about it. You’ll notice that the book only has eight chapters featuring eight women writers, but the subtitle mentions nine: the ninth being of course Biggs herself. She weaves her personal story throughout each chapter, which can sometimes be quite repetitive. It requires a certain amount of ego to draw parallels between herself and these women writers many of us have idolised. To be fair, I’m not sure that Biggs has that tremendous ego, but was probably advised by agents or publishers that this was a more unusual and interesting angle to approach what would otherwise be simply short biographies. Or add a hook to a memoir that might otherwise feel quite banal.

It is certainly a trend at the moment in literature: the auto-fiction of Knausgaard and Rachel Cusk, memoirs that feel like essays and link up with the author’s other interests (nature – Amy Liptrot, languages – Polly Barton and Mireille Gansel, travelling and property – Deborah Levy, health and community building – Tanya Shadrick and Polly Atkin), fiction that feels like memoirs (Jenny Offill). And on and on the list goes and I have to admit I like reading most of them. I wonder if blogging and appearing on social media has made the ‘I’ so much more interesting in narration. Instead of the long-vaunted (and perhaps mourned) ‘death of the author’, we have the author front, back and centre of any work.

Does it work? Well, a couple of times I felt the comparisons were a little forced and would have liked to see less of the author’s own tribulations. (Perhaps I’d have liked it more as a separate memoir, although the author chooses to remain relatively discreet about the details of the breakdown of her marriage.) Her personal reactions to these women, what they meant to her, and a more in-depth reading of some of their work (Maggie Tulliver as a heroine, or Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God, for example) are the most successful sections, to my mind. I resonated most with Biggs when she expresses her own relief at regaining her heroine Simone, freed from her concrete block as an icon, allowing her to be a flawed, real woman rather than an example to others. When she leaves enough room for the readers of her book to place themselves in that landscape, it is quite a powerful and enjoyable read, but does not add much that is new to our knowledge of those writers.

P.S. Thank you for Rohan Maitzen’s comment below, which reminded me of one book that combined the personal with the biographical and sensitive analysis in a way that really moved me and did bring a lot of new knowledge: Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, which I reviewed for Shiny New Books.

Reading and Events Summary for May 2023

It’s been a very mixed month, not just in terms of the weather, but also with reading and life events. I read 15 books, of which 12 were by women authors, a record proportion I believe. Although my reading theme this month was the Far East, only four of the books were in translation, as many of the authors from that part of the world write in English. I was entranced by the gentle melancholy of How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart, and invigorated by the energy of Five Star Billionaire. I was charmed by the historical crime novel set in war-time Singapore The Mushroom Tree Mystery, a serendipitous discovery at Bristol CrimeFest. I was less enamoured of Rainbirds, but intrigued by the first novel I read set in Papua New Guinea, The Mountain.

In addition to the Far East, I also visited Mauritius via the powerful, poignant writing of Ananda Devi in Eve Out of Her Ruins, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman. I met another group of young people from very different backgrounds but equally directionless perhaps in Kaska Bryla’s The Ice Divers (Die Eistaucher). I also seemed to encounter quite a few women on the verge of a nervous breakdown (or maybe just beyond that point) in several books. Carlota Gurt’s Alone, translated by Adrian Nathan West, was quite a wild ride, although it started off conventionally enough. Baek Se-hee’s I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki, transl. by Anton Hur, is a very candid exploration of low-level but disabilitating depression and low self-esteem – and also fitted into my Far East reading category.

From the remaining books, I was very impressed with Winter Counts, and of course enjoyed Deborah Levy, although this book felt very similar to her recent non-fiction trilogy, to the point where I got confused as to what I was reading. (It also reminded me a bit of the film Tár). Lost for Words about a bookseller and a bookshop was charming but somewhat predictable, while the remaining three books really rather infuriated me. The Cartographers was at least entertaining, if rather full of plot holes, but I could not finish Missing Pieces, which felt completely manipulative (the author deliberately withholding information to make the dual timeline more exciting). And, with apologies to those who loved Sorrow and Bliss, I was profoundly annoyed by Martha and the portrayal of mental illness in that book – as well as the author’s vague and lazy ‘any similarities to real-life mental health conditions are accidental’ disclaimer. Three turkeys and two average reads make for a surprisingly low-scoring month overall, very unlike most of my reading.

Meanwhile, real life started off with a major scare with Maxi, our new cat, but it seems we got lucky and she does not suffer from a major heart defect (although there does seem to be a slight defect which we need to monitor).

My younger son had his final day at school, and has now started his A Level exams. My older son finished his exams and came home – he had pre-ordered the latest Zelda game and has been mostly playing it ever since he got back.

I (or rather, Corylus) was outbid for a book and author I loved – but who can compare with the Big Five publishers? I can’t blame the author for finding the best possible financial deal and exposure. I had the consolation of seeing one of our lovely Icelandic authors Jónína Leósdóttir in action at Bristol CrimeFest, and also find out more about her truly fascinating life and ideas over lunch. Since I only stayed for a few hours in Bristol that Saturday, I missed all the scandal that ensued later that day and the following day, so all I can say is that I hope literary festivals move on with the times and open their gates to a greater diversity of moderators and panellists. There’s plenty of talent out there instead of having the same old faces over and over!

On the translation front, I had to translate a new play in a weekend to be able to take part in a competition, because the play I had translated didn’t meet the criteria. That will teach me to read the small print a bit sooner! I am very excited about the new play, however, as it’s a young female playwright from Romania, and she writes a lot of things that I like, so let’s hope it’s the start of a wonderful collaboration.

Just as I finally got to start physiotherapy this month after my spinal/neck injury in February, I got a new health scare – a sudden itchy, burning rash on my face. The doctor seemed to think it was more likely to be an extreme reaction to an expired face cream (don’t try to save money, throw away your long-opened pots of cream!) rather than shingles, but the antihistamines, ointments and antibiotics don’t seem to be in a rush to work… and my younger son has also reported a rash on his face, although milder than mine. So who knows what it could be? Scabies comes to mind, which makes me feel like a Victorian slum dweller, although apparently it has nothing to do with poor hygiene.

The abundance of Bank Holidays this month has been nice – although from now on I will always have Mondays and Fridays ‘off’, as I’ll be working part-time, so it was just a taste of what’s to come.

Hope your May has been less troubled by sudden showers, mediocre reads and other interruptions! What has been your favourite book this past month? And which one didn’t quite live up to expectations?

#FrenchFebruary: New-to-me Women Authors – Triolet, Salvayre, Leduc

While staying at my friend’s house near Vevey, I had the pleasure of exploring her extensive library, which contains quite a lot of French-speaking writers (since my friend is also a translator from French). So I had the opportunity to discover three new women writers.

Elsa Triolet: Roses à crédit (Roses on credit), 1958

A still from the film Elsa la Rose

Of course I had heard of Elsa Triolet, usually as an appendage to Louis Aragon, I’m ashamed to say. I also saw the touching documentary made about her by Agnes Varda ‘Elsa la Rose’, which is basically Aragon telling us about his love for her and Michel Piccoli reciting poetry about her and she blushing and brushing it off.

“All these poems are for you. Do they make you feel loved?”

“Oh, no! They aren’t what makes me feel loved. Not the poetry. It’s the rest. Life.”

I know she had a fascinating life: the daughter of Russian Jews, she emigrated to France, and wrote first in Russian and then in French. She met Aragon in 1928, they fought in the Resistance during WW2 and, though she joined the French Communist Party in the early 1950s, she protested vehemently against Stalinist policies. She was the first woman to win the Goncourt Prize. I had heard that after her death in 1970, Aragon kept the calendar in their house forever fixed on the day she died – because time had no meaning for him without her. But I had never read anything by her. This book is the first in a trilogy she called The Age of Nylon, which uses different characters and life stories to critique post-war French society. And perhaps it’s no coincidence that the rose imagery is so strong in this book, while Agnes Varda’s documentary refers to Elsa herself as a rose.

This particular book is about the rise of the consumerist society: Martine comes from a very poor rural household, with rats and cockroaches roaming around the house, her mother ready to sleep with any man she encounters and a great number of siblings all living in uneducated squalor. She is determined to escape this misery and befriends a girl at school whose mother is a hairdresser. She becomes her apprentice and later they all move to Paris, where her neat and precise ways make her a highly-appreciated beautician. She has set her sights on marrying her childhood crush, Daniel Donelle, who stems from a family of horticulturists. He is obsessed with creating a new variety of rose with the shape of the modern rose but the fragrance of the old one. Although Martine seems to support him in this mission, in truth all she wants is a bourgeois life with all the latest ‘must haves’ (some of them in dubious taste, as Daniel observes) and she gets into terrible debt in order to create her dream life.

While this seems like a straightforward story of a mismatched couple, there is a lot of implied social critique. I love the way in which Triolet observes the little specific details of rural and urban houses and lifestyles, and somehow manages to make them truly universal (at least for post-war Europe).

We can sympathise with Daniel’s exasperation at Martine’s greediness, but I am pretty sure that Elsa Triolet, who experienced hardship and poverty herself, will have had a lot of understanding for her desire to improve herself through material possessions. I could certainly detect my mother’s traits and tendencies in this book, as well as my father’s more idealistic, less materialistic streak.

Lydie Salvayre: Marcher jusqu’au soir (Walk until Evening), 2019

It takes some convincing, but the author Lydie Salvayre finally agrees to spend the night in the Picasso Museum in Paris, where there is a Giacometti exhibition. One of her favourite works of art in the world is Giacometti’s Walking Man, which she feels expresses best our human condition ‘our endless solitude and vulnerability, but, in spite of that, our stubborn desire to continue living, our stubborn desire to persevere against all reasons for living’.

To her surprise, she experiences a sense of fear and a near panic-attack locked in with all that art and has a rant about museums, the purpose of art, whether beauty can really save us.

This becomes a pretext for her to remember her childhood with a frightening revolutionary father (whom she also describes in her Goncourt Prize novel Pas pleurer – Don’t cry), and also poke fun at the pretentiousness and snobbishness of the art world. The Walking Man intrigues and terrifies her in equal measure, for she cannot help but see it as a metaphor for humankind walking towards death and extinction, no doubt influenced also by the fact that she was undergoing chemotherapy at the time.

She skilfully weaves her own story, her acute past and present fears, with that of Giacometti the man and his art, his immense modesty, how he was never satisfied with his work and would often remodel even his so-called ‘finished’ sculptures. It is reported that he said: ‘In a fire, if I had to choose between saving a cat and a Rembrandt painting, I would choose the cat.’ (See a similar discussion in Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid).

Violette Leduc: La femme au petit renard (The Lady and the Little Fox Fur), 1965

This is the saddest of the three, all the more so when we think that Leduc was very much a proponent of what we call ‘autofiction’ nowadays. This slim little volume depicts the plight of a sixty-year-old woman (considered ancient, apparently, back in the 1960s). She is so poor that she is counting out the beans for her coffee, or trying to divide six potatoes by eight days. She avoids the foodstalls in the market and spends her small change on a metro ticket, so that she doesn’t feel so alone and can feel the warmth of the crowds.

She paces up and down in her garret room, containing pieces of furniture which indicate that perhaps she was not always so down on her luck. She talks to her furniture, and you can’t help wondering if the hunger is causing hallucinations. One day, she has a terrible craving for an orange and goes down to rummage among the rubbish bins for a half-rotten orange someone might have thrown away. Instead, she finds an old fox fur. She imbues this discarded neck adornment with life, and treats it like a much-loved pet, but decides she will have to part with it. She has to sell it so she can get some money to eat.

I won’t tell you the end of the story, merely state that it is almost unbearable to read and the ending is somewhat ambiguous. Imagine a Jean Rhys heroine who has grown old and ugly, who no longer is able to find any male protectors to pay her bills, and who finds herself all alone, starving, wandering in a half-demented state through the streets of Paris.

This is all written in a breathless recitative style, a long monologue (or dialogue with the objects surrounding her), with the exception of one short chapter in which we see the woman through the eyes of others (and realise just how pitiable and weird she seems). There is something of Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness style here, particularly the sections in Mrs Dalloway dedicated to war veteran Septimus Smith. Her style is raw, unfiltered, somewhat chaotic, often with no punctuation or paragraphs. It feels like someone on the edge of despair – or maybe on the verge of exploding with anger. And yet, just when we think we’ve reached the nadir, we find in our narrator and perhaps in the author herself that will to survive, that rhythmic cry of ‘I am, I am, I am’.

I was hoping to be able to place at least two of these books also under the #ReadIndies initiative, hosted by my dear blogging friends Karen aka Kaggsy and Marcia aka Lizzy Siddal, but it turns out that the proud publisher Gallimard, host of so many Nobel and Goncourt Prize winners, is no longer independent, but part of Groupe Madrigall. Better luck with my next two #FrenchFebruary reads…

20 Books of Summer (More Like 30)

Cathy at 746 Books has been hosting this annual event for several years now: a very simple idea – to burn through your TBR pile by selecting the 20 books you plan to read over June/July/August. Summer in some parts of the world, winter in others. I usually get close to the fateful number twenty, but am easily distracted on my journey.

I have already announced that I will dedicate June to French language literature, July to Spanish language and August to Women in Translation more widely, so I have a huge pile of books to choose from. Since I never know what mood I will be in when the time comes, I am giving myself a large selection of at least ten or twelve every month in each category, so that I can choose the ones I feel most attracted to at the time.

So here goes:

June:

I’ve picked writers I know and love for my birthday month, or else books I’ve been looking forward to reading for a long, long time.

1. Maylis de Kerangal: Painting Time
2. Delphine de Vigan: No et moi
3. Sophie Divry: La condition pavillonnaire
4. Lola Lafon: Reeling
5. Dany Laferriere: Je suis un ecrivain japonais
6. Jean Claude Izzo: L’aride des jours
7. Romain Gary: L’Homme a la Colombe
8. Gael Faye: Petit Pays
9. Pascal Garnier: Nul n’est a l’abri du succes
10. Janis Otsiemi: La vie est un sale boulot

July:

I am far less well-read in Spanish language literature (or Portuguese – other than Brazilian), although I seem to enjoy it a lot when I do get around to reading it.

1. Claudia Pineiro: Elena Knows
2. Gabriela Cabezon Camara: Slum Virgin
3. Maria Judite de Carvalho: Empty Wardrobes
4. Rosa Maria Arquimbau: Forty Lost Years (I am including Catalan in the Spanish/Portuguese language challenge)
5. Juan Pablo Villalobos: I don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me
6. Enrique Vila-Matas: The Illogic of Kassel
7. Javier Marias: Your Face Tomorrow (Vol. 1 at least)
8. Roberto Bolano: The Skating Rink
9. Javier Cercas: Even the Darkest Night
10. Rafael Bernal: The Mongolian Conspiracy

August

I am being clever here, or so I think, because I can leave any unread women authors from June and July for this month. In addition to that, I m also taking a look at the rather chunky ones below:

1. Olga Tokarczuk: The Books of Jacob
2. Svetlana Alexievich: Second-Hand Time
3. Esmahan Aykol: Divorce Turkish Style
4. Magda Szabo: Iza’s Ballad
5. Anke Stelling: Schäfchen im Trockenen (Higher Ground – because you can never get too many stories of Berlin)

Additional Random Choices:

All by and about women and all of them quite chunky:

1. Tirzah Garwood: Long Live Great Bardfield
2. Tessa Hadley: The Past
3. The Letters of Shirley Jackson
4. Stela Brinzeanu: Set in Stone
5. Yvonne Bailey-Smith: The Day I Fell Off My Island

Which of these have you read or do you look forward to reading? Also: am I mad to choose quite a few looooooong books?

Oz Feb and #ReadIndies: Miles Franklin

Miles Franklin: My Brilliant Career, Virago Press, 1980.

When I first asked for recommendations for Australian authors a few years ago, particularly women authors, the name that cropped up most frequently was Miles Franklin and her classic novel My Brilliant Career, written when she was sixteen and published when she was twenty-one in 1901. It contained enough autobiographical material for readers to think it was a memoir, and it became a ‘succès de scandale’, which proved so distressing to the young author that she forbade its republication until after her death. Nevertheless, she revisited the story in a sort of sequel called My Career Goes Bung, although that too was deemed too scandalous at the time and wasn’t published until 1946. She was a prolific writer, in spite of her peripatetic lifestyle and numerous other jobs across three continents, but never quite replicated her early success.

My Brilliant Career (brilliant in this case is both ironical and also expresses the idealism of the heroine) follows a few years in the life of young Sybylla and her downwardly mobile family and is one of the first examples of what one might call ‘working class’ literature, albeit from the rural environment.

There is no plot in this story, because there has been none in my life or in any other life which has come under my notice. I am one of a class of individuals which have not time for plots in their life, but have all they can do to get their work done without indulging in such a luxury.

As you can tell from the titles of the two books themselves, we are no longer in prim and proper English Edwardian literature territory here. The 1890s were very much a decade when Australia was finding its own political identity but also its voice, and what a raucous, unfiltered, lively voice it was, at least judging by this book. As one critic (Havelock Ellis) at the time described it, it reads a bit like the work of ‘a Marie Bashkirtseff of the bush’, which can be regarded as a back-handed sort of compliment. On the one hand, it is precocious, high-spirited and sincere. On the other hand, it can be regarded as childish, temperamental, pretentious, overwrought.

To me, it felt like both. It was certainly a book ahead of its time, with its rejection of marriage or a happy ending, and the way the heroine Sybylla expresses her desire to escape from a dull life and societal expectations, and pursue a fulfilling artistic career instead. It ventures further than even the Brontë sisters dared to go, but it all becomes permissible because it is seen through the eyes of a teenage girl (16-17 years old for most of the book), who wouldn’t really be portrayed again with such accuracy and detail until the 1960s. There is all the drama and complaining and concerns about her looks that we might expect of any girl that age, at any time throughout history, but Sybylla is more than that. She is interested in arts and politics, she is active and resolute, mischievous and witty, self-deprecating but also proudly independent. She is also very much in love with the landscape and life on her grandparents’ farm, providing us with many lyrical descriptive passages, but also no-nonsense glimpses of the hard daily work.

Although she protests so much about her lack of height and good looks, it seems there is no shortage of men falling in love with her vivacious personality, especially the tall, quietly supportive Harry Beecham, whom no doubt most women readers fall in love with. We may feel she is mistaken or even cruel when she ultimately rejects Harry, but at the same time you cannot help but cheer her on as she realises that she is not the marrying kind, that her ambitions are too high and she would never be content to be the accomplished dilettante wife of even the nicest of farmers. She is prepared for the loneliness that this might bring her in life, but she has already experienced that in her family: her drunkard father, her demanding mother with whom she clashes.

Our greatest heart-treasure is a knowledge that there is in creation an individual to whom our existence is necessary – someone who is part of our life as we are part of theirs, someone in whose life we feel assured our death would leave a gap for a day or two. And who can this be but a husband or a wife? Our parents have other children and themselves, our brothers and sisters marry and have lives apart, so with our friends; but one’s husband would be different. And I had thrown behind me this chance; but in the days that followed, I knew that I had acted wisely.

There are some unpleasant or puzzling aspects to this book too. The casual racism and disparaging treatment of servants would have been typical of the period, perhaps, but grate on modern ears. Although it is true that Sybylla does not have many positive male role models in her life, she seems to have rather extremist views about men in general, expecting them all to behave badly. There also seems to be a bit of sexual squeamishness going on, some overreactions when anyone touches her that could indicate some deeper traumas.

In conclusion, I am glad I read this book – it is refreshingly different from anything written in England at the time, but there was a bit of a YA tone to it. I think I would have loved this even more if I had read it aged fourteen, together with Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle.

Still from the film My Brilliant Career (1979)

Virago is now part of Hachette, but back in 1980 when this book was first reissued in the Virago Modern Classics series, with a foreword by Carmen Callil, it was an independent publisher, so I am not really cheating, am I, if I include this in the #ReadIndies initiative organised by my blogging friends Lizzy and Kaggsy.

Maki Kashimada: Touring the Land of the Dead, transl. Haydn Trowell, Europa Editions

I can never stray too far from Japanese literature, even though it’s no longer January in Japan. This book, which is made up of two separate long short stories or novellas, was published by Europa Editions earlier this month and is translated by Australian academic and translator Haydn Trowell. I was lucky enough to receive an ARC (and to be only a week or two late in my reviewing of it).

The first novella Touring the Land of the Dead won the Akutagawa Prize in 2012 and, back then, Glynne Walley at the University of Oregon commented that it could be translated as ‘A Tour of Hell’ or ‘Running Around in the Afterlife’ or even ‘The Dark Land and Its Rounds’. [The wide range of possibilities gives you an idea of why I gave up ever translating from Japanese.] The second novella Ninety-Nine Kisses was a sort of bonus at the time, to make the entry book-length, and Walley is possibly the only reader other than me who preferred it to the prize-winning one. Most readers were repulsed by the strong hints of incest in the second story, but for this Shirley Jackson fan, it had more of the slightly sinister insider vs. outsider vibe of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Anyway, back to the first novella, with a clever title that sounds appropriate for the spa holiday that our protagonist Natsuko undertakes with her husband, but also refers to that well-known maxim that ‘Hell is other people’ – in this case, Natsuko’s family.

You poor thing, her mother would say. You poor, poor thing, working so hard in place of your husband at that drab job of yours… Even though what was really deserving of pity were those hours spent in that restaurant looking at that tonguesole meuniere, that evening spent together with someone who didn’t understand her at all, in that gorgeous world in which she didn’t belong.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Natsuko’s mother and brother are lazy spongers, with a breathtaking sense of entitlement, who have never been able to recover from their loss of fortune and status. They have no qualms about borrowing money from Natsuko, the only member of the family actually working, while berating or faux-pitying her constantly. Natsuko’s husband, Taichi, was struck with a debilitating illness (something like MS, although it is never named) soon after their wedding, so she has been the one supporting her household on her part-time wages. She takes him on this very brief holiday because the hotel that her family used to consider the height of luxury now offers affordable spa breaks. The place of course triggers all sorts of memories, mainly of how abominably her family treated her, and she ends up considerably more appreciative of her husband, who at first seems naive, but ultimately proves himself to be simply not bitter and therefore quite wise.

Although Natsuko resents her mother and brother from the very start of the story, the novella represents a journey towards Zen wisdom and acceptance. The story ends on an upbeat note as Taichi finally gets an electric wheelchair and becomes more mobile. But Natsuko herself learns to let go of resentments, let go of caring what her family thinks and does, but without becoming numb, like she does earlier in the book, and giving up all hope:

She had already given up on everything. And she never thought too deeply about why such unreasonableness, such unfairness, such unhappiness always befell her. She lived her life trying to think about it all as little as possible. Because it wasn’t the kind of thing you could easily look at, not directly. And if, by chance, she were to glance at it, she knew it would leave an unhealthy, fatal wound…

The style in this story is quite pared down, the language simple and everyday, almost dull. By way of contrast, the second story is more baroque, more ornate, at times lyrical, a bit of a fever-dream from the youngest of four sisters, who, together with their mother, have created a powerful little matriarchy in their house in Shitamachi. Desite their little squabbles, they are a tight-knit unit (the youngest sister is so smitten by the beauty of her older sisters that she expresses rather explicity sexual longings towards them, as mentioned earlier on – but ambiguously enough that it can be brushed off as merely a bit of an unhealthy obsession with the family nest). At least, until a young man called S makes his appearance – an outsider to their area and clearly buying into all of the reputation of Shitamachi.

This is the aspect of the story that I found most interesting, because Tokyo’s Shitamachi was traditionally the poorer, flat area around the Sumida river, where fishermen, tradesmen, craftsmen lived and where the entertainment and red-light district were situated. It was also a melting pot of Edo culture, kabuki artists, sumo wrestlers, with Saikaku Ihara describing the ‘floating world’ in words, and Utamaro in pictures. Later, the area featured strong women writers and activists such as Higuchi Ichiyo and Hiratsuka Raicho. Clearly, S is attracted to the area for its reputation and a nostalgia for the past; he somehow expects the four sisters to live up to his false image of the place. Instead, they are unusual for their area and backgroudn. Their mother has raised them on French nouvelle vague films and frank discussions about their bodies and sex. Two of the sisters might be considered old maids by Japanese standards (around the age of thirty), but they are bold about expressing their desires, at least to each other.

Azalea Festival at the Nezu Shrine, as mentioned in the story.

The outsider is dangerous – he might upset their precarious balance. The narrator, who reminds me very much of Merricat in Shirley Jackson’s novel, with an equally slippery manner that makes you question how much to believe her, seems to be the only one to be fully aware of what this intrustion might mean:

They’re all my sisters. We were all one body to begin with. But then we were born, cut away from each other one by one. That’s why I want him to stop, this S – to stop planting these seeds of love inside them. We don’t need all that… We’re a perfect whole. Like Adam before Eve. Or like a hermaphrodite.

I find it intriguing and almost perplexing that, despite the sexism that women experience in Japan (far more overtly than in the English-speaking world, although clearly that doesn’t mean there is less of it here, as recent events have shown), contemporary Japanese women writers, such as Kawakami Mieko or Misumi Kubo, seem to be at the forefront of candour about their bodies, their sexuality, their darker impulses. As if to catch up with those generations of Japanese male writers holding forth quite explicitly on these topics for well over a century. Or, perhaps, because they cannot always voice those thoughts in public without being judged, they choose to do so via their fiction. Many of them write within the Japanese tradition but also bring in plenty of Western references, thereby building hybrid, occasionally oddly-shaped constructions. Not all of them are successful, but they are always interesting to read.

I have to admit I love this current publishing hunger for Japanese women authors and can only hope that it will last for a long, long time. You can find another review for this on Tony’s site, as he also shares my passion for Japanese literature. I think if Tony and I ever met in real life – preferably somewhere in Japan – we would probably never stop talking!

January in Japan: Higuchi Ichiyo, First Professional Woman Writer

Robert Lyons Danly: In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life of Higuchi Ichiyo with Nine of Her Best Short Stories, Norton, 1992.

Higuchi Ichiyo is revered in Japan as the first major woman writer of the modern era, poised between traditional Japan and the death of the samurai era, and the rapidly modernising Japan of the late 19th century, a precursor to the many excellent women writers that Japan produced in the 20th century and the present-day. Although her portrait appears on the 5000 Yen note, and most of her stories have been adapted for film, I had not really read any of her work until Mieko Kawakami mentioned her as a role model and inspiration in her interview at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

Higuchi Ichiyo on the 5000 yen note.

Although Ichiyo died in 1896 of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four, she left behind a legacy of nearly four thousand classical poems, twenty-one well-crafted stories and numerous essays, which would make anyone else feel like a slouch in comparison. Some of her stories are regarded as examplary to this day. This book contains nine of those stories, as well as extensive quotes from her very detailed, lively and accomplished diary, which she kept over a long period of time (and which I wish would get translated in its entirety into English). It also contains biographical notes, showing just how surprising and remarkable her achievements were, because she came from an impoverished former samurai family, and became de facto the head of the family at an early age, was largely self-taught and constantly struggled to make a living to support her mother, her sister and herself.

Trained initially in the classical style of poetry, and clearly a huge fan of the writing of the Heian court, this all changes in 1893, when she and her family move to the poorer, red-light districts of Tokyo and try to run a stationery shop (not very successfully). Her stories become less melodramatic and inspired by the past, and instead feature both a rich description of a particular time and place, as well as social critique. She allows the rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, orphans, shopkeepers from their neighbourhood to appear as fully-rounded characters and voice their concerns, their small joys and triumphs, as well as their disappointments and defeats. At the same time, she also depicts the social constraints placed upon them.

In her most famous and accomplished story/novella Takekurabe (translated here as Child’s Play), we encounter a group of youngsters growing up in the Yoshihara red-light district. We are privy to their games and teasing, their quarrels and fights, their mischief and bullying, but also their kindnesses and mutual help. Midori is a free spirited, almost pampered girl, generous at sharing the little luxuries money can buy with her friends – but her money comes from her older sister’s work as a courtesan and she herself is being groomed to follow the same fate. Nobu is the shy, introverted son of the local priest, perpetually embarrassed by the materialistic, wordly nature of his parents. Shota is the wealthiest of the three, the son of the local pawnbroker, but he is a likable boy, constantly embarrassed by his family’s avaricious ways. As the children reach their mid-teens, they realise that the world of opportunities that seems to lie ahead of them… are actually illusions, that their fate was always to follow in their parents’ or sister’s footsteps. The solidarity and hope that they had as children drains away and they are left feeling very lonely indeed.

The last story Wakaremichi (Separate Ways) addresses the same problem, although here it is a friendship between Okyo, a young woman in her twenties who works as a seamstress and the boy who oils umbrellas Kichizo, nick-named the Dwarf, because he looks far smaller than his actual age (sixteen). Okyo is finally forced to become the mistress of a rich older man and Kichizo feels utterly betrayed that she should choose that way of life. Childish innocence gets destroyed by adult pragmatism in all of her stories.

Nigorie (Troubled Waters) is an earlier, slightly more melodramatic piece, but it succeeds in showing the life of courtesans as they grow older and fade in popularity, and the dreams they have had to cast aside. Meanwhile, in Jusanya (The Thirteenth Night), the author addresses the plight of the woman desperate to leave an abusive husband. Oseki returns home to her parents one night to say that she wants a divorce, but that would not only bring poverty and disgrace upon her family, but it would also mean she never gets to see her son again.

Ichiyo’s protagonists have very little wriggle room, very few choices open to them. They simply hustle and try to get through the day, the week, the month, and feed their dependents. This type of subject matter was perhaps not entirely new (there had been stories about the red-light district or ‘floating world’ before, notably Saikaku Ihara from two centuries earlier), but most of the stories were told by men and had a certain quality of titillation and sensationalism. Ichiyo shows real compassion and understanding for her characters. Moreover, it’s not just her subject matter that makes her memorable, but her beautiful style: full of allusions to classical works, elliptical, compact, full of word associations, puns, kakekotoba. These last are so-called pivot words, where you use the phonetic reading of a kanji character to convey multiple meanings concurrently – a much prized rhetorical device, because you can be concise yet introduce multiple layers of meaning. I suspect she might be quite difficult to read in the original, and not just because she was writing 130 years ago.

You can read a review of this book and of Ichiyo’s stories on Tony Malone’s excellent blog. If you get a chance to see the 1955 film of Takekurabe directed by Gosho, it provides a useful counterpoint to those in Japan who were looking back with nostalgia at the Meiji period during the post-war years.

Still from the film Takekurabe.

#GermanLitMonth: Marlen Haushofer

This is a good year to be reading Marlen Haushofer: 100 years since her birth and 50 years since her death. I wasn’t aware of these anniversaries but finally got to read her best-known work The Wall a few months ago and was blown away by its mix of vivid description, eerie atmosphere and philosophical/ecological musings. I’ve been keen to read anything and everything by Haushofer since, but was disappointed to find that, although her output for adults is reasonably small, it is not exactly easy to find even in German. I think her biographer Daniela Strigl is quite right to criticise the publishers for falling asleep on the job and missing this opportunity.

The truth is that, beyond her tales for children, which were frequently read in Austrian schools when I was a child, her work has always been a minority taste. She was very much admired but not widely read, although she enjoyed a brief renaissance as a feminist icon in the 1970s/80s. Her current book covers don’t do her any favours either, as they make it look like romantic (which many people misread as sentimental) fiction for and about women. Not that there is anything wrong with that kind of fiction, but it puts off a wider audience.

So I should say that Haushofer is in fact the anti-romantic writer. She depicts human loneliness (yes, particularly for women, but more generally as well) like no other writer I know. The loneliness can be physical (as it is in The Wall), but, equally, it can be the devastating loneliness of being in a relationship, or living in a crowded city, or being in a group of friends and still feeling misunderstood.

Die Tapetentür (translated as The Jib Door, but I have no idea what that means so I translated it as The Wallpaper Door – a concealed door in the wallpaper) is the story of Annette, a quiet, introverted, solitary librarian. She has had some relationships with men, but is quite relieved when things go nowhere or the men move away. She enjoys her life and routine, has one good friend and a few acquaintances whom she either respects or secretly mocks.

She is shaken out of her contentment when she meets the lawyer Gregor, who is temperamentally almost her exact opposite – extroverted, a womaniser, a bit of a macho man, who doesn’t enjoy reading or being quiet. In spite of her misgivings, she marries Gregor and expects a child. She is not entirely convinced she will be a good mother, but she is both fascinated and repulsed by the animal response and change in her body. She seems resigned to the traditional division of labour and gender roles in the household, even though she resents Gregor for cheating on her and not being more tender and understanding.

The narrative switches between close third person POV and Annette’s diary entries, so we get to see both her behaviour in social situations, but also see her anxieties and doubts reflected in her journal. She also muses about life more generally and makes some witty observations about society, single and married people, even wealth and poverty. The concealed door that Annette suddenly sees in the wallpaper (she is the only one that notices the door, so it probably is a metaphorical rather than a literal one) represents perhaps the wall that Annette has put up between herself and others, and a door that she is unable or unwilling to walk through in the battle of the sexes.

Memoir Month: Maggie Gee and Beth Ann Fennelly

Women’s memoirs are bringing great comfort and inspiration to me at the moment, especially those of women writers. (To be honest, I seem to read very few memoirs by people who are not writers or dancers… and that has been the case since childhood.)

Maggie Gee: My Animal Life

Unusually for a writer, Maggie Gee focuses not so much on her interior life, but on what she calls her ‘animal life’ – the life of the body, the senses, sex and love, birth and parenthood, illness, aging – all the things which make Jinny in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves so irresistible.

Not to degrade my life, but to celebrate it. To join it, tiny though it is, to all the life in the universe. To the brown small-headed pheasant running by the lake in Coolham. To my grandparents and parents, and my great grandparents who like most people in the British Isles of their generation wore big boots, even for the rare occasions of photographs, and lived on the clayey land, and have returned their bones to it, joining the bones of cattle, horses and foxes.

Her accounts are frank and fresh, humorous and without an inflated ego. She is content with her husband, her daughter, her writing, but she constantly asks herself questions: How can we bear to lose those we love most? How do we recover from our mistakes? How do we forgive ourselves – and our parents? What do men want from women, what do women want from men? Why do we need art and why are we driven to make it? On the whole, she attempts to answer these through personal observations and reflections, acknowledging her luck but also detailing those near-misses. After a clear, deftly-rendered memory, she will often start a more general musing on the subject.

Above all, I enjoyed her observations about the life of a writer (creatives in general, but she singles out writers and storytellers in particular). For example, she describes how her writing career nearly derailed when she became too complacent. She admits that the literary world can feel like a jungle, that it is bowing down to commercial reality. Yet I like the way she refuses to be bitter about it – and seems to have a very kind word to say about book bloggers without an agenda other than sharing their love of books.

In the jungle, writers are opportunists. We are show-offs, trying to display our coats. We need to be the most beautiful and youthful, we need to have novelty, we need to have mates… If we fall, we must be sure to get up quickly, for if we lie there, bleeding, we will die down there… Of course, some good writers do well in the jungle… But it isn’t inevitable, it isn’t even normal. If you want to know where the best writers are, you can’t tell by reading the literary pages, or going to big bookshops, or looking at prize lists. You must read for yourself, and think for yourself, or listen to voices you know and trust: private readers: truth-tellers…

And then there is the work. Come back to that. Get up on the wire, walk the line in the sunlight. Breathe, concentrate, find the nerve.

Beth Ann Fennelly: Heating and Cooling. 52 Micro-Memoirs

If Maggie Gee is inspirational in terms of content, then the second memoir I read was inspirational in terms of form. Beth Ann Fennelly is in fact the Poet Laureate of Mississippi and these micro-memoirs (ranging in size from one sentence to 3-4 pages) are almost like prose-poems. Poignant observations, tiny vignettes, which make you suddenly see the world in a new way. The poet describes herself as being bad at remembering, so these memoirs come out higgledy-piggledy, some of them with addendums, some of them on topics she keeps coming back to (like Married Love). But of course that is all carefully and deliberately constructed.

She was recommended to me by poet Anne-Marie Fyfe, when I attended her workshop on the ‘Home Movie’ (writing about house and home). They are very funny and quirky, some seem just casual throwaway remarks, but they build up over the length of the book into something far more coherent and touching. Here are just three very short ones which I love:

I Knew a Woman

Everything she had was better than everything the rest of us had. Not by a lot. But by enough.

Mommy Wants a Glass of Chardonnay

If you all collected all the drops of days I’ve spent singing ‘Row, row, row your boat’ to children fighting sleep, you’d have an ocean deep enough to drown them many times over.

I Come From a Long Line of Modest Achievers

I’m fond of recalling how my mother is fond of recalling how my great-grandfather was the very first person to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on the second day.

Women’s memoirs month

This month I’ve decided to focus on memoirs (factual or slighly fictionalised) by women writers. The first two that I read were Motherwell by Deborah Orr and Splithead by Julya Rabinowich (translated by Tess Lewis).

Deborah Orr: Motherwell

Although Motherwell is the name of the place where Deborah Orr was born and grew up, it is a felicitous play on words, because her relationship with her mother was going anything but ‘well’ and because it is a story of origin, such as the fountain/ well that gave her inspiration and values for the rest of her life (even if she chose to rebel against them).

Motherwell is – or was – a working-class coal and steel town on the Clyde Valley. The stripping back of its industry had already started when Orr was a child, the town lost its purpose and the people lost their identity. Orr hated the town and longed to escape – which she did, as soon as she left school – but this is a more nuanced revisiting of the place at the removal of several decades, a brutally honest look at what was both good and bad about it. There are moments of real lyricism, childhood friendships revisited (and the division between Catholics and Protestants stated all too clearly), and Orr’s love of nature becomes apparent. Both the child and the grown-up Deborah appreciate the landscape around her home town, the great river Clyde on their doorstep, the woods and marshlands. What she notices in the present-day, however, is that more attention is being given to the historical background of the area, which used to be a royal hunting forest in the Middle Ages.

There’s a sign by the tree now, telling people this stuff…. But none of this was there when Motherwell was a place with a future. The heritage industry moves in when people don’t know who they are any more and have to focus on who they were instead.

This is the story of a certain time and place, but it’s also a personal family history. Orr is sometimes a little too harsh on her parents, but she also tries to understand how their hard and unsatisfactory lives shaped them, and why this might have made them less-than-perfect and rather unsupportive parents. Having a difficult relationship with my mother myself, I could relate to many of the instances she describes.

It makes me grieve for the lost Win, the bright, talented girl who could have got so much more out of her life, if all of her life hadn’t been squashed into the tiny space of husband, home and children. My mother’s whole existence… was ordered by the choices of men. Their attention, their validation – that was everything to Win. She didn’t even think about it, was not really aware of it. Being in the good graces of men, attracting them, keeping the one you chose… these were the only important ways in which to gauge the worth of a woman. Win’s forty -year marriage to my father had been the great achievement of her life. Getting married, being married, staying married. These were things my mothers was violently, indefatigably in favour of.

My mother slagged off women, women she didn’t feel superior to who were different to her in a way that made her doubt herself, because she was so invested in the perfection of her womanhood, so proud of it.

Yet I can accept her unsentimental critique of her parents, because I can imagine she was just as hard on herself. Nevertheless, as she rummages after her mother’s death through her bureau, where she kept all of her paperwork and valuables, she finds keepsakes of many of her achievements as a child and a collection of clippings of her articles after she moved to London and became a journalist. Her parents were proud of her after all – they just weren’t the generation or perhaps the personalities who could comfortably articulate that.

I’d read a few articles by Deborah Orr, but I really became aware of her on Twitter in the last few months before her premature death, when she was describing in painful detail her nasty divorce. (You can imagine why I could relate to that). She does not shy away from painful details in this book either, and I do wish she could have lived longer to write the next volume of her memoirs.

Julya Rabinowich: Splithead

Julya Rabinowich emigrated from Russia to Austria in 1977, when she was just seven. She is now considered one of the most interesting German language writers of her generation (she is also a translator, playwright and painter). Both her parents were artists and this ‘novel’ is a very lightly fictionalised account of her own move to Austria. It tells the story of Mischka, born in St Petersburg into an extended Jewish family. She moves to Vienna with her parents and grandmother, and her story of trying to fit into the Viennese schools and society is interspersed with memories of their life in Russia, as recounted by Spaltkopf (“Splithead”), a Russian fairy-tale monster who feeds off the emotions of his victims. It’s a quirky experimental style, quite different from the more straightforward account by Deborah Orr. While I generally like experimental fiction, I have to admit that I found this style annoying at times, too jerky and bitty, swerving from one paragraph to the next, even from one sentence to the next, to Russian folk tales or imaginary friends or other influences.

Although I enjoyed the scenes of life in a block of flats in St Petersburg, the descriptions of neighbours and scenes of naughtiness, the oppressive atmosphere that they had to learn to navigate, I felt that the life in exile section was not as detailed as I’d have liked. I much preferred the descriptions of life as an immigrant in Switzerland by Irena Brežná or Julia Franck’s description of life in a refugee camp in West. There were some scenes such as the one below, but far too few of them for my liking.

We wait in a long queue with other emigrants for allocation by the organization responsible for us… Our goal is the shabby desk of the official who will interview us… An endless wave of complaints washes over the man facing us with his questionnaires. There is no alphabet in the world that can capture this despair. Whatever gets set down on the form is not what makes up the person. Our Noah’s Ark, which we’ve lined up by twos to enter, doesn’t have enough room for us all; at least, that is the rumour.

As for Mischka herself, she is a bit of a manipulative brat (the description of what she does to her mother at some pointm for no good reason at all just broke my heart) and she gets even worse when she grows up. However, there are little gems of insight scattered throughout the book, which kept me reading on. Of course, means of communication have moved on since the 1970s, but perhaps it’s still not easy to get past censorship in the ‘mother country’.

Emigration tears people apart. They learn about high points and personal disasters in letters and phone calls. Closer contact is impossible. As if they had landed on another planet, breathing is difficult in the spacesuits that they don’t dare take off for fear there won’t be enough air in the new atmosphere. Their chests rise and fall with difficulty.Their lungs hurt. The voices of the other settlers croak through the microphones in their helmet.