June 6, 2008
Boyish book binge (which is different from a bookish boy binge)
I’m on a short boyish book binge. Now reading Victory by Joseph Conrad, for reasons I’ve already mentioned. It’s really wonderful, actually, thoroughly enjoyable. My last memory of reading Conrad was loathing Lord Jim and never actually finishing it (which was actually part of the reason it took me so long to get around the Lucky Jim [no relation]), so I am pleasantly surprised. I suspect my dislike for Lord Jim, however, had something to do with nautical themes and me being twenty. I’ll be rereading Heart of Darkness this summer, and so I’m pleased that my Conrad context will be just a bit wider. Anyway, Victory. All day I’ve been struck by the line, “For the use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears.”
Next book on my list is Engleby by Sabastian Faulks, because Emily Perkins mentioned it in my interview with her. I am looking forward to that, and an author entirely new to me (and a buzzy one, because of James Bond).
So yes, two novels by men. As the last twenty-one novels I’ve read have been by women, this intervention was probably necessary. I do try to read men’s fiction once in a while, just to keep vaguely abreast of things. They’re not really for me, of course, but I do it for the sake of fairness. You’d be surprised how much good stuff there really is, actually, particularly once you move away from the more peculiar fixations (dogs, and cigars, and warfare). Some of it I can even identify with, though I’m not sure I’d call it literature exactly. There’s just never enough linoleum for it to qualify as that.
June 4, 2008
Springing
“April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can’t keep, all passion is really a setup, and we’re doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go there anyway, around the bend, unconditionally. I’m a soul on ice flung out on a rock in the sun, where the needles that pierced me begin to melt all as one.” –Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Vegetable Miracle
A table full of wonderful things, brought back from our first trip to the new Bloor Borden Farmer’s Market.
June 4, 2008
What I Need
I’m currently reading Carol Shields, whose work has always struck me as particularly subversive, and her letters and interviews make clear that this was consciously so. The anger in her final novel (and finest, in my opinion) Unless is palpable, directed, but appropriately complicated by the world we live in, and Shields’ understanding of it. But not loud, no, and not destructive. “I am trying to put forward my objection gently,” her narrator writes. “I’m not screaming as you may think. I’m not even whining, and certainly not stamping my lady-sized foot. Whispering is more like it.”
Of course, I don’t think that novels have to be subversive. I think that the miracle of novels is that they do such mulitudinous things, provide us with infinite horizons to discover, and I’m always a bowled over by those who claim to have these complex organisms wrapped up in a tiny box. Michael Bryson writes in The Danforth Review, “We need our inherited tropes to be broken down, deconstructed, challenged to the core, overturned,” but the thing is, I don’t. And it’s not because I’m stupid, or because I’m “middlebrow”, however much I might be both. It’s just that what I need is different.
I need work that takes our inherited tropes and builds upon them, expanding their infinite possibilities. I need construction. Challenge to the core, but bloody well make something of that challenge. Not necessarily to have things overturned, but at the very least surmounted. Make something. I need means to lead to ends, and I want to like where I have landed. I want to acknowledge where I started. I want power in whispers, so that I can really listen. No foot stomping, no sir.
June 3, 2008
Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith
The Myths series has a bit of the gimmick about it. These “contemporary take[s] on our most enduring myths”, with their promises to “shed new light”. The books so lovely and slim, they could almost slip inside a pocket, so there is certainly no physical evidence of their substance. Look at the drawing on the cover of Girl Meets Boy, for example, all delicate lines and flowers. Positively precious.
But what would you say if I told you the drawing was called “Self Portrait as a Small Bird” and the self being portraited was Tracey Emin. Wouldn’t you agree then, that this is a book with tricks up its proverbial sleeve? And so it is, being a book by Ali Smith, whose The Accidental was one trick after another. But now the trick is on me, and it may be on you, because there’s nothing of the gimmick about Smith’s latest novel at all.
“Smith’s latest novel” I say, for this is exactly right. It is a powerful novel and it can stand alone. A slim book, yes, and part of a series, but then there is actually very little uniform about The Myths. Featuring a wide range of writers from various backgrounds who select their own myths and approach these stories in any way they choose. In Girl Meets Boy, Smith working with the myth of Iphis, from Ovid’s Metamorpheses. As she writes in her afterward, “It is one of the cheeriest metamorpheses in the whole, one of the most happily resolved of its stories about the desire for and the ramifications of change.”
And like any novel, this one has its very own story. Beginning, “Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says.” Quickly establishing a world of unfixed parametres, of shape-shifting, as young sisters Anthea and Imogen absorb their grandfather’s stories. TV game show Blind Date playing in the background, with host Cilla Black between the panel of boys and the panel of girls. Anthea wondering, “But which is Cilla Black, then, boy or girl? She doesn’t seem to be either… She can go between the two sides of things like a magician or a joke.”
In the future, however, which is the present day, all the magic has been put aside. The girls’ grandparents have long ago been lost at sea, and life is weighty with its disappointments. Anthea has come back home to Inverness to live with her sister, who has been able to secure her a job as a “Creative” for the multinational conglomerate Pure. And Anthea finds herself easily distracted one day during a “Creative” brainstorm session by one certain vandal in a kilt.
In Girl Meets Boy, Ali Smith presents metamorphosis as possibility. Anthea joining forces with the vandal, spreading slogans: “ALL ACROSS THE WORLD, WHERE WOMEN ARE DOING EXACTLY THE SAME WORK AS MEN, THEY’RE BEING PAID BETWEEN THIRTY TO FORTY PERCENT LESS. THAT’S NOT FAIR. THIS MUST CHANGE.” Anthea also falling in love for the first time in her life, with this vandal, who is a woman. Much to her sister’s horror (“My sister would be banned in schools if she was a book.”)
So here is an old story inside inside this new story, which is a love story, and actually no less than two. For such a slim book, this is something, and that the stories sit comfortably amidst so much stuff of ages– from the ancient Greeks to our poppest of culture, allusions, winks, nods and odes. There are lines and lines and lines between these lines.
But Smith’s language, of course, is always her most marvelous trick. Amidst all the stuff, rendering her thesis quite simple: that in a world where things are changeable, things can change. Innumerable doors swinging open upon this promise, that progress is a way forward after all. “And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with.” A most refreshing triumph.
June 1, 2008
Stumbled In
Stumbled into a used bookshop today, and stumbled out after with an arm-full. Some controversial: Birthday by Alan Sillitoe, the sequel to my beloved Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Forty-years on, it is could be one thing or another. I also picked up Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, for I’ve hardly read her at all. And then I got The Orange Fish and Dressing Up for Carnival by Carol Shields, and though I’ll read one shortly, I’ll not read the other for years and years, for these are the last two I have left to read, and I don’t want to live in a world without more Carol Shields to discover.
Now reading Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith. Just finished Deborah Eisenberg’s majestic Twilight of the Superheroes.
June 1, 2008
Histories
A tiny post today over at the Descant blog, about “Encounters with Books: And the Histories Inside Them”.
May 30, 2008
Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
I was the less-than ideal reader for Rivka Galchen’s first novel Atmospheric Disturbances, unequipped with referential tools necessary to place this book within its proper context. I’ve never read Borges, I don’t even know how to say “Borges”. And though I know how to say Pynchon, I’ve never read him either. I also only found out what “postmodernism” was three years ago, and sometimes I’m still not sure (though I take solace in the fact that you’re probably not sure either).
And so the beginning of Atmospheric Disturbances was a bit tough on me, Galchen’s narrator Dr. Leo Liebenstein, a psychiatrist, speaking exactly the way you’d think that the world’s driest psychiatrist might. A driest psychiatrist under psychosis, for that matter. When he becomes convinced his wife Rema has been replaced by a simulacrum, the ensuing narrative has nothing of the lightness I might have expected from such a premise. Instead, for complicated reasons, Leo comes to suspect a meteorologist called Tzvi Gal-Chen is at the heart of this matter, and begins to explore Gal-Chen’s work. Which doesn’t make for easy reading, you might imagine, particularly as it is unclear whether Leo’s own connections make sense, and so we are left to decipher and draw our own conclusions.
The book wasn’t easy, but about 80 pages in, it became clear to me that the effort was worth it. And that Rivka Galchen was actually playing, in innumerable ways and most postmodernly. Leo’s singular perspective an achievement, unflinching and impossible. We learn about him slowly, in bits and pieces from the world around him, as his own point of view reveals not much from “the consensus view of reality”. Leo was probably never considered normal, but in his current state of mind, reality has twisted itself into a nightmare. Which, considering what a nightmare reality can be as straight as arrows, ensures layer upon layer of complexity.
For me the payoff was that each of these layers revealed something essential, important and surprising. Often something beautiful too, and at its very heart, this novel is a love song. From Galchen to her late father, who is the actual Tzvi Gal-Chan and, as Galchen says in her interview with BGB this novel was an excuse for her to write his name down over and over. I love that, and lines she blurs between fact and fiction, in a way that is analogous to Leo’s whole perspective.
Love too, between Leo and Rema. This premise, of her supposed body snatching far more than just a premise, because when Leo looks at the simulacrum, he doesn’t recognize his wife because of this woman’s crows feet, her few extra pounds. That the person we fall in love with gets lost over time, and we have to find ways to fall in love over and over again, even the sanest of us, and how much is that ever possible?
Of course Atmospheric Disturbances works not just in the theoretical, also encompassing elements of mystery and adventure. The plot pushes forward, puzzling in multitudinous ways, but thoroughly engaging and delightful.
May 30, 2008
The Unattestable
“As I consider our modern lives, I feel that, due to the growing uncertainty of the world, people anxiously want to believe themselves on top of things, in control. Especially in the United States just now, at the height of world power, there is an impulse to settle on what is attestable, to pronounce and explain; to exclude mystery, imagination, the intuitive powers of individual existence. What about the inattestable, that informs all that matters to us? What about the accidental nature of our life? The salient events of private life are always tinged with the accidental. If I hadn’t gone to a party that Muriel Spark gave down the road here in the Beaux Arts Hotel, I would never have met Francis Steegmuller.” –Shirley Hazzard, The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
May 30, 2008
Police on my back
As you know, here at Pickle Me This I make a point of writing responses to my reading, celebrating any little bit of fun I might get up to, as well as tracking incidents of the po-lice busting down my door in the middle of the night. Well, in this specific circumstance, when I say “busting down”, I mean “knocking at” but it was forceful, unrelenting. In a dozy stupid, I got out of bed and went downstairs to see what was going on, and was quite terrified to see two men standing by my door. As my door is around the back of the house and upstairs, you have to crawl under a fence and shimmy up a drain pipe to get there, we don’t get a lot of passer-bys, particularly whilst we’re sleeping.
I felt a little bit relieved when I made out that the two men were officers in uniform though, which only shows how dozy I was, because police in the middle of the night is rarely good news. Except (thankfully) in this specific circumstance, of course, because it just so happened that the police were there with an arrest warrant for Will Smith. Will Smith! How exciting. Unfortunately, however, Will Smith doesn’t live in my apartment, nor the neighbours’ down below, and so the poor police were going to all that trouble for nothing. They were quite nice about it though, polite and everything, and they didn’t even make fun of my hair.
When I got back to bed however (and my husband had been roused by this point, I must mention), the implications of what could have been weighed in heavily, and I was more awake than I’d been the whole day before, pounding heart and staring at the ceiling for ages.
But yes, it really was good news, the police busting down my door on a warrant. Because I’ve now had the experience of having the police busting down/knocking on my door on a warrant. How cool is that? I feel sort of like Lethal Bizzle, back when he had to hide in that shed. Or like Alison Janney in Drop Dead Gorgeous, and I’m just sorry I didn’t think to utter her wonderful line: “Oh Christ, are we on COPS again?”
May 30, 2008
Avocado Scones
Not content to have had the pleasure of two (2) raspberry scones on separate occasions yesterday, I was determined to bake a batch of scones tonight. But not just any, no. For weeks I’ve been wanting to bake avocado scones, sure that two of my most beloved foods couldn’t help but have a wonderful marriage. Got the recipe here, and the results were extraordinary. The best scone I’ve ever had in my life, and let’s just say, I’ve had a few. The avocado flavour was barely there, but everyone’s favourite fatty fruit (but the good fat) had left its mark in a green tinge, and such unbelievable moistness. The perfect savoury accompaniment to my dinner tonight, which was a rice salad, with feta, roast red pepper, chickpeas and dill. And then for lunch tomorrow! There’s so much to look forward to.
