March 10, 2007
Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert
Though a startlingly original novel, Rachel Seiffer’s Afterwards brought other works to mind, in the most flattering way. Seiffert’s sparing prose made me think of Jon McGregor’s in If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, its consideration of grandparents is similar to Alayna Munce’s When I Was Young and In My Prime, and the beautifully-written portrayal an English working class ethos reminded me of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Which, again, is not to say that Seiffert’s novel is derivative, but rather there is so much going on within it, a review could take a wide variety of approaches.
I’ll keep my approach wide. Here we find prose as lovely as the story it tells. Seibbert’s omission of all unnecessary words and discription is so finely tuned that she matches the way our thoughts proceed, and reading along the page we miss nothing. She shows a particular mastery of providing the best example with which to illuminate an entire character, which is so difficult to do . But the story too– a love story, in which the love is not at the forefront. And each character comes into this story with their own backstory (as people tend to do) and it all ties up together in the end, with such a marvelous cohesion that even the unresolved ending is somehow satisfactory.
Here is the story of Alice, who meets Joseph. Her grandmother has recently died, and she is also taking care to visit regularly with her grandfather, David, a difficult man, and she is curious to know about his time in the British Imperial Army in Kenya in the 1950s. She is bothered by what he keeps from her, and she begins to see a similar reticence in her new boyfriend Joseph, who can identify with Alice’s grandfather’s situation through his experiences in the British army himself, having served in Northern Ireland. Not that the two men connect easily, by any means, and their commonalities eventually surface in an explosive and disturbing climax. And Alice stays outside of all of this. As readers, we are privy to the backstories, but Alice never gets to know, and her coming to terms with the impossibility of knowing is one of the intriguing themes of the story, and a neat twist on love. The flipside of that is how Joseph and David deal with their isolation, and whether or not telling is any release after all. What do you do with the past once it’s over?
No answers, of course, but Seiffert gives us pages and pages on which to ruminate.
March 9, 2007
The Joy of Things
My kitchen windowsill is one of my favourite corners of our apartment and it’s become even more pleasant with the addition of this little gerbera plant– a gift from Jennie who came to dinner last night. The flowers bloom and we had a delightful time. Also notable on the sill is my yellow dragonfly sugarbowl– at gift from Kate. Oh, the joy of things. In other notables, the letters which spell SLOAN have rubbed off my keyboard. M is on its way out too. I can’t see that I favour these letters particularly, and I wonder overused words of mine have hastened the erasure? Fruit and veg is getting cheaper at the grocery store, which indictates spring is coming. Weather forecasts above 0 for this weekend indicate much of the same, oh bliss. This short winter has been a long long time happening. And I am hankering after watermelonish festivities.
March 9, 2007
Cutting page intake
The last two books I’ve read have been 700 and 900 pages respectively, and though I do like devouring books, these have been awfully big meals. I look forward to some less sprawling novels in the near future; next up is Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert. And we just got Lisey’s Story by Stephen King from the library. Stuart is currently in the midst of it, but he says that I’m going to love it when my time comes.
But I am so glad I read Middlemarch. My monthly classics plan is doing wonders to close up some holes in my reading, and each book I’ve read so far, I would pity having missed forever. The book was extraordinary, and it’s been said before, but all I wish to say is that I agree. The scene that to me demonstrated Eliot’s force as a writer and character creator was when Dorothea calls on Lydgate, and meets Rosamond for the first time. This was a fair way into the book, and by this point I knew both these women intimately. And I could not fathom that they could be ignorant of one another, because they were each so vivid to me. Besides, how could anyone not know Miss Brooke? Each of Eliot’s characters were so persuasively people.
And then the Richard Dawkins vs. Peter Kay affair. Who could beat up whom? We’re Peter Kay fans at our house, and Stuart went off Dawkins with The Ancestors Tale, and so we’re betting on the boy from Bolton.
March 7, 2007
Half a Grapefruit
~Horse Nicholson had made a lot of money as a contractor and had left that to go into politics. He had made a speech saying that what they needed was a lot more God in the classroom and a lot less French.~
March 6, 2007
Poor Scoot
Brilliant! Nora Ephron profiled in The Guardian. Kundera on the art of the novel. Deanna McFadden writes around town— with an interview with Ben McNally. Beryl Bainbridge on writing. Martin Levin on book lists, and more here.
I will speculate about why we love them– lists in general, I mean. They give the illusion of containment and control, and for a brief instant, all is manageable. The universe is catalogueable, navigable. To-do lists particularly illustrate the power we grant words; if it is written, it will get done. Book lists provide our sprawling to-be-read piles with an armature, and this is assuring. We don’t need to do anything with lists though, really. Their very existence is their object, and beyond that they are scrap. Therefore, no one needs to worry Sirs. List away and live free.
Middlemarch continues. I had to trade in my copy for another, however, as the small print was making me go blind.
And you do have to worry about a grown man called Scooter. Unless, of course, he is a muppet.
Short short story contest here in The Guardian. Fun.
March 5, 2007
Pages to turn before I sleep
Book-wise (and really, is there any other wise?) March is an exciting month for me, as I’ve got a stack of to-be-reads this high. But at the moment I’m in the midst of Middlemarch— my March Classic. And it’s absolutely huge, so I will be embroiled for a long while. It’s very bookish and pretty wonderful though, which is fortunate for such a big commitment. I will enjoy the ride.
March 5, 2007
Weapons to be deployed
~It is easy to make light of this kind of “writing,” and I mention it specifically because I do not make light of it at all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words (as well as with people who hung Stellas in their kitchens and went to Mexico for buys in oilcloth), a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page. In a caption of, say,eight lines, each line to run no more or less than twenty-seven characters, not only every word but every letter counted. At Vogue one learned fast, or one did not stay, how to play games with words, how to put a couple of unwielding dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence composed of precisely thirty-nine characters. We were connoisseurs of synonyms. We were collectors of verbs. (I recall “to ravish” as a highly favoured verb for a number of issues, and I also recall it, for a number of issues more, as the source of a highly favored noun: “ravishments,” as in tables cluttered with porcelain tulips, Faberge eggs, other ravishments.) We learned as reflex the grammatical tricks we had learned only as marginal corrections in school (“there are two oranges and an apple” read better than “there were an apple and two oranges,” passive verbs slowed down sentences, “it” needed a reference within the scan of the eye), learned to rely on the OED, learned to write and rewrite and rewrite again. “Run it through again, sweetie, it’s not quite there.” “Give me a shock verb two lines in.” “Prune it out, clean it up, make the point.” Less was more, smooth was better, and absolute precision essential to the monthly grand illusion. Going to work for Vogue was, in the late nineteen-fifties, not unlike training with the Rockettes~ Joan Didion, Telling Stories
March 4, 2007
Drawer, get ready for this.
Finished. Conversations About Gravity. 80500 words, many of which, I admit, I’m rather fond of. Beginning, middle and end.
March 4, 2007
New Title
Conversations About Gravity. I think it’s perfect. And the whole thing will be finished tomorrow.
March 3, 2007
Mini*Pops
Fun site of the week is Mini Pops Magic, which taught me plenty about one of my first favourite bands. Looking through their discography, I realized that my family owned at least four of their albums– I’d forgotten. I was also surprised to learn they were British (though I probably should have known). They were known for their Channel 4 television show in 1982 which was controversial due to that old “eight year olds dressed like harlots” problem. The show was cancelled, but a number of albums were released, and were particularly popular in Canada, where the Mini Pops embarked upon a three week tour. Who knew?
