I finished eight books this month, five by women/POC and three in German, so just about on schedule. Most reading time has actually gone into the staggeringly brilliant Books of Jacob, but finishing that’s for another month.
Streulicht — Deniz Ohde
Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen — Heinrich Böll
Drei Kameradinnen — Shida Bazyar
The Gulag Archipelago — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Second-hand Time — Svetlana Alexievich
Tenth of December — George Saunders
Time is the Fire — Connie Willis
Backwater — Dorothy M. Richardson
Streulicht and Drei Kameradinnen were a great pairing — reading them both at the same time led to me occasionally confusing the two, so similar were some of their experiences (particularly with undervaluing of their educational achievements) — quite a telling point in itself. Streulicht is a classic Bildungsroman, centring literally on the educational experiences of a girl of mixed White and Turkish origin growing up near an industrial estate. The descriptions of the bleak physical environment are often extremely beautiful, while the social environment has fewer redeeming features; the estrangement between the narrator and her childhood friends is particularly painful. Drei Kameradinnen has much more overt anger, but also humour, delivered by a frankly unreliable narrator. The friendship between the three central characters and the engaging style balance the often dark events well.
Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen is superficially dissimilar — a comic short story in a 50s Rhineland radio station — but the themes of political and religious hypocrisy form a disconcertingly strong connection with the contemporary novels.
Solzhenitsyn and Alexievich also resonated together. The former was surprisingly funny in places, reminding me often of Gogol. Alexievich presents a kaleidoscope of narratives from the latter days of the Soviet Union, from touching love stories, through some very hard to take conflicts involving racism, alcoholism and greed, to accounts of the democracy movement in Belarus which reference Solzhenitsyn and show that, as one contributor says, “In five years, everything can change in Russia, but in two hundred — nothing.”
George Saunders and Connie Willis are both represented by broadly-SF short stories. Saunders’ writing style is wonderfully entertaining; in his writing on writing he talks about “his mental compass, which has a needle that points to P (Positive) or N (Negative) according to how he feels when he rereads his own words. He checks the needle each sentence. If it points to N, he revises. He revises till the needle points to P for the entire text.” The result is a highly-honed, sometimes perhaps fatiguingly-so text, but over the short story distance it works brilliantly. The title story especially includes some brilliant similes:
Coatless bald-headed man. Super-skinny. In what looked like pajamas. Climbing plodfully, with tortoise patience, bare white arms sticking out of his p.j. shirt like two bare white branches sticking out of a p.j. shirt. Or grave.
An image flashed of the old guy standing bereft and blue-skinned in his tighty-whities like a P.O.W. abandoned at the barbed wire due to no room on the truck. Or a sad traumatized stork bidding farewell to its young.
Willis is somewhat the opposite: her stories are baggy monsters which proceed genially and rather repetitively, enjoyable if you’re not in a hurry. I actually enjoyed the speeches which conclude the book rather more than the stories, as they allowed her humour and personality to come through.
The second installment of Pilgrimage was more challenging than the first, but living through Miriam was constantly stimulating — and quotable:
Opposite them at the far end of the room was a heavy grey marble mantelpiece, on which stood a heavy green marble clock frame.
For a moment the sheen on Miss Haddie’s silk sleeves had distracted her by becoming as gentle and unchallenging as the light on her mother’s dresses when there were other people in the room.
It was only when she was alone and in the intervals of quiet reading that she came into possession of her hands. With others they oppressed her by their size and their lack of feminine expressiveness. No one could fall in love with such hands. Loving her, someone might come to tolerate them. They were utterly unlike Eve’s plump, white, inflexible little palms. But they were her strength. They came between her and the world of women. They would be her companions until the end. They would wither. But the bones would not change. The bones would be laid unchanged and wise, in her grave.
Miss Meldrum and Miss Stringer, the two bald Scotch chemists who went out every evening to look for a comet, the pale frowning girl from Plaistow with her mad-eyed cousin whose grey curls bunched in a cherry-coloured velvet band seemed to say “death—death” to Miriam more dreadfully out here amongst the greenery than when she suddenly caught sight of them at table, sat disconnectedly in chairs behind the squatters on the grass.
What was life? Either playing a part all the time in order to be amongst people in the warm or standing alone with the strange true real feeling—alone with a sort of edge of reality on everything; even on quite ugly common things—cheap boarding-houses face towels and blistered window frames.
I had been planning to continue Richardson at my usual six-monthly pace, but I’ve discovered a twitter group (#PilgrimageTogether) who’re doing one a month this year. I’ve mistimed the first two now, but it may not be too late to drop in!