Twelve books finished this month, including my target three in German and seven of the twelve by women/POC.
- Birds in London — W. H. Hudson
- Kaltenburg — Marcel Beyer
- Selbs Mord — Bernhard Schlink
- Cottbus: Geschichten und Anekdoten — Helmut Routschek
- The Lifted Veil — George Eliot
- George Eliot: A Life — Rosemary Ashton
- Seven Devils — Elizabeth May and Laura Lam
- Honeycomb — Dorothy M. Richardson
- My Phantoms — Gwendoline Riley
- Wise Children — Angela Carter
- The Comedy of Errors — William Shakespeare
- The Epic of Gilgamesh — Andrew George (ed.)
Birds in London was published in 1898, and is still a charming look at the bird life of the city, and an interesting comparison with the current situation in this and other towns. Hudson seems to have had a particular affinity for corvids (good man), and devotes the first few chapters to them.
It is a pity that, before consenting to rebuild St. Paul’s Cathedral, Sir Christopher Wren did not make the perpetual maintenance of a colony of jackdaws a condition. And if he had bargained with posterity for a pair or two of peregrine falcons and kestrels, his glory at the present time would have been greater.
We ourselves, our great philosopher tells us, are ‘hopelessly’ anthropomorphic. The rook appears to be in as bad a case; to his mind we are nothing but bigger rooks, somewhat misshapen, perhaps, featherless, deprived by some accident of the faculty of flight, and not very well able to take care of ourselves.
He relates some interesting techniques for persuading birds to settle:
We have an account of the curious origin of the Temple Gardens rookery, one of the best known and most populous of the old London rookeries. In the ‘Zoologist,’ vol. xxxvi. p. 196, Mr. Harting relates that it was founded in Queen Anne’s time by Sir Richard Northey, a famous lawyer at that period, who brought the first birds from his estate at Epsom. A bough was cut from a tree with a nest containing two young birds, and conveyed in an open waggon to the Temple, and fixed in a tree in the gardens. The old birds followed their young and fed them, and old and young remained and bred in the same place.
A year or two ago my friend Mr. Cunninghame Graham, writing from his place in the north, told me that he had long desired to have rooks in his trees, and that he had written to an eminent ornithologist, with whom he was not personally acquainted, asking for advice in the matter. The naturalist replied at some length, pointing out the fallacies of Socialism as a political creed, but saying nothing about the rooks. Probably he had nothing practical to write on the subject, but he might at least have informed his correspondent that Mr. Hawker, the famous parson of Morwenstow, had got his rooks by praying for them. He prayed every day for three years, and his importunity was then rewarded by the birds coming and settling on the very trees where they were wanted.
His rather whimsical tone makes him good company, helped by his attitudes having more in common with the nature reader today than with most of his contemporaries. Though much smaller than the modern city, 19th-century London seems to have been even more denatured, and some of his predictions have fortunately proved wrong (“It is exceedingly improbable that any of the raptorial species which formerly inhabited London—peregrine falcon, kestrel, and kite—will ever return”), despite the efforts of the London park-keepers to tidy things up:
To the Claphamites of the past the furze must have seemed an unregenerate bush, and the bramble something worse, since its recurved thorns would remind them of an exceedingly objectionable person’s finger-nails. As for the yellowhammer, that too gaily apparelled idle singer, who painted his eggs with so strange a paint, it must indeed have been a relief to get rid of him.
Kaltenburg, by Marcel Beyer, is another heavily corvidian book, and the cover’s promise of jackdaws was fulfilled. Like Hudson’s book, it alludes to the disappearance of some species in the city where it takes place:
Heute findet man in der Stadt kaum mehr als eine Handvoll Brutpaare pro Jahr, die Dohlen haben sich schon lange aus Dresden zurückgezogen.
The novel tells through the eyes of one of his proteges the story of Kaltenburg, a zoologist with a house full of animals, and includes some lovely details:
Nirgendwo Deckenleuchten, die Vorhangstangen jedoch sind – anders als die Vorhänge – in jedem Raum geblieben: Alle Finken müssen geeignete Schlafplätze vorfinden.
The figure of Kaltenburg draws heavily on Konrad Lorenz; in King Solomon’s Ring, Lorenz tells of how holding out his black swimming trunks caused him to be judged an “eater of jackdaws”, with unfortunate consequences. Similarly in this book, when an artist attempts to draw one of the professor’s daws:
Welche Bedeutung Zeichenkohle hat – das begriff Martin seinerseits fast ebenso rasch. Eine menschliche Hand, die etwas Schwarzglänzendes umgreift, bringt jede Dohle zur Raserei. Ein paar Tropfen Blut, ein zerkratztes Blatt.
The parallels with Lorenz extend to the zoologists’ darker sides, with Kaltenburg finding ways to thrive in both Nazi and DDR eras. An interesting side of the book is that it shows how while people were heavily affected by the regimes, they continued to live their own lives under them:
Dabei bin ich mir gar nicht sicher, ob Ludwig Kaltenburg tatsächlich jemals in der DDR war, oder ob er nicht darauf bestanden hätte, er habe in Dresden gelebt und von hier aus lediglich den einen oder anderen Ausflug in die DDR gemacht.
The other two German books this month continued the DDR theme. Selbs Mord was not what I’d expected: it’s an odd mix of philosophising and cozy crime, featuring a detective on the brink of retirement named “Selb”, in order to allow Schlink to name the titles in the series Selbs Justiz, Selbs Betrug, and finally Selbs Mord (in the manner of a Saturday evening ITV series). There are some more interesting passages along the way (notably when Selb is forced — or allows himself to be forced — to perform a Nazi salute by skinheads in Berlin), but in the end nobody dies who you much care about.
The plot involves a western bank which has taken over a Sorbian bank following reunification, with nefarious aims. Not much of the book takes place in Cottbus, but it was interesting to see the portrayal of the city’s people, and especially its Sorbian population.
Finally, Cottbus: Geschichten und Anekdoten does exactly what it says on the tin. The folksy style was rather irritating, but I’m glad I now know a little more about the city’s history.
Ashton’s biography of George Eliot was a good balance of the readable and the informative; it would have made more sense to read this before the diaries, but I was able to remember enough of them to fit them together with the biography. Eliot’s unpromising origins make her choice of career even more remarkable, and her social circle was intriguing: Tennyson, a couple of Trollopes, the Burne-Jones’ etc. all pass in and out of the story. The Lifted Veil is scraping the Eliot barrel somewhat, but anything by her is worth reading. The gloom is quite invigorating:
My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really was, by contrast with all the after-years.
all the intermediate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.
Seven Devils was an entertaining piece of feminist scifi, although the “sci” very much takes a back seat. I did enjoy the use of Scots to represent the speech of the oppressed underclasses.
Pilgrimage year continued with Honeycomb. As usual, nothing much happens happens on the surface — Miriam spends one chapter walking into town to buy a bag of sweets, for example — but inside her mind, everything is in turmoil. I’ve never done any book club reading, but I am enjoying following other people’s ideas on the twitter group. My Phantoms is also interesting for its perspective: the narrator is the daughter in a dysfunctional family, who gradually reveals how much of the familial catastrophe is her own doing (though other readers seem to disagree with me here):
‘Our sofa is pretty lumpy, actually,’ I said, with a smile. Another lie. And another misstep. I could feel, I could tell, she was going to pounce now, going to gamely say, ‘I don’t mind lumpy!’ Well, I killed that impulse. I dropped my smile, checked my watch.
… she still often didn’t respond or even register that she was being spoken to. That gave me an evil licence, sometimes. I could find myself carrying on these mad monologues, as a child might with a toy. What strikes me now is that this perhaps wasn’t so different from the way I’d always spoken to her. Which is to say, assuming half of what I said wouldn’t ‘go in’, or if it did, would not be understood, and would be rudely sent back, with a ‘What’s that mean?’ or a ‘Why?’
This was also a month full of twins — two sets in The Comedy of Errors, and a whopping five in Wise Children. I enjoyed the Comedy more than I’d expected, despite the difficulties of having to have jokes explained in the footnotes; the introduction to the Cambridge edition did a good job of highlighting the darker elements of the play.
The Epic of Gilgamesh was a fascinating experience — the Penguin edition includes not only the main text (with scrupulously marked lacunae), but also various other related texts from the long period during which the poem was reworked. The information given about how Assyriologists go about restoring, deciphering and translating the tablets was also highly impressive.
The work itself I found most attractive in its odd details. Gilgamesh (stressed on the second syllable, it turns out) mourns his friend Enkidu:
Six days I wept for him and seven nights.
I did not surrender his body for burial,
until a maggot dropped from his nostril.
A woman bakes a loaf of bread a day in order to show Gilgamesh how many days he’s been unconscious:
Go, bake for him his daily bread-loaf, and line them up by his head,
and mark on the wall the days that he sleeps!’
So she baked for him his daily bread-loaf, she lined them up by his head,
noting on the wall the days that he slept.
His first bread-loaf was all dried up,
the second was leathery, soggy the third,
the fourth flour-cake had turned to white,
the fifth had cast a mould of grey,
fresh-baked was the sixth,
the seventh still on the coals:
then he touched him and the man awoke.
And Gilgamesh drops his toys into the underworld, then sits down and cries:
his ball and his mallet both fell down to the bottom of the Netherworld.
With … he could not reach it,
he used his hand, but he could not reach it,
he used his foot, but he could not reach it.
At the Gate of Ganzir, the entrance to the Netherworld, he took a seat.
Gilgamesh began weeping and sobbing:
‘O my ball! O my mallet!
O ball, which I had not yet enjoyed to the full!
Another point of interest is the close parallels between Babylonian and Biblical mythology:
‘This plant, Ur-shanabi, is the “Plant of Heartbeat”,
with it a man can regain his vigour.
To Uruk-the-Sheepfold I will take it,
to an ancient I will feed some and put the plant to the test!
‘If the ancient grows young again,
I will eat it myself, and be once more as I was in my youth!’
At twenty leagues they broke bread,
at thirty leagues they stopped for the night.
Gilgamesh found a pool whose water was cool,
down he went into it, to bathe in the water.
Of the plant’s fragrance a snake caught scent,
came up in [silence], and bore the plant off.‘The seventh day when it came,
I brought out a dove, I let it loose:
off went the dove but then it returned,
there was no place to land, so back it came to me.
‘I brought out a swallow, I let it loose:
off went the swallow but then it returned,
there was no place to land, so back it came to me.
‘I brought out a raven, I let it loose:
off went the raven, it saw the waters receding,
finding food, bowing and bobbing, it did not come back to me.