Nine books finished this month, six by women/POC, and two in German (made up for by the extra one last month).
- Identitti — Mithu Sanyal
- The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s — Brian Aldiss
- England and Other Stories — Graham Swift
- The Separation — Christopher Priest
- Interim — Dorothy M. Richardson
- RunRabbitRun — Nadja Sennewald
- What I Don’t Know About Animals — Jenny Diski
- O Caledonia — Elspeth Barker
- Amora — Natalia Borges Polesso tr. Julia Sanches
Starting with the Germans, Identitti was tremendous fun. In this tale an Indian cultural studies teacher at a German university is revealed, Dolezalesquely, to actually be white. The novel is short on action, consisting mainly of discussions between the teacher, her favourite student, and their circle of friends and relatives (plus the goddess Kali), but Sanyal combines intellectualism and vulgar humour in the manner of Angela Carter. It’s a really gripping novel of ideas (and also available as a radio play).
RunRabbitRun, by Nadja Sennewald, is rather similar to Unter Markenmenschen, which I read last month: near-future sci-fi, set in Germany with a female protagonist. This time the issue is the surveillance-heavy para-states established by corporations, exemplified by a TV company which runs a gameshow in which a “hare” has to solve riddles and escape capture, while having the sights and sounds her experiences broadcast to “hobby hunters” seeking to claim the prize for catching him. There’s a pleasingly ambiguous ending, and a diverse cast of outcast characters who help the hare for their own purposes. The copious slang makes it a lively read, if slightly challenging for the likes of me.
Similarities to other books and writers seems to have been a theme this month: in honour of the late Elspeth Barker, I read O Caledonia, which was an absolute hoot (if a grim hoot), with a castle-set story reminiscent of Iain Banks crossed with Shirley Jackson. It’s also the second of my books this year to feature a jackdaw on the cover, and quite extensively inside, with consequently compulsory reference to Konrad Lorenz:
In Konrad Lorenz’s wonderful King Solomon’s Ring she found the explanation. He wished to lure her into her pocket, and there they would build a nest together. He had chosen her as his mate, his true and everlasting love, for jackdaws are monogamous. How strange that the creature who offered her all this should be a bird. How strange for him that she should be a human.
A large part of the book’s attraction is the depiction of the local Scottish gloom:
the cold parlours of outlying crofts, where the Bible was open beside a ticking clock and rock buns were assembled on snowy doilies, malignly aglitter with the menace of carbonised currants.
They were singing too, ‘And not hymns either’, as she said later.
Nanny was bearing down with a face like the North Sea.
Hector was there to meet her at Aberdeen station. There was a sparsely decorated Christmas tree at the end of the platform. Looking at it, Hector observed, ‘This will mean death to thousands of innocent birds.’
One other bookish connection: a parrot which, as in Humboldt’s Aspects of Nature, provides a glimpse of lost language:
Janet’s father’s earliest memories were of the astonishing oaths known to this bird, who was then a hundred and two years old and spoke in ripe gamey accents long since gone from the world of men. Grandpa believed there must be a fair number of such long-lived birds in Scotland – even perhaps in England – and it would be a fine thing to have them all gathered in a great dining hall, invoking ghostly midshipmen and dragoons, violent drinkers and merry rhymesters, perhaps even occasionally an elderly lady of refinement. This, he said, would afford a historical experience of rare value; indeed, ancient parrots should be feted and cultivated as true archivists.
The mutual incomprehension of Janet and her jackdaw echoes Jenny Diski’s attempts to understand her cat in What I Don’t Know About Animals:
What I don’t know, and what I don’t know about what she knows, is almost everything. Nevertheless, we get along well enough together, sharing the house and the world, however differently. As far as I can tell.
She ties in her personal experiences with the work of earlier writers, such as Robert Nagel’s What Is It Like to be a Bat?:
The world of the bat is not our world, not even accessible to our imagination, nor even our language. We can, he says, only imagine what it would be like for us to be a bat, not what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Perhaps it is only possible for me to imagine what it would be like for me to be you, not for you to be you. This isn’t an ethical distinction between bats and me, or you and me, but an abyss of knowledge that we simply can’t cross.
We learn that Derrida was given to similar musings:
his pet cat has a habit of following him every morning from the bedroom into the bathroom and staring at Derrida without his clothes on. Derrida stands naked in his bathroom. The cat stares at his genitals. Derrida, the man, is naked as animals apparently can’t be, which is consciously naked, selfconsciously naked, knowing good and evil and therefore finding himself filled with a difficult-to-define sense of guilt.
Does the look mean ‘Open the door’? Does it mean ‘What to make of that creature who feeds me and opens the door, strips off its outer skin and underneath has a dangly thing just there, not quite within reach, almost like a half-dead mouse, and it moves a little, quite unpredictably’? Does it mean ‘Here is another form, different from the one which I followed from the bedroom. I wonder how it got here and if it’s well-trained enough to know that when I look at it, it must open the door’?
Her engagement with the literature is sometimes perfunctory — she has a tendency to dismiss a philosopher’s life’s work with a short paragraph or two — but she is always thought provoking:
I doubt very much (trying hard to look back) whether young children really think of themselves as the same species as adults. Indeed, they are so different, so lacking in cultural understanding, as well as physical adeptness, that in a real sense they aren’t human like adults are until they become so – a good many years after their birth.
A series called Zoo Quest began in 1954 hosted by an achingly young David Attenborough, who had the bright televisual idea of straddling the separate strands of the BBC’s nature offerings: the zoo and the wild. It was a decidedly uncomfortable position, as we would see it today. Each series centred on a filmed safari to a distant, exotic country to find and capture a particular rare animal for the London Zoo.
Another species paying you no attention is a most marvellous thing
I dislike and disapprove of the colonising aspect of finding easy connection with animals, while at the same time aching for it and identifying it in my relations with animals. The balance of the affect is always ‘They are somewhat like me’, rather than ‘I am somewhat like them’. We deny dignity and selfhood, whatever that might be to whatever creature it is, by making sentimental assumptions about why, what or how an animal is experiencing.
Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage continued this month with Interim. This volume centres on life in Miriam’s London boarding house. She is still attempting to find her social position:
They looked out from that life, seeing hers as hardship and gloom, pitying her, turning blind eyes unwillingly towards her attempts to unveil and make it known to them. She saw herself relinquishing efforts, putting on a desperate animation, professing interests and opinions and talking as people talk, while they watched her with eyes that saw nothing but a pitiful attempt to hide an awful fate, lonely poverty, the absence of any opening prospect, nothing ahead but a gloom deepening as the years counted themselves off.
She listened openly, apologising in swift affectionate glances for her stiff middle-class resentment of his vulgar appearance.
And her observations of the different nationalities passing through the boarding house are sometimes startling:
A Canadian woman ….. that circular jaw movement was made by the Canadian vowels. They disturbed a woman’s small mouth more than a man’s. It must affect her thoughts, the held-open mouth; airing them; making them circular, sympathetically balanced, easier to go on from than the more narrowly mouthed English speech
I finished three volumes of short stories: Amora, by Natalia Borges Polesso, is a (not very Borgesian) collection of stories about lesbian relationships. The more substantial stories are very good; it’s a pity that the sexuality of the characters is still noteworthy, but their own negotiation of social position in an often intolerant Brazil is a prominent feature.
England and Other Stories has an old-fashioned feel to it: characters called Albert or Charlie are seen at turning points in their lives, often in middle-age. It’s elegantly-written, and undramatically enjoyable.
Old-fashioned in a different way are The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s of Brian Aldiss. They are very much stories of the 50s, with endearingly inaccurate visions of the future, seen from a 1950s present. Some of the similes are memorable:
A slender man with a face the colour of an old pocket, dressed in a faultless suit, entered and attempted to smile at Tyne.
dapper, fifty-ish, a little like a wolf with an expense account, smelling agreeably of the most fashionable shaving soap.
Finally, Christopher Priest’s The Separation has a similar atmosphere, set largely around the second world war. In true Priest fashion, there are multiple timelines which are not ultimately resolved, but which the reader can have a rewarding time pondering. The often eccentric scenes involving a bomber crew are at times very similar to those in A. L. Kennedy’s Day, and the portrayal of the historical period counterpoints the speculative aspect of the book very effectively.