Dancing Mad God

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.

Another eight books finished this month, five by Women/POC.

• Alte Sorten — Ewald Arenz
• The Books of Jacob — Olga Tokarczuk
• Sieben leere Häuser — Samanta Schweblin
• Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? — Lev Parikian
• In Morningstar’s Shadow — Aliette de Bodard
• Dunkelblum — Eva Menasse
• die dinge, die ich denke, während ich höflich lächle | Synchronicity — Sharon Dodua Otoo
• You Should Come With Me Now — M. John Harrison

The Books of Jacob is huge. Almost a thousand pages, with a large cast and covering a fairly lengthy period of time, it still manages to keep the reader’s attention by focusing on a few central characters. The book is based on a true story, and clearly involved a lot of research into the period and place — a Poland very different from the modern state, essentially multicultural and stretching through what is now western Ukraine to borders with the Austrian and Turkish empires. The book itself is similarly diverse, part-epistolary, studded with uncaptioned illustrations Sebald-style, and, in simple but effective trick, with pages numbered in reverse. As well as being a nod to the Hebrew reading direction, the page-numbers counting down create an increasing sense of drama.

Dunkelblum has some interesting similarities: it’s set on the eastern border of Austria (“Dort hinten beginnt Asien, sagten die Dunkelblumer gern mit pathetischem Schaudern in Richtung Grenze, wir sind die letzten Ausläufer”); it covers events throughout the twentieth century; and as a “novel of a town” it has many characters (with a list of Dramatis Personae to help keep track). It’s an ensemble piece, choosing not to focus on any particular characters, but on the town as a whole. The sense of place is wonderful — another welcome appendix is a gloss of the Austriacisms which permeate the book. These appear primarily in the dialogue, but the border between this and the narration is fluid, with the latter taking the points of view and linguistic tics of the characters concerned. Hungary is usually “over there”: “Unterrichtet wurde übrigens auf Drüberisch, da man in Horkas erstem Lebensjahrzehnt noch zu Drüben gehörte.”

The people of Dunkelblum are portrayed with affection, despite the often dark subject matter, and there’s a Whisky Galore-type celebration of the patronised locals: “Jedes Land hat seine Ostfriesen, in Österreich sind es die Burgenländer.” One character’s memories of his mother are particularly well-drawn: “Jedes Mal, wenn sie ihn um etwas schickte, verlangte sie etwas Großes, auch wenn die jeweilige Sache gar nicht besonders groß war oder es nur ein einzelnes Stück davon gab. Aber so war es gewesen, das machte ihr Spaß, und wie lange hatte er nicht mehr daran gedacht. Kisfiam, die große Schere, die große Rolle Spagat, die große Schaufel, da drüben, sperr die Augen auf.”

There’s an additional lack of unity in the plotting: Menasse plays with the expectation that everything will be wrapped up in the end; an expectation which the characters at times share and discuss (“ich war mir sicher – da gibt es einen Schlüssel, einen Code. Und ich wollte ihn unbedingt finden – vielleicht bin ich der Einzige, der ihn finden kann?”). As in life, some things are connected, others aren’t, and some are just red herrings.

The novel seems to satirise the “cozy crime” genre so popular in Britain; it and the next book, Alte Sorten, can be seen as examples of a parallel German genre, the Dorfroman (while Dunkelblum is nominally a town, the number of characters does not obviously reflect that). Alte Sorten lacks the other novel’s humour, but it focuses tightly on the relationship between the two main characters: a woman running a farm on her own, and a teenage girl who comes to stay with her. It’s much more rural in tone, with the newcomer allowing for much description of agricultural practices which paints the picture well, if at the cost of some info-dumping. Over the course of a few weeks at the start of autumn, both characters do a lot of growing: “Die meisten Leute hatten vergessen, dass auch im Herbst Dinge wachsen konnten; und dass man mit ihnen vorsichtiger umgehen musste, als mit denen, die im Frühjahr kraftvoll aus der Erde schossen.”

Nature also dominates Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear?, a narrative of a big year by a very rusty bird-watcher. Like Simon Barnes, Parikian uses his poor birdwatching skills and humour to engage the naturally-challenged reader, but even the jokes smuggle in information (“a capercaillie, which sounds like a mixture of a ball going down a plughole and someone sanding a grasshopper”).

Sieben leere Häuser and die dinge, die ich denke, während ich höflich lächle | Synchronicity are both by adopted Berliners, and were both translations into German — the former has not yet appeared in English, but fortunately the German market is more receptive than some others to translated books! The stories are in a similar absurdist vein to A Mouthful of Birds. The Otoo book consists of two novellas which were originally written in English, but the German translation fits well with Berlin setting. Both unfold in interesting narrative techniques: the first reveals gradually deeper layers of the story as it goes back in time (chapters numbered in reverse, a la Tokarczuk!), while the second is divided into short chapters for the 24 days of advent.

In Morningstar’s Shadow is a group of three stories set in an alternate history of Paris; they provide brief, but welcome glimpses of the earlier lives of characters from de Bodard’s novel The House of Shattered Wings.

The last collection of stories, You Should Come With Me Now, is classic recent M. John Harrison. The stories range from poetic sketches of a page or less, to mid-length narratives which often include material which Harrison reworked later (in this case, in The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again). This creates a very Harrisonesque, enjoyably unsettling feeling in the reader.

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!

My latest completed book (or rather volume one of two) for pgdp is Aspects of Nature, by Alexander von Humboldt. This is a rather odd one, consisting of three papers by Humboldt, together with his own supplemental notes to each, which actually take up the great bulk of the text.

The papers are all based on Humboldt’s South American expedition: one on Steppes and Deserts, focusing on the Venezuelan prairie; the second on the Cataracts of the Orinoco; and the last on Nocturnal Life of Animals in the Primeval Forest. These are all quite easy reading, the latter two in particular rather narrative in tone.

The notes, written much later in Humboldt’s life, are a mixed bag, with interesting references to other sources and developments subsequent to the original papers, along with some very dry and outdated discussion of the heights of various mountain ranges, temperatures etc. For most people, these are unlikely to be read from start to finish.

The sections on the search for the source of the Orinoco river in particular give an impressive picture of the discomforts and dangers nineteenth-century explorers were willing to endure in order to gain scientific information. Attitudes can be hard for the modern reader to understand; Humboldt writes within a couple of pages of the sadness of language extinction:

It is even probable that the last family of the Atures may not have been long deceased, for (a singular fact,) there is still in Maypures an old parrot of whom the natives affirm that he is not understood because he speaks the Ature language.

and of doing a spot of grave-robbing:

We left the cave at nightfall, after having collected, to the great displeasure of our Indian guides, several skulls and the entire skeleton of a man.

One particularly interesting section for me was on native Americans and Inuit discovering Western Europe, from Roman until relatively recent times:

James Wallace, in his “Account of the Islands of Orkney, (1700, p. 60),” relates, that in 1682 a Greenlander was seen in his boat off the South Point of the Island of Eda by several persons, who did not succeed in bringing him to shore. In 1684, a Greenland fisherman appeared in his boat off the Island of Westram. In the church at Barra there was suspended an Esquimaux boat, driven thither by currents and tempests.

Volume two (which I should get round to some time this year) deals in similar style with the Physiognomy of Plants, Volcanoes in Different Parts of the Globe, the mysterious “Vital Force, or Rhodian Genius”, and the Plateau of Caxamarca.

I finished a round 60 books in the second half of 2021, exactly half by non-white-males. The other measure I’m starting to keep track of is the number in German — 14 this time.

Short stories

Subtly Worded and Other Stories — Teffi
Where I’m Calling From — Raymond Carver
The Ebony Tower — John Fowles
The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed — Mariana Enriquez
Fallensteller — Saša Stanišić
Die Wahrheit über das Lügen — Benedict Wells
The Flicker Against the Light — Jane Alexander
The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories — Haruki Murakami and Jay Rubin
365 — James Robertson

I kept up with at least one story a day — actually two a day, as I read one of James Robertson’s 365 online for each day in addition (the last one is excellent: https://three-six-five.net/Stories-And-Music/December/31 ). Wisdom from Raymond Carver:

In addition to being in love, we like each other and enjoy one another’s company.

And gems from Modern British Short Stories:

Wilson — We both agreed then that Rodney Galt was quite awful in most ways but that we rather liked him all the same. This is my usual experience with a great number of people that I meet, but Henry found it more surprising.

Ballard — The white flank of the Shuttle’s hull was a lantern of translucent bone, casting a spectral light over the sombre forest.

Carter — Our pelts were stippled with the fretted shadows of the lace curtains as if our skins were a mysterious uniform provided by the management in order to render all those who made love in that hotel anonymous.

There were some lovely comparisons in The Flicker Against the Light:

her mouth went tight like the opposite of chocolate

The Japanese stories had lots of interesting discoveries, while it was fun to read about a place not completely dissimilar to where I now live in the title story of Fallensteller.

das Dorf bald von einer Entführung sprach, nicht ohne Stolz, dass solche arabischen oder großstädtischen Vorkommnisse auch bei uns möglich waren.

Einige scheinen Bauarbeiter oder Promis zu sein, da im Oktober noch stark braungebräunt.

Non-fiction

Rewild Yourself — Simon Barnes
Das Verborgene Leben der Meisen — Andreas Tjernshaugen
Travels into Bokhara — Alexander Burnes
Sightlines — Kathleen Jamie
Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China — Arthur Waley
The Natural History of Selborne — Gilbert White
Storm in a Teacup: The physics of everyday life — Helen Czerski
The Journals of George Eliot — George Eliot

Simon Barnes’ Rewild Yourself was a good counterpart to my year of nature discovery — some things I’ve already done, some I’m working on, and some for the future. The Natural History of Selborne was tough reading in places — his approach was along the lines of ‘shoot first and observe later’, but it was interesting to compare his own observations with what I’ve seen. It’s full of little nuggets:

Now is the only time to ascertain the short-winged summer birds; for, when the leaf is out, there is no making any remarks on such a restless tribe; and when once the young begin to appear it is all confusion: there is no distinction of genus, species, or sex.

when some years ago many Guernsey lizards were turned loose in Pembroke College garden, in the University of Oxford, they lived a great while, and seemed to enjoy themselves very well, but never bred.

I have frequently remarked that swallows are seen later at Oxford than elsewhere; is it owing to the vast massy buildings of that place, to the many waters round it, or to what else?

A neighbour of mine, who is said to have a nice ear, remarks that the owls about this village hoot in three different keys, in G flat, or F sharp, in B flat and A flat. He heard two hooting to each other, the one in A flat, and the other in B flat.

The same person finds upon trial that the note of the cuckoo (of which we have but one species) varies in different individuals; for, about Selborne wood, he found they were mostly in D: he heard two sing together, the one in D, the other in D sharp, who made a disagreeable concert: he afterwards heard one in D sharp, and about Wolmer Forest some in C.

If any person would watch these birds [swifts] of a fine morning in May, as they are sailing round at a great height from the ground, he would see every now and then, one drop on the back of another, and both of them sink down together for many fathoms with a loud piercing shriek. This I take to be the juncture when the business of generation is carrying on…. When they mute, or ease themselves in flight, they raise their wings, and make them meet over their backs.

it does not appear from experiment that bees are in any way capable of being affected by sounds; for I have often tried my own with a large speaking-trumpet held close to their hives, and with such an exertion of voice as would have hailed a ship at the distance of a mile, and still these insects pursued their various employments undisturbed, and without showing the least sensibility or resentment.

A good ornithologist should be able to distinguish birds by their air as well as by their colours and shape, on the ground as well as on the wing, and in the bush as well as in the hand. For, though it must not be said that every species of birds has a manner peculiar to itself, yet there is somewhat in most genera at least, that at first sight discriminates them, and enables a judicious observer to pronounce upon them with some certainty.

during these two Siberian days, my parlour cat was so electric, that had a person stroked her, and been properly insulated, the shock might have been given to a whole circle of people.

Here’s another nature-watcher, Kathleen Jamie, on silence and teenagers:

a mineral silence which presses powerfully on our bodies, coming from very far off. It’s deep and quite frightening, and makes my mind seem clamorous as a goose.

For a few years they’ll enter a dark mirror-tunnel whose sides reflect only themselves.

George Eliot’s Journals were rather a curate’s egg, with plenty of longueurs, but also wonderful views of her and Lewes being bored by Wagner, going rock-pooling, comparing sales figures with the Brontës’, and ploughing their way through the library.

SF/F

Vagabonds — Hao Jingfang
Station Eleven — Emily St. John Mandel
Memoirs of a Spacewoman — Naomi Mitchison
The House of Shattered Wings — Aliette de Bodard
Surface Detail — Iain M. Banks
The Dream Archipelago — Christopher Priest
Der satanarchäolügenialkohöllische Wunschpunsch — Michael Ende
Parable of the Sower — Octavia E. Butler
A Stranger in the Citadel — Tobias S. Buckell
Blindness — José Saramago
The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood
The Sandman Vol. 5: A Game of You — Neil Gaiman

I was really excited by the idea of Vagabonds, but the reality was some of the worst writing I’ve ever come across:

Thinking about everyone who had spoken with him about his film, Eko felt like a pedestrian standing still on a median, surrounded by busy lanes of rushing traffic. He didn’t care about the opinions of the other delegates, because they were like arrows aimed at the wrong target. The useless suggestions formed a constricting lasso around him, but his interest was like a soap bubble caught by the lasso, expanding in a different dimension even as the lasso tightened.

“It’s all because he picked the right mentor. I think the mentor was just promoted to be a system director recently, and his project has ironclad funding for the future. He really likes Martin and asked him to be in charge of several key simulations. Martin’s citation rate skyrocketed, which allowed him to be promoted over several researchers with much more seniority.”

In the sky, strange planets lit up one after another, like abstract pencil sketches.

Coincidentally, three of these books — Station Eleven, Blindness, and Parable of the Sower — were about societal collapse during or in the wake of pandemics; apply comparison here. I very much liked the first two, especially the hypnotic quality of Blindness:

I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.

Station Eleven had its lighter moments:

They’d all seen the post-apocalyptic movies with the dangerous stragglers fighting it out for the last few scraps. Although actually when she thought about it, Annette said, the post-apocalyptic movies she’d seen had all involved zombies. “I’m just saying,” she said, “it could be much worse.”

Memoirs of a Spacewoman was quite an experience:

But meat-eating did make the jackals less pleasant to talk to than the dogs, though they were just as intelligent and perhaps rather more original-minded. The hyaena was intelligent too, and could be communicated with; leopards tended to be perpetually otherwhere.

Reading The Handmaid’s Tale was very much influenced by having seen the series, but there were some lovely linguistic touches:

The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.

an aging bass baritone, his cheeks like emptied udders

her long broom-coloured hair [although I suspect I’m misunderstanding the “broom”, I prefer my interpretation]

Surface Detail had aliens suspiciously similar to people I know:

When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.

A Game of You was probably the best Sandman I’ve read so far; despite being essentially one big dream sequence, it avoids the arbitrariness that they often fall into.

Crime

The Silver Swan — Benjamin Black
Knots and Crosses — Ian Rankin

Hm. Still not a huge fan of crime fiction.

Gutenberging

Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion — John Cuthbert Lawson

More details on this one in my earlier post: http://chinese-poems.com/blog/?p=2203

Poetry

Begin Again: Poems by Gracey Paley — Grace Paley
On Love and Barley — Matsuo Bashō
Shakespeare’s Sonnets — William Shakespeare
Purgatory — Alasdair Gray

I much prefer Paley’s stories to her poems, but this had plenty of enjoyable moments:

there is a plan being made
in that small apartment
TO BE GOOD AND HAPPY FOREVER
The fact is this can be successful
if it starts late enough in life

I am especially open to sadness and hilarity
since my father died as a child
one week ago in this his ninetieth year

It is the poet’s responsibility to learn the truth from the
powerless

And all of Hand-Me-Downs and Walking in the Woods, here: https://persimmontree.org/summer-2007/ten-poems/

Bashō’s haikus don’t always come over well in translation, but there were some very striking ones:

Clouds — a chance to dodge moon-viewing.

Skylark sings all day, and day not long enough.

Snowy morning — one crow after another.

The Sonnets were much weirder than I’d expected — the first group were by some way the least enjoyable, so it took me a while to get into them, but the Arden edition’s annotations were very helpful. Gray’s non-boring version of Dante continues, and I’m looking forward to Paradise.

Literature

Birdcage Walk — Helen Dunmore
Gehen Ging Gegangen — Jenny Erpenbeck
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead — Olga Tokarczuk
A Change of Climate — Hilary Mantel
Das Haus der glücklichen Alten — Valter Hugo Mãe
The Magic Toyshop — Angela Carter
In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts — Eugen Ruge
Secrecy — Rupert Thomson
Engleby — Sebastian Faulkes
Schäfchen im Trockenen — Anke Stelling
The Third Man — Graham Greene
Der Sommer der Schmetterlinge — Adriana Lisboa
Spring — Ali Smith
The Butt — Will Self
Archipel — Inger-Maria Mahlke
Stephen Hero — James Joyce
Mein Deutscher Bruder — Chico Buarque
Blaue Frau — Antje Rávik Strubel
Adas Raum — Sharon Dodua Otoo
Pointed Roofs — Dorothy M. Richardson
A Way in the World — V. S. Naipaul
Die Ausgewanderten — W. G. Sebald
Bellwether — Connie Willis

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was great fun, an anti-detective, environmentalist novel with a memorable protagonist you want to spend time with.

For some time I shared my bed with a Catholic, and nothing good came of it.

They were more human than people in every possible way. More affectionate, wiser, more joyful.

The fact that we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future is a terrible mistake in the programming of the world. It should be fixed at the first opportunity.

Stephen Hero was no Portrait of the Artist, but there are some great lines:

The young men in the college regarded art as a continental vice

Stephen gazed at the idea-proof young man

A spiritual interpretation of a landscape is very rare. Some people think they write spiritually if they make their scenery dim and cloudy.

I do not idealise the girls I see every day. I regard them as marsupials.

Civilisation may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws

Who taught you to drink pints of plain porter, might I ask? Is that considered the proper thing for an … artist to do?

Angela Carter writing the uncanny:

Her carved eyeballs stared back at them with the uncanny blindness of statues, who seem always to be perceiving another dimension, where everything is statues.

I loved Das Haus der glücklichen Alten — emotionally devastating, satirical, but also very amusing about life, fascist Portugal, and especially age:

als hätte ich wütende Katzen in den Knochen

Wir haben am Ende mit dem schrecklichsten Tier zu tun, dem Tier in uns, mit der Bestie, die wir selber sind. Die entscheidet, dass der Moment gekommen ist, in dem unsere Sinne allmählich abgeschaltet werden, und die entscheidet, wie und wann wir welchen Schmerz oder welchen Wahnsinn erleiden müssen…. alt sein heisst, gegen den Körper zu leben. Die widerliche Bestie, die wir sind und die uns nicht mehr erträgt.

In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts was another great discovery, thanks to parents-in-law; a big story of people living their lives in and after the DDR-period. Blaue Frau and Adas Raum were contrasting, but equally exciting German-women discoveries. Die Ausgewanderten had a great almost-Austrian gloom:

Der Hemdkragen war ihm um seinen faltigen Hals, der wie der mancher Federtiere oder einer Schildkröte harmonikaartig aus- und einfahren konnte, zu weit geworden

nichts war für mich, seit ich einmal in München gewesen war, so eindeutig mit dem Wort Stadt verbunden wie Schutthalden, Brandmauern und Fensterlöcher, durch die man die leere Luft sehen konnte.

Meanwhile, Mein Deutscher Bruder included someone trying to read Sebald:

das Kapitel nahm keine Ende. Es waren Seiten und Seiten eines einzigen Absatzes, und ich konnte nicht mehr mittendrin aufhoeren

Twitter, of all places, introduced me to Dorothy M. Richardson:

She loathed women. They always smiled. All the teachers had at school, all the girls, but Lilla. Eve did . . . maddeningly sometimes . . . Mother … it was the only funny horrid thing about her.

Did she want to tell anybody? To come out into the open and be helped and have things arranged for her and do things like other people? No….

There are no rules for English pronunciation, but what is usual at the University of Oxford is decisive for cultured people

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

Next

I managed most of what I’d planned this time, but non-Shakespearean plays (Ibsen? Strindberg?), volume 2 of Parfit’s On What Matters and Max Porter are still to do. There are a lot of other things I want to fit in: Eliot’s poetry, three German books a month, finishing the Culture read-through … my planning spreadsheet currently has 66 books, which might be a tall order! Some of them are also very long: Tokarczuk’s Books of Jacob (992 pages), Nino Haratischwili’s Das Achte Leben (1280 pages), and Birds Britannica over the course of 2022. Here’s to a wordy year!

I finished an industrious 54 books in this six months — more than my rough target of two a week. Also pleasingly, exactly half were by non-white-males. So woke. There were also a few big books, notably Doris Lessing’s and Grace Paley’s collected stories, Tony Harrison’s collected poems, and of course the Wake. I have many quotes this time!

Short stories

Ted Chiang — Exhalation
The Hidden Girl and Other Stories — Ken Liu
Scenes of Clerical Life — George Eliot
Stories — Doris Lessing
Tales of the Jazz Age — F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories — Susanna Clarke
The Door in the Wall and Other Stories — H. G. Wells
The Thing Around Your Neck — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time — A. L. Kennedy
Smoke and Mirrors — Neil Gaiman
Tenth Doctor Tales — Peter Anghelides et al.
Collected Stories — Grace Paley

A bit of a tragedy here — this was the last of George Eliot, at least in terms of prose fiction. I need to find her letters, and start on them. Even this early work is full of gems:

As she entered, her face wore the smile appropriate to the exits and entrances of a young lady who feels that her presence is an interesting fact

And indeed the Mr. Gilfil of those late Shepperton days had more of the knots and ruggedness of poor human nature than there lay any clear hint of in the open-eyed loving Maynard. But it is with men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow, which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding into plenteous beauty; and the trivial erring life which we visit with our harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb is withered.

this tenderness of the son for the mother was hardly more than a nucleus of healthy life in an organ hardening by disease, because the man who was linked in this way with an innocent past, had become callous in worldliness, fevered by sensuality, enslaved by chance impulses; pretty, because it showed how hard it is to kill the deep-down fibrous roots of human love and goodness–how the man from whom we make it our pride to shrink, has yet a close brotherhood with us through some of our most sacred feelings.

Our daily familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds, and those who sit with us at the same hearth are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good.

Thank heaven, then, that a little illusion is left to us, to enable us to be useful and agreeable—that we don’t know exactly what our friends think of us—that the world is not made of looking-glass, to show us just the figure we are making, and just what is going on behind our backs! By the help of dear friendly illusion, we are able to dream that we are charming and our faces wear a becoming air of self-possession; we are able to dream that other men admire our talents—and our benignity is undisturbed; we are able to dream that we are doing much good—and we do a little.

Ted Chiang’s Exhalation is very clever, if lacking a little in soul, with thought-provoking ideas about the effects of technology on our selves:

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.

Fitzgerald was sometimes splendidly spiky:

Then came supper, and after that they went out for a walk, up two blocks and through Central Park, or sometimes to a moving picture, which taught them patiently that they were the sort of people for whom life was ordered, and that something very grand and brave and beautiful would soon happen to them if they were docile and obedient to their rightful superiors and kept away from pleasure.

Grace Paley completely blew me away. Clever, funny, and wise:

Inside the head is the only place you got to be young when the usual place gets used up.

The only problem is that she didn’t write enough, but I’ll try the poems.

A. L. Kennedy mentioned on twitter that We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time had sold 85 copies in hardback, so I felt obliged to get the 86th. And very glad I did: she writes so well about the ordinary crises of life.

Literature

Normal People — Sally Rooney
My Cleaner — Sally Gee
The Children Act — Ian McEwan
Homegoing — Yaa Gyasi
Finnegans Wake — James Joyce
Beyond Black — Hilary Mantel
4321 — Paul Auster
Winter — Ali Smith
Stonemouth — Iain Banks
The Voyage Out — Virginia Woolf
The Gustav Sonata — Rose Tremain
Hamnet — Maggie O’Farrell
Silence — Shusaku Endo

Finnegans Wake took a bit of determination to get through, but with the skeleton key to give an idea of what was happening, I was free to enjoy the use of language. The lists, especially, were splendid. 4321 is also hugely long — too long, at times — but the device of the four narrators works very well to address the philosophical idea of what makes a person through convincing stories.

The Voyage Out is very odd, but includes some great descriptions:

The shooting motor cars, more like spiders in the moon than terrestrial objects

“How are you, Vinrace?” said Ridley, extending a limp hand as he came in, as though the meeting were melancholy to both, but on the whole more so to him.

Rachel was an unlicked girl

Hamnet achieved another impressive trick — writing about Shakespeare, but making Agnes a perfectly natural centre of the novel.

SF/F

The Apex Book of World SF — Lavie Tidhar (ed.)
The Evidence — Christopher Priest
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again — M. John Harrison
Little Eyes — Samanta Schweblin
The Hydrogen Sonata — Iain M. Banks
Midnight Robber — Nalo Hopkinson
The Constant Rabbit — Jasper Fforde

Little Eyes is a little gem, dealing with contemporary themes of surveillance and social atomisation through a mosaic of tales. The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is one that I need to read again; as he often does, he incorporates material from one of his earlier books in a very disorientating way. Credit also to Jasper Fforde for a very funny take on good old British xenophobia.

The Hydrogen Sonata includes some of Banks’ best lines:

It would be far preferable if things were better, but they’re not, so let’s make the most of it. Let’s see what fresh fuckwittery the dolts can contrive to torment themselves with this time.

Any customary sign-off?
Well, hers to me is usually, ‘Well, if you’re going to be like that!’ followed by the screen going blank, and mine is usually, ‘Um, you take care,’ because it sounds, well, caring, without necessitating the use of the word ‘love’.

The truth is the truth. You tell it even when it hurts or it loses its value even when it doesn’t.

German

Herkunft — Saša Stanišić
Eine unberührte Welt Band 2 — Andreas Eschbach
Die fünf Seelen des Ahnen — Ulrike Nolte
Die Ringe des Saturn — W. G. Sebald
Altes Land — Dörte Hansen
Liebesarten — Ulla Hahn

I’d read the Sebald long ago in English, but some things just sound better in German:

ich wusste wohl weder damals, noch weiss ich es heute, ob ich das einsame Gehen als eine Wohltat empfand oder als eine Qual.

Altes Land is a great portrayal of life in the German countryside — various mixes of locals and immigrants try and generally fail to understand one another, and Hansen manages to understand and laugh at everyone simultaneously.

In Liebesarten, I discovered that I’m not the only one to have amused myself in this way in church:

Thekla schaute ihn an und ließ, wie sie es als Kind in der Kirche mit den Kerzenflammen getan hatte, durch ein leichtes Nachobenkippen der Pupillen die Konturen seines Gesichtes verschwimmen

And I loved:

selbst im Sommer sah [der alte Birnbaum] mit seinem spaerlichen Laub wie ein getarnter Winterbaum aus

Shakespeare

Henry VI Part 1 — William Shakespeare
Henry VI Part 2 — William Shakespeare
Henry VI Part 3 — William Shakespeare
Richard III — William Shakespeare

First Henriad! The first three are a little ropey, but Richard III more than made up for it. It stirred vague memories of Ian McKellen at His Majesty’s in Aberdeen.

Entertainment

March Violets — Philip Kerr
The Constant Gardener — John le Carré

I read The Constant Gardener mainly because I thought that The Constant Rabbit would be a parody of it; in this respect I wasted my time. I wasn’t really amazed by my first le Carré, but I’ll give the earlier ones a try.

Poetry

Hell — Alasdair Gray
The Birthday Letters — Ted Hughes
The Sun-fish — Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Collected Poems — Tony Harrison

I was a bit uncertain about Hell, as not being “real” imaginative Gray, but it turned out to be a hoot. He ruthlessly cuts out all the boring bits of Renaissance Florence politics, and there are interesting overlaps with Lanark‘s questing, being guided, and phantasmagoric dystopia generally. After a slow start with the early works, I really enjoyed Tony Harrison too; he makes great use of rhyme:

Or getting a taxi to Slovakia to have a/stroll round medieval Bratislava/and, with herby Becherovka and weak tea,/I toasted you in Slovak: Nazdravi!

Non-fiction

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief — Lewis Wolpert
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake — Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson
Orientalism — Edward Said
The Hidden Life of Trees — Peter Wohlleben
Breathtaking — Rachel Clarke
Venice — Jan Morris

One interesting point from Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast:

Science is not the same as technology. Technology alters nature: things are made. The final product of science is understanding, while that of technology is a product, something that is used. Much of modern technology is based on science, but this link is of recent origin, since science had virtually no impact on technology until the nineteenth century. Technology includes the ancient arts of agriculture and metal making, as well as the great Renaissance buildings and the machines and engines of the Industrial Revolution. All these were achieved without any influence from science

The Hidden Life of Trees was full of interesting nuggets, especially relevant to the mixed oak and beech that I’m living near now:

When there is a lack of nitrogen, the [fungus] releases a deadly toxin into the soil, which causes minute organisms such as springtails to die and release the nitrogen tied up in their bodies, forcing them to become fertilizer for both the trees and the fungi.

In a forest that has been left to its own devices, the genetic makeup of each individual tree belonging to the same species is very different. This is in contrast to people, who are genetically very similar…. In contrast, the individual beeches growing in a stand near where I live are as far apart genetically as different species of animals.

Breathtaking — an account of the first wave of Covid — was another which I wasn’t sure I’d take to, but I recommend it highly. It’s a reminder of just how well and how badly different people responded at the time, and manages to balance the terrible facts with an underlying optimism about human nature which is very moving.

The episodic nature of Venice meant that it took me a while to finish, but it was always enjoyable. Morris includes portraits of the people and out of the way places (such as the further-flung islands of the lagoon) which most visitors don’t experience, and has some brilliant lines:

(she is the only Christian city marked on Ibn Khaldun’s celebrated fourteenth-century map, together with such places as Gog, Oman, Stinking Land, Waste Country, Soghd, Tughuzghuz and Empty In The North Because Of The Cold)

I once went to an exhibition in Venice that consisted of some fifty portraits, all by the same artist, all meticulously executed, all very expensive, and all of the same cat

I once saw a young business man, sitting on his haunches in the Via 22 Marzo, fanning an exhausted bull terrier with his briefcase

The lanes of Venice often have lovely names – the Alley of the Curly-Headed Woman; the Alley of the Love of Friends Or of the Gypsies; the Filled-In Canal of Thoughts; the Broad Alley of the Proverbs; the First Burnt Alley and the Second Burnt Alley, both commemorating seventeenth-century fires; the Street of the Monkey Or of The Swords; the Alley of the Blind.

‘The piazza of St Mark’s’, wrote a medieval Venetian monk, with a fastidious sigh, ‘seems perpetually filled with Turks, Libyans, Parthians and other monsters of the sea.’

There are 107 churches in Venice, and nearly every tourist feels he has seen at least 200 of them

While the women stitch, the men go fishing, as in an allegory, or an opera.

My plan for the rest of the year so far: Shakespeare sonnets; more non-Shakespearean plays; Paley’s poems; more German; volume 2 of Parfit’s On What Matters; the last biggish Joyce for me — Stephen Hero; and explore a few new people — Rupert Thomson and Max Porter look intriguing.