Dancing Mad God

I finished a holiday-boosted 14 books in August; 12 of those by women/POC, thanks to Women in Translation month (which turns out to mean non-men writing in non-English, even if that’s not so catchy).

• The Trap — Dorothy M. Richardson
• Before Now — Moira McPartlin
• Valentino — Natalia Ginzburg tr. Maja Pflug (not clear if she is the only translator)
• Ministerium der Träume — Hengameh Yaghoobifarah
• Hikayat: Short Stories by Lebanese Women — Roseanne Saad Khalaf (ed.) (various translators)
• Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex — Oksana Zabuzhko tr. Halyna Hryn
• A Girl’s Story — Annie Ernaux tr. Alison L. Strayer
• Statusmeldungen — Stefanie Sargnagel
• Silma Hill — Iain Maloney
• The Devil’s Pool — George Sand tr. Jane Minot Sedgwick and Ellery Sedgwick
• Still Born — Guadalupe Nettel tr. Rosalind Harvey
• The Sandman Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections — Neil Gaiman
• Alles, was wir nicht erinnern — Christiane Hoffmann
• Oberland — Dorothy M. Richardson

Starting with two instalments of Pilgrimage, both are short and sweet. The Trap sees Miriam taking part in a misguided flat-sharing experiment, lightened by some Wildean dialogue with her flatmate:

“They ought to be pensioned.”

“The poor?”

“Everybody. I should love to be pensioned.”

“And remain in idleness and dependence? Oh, no.”

“Not dependence. Interdependence. No compulsion.”

“What would you do?”

“Spend several years staring; and then go round the world.”

and bizarrened by observing Yeats at his window in the flat opposite.

As in some of the earlier volumes, there are fascinating glimpses of turn-of-the-century life, from soap-cutting to how to move house:

“I’ll go round for my things. Must find a greengrocer,” she said, looking in on Miss Holland cutting a slice from a substantial bar of plain soap.

“You prefer a greengrocer? I am employing the Church Army myself. They are most useful. And it is quite the least expensive way of moving.

More of Miriam being neurodivergent:

It was bad to be so different and to like being different.

And as with the death of her mother, her sister’s death is mentioned only in passing:

It was strange, one of those strange hints life brought that she should have appeared at the very time of the other Eve’s unbearable death, bearing not only her name, but her gentle certainties. And her way of gathering all spears to her own breast.

After several volumes in cheap London rooms, Oberland takes us back to where Pilgrimage started, on the continent — in this case, Switzerland. Little about long-distance travel seems to have changed in the last century:

She had no idea of how long she had sat hemmed and suffering, with nothing in her mind but snatches of song that would not be dismissed, with aching brow and burning eyeballs and a ceaselessly on-coming stupor that would not turn to sleep.

Miriam also seems to have modern ideas about mindfulness:

free from the risk of hearing the opening day fretted by voices set going like incantations to exorcize the present as if it had no value, as if the speakers were not living in it but only in yesterday or to-morrow.

and fundamental attribution error:

Again she had that haunting sense of being a collection of persons living in a world of people always single and the same.

The village of Oberland is becoming dominated by tourism — souvenirs:

Little expensive cheap things whose charm was beyond price

Living inside her head, we learn about the importance of soap:

all great days had soap, impressing its qualities upon you, during your most intense moments of anticipation, as a prelude. And the realization of a good day past, coming with the early morning hour, is accompanied by soap. Soap is with you when you are in that state of feeling life at first hand that makes even the best things that can happen important not so much in themselves as in the way they make you conscious of life, and of yourself living. Every day, even those that are called ordinary days, with its miracle of return from sleep, is heralded by soap, summoning its retinue of companion days.

Miriam spends considerable time with the “tourist community”, but is ultimately alone with the landscape:

all that could be felt to the full only in solitude amongst things whose being was complete, towards that reality of life that withdrew at the sounding of a human voice.

Alpine winter tremendously at work, holding her fascinated at windows downstairs, upstairs; mighty preparation for the beauty of days she would not see, robbing her of farewell, putting farewell back into yesterday’s superficial seeing which had not known it was the last.

Valentino is a novella (here with a few earlier short stories) by Natalia Ginzburg. They may not have been the best place to start with her — all were relatively slight — though I did enjoy her endnote about the difficulties of becoming a writer in such an unglamorous world as middle-class, inter-war Turin. I wasn’t enormously excited by The Devil’s Pool either, though in this case I don’t feel much need to explore George Sand further.

Hikayat: Short Stories by Lebanese Women was a mixed bag, as one might expect. The editor mentions in the introduction that there aren’t that many short stories by Lebanese women, and some of the works here are extracts from longer works, or were written for creative writing workshops. There’s some poor writing (or translation):

‘ … Occasionally I played chess with some of the regulars there, but mostly I donned my mask and flippers to go skin-diving, relishing the cool serenity of the Mediterranean,’ he explained to the interested guests.

Some stories are written in a very florid style which I also found in some Algerian novels, and which I can quite enjoy:

But I know, I know that she loved me desperately, totally, like a cloud loves another cloud and merges into it, why must I keep playing a game, now, when I’m under her death’s absolute power, having lost the very notion of my own self?

“Voice”, by Patricia Saraffian Ward, was the standout story for me, subverting the expectations of the male narrator and the reader.

Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is a love(ish) story about two Ukrainian artists in America. Their chaotic lives are matched by the narrator’s monologic style (parentheses spanning several pages); I was intrigued enough to look out for some of her other works, and there’s an obvious contemporary relevance in the subject matter:

the Ukrainian choice is a choice between nonexistence and an existence that kills you, and that all of our hapless literature is merely a cry of someone pinned down by a beam in a building after an earthquake—I’m here! I’m still alive!—but, unfortunately, the rescue teams are taking their time and on your own—how the hell are you supposed to get out?

at home, in your poor beaten-down country, a country of government officials with sagging pants and generous sprinkles of dandruff on their jackets, greasy writers adept at reading in one language only and not partaking of that ability all too often, and shifty-eyed, cockroach-like businessmen with the habits of former Komsomol organizers

Turning to more definite hits, A Girl’s Story was my first Annie Ernaux, and certainly not my last. Ernaux is like an emotionally self-aware Knausgard: she tells the story of a period of growth and traumas in her teenage years, all the time aware of the differences between her younger and current selves:

To list her social inadequacies would be interminable. She does not know how to make a telephone call, has never taken a shower or bath. She has no experience of environments other than her own, which is Catholic and working class, of peasant origin. From this distance in time, with her great insecurity about her social graces and use of language, she appears to me gauche, ill at ease, even rough-spoken.

The most intense part of her life is the time she spends immersed in the books she has insatiably consumed ever since she learned to read. All she knows about the world she has learned from these, and from women’s magazines.

From her examination of herself, grow broader thoughts about life, time and writing:

At this very moment, out in the streets, the open spaces, on the metro, in lecture halls, and inside millions of heads, millions of novels are being written chapter by chapter, erased and revised, and all of them die as a result of becoming, or not becoming reality.

One cannot see the future of something learned.

to ask a question rarely broached in literature: how does anyone who is just starting out in life muddle through the necessary ordeal of finding a way to earn a living, deal with the moment when a choice must be made, and eventually, with the feeling of being, or not being, where they ought to be?

I know it is impossible for me to remove – sacrifice – everything I have written about her up until now. This also applies to what I have written about myself. That is how this writing differs from a fictional narrative. There can be no tampering with reality, with the this-happened element

It is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibilities of writing.

The combination of autobiography and more philosophical speculations is thrilling.

Statusmeldungen sees Stefanie Sargnagel also mining her life experiences, but distilling the results into mostly tweet-sized entries for each day. Some of the cultural references are obscure to the uninitiated, but the format works very well — she creates larger patterns of series of entries alternating with stand-alones, to great effect — and she enjoys making fun of herself, her milieu and Austrian society more broadly:

4.10.2015 Immer dasselbe: Am Anfang bin ich urbegeistert, dann verlier ich das Interesse (Refugees)

28.2.2016 Schwanz ist die Abkürzung von Schwanentanz

Another very worthwhile experience was Hengameh Yaghoobifarah’s Ministerium der Träume — it begins as a study of the troubles of a woman who is totally unprepared for becoming her niece’s guardian, then metamorphoses into a less-convincing thriller. The developing relationship between the two, plus the depiction of life as a gay person of colour in Germany, are both very well done, however (and my colloquial German was considerably enhanced).

Alles, was wir nicht erinnern is the story of a German journalist (and now government spokeswoman) retracing the route taken by her father’s family when fleeing Silesia at the end of the war. She talks to everyone she can find, and shows their complexities with admirable even-handedness: there are Czechs in the former Sudetenland who turn out to be antisemites, but also returning German former-refugees who see their own history reflected in recent arrivals from the Middle East. The journey is interwoven with a moving account of the family’s post-war years and her father’s eventual death.

Still Born is an excellent novel, based on a true story, of a series of maternal relationships in Mexico City. One of these (involving pigeons) is perhaps a little over-symbolic, but like Hoffman and Yaghoobifarah, she shows clearly the value in the imperfect.

A couple of Scottish novels: Before Now conveys the energy of life in a working class Fife village through exuberant use of dialect. I found the conclusion rather forced, but it didn’t detract from an enjoyable read. Iain Maloney’s Silma Hill is set in another village, where a witch-trial unexpectedly rubs up against 18th-century rationalism. The tone darkens considerably as the novel progresses, with both comic and tragic elements done well, though again I had some issues with the ending.

The final book for this month was The Sandman Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections — my first volume after a bit of a hiatus. This is a collection of short stories, impressively varied, and the series gets better and better.

Following on from Women in Translation month, I’m planning an Asian month for September, to go along with Black History Month in October. And following on from The Sandman, I’d like to do one graphic novel a month at least until the end of the year.

Ten books finished this month, six by women and four in German, so on target so far!

• Hurricane Season — Fernanda Melchor tr. Sophie Hughes
• Annette, Ein Heldinnen-Epos — Anne Weber
• The Testaments — Margaret Atwood
• Automaton — Berit Glanz
• Revolving Lights — Dorothy M. Richardson
• Wenn es dunkel wird — Peter Stamm
• Die Birnen von Ribbeck — Friedrich Christian Delius
• If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things — Jon McGregor
• Emergency — Daisy Hildyard
• The Affirmation — Christopher Priest

Starting with two Fitzcarraldi, Emergency is another of the “novel which reads like a memoir” genre which is so popular these days (and which I do like). Set in a village which, as Hildyard says, is neither rural nor industrial — a hodgepodge of dowdy houses, agribusiness, and an occasionally-worked quarry — this is an anti-pastoral novel of cruelties and occasionally kindnesses (the children tease a disabled woman, who feeds a three-footed deer cake). Ecological links are supplemented, if not superseded, by the economic and polluting links of globalisation, while the narrator buys processed bread in the supermarket: “There was nothing alive inside this building, except humans. That was why it was safe.”

Hurricane Season is set in a somewhat equivalent location in Mexico, between country and town, and is utterly remorseless — chapters cycle between different characters’ viewpoints, but the pages-long sentences, brilliantly translated by Hughes, present a consistently dark story, centred on the murder of a witch. More important than the plot, however, is the depiction of a society in breakdown, utterly bleak, but thrilling to read.

Annette, Ein Heldinnen-Epos also takes a non-traditional form. It tells the story of Anne Beaumanoir, who worked first for the Resistance during the Second World War, then for the FLN in the Algerian struggle for independence. The “heroic epic” of the title is reflected in the printed layout:

Ein Jahr verstreicht, und sie ist immer noch blutjung.
Gehts vielleicht auch ein bisschen schneller mit dem
Erwachsenwerden? Wie lange soll das alles noch
auf diese öde, für ihren Geschmack viel zu
tatenlose Weise weitergehen? Halbherzig
fängt sie in Rennes ein Studium an, und zwar
der Medizin, während sie ganzherzig von einem
Schicksal träumt, von Opfern und von Heldentaten.

Listening to the audiobook, however, the effect is lost, and the text sounds effectively like standard, if eloquent, prose. More relevant is the claim Weber makes for Beaumanoir’s heroism: a woman whose activities were largely message-carrying and, later, the practice of medicine, her moral heroism in following her conscience is impressive.

I finally caught up with the debut novel of Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. It’s in yet another non-traditional form, with a fragmentary narrative shifting rapidly between different unnamed characters. Their frequent interactions keep the story unified, and the non-naming is much more than a fancy: it keeps the reader from pre-judging the characters on the basis of, particularly, ethnicity. The often marvellous prose (“his head startles round to look at me”) again makes creative use of line breaks, often breaking after each sentence :

And so today I’m back on the telephone.

I’m listening to my mother talking, and I’m waiting for the right moment to interrupt.

I know that I have to tell her, I know that I will be able to tell her if I use the right words at the right moment.

Two pillars of feminist writing next: this month’s instalment of Pilgrimage was Revolving Lights. It’s dominated by Miriam’s developing relationship with Hypo Wilson (=H. G. Wells, although Wells is mysteriously referred to by his own name on occasion). Their conversations are a particularly fruitful source of juicily outrageous opinions, but there’s much else to enjoy in this volume:

most people were ready to answer questions, showing by their angry defence of their opinions that they were aware, and afraid, of other ways of looking at things.

Foreigners, except perhaps Germans, answer [a request for directions] differently. Obsequiously; or with a studied politeness that turns the occasion into an opportunity for the display of manners; or indifferently, with a cynical suggestion that they know what you are like, and that you will be the same when you reach your destination. They are themselves, without any fulness or wonder. English people are always waiting to be different, to be fully themselves. Strangers, to them, are gods and angels.

She, with no resources at all, had dropped to easy irresponsible labour to avoid being shaped and branded, to keep her untouched strength free for a wider contemplation than he would have approved, a delight in everything in turn, a plebeian dilettantism, aware and defensive of the exclusive things, but unable to restrict herself to them, unconsciously from the beginning resisting the drawing of lines and setting up of oppositions?

But being her own solitary companion would not go on forever. It would bring in the end, somewhere about middle age, the state that people called madness…. Perhaps the lunatic asylums were full of people who had refused to join up? There were happy people in them?

You’ve no idea how British you are. A mass of British prejudice and intelligent obstinacy. I shall put you in a book.

had felt that they regarded her not with the adoration or half-pitying dislike she had had from women in the past, but as a woman, though only as a weird sort of female who needed teaching.

The tappings of her feet on the beloved pavement were blows struck hilariously on the shoulder of a friend. To keep her voice from breaking forth she sang aloud in her mind, a soaring song unlimited by sound.

“I suggest we have tea,” bellowed Michael softly

Alma neighed gently and with little gurgles of laughter put her hands about her and gently shook her.

People who care only for form think themselves superior. Then there is something wrong with them.

Their marriage was a success without being an exception to the rule that all marriages are failures, as he said.

Countries without foreigners are doomed.

The joy of being with him, the thing that made it worth while to flatter by seeming to agree was more than half the sense of triumphing over other women.

I enjoyed The Testaments rather more than I’d expected: while the plot is slightly ropey, the characterisation of the women of Gilead is impressive. The star turn is Aunt Lydia, largely rehabilitated and spitefully enjoyable company.

Then two (sort of) science fiction novels: The Affirmation is one of Christopher Priest’s best: an early (I think the first) work set in the world of the Dream Archipelago, it tells the story of one central character and two worlds, exploring typically Priestian ideas of reality and identity. It’s perhaps more didactic than his later work in the way it does this, but the narrative is still compelling. Automaton is determinedly contemporary, showing the world of the precariat who make ends meet moderating social media posts and performing online piecework for pennies. The story of how they form personal connections despite their situation is engaging, though the earlier chapters showing the tediousness of their lives perhaps necessarily drag a bit.

Lastly, two new German-language discoveries for me. Wenn es dunkel wird is a collection of stories by the Swiss writer Peter Stamm, very well narrated in the audiobook format and often witty. A favourite was Dietrichs Knie, in which a man intercepts flirtatious emails between his partner and a colleague, and proceeds on a Cyranovian trajectory. Die Birnen von Ribbeck, riffing on a poem by Theodor Fontane, is a short but pointed monologue commenting on the descent of West Germans onto the East after Die Wende. The oral style suited the audiobook format perfectly.

Eleven books finished this month, six by women/POC, and an unexpectedly successful five in German. That makes a respectable 58 for the first half of the year.

• Der andere Name (Heptalogie I – II) — Jon Fosse tr. Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce
• Sinopticon — ed. Xueting Christine Ni
• An der Baumgrenze — Thomas Bernhard
• The Best of All Possible Worlds — Karen Lord
• Eure Heimat ist Unser Albtraum — Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah et al.
• Katherine Carlyle — Rupert Thomson
• Deadlock — Dorothy M. Richardson
• Marzahn, Mon Amour — Katja Oskamp
• All About Love — bell hooks
• Der Trost Runder Dinge — Clemens J. Setz

Der andere Name (Heptalogie I – II) is, like Claudia Durastanti’s Die Fremde, and the in-progress Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, published by Fitzcarraldo in the UK, and falls into the “devastatingly brilliant” genre they seem to specialise in (emphasis on the devastating). In this volume (the first two of seven parts) not a great deal happens, but we inhabit the head of an ageing Norwegian painter living near not-quite Bergen, who interacts with a few obscurely-defined characters who seem to be different versions of one another. So far so off-putting, but it’s told in such a perfectly-judged voice (compared to Beckett by Brits, but for me the German version recalled Thomas Bernhard) that its repetitions keep the reader (or listener — the German audiobook is wonderfully-read) hooked throughout.

Some actual Bernhard for the first of the short story volumes this month — An der Baumgrenze contains three intriguing, but relatively slight earlier works. More substantial Austrian weirdness is to be found in Der Trost Runder Dinge, which contains stories of Schweblinian uncanniness written in an irresistable prose style. At their best, the stories combine this stylistic brilliance with understated pathos, as in the story of a woman travelling around Norway with a … a something not quite specified, or the ultra-brief final picture of a mentally-ill father who thinks he has regained his youth.

The third collection of stories, Sinopticon — an anthology of Chinese science-fiction — was unfortunately a dud. As with my earlier attempts with Chinese sci-fi, my main obstacle is the writers’ frequent tin ear for dialogue: “This year it’s on an unprecedented scale, the university’s arranged all kinds of banquets and social gatherings. As chief rep of student relations at He’lin First University, how could I not pay any attention?” Trying to be open-minded, I can imagine that Chinese people could just have a different way of talking, which might sound odd to someone from a different cultural background, but I just don’t think that’s true (based on personal experiences, and on reading other genres of Chinese literature). It reads to me more like bad sci-fi info-dumping.

Much more successful POC-SF was from Karen Lord — The Best of All Possible Worlds is told in a comic voice reminiscent of Connie Willis, but presents an interestingly-nuanced world with recognisable, but not hammered-home elements of African cultures. The episodes are rather loosely connected, but taken as a road movie rather than a highly-structured arc, it’s very enjoyable.

Three(ish) works of non-fiction this month: All About Love, by bell hooks, was thought-provoking and maddening in equal measure. The Americanism was often hard to take for this uptight European, especially the religion and the very straight-faced discussion of self-help books, but there are plenty of interesting ideas:

While I do not want to suggest that extended families are not as likely to be dysfunctional, simply by virtue of their size and their inclusion of nonblood kin (i.e., individuals who marry into the family and their blood relations), they are diverse and so are likely to include the presence of some individuals who are both sane and loving.

Estrangement from the realm of the senses is a direct product of overindulgence, of acquiring too much.

hooks’ personality comes through in some real zingers:

As one man bragged about the aggressive beatings he had received from his mother, sharing that “they had been good for him”, I interrupted and suggested that he might not be the misogynist woman-hater he is today if he had not been brutally beaten by a woman as a child.

but one suspects that she wasn’t the easiest person to get along with:

If a friend gives me a gift and asks me to tell him or her whether or not I like it, I will respond honestly and judiciously; that is to say, I will speak the truth in a positive, caring manner. Yet even in this situation, the person who asks for honesty will often express annoyance when given a truthful response.

Eure Heimat ist Unser Albtraum is a collection of essays by, broadly, “people of migrant backgrounds”, to use the favoured German term. Some of the contributors I already knew — Mithu Sanyal, Sharon Dodua Otoo — while others were new discoveries. They paint a depressing picture of the treatment of outsiders in contemporary Germany, which like Scotland prides itself overmuch on being now a non-racist country, but this is combined with a humour that frequently made me laugh out loud, and a determined focus on how people can respond.

Marzahn, Mon Amour is presumably somewhat disguised, but based on the author’s real experiences with her customers when working as a Fußpflegerin (pedicurist? chiropodist? German doesn’t seem to distinguish) in the Marzahn district of Berlin. Oskamp addresses several times the uncomfortable reactions of her writer acquaintances to her taking up the profession, forcing the readers to confront their own prejudices. The bulk of the book consists of relating the stories of some of her clients, mostly elderly residents of the decidedly unfashionable district. She tells these simply and engagingly, her respect for her customers providing her own response to those who look down on her and them.

Another road movie in Katherine Carlyle, the prologue of which starts with a 10/10 opening sentence:

I was made in a small square dish.

Chapter one gets going with a lovely simile:

Another beautiful September. The sun richer, more tender, the colour of old wedding rings.

And so it continues, with Thomson seemingly teasing the reader with his sensory evocations:

The air smells of spinach and wet fur. (Rome)

The air smells of parsnips and stainless steel. (Belarus)

and several more.

Similes are good too:

A dark van races past, its tinted windows closed. From inside comes the thud of hip-hop, as if the van is an animal. As if it has a heart.

No one stares down into his phone like a daredevil about to dive into a small pool from a great height.

And he sees the funny side of Russia:

When I wish him a good day he gives me a fatalistic look.

‘We will see,’ he says.

Amid the fun and games, there’s a story which darkens (appropriately) as we head to Svalbard. Thomson balances the thriller elements, the virtuoso writing and an engaging, if irritating, main character to make a fine book overall.

Two modernist classics to finish off: the Joyceathon continued with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I can confirm is much better than Stephen Hero, and much worse than Ulysses. I’d blanked from my memory the great slabs of theology and aesthetics which make the later chapters a bit of a slog.

Finally the latest instalment of Pilgrimage, Deadlock, shows Miriam starting to grow into a writer and beginning — just — to develop her own ideas. Her intolerance of others’ perceived conformism (someone in the Pilgrimage Together discussion group aptly compared her to Holden Caulfield) is not yet matched by any real independence of her own, but there are some green shoots. And Richardson is irresistably quotable, as always:

Certainly she would not read the pamphlet. However clever the man might be, his assumptions about women made the carefully arranged and solemnly received display of research, irritatingly valueless.

The chill of Mr. Shatov’s indifferent response to her explanation was buried in her private acknowledgment that it was he who had forced her to discover something of the reason of her enchantment. He forced her to think. She reflected that solitude was too easy. It was necessary for certainties. Nothing could be known except in solitude. But the struggle to communicate certainties gave them new life; even if the explanation were only a small piece of the truth

Nearly always she must appear both imbecile and rude, staring, probably with her mouth half open, lost. Well-brought-up children were trained out of it. No one had dared to try and train her for long. They had been frightened, or offended, by her scorn of their brisk cheerful pose of polite interest in the surface of everything that was said. It was not worth doing. Polite society was not worth having. Every time one tried for awhile, holding oneself in, thinking of oneself sitting there as others were sitting, consciousness came to an end. It meant having opinions. Taking sides. It presently narrowed life down to a restive discomfort…

Wealth made life safe for him. People could be people to him; even strangers; not threats or problems. But even a wealthy Englishman would not calmly give ten pounds to a disreputable stranger

Harriett is perfect for that. We learnt it in church. But when she used to twist all the fingers of her gloves into points, under the seat, and then show them to me suddenly, in the Litany

her German, neglected so long, grew smaller and smaller, whilst, most inconveniently, her reputation for knowing German grew larger and larger.

It is not what people may be made to see for a few minutes in conversations that counts. It is the conclusions they come to, instinctively, by themselves.

Highlights

My top six so far this year:

• Der Trost Runder Dinge — Clemens J. Setz
• Der andere Name (Heptalogie I – II) — Jon Fosse tr. Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel
• Die Fremde — Claudia Durastanti tr. Annette Kopetzki
• A Manual for Cleaning Women — Lucia Berlin
• The Books of Jacob — Olga Tokarczuk
• Tenth of December — George Saunders

Next

Looking back at my plan from the end of last year, I’ve completely failed on non-Shakespearean plays (but I have some of Jon Fosse’s to make up for that next time), plus volume 2 of Parfit’s On What Matters, Max Porter, Eliot’s poetry, and Nino Haratischwili’s Das Achte Leben, so they’re still on the list. Add to that some graphic novels, and my growing backlog of Fitzcarraldo hard-copies. Pilgrimage will be finished in December, Ulysses the next December (planning ahead), and I’m planning a Black History Month in October. Three German books a month worked quite well, so I’ll try upping it to four!

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.

Ten books finished this month, 6 by women/POC and four in German. Romance-language translations and genetic engineering emerged as my themes of the month.

• A Manual for Cleaning Women — Lucia Berlin
• Meine geniale Freundin — Elena Ferrante tr. Karin Krieger
• A Lonely Man — Chris Power
• The Tunnel — Dorothy Richardson
• Die Fremde — Claudia Durastanti tr. Annette Kopetzki
• Mein Onkel der Jaguar — João Guimarães Rosa tr. Curt Meyer-Clason
• Unter Markenmenschen — Birgit Rabisch
• Inversions — Iain M. Banks
• Klara and the Sun — Kazuo Ishiguro
• Treacle Walker — Alan Garner

Prompted by its mention in My Phantoms, this was my second attempt at Meine geniale Freundin — earlier I tried reading the English translation, but couldn’t deal with the comma splices (presumably faithful to the original Italian sentence structure). No problems with that this time, whether because it was in German or because I listened to the audiobook. It’s fantastic — it starts off as an attractive portrait of the narrator’s charismatic friend, then shows a much more complex and interesting relationship developing against the background of an Italy within living memory, but economically and socially more reminiscent of a 19th-century village.

Another translation from Italian, and with similar southern-Italian poverty in the background, Claudia Durastanti’s Die Fremde was also brilliant. In the UK it’s published by Fitzcarraldo, who do a great line in enjoyably devastating reads (making them the first publisher since Picador in the early 90s that I take as a recommendation). This is very much in that vein: an autofictional “novel” which tells the story of Durastanti and her parents through a series of fragments. The introductory family history is full of traumas, each narrated briefly before giving way to the next one, which only heightens the effect. Here’s the narrator’s deaf mother being taught to speak by some nuns:

Wir hatten nie große Küchenmesser im Haus, weil sie meine Mutter an die Schuljahre erinnerten, als die Nonnen der einstigen Klosterschule Suore Maddalena di Ca-nossa ihr ein Messer auf die Zunge legten und sie aufforderten, zu schreien, damit sie lernte, mit ihren Stimmbändern Töne hervorzubringen. Oder sie musste elektrisch geladene Drähte anfassen, und die Nonnen befahlen ihr, noch lauter zu schreien. So hat meine Mutter gelernt, den Klang ihrer Stimme wiederzuerkennen.

One more translation — of sorts — this month was Mein Onkel der Jaguar. This is a very short book by a writer known for a very big book (Grande Sertão), but it features the same wordplay which has led to him being compared to Joyce. This creates obvious problems for the translator, which Meyer-Clason deals with by leaving a substantial proportion of words untranslated — some glossed at the back, others clear from the context. It’s an effective way of handling it (and makes the reader feel clever). The story of a jaguar-hunter in Brazil who becomes — in some sense — one himself is relatively slight, but the use of language creates a great sense of place.

South America also features heavily in A Manual for Cleaning Women. Like the Grace Paley stories I read last year, Berlin’s stories draw heavily on her own life, so a childhood spent in Chilean mining towns, alcoholism and ill-health constantly reappear. Like Paley, she writes with a humour and humanity which lighten the gloom; also like her, there’s not much else of her to read beyond this collection, so finishing it was a pity!

Some Berlin similes:

Her hotel looked blowsy and jaded to her, askew on the hillside. Bougainvillea spilled over its walls like a drunken woman’s shawls.

Mrs. Snowden waited for my grandmother and me to get into her electric car. It looked like any other car except that it was very tall and short, like a car in a cartoon that had run into a wall. A car with its hair standing on end.

Bella Lynn and her friends would slouch in the Court Café under pompadours, blowing smoke from their nostrils like petulant dragons.

Final view of a young couple:

I turned the corner and pulled over to the curb, watched them walk away in the drenching rain, each of them deliberately stomping in puddles, bumping gently into each other.

And cat-lady logic:

I talk to my cat but I feel silly because he is totally deaf.

Most of Dorothy Richardson is also in one book, although fortunately it stretches to 1800 pages and 13 volumes. In The Tunnel, both Richardson and Miriam seem to be really hitting their stride. Miriam is building social and professional relationships which will develop over the next few instalments, while Richardson becomes more experimental in her use of language (noted rather plaintively by the transcriber of the Project Gutenberg edition, which is impressively accurate!).

As usual I amassed a long list of quotes from this volume, covering Richardson’s use of repetition:

people with gentle enlightened faces and keen enlightened faces

“So I thought the best thing to do would be to come and ask you what would be the best thing to do for her.”

And her/Miriam’s sharp opinions:

Shakespeare’s plays are ‘universal’ because they are about the things that everybody knows and hands about, and they do not trouble anybody. They make everyone feel wise. It isn’t what he says it’s the way he says all these things that don’t matter and leave everything out. It’s all a sublime fuss.

On society women:

Refined shrews, turning in circles, like moths on pins; brainless, mindless, heartless, the prey of the professions; priests, doctors and lawyers. These two groups kept each other going. There was something hidden in the fact that these women’s men always entered professions.

On men:

Your reading is a habit, like most men’s reading, not a quest.

On people:

“I always begin by idealising people.”

“Do you indeed?”

“Yes, always; and then they grow smaller and smaller.”

A Lonely Man was great fun. I could identify with Robert’s experiences of living in Germany — “[His family] were becoming Berliners while he moved through the city like a ghost, solitary and largely silent.” — and there’s some lovely writing — “Two tears fell down her cheeks, one fast, the other slow.” The thriller aspect of the story isn’t really my genre, but the ending was beautifully-judged.

Treacle Walker is a wonderfully odd little book: a mash-up of Coraline, folktale, and physics written in language often reminiscent of Riddley Walker:

‘Treacle Walker? Me know that pickthank psychopomp? I know him, so I do. I know him. Him with his pots for rags and his bag and his bone and his doddering nag and nookshotten cart and catchpenny oddments. Treacle Walker? I’d not trust that one’s arse with a fart.’

Inversions was the last book of my Culture re-read — until the next time. Even on a second reading, Banks’s playing with the reader’s expectations works well, and this was a satisfying, if untypically-Culture, end to the sequence.

Lastly, an interesting pair of sci-fi books: Unter Markenmenschen is a short book about a near-future Germany where genetically-engineered designer babies dominate. It’s very much a novel of ideas, where the plot involving the characters is a hook on which to hang the portrait of a society. It’s an interesting portrait though, and the diary format is pleasingly reminiscent of an 18th-century epistolary novel. Klara and the Sun adds to the GE aspect the android of the title, and Ishiguro achieves a natural and subtle integration of characters and world-building. The dialogue in particular is classic Ishiguro, somehow elegant and inarticulate at once.

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.