There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification: 1 Corinthians 14:10 King James Version
I rea
There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification: 1 Corinthians 14:10 King James Version
I read this book after the realisation that I had read (and loved) 5 of the six books on the shortlist for the 2014 Goldsmith prize.
Will Eaves has classed the book as a novel, but its only really a novel in that it isn’t a short story book – in practice it defies conventional literary categorisation with the best description being on the back cover:
A book of soundings, a jostle of voices that variously argue, remember, explain, justify, speculate and meander
The book is a series of short paragraphs written as first person monologues, from different perspectives, each giving us a brief window into a life or situation, and each (as the epigraph quoted above says) with signification.
Most of the narrators are one-offs, although a small number reoccur (the friend of an angry ranter, a man reflecting on his childhood ferrets and stoats).
Strangely for me one of the weakest and longest paragraphs seems to be set at a disco in the Norfolk town Watton where I attended comprehensive school. Others though resonated strongly.
I like [punk] music now and I’m nostalgic about it because I can afford to be, but its dishonest of me. Back then it was a different story because I was four foot ten with a bowl cut … They were terrifying. The skinheads were the real ones, they were terrifying
I’m sure my parents didn’t do that. I can’t remember having “playdates” or whatever they are called, and going round with other young families in packs. It’s new and its outrageous
Others show great humour – I particularly enjoyed this rant ..
They were a bunch of professionals. Of teachers. There was a geography teacher, a history teacher and an English teacher. They were hustlers – that’s the point. They’d organised themselves into a group and they went from pub to pub, wiping out. Cleaning up, sorry. They knew they were going to win …. And they were so smug, that’s what got me. You have to understand it was a calculated play. Nothing innocent about it ….. it was the fact they were hustlers [that got me] and the point about hustlers, the point about hustlers you have to get straight is they always win. It’s not fair. The locals didn’t stand a chance .. I could have strangled the lot of them
Or
Neil and Ursula were both epidemiologists, which makes it sound like one of them caught it off the other, but they only work three days a week, and that rather brings them down to earth in my eyes. I suppose you have to hope that the epidemic doesn’t strike on the one day they haven’t got covered
A small number of themes occur – most noticeably some reflections on artificial intelligence, one of which goes back to some of the very core at the heart of this book
Recognition of emotion by a computer isn’t going to be enough. It must also immerse itself in the sensation of the emotion in order to understand it. (There must be a degree of empathy). But emotion is individual, discrete. Its quality depends on the individual experiencing it …. How do we reconcile the need for immersion with the recognition of a unique emotional experience? … Computers are too connective. They’re tyrannically social. The test of them as evolved entities will be when something cuts them off and still they cling on for reasons that are mysterious, not to us, but to them. When a computer turns up out of the blue, in the outback, in the back of beyond, bearing the scars of its survival, with tales to tell and a devastated look in its eyes, we’ll have to start listening
Overall an unusual but interesting variation on literature – exactly the sort of writing the Goldsmith was designed to celebrate....more
The novel takes its inspiration from the fresco painted by the 15th Century artist Francesco del CossRevisited for the 2019 Mookse Madness tournament.
The novel takes its inspiration from the fresco painted by the 15th Century artist Francesco del Cossa at the Ducal Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara – known only for a letter he wrote to the Duke asking if he could be paid more than the other artists given his clearly superior work.
The novel has two first person sections: one "Eye" narrated by the painter Francescho (in the book), and the other, "Camera", the tale of a 21st Century girl, George the precocious teenage daughter of a bohemian art-loving mother who has died a few months before her section is narrated.
Both are written in a stream of consciousness style jumping around in time and place – “Eye” in particular (especially for the opening and closing sections which are hard to follow as a result).
Crucially the two stories overlap and interleave and different versions of the book have different sections as the first section: which comes first is in Smith’s ideas related to a wider idea of Fresco’s painted over other Fresco’s and later uncovered :
"You have the very first version of the fresco underneath the skin, as it were, of the real fresco. There's a fresco on the wall: there it is, you and I look at it, we see it right in front of us; underneath that there's another version of the story and it may or may not be connected to the surface. And they're both in front of our eyes, but you can only see one, or you see one first. So it's about the understory."
In “Eye” we follow George shortly after her mother’s death, she is befriended by a popular girl at school (who clearly would like to go further than friends).
This part of the story contains many discussions with her school friend and with her school counsellor as well as George’s memories of the last trip she took with her mum (and young brother) to see the fresco in Ferrera with which her Mum had become taken. George becomes obsessed with Francesco del Cossa (she hangs out in a gallery with one of his few pictures) and with her friend plans a story written as though by him.
She is also troubled by a modern day female potter who became obsessed with her mother (and with who her mother was in turn intrigued by the attention and devotion she received). Her mother was revealed before her death as one of the founders of a subversive artist movement and was convinced she was being followed and George thinks the lady may be some form of Spy. As the story ends, she is amazed when the lady comes into the viewing gallery and George stalks her back to and then outside her house.
“Camera” is more surreal – we get Francescho’s back story he (like other artist at the time its implied) is a girl disguised by his father as a boy so as to be able to pursue her artistic talents: the fact she is a girl is known by others but acceptable only as long as its unspoken and unacknowledged by them and her.
As with George we get flashbacks to her mother, as with George she is befriended by someone more popular : a son of one of the local important families, although it becomes clear that there is an unacknowledged (not last because her very being a girl remains unspoken) and unconsummated love for her from the friend.
The surreal element is that the book is seemingly written after “Eye” when Francescho is hurtled back into modern times and observes what we know to be George (but he at first assumes is a boy, just as George and her mother automatically assume Francesco is a male painter) as she continues to stalk her mother’s friend. Some parts of this section are either slightly false (Franchesco mixes faux-medieval speech ("purgatorium") with 21st century teenage argot ("just saying") albeit this is all part of Smith's deliberate blurring of time) and slightly clichéd (Ipads are seen as some form of votive tablet) but other than the opening and close this is ultimately the better section.
Both George and the young Francescho, like it seems many of Smith’s characters, are slightly too precocious children to be fully believable – for example George and her friend swap Latin titles of popular songs.
The book also relies a lot on verbal descriptions of 15th Century Art and 20th Century iconic photographs (which George keeps on her wall) which don’t always really capture what is being described and which are much easier to follow for the one painting and one photo on the book’s jacket cover.
Overall a fascinating, ambitious and thought provoking book – a long way from perfect but admirable for its attempt and one to return to frequently....more
Dystopian novel set in an unnamed country where culture is overshadowed by a possible event in the past referred to mainly as “"what Happened if it haDystopian novel set in an unnamed country where culture is overshadowed by a possible event in the past referred to mainly as “"what Happened if it happened". Although it is never really spelled out it is clear (to the reader perhaps more than to the characters) that this was a all-encompassing anti-Semitic massacre/mass expulsion of the Jews. Although the country is unnamed (albeit it seems Celtic of some form) the period is perhaps closer to our own with “what happened if it happened” following on from the Israeli/Palestinian tensions (again this is only via allusion rather than explicit) and fuelled by social media.
Really the narrative takes a second place to and facilitates a detailed (although never polemical or too literal) exploration of anti-Semitism.
In all ways a vastly superior book to The Finkler Question. The themes are clear – that humanity rests on the need to define itself by the “other” and to identify someone to blame for the world’s issues and that for Christians and Muslims, the Jews retain enough of the same characteristics and enough distinctives to be the ideal (in fact only really possible) such other.
Overall this is an excellent book – very well written, with the allusion and politics complementing rather than overwhelming the story and with much which is topical (Jacobsen might say that is because it is eternal) and thought provoking....more
Huge sprawling novel of ideas in the first decade of the 21st Century.
The novel is narrated by a banker specialising in mortgage CDOs (and one of the Huge sprawling novel of ideas in the first decade of the 21st Century.
The novel is narrated by a banker specialising in mortgage CDOs (and one of the first to get them rated by the agency of the father of a college friend) but now facing the imminent sack as the partners of his bank prepare to sacrifice him. He receives an unexpected visit from an old friend Zafar. Both were bankers and traders, both Oxford mathematicians and both from immigrant families from the sub-continent. But where as the narrator is the son of a physics professor and grandson of a wealthy and very well connected Pakistani family and grew up at Princeton and Oxford; Zafar is the child of two poor Bangladeshis, grew up in London slums and even returned to his extended family in Bangladesh, is far more brilliant and makes a career in law after banking.
Zafar and the narrator have lost touch. During his visit Zafar tells the narrator of his story and the book consists of the narrators retelling of this mixed up with his own story. The key parts are around Zafar's relationship with Emily the daughter of an upper class but very dysfunctional English family and his meeting up with her in post 2001 Afghanistan against the disappointingly implausible sub-plot of his involvement in a Pakistani sting operation against the Afghanistani head of an NGO who is a Taliban agent.
A key theme is identity, belonging and segregation by: race; nationality, ethnicity and religion within nations; the inability of outsiders to appreciate these differences - Zafar is from a part of Bangladesh more which doesn't speak Bengal and voted against joining East Pakistan yet most people cannot even distinguish him from being Indian and Pakistani taxi drivers speak to him in Urdu); by field of study, by occupation; but above all by class which Zafar in particular feels trumps all others (reflecting perhaps of course his own inferiority complex and resentment in this area).
Other themes explored at length in the book include (but are far from limited to): behavioural science and the limits on human rationality; the banking crisis and its origins; Bangladesh, it's founding, the Western Pakistani atrocities and American complicity; ; friendship and how it lapses and how those lapses then create uncomfortable barriers; make female relationships (which in the book are related with an unconscious mysoginistic slant by the narrator); Gödel's incompleteness theorem and the impossibility of really understanding anything fully; mathematics, it's beauty and intermediate status between but above both art and science; the Western war in Afghanistan and its hypocrisies; the role of NGOs; exile and belonging and the status of returning exiles as well as the contrast between refugees, migrants and exiles; literature and finding oneself in literature and quotes - each chapter not just starts but is woven around epigraphs carefully selected from the narrator from Zafar's notebooks and which for Zafar become part of his understanding and exposition; remembering and retelling as well as the role of one party retelling another's story (this is fundamental to the whole artifice of the book, with the narrator drawing on and consciously selecting and ordering from Zafar's notebooks and recordings of their conversations) and the challenges of biography; confession and the need (like the Ancient Mariner) to tell the story to another; guilt.
Like many others of my Goodreads friends, I re-read just ahead of the publication of the concluding book of the trilogy which this book commenced. My Like many others of my Goodreads friends, I re-read just ahead of the publication of the concluding book of the trilogy which this book commenced. My original review of this and the second volume Transit is below – on this reading I enjoyed finding quotes which summarised for me either Rachel Cusk’s underlying technique in writing the trilogy, or the choice of title for this first volume.
There was so little interface between inside and outside, so little friction
Sometimes .. the loss of transition became the gain of simplicity
If there’s one thing I know, it’s that writing comes out of tension, the tension between what is inside and what’s outside. Surface tension, isn’t that the phrase – actually that’s not a bad title
The perimeter of shade had receded and the glare of the street advanced, so that we now sit almost at the interface of the two
Clelia favoured symphonies: in fact, she possessed the complete symphonic works of all the major composers. There was a marked prejudice against compositions that glorified the solo voice or instrument …. It occurred to me that in Clelia’s mind .. [symphonies] perhaps represented … a sort of objectivity that arose when the focus became the sum of human parts, and the individual was blotted out
In the center of Clelia’s apartment was a large light space, a hall, where the doors to all the other rooms converged. Here standing on a plinth was a glazed, terracotta statue of a woman
It marked some difference between him and me, in that he was observing something while I, evidently, was entirely immersed in being it. It was one of those moments, I said, that in retrospect have come to seem prophetic to me
Her consciousness, at that point - she was forty three years old - was so crammed full not just of her own memories, obligations, dreams and knowledge, and the plethora of her day to day responsibilities, but also of other people's - gleaned over years of listening, talking, emphasising, worrying - that she was frightened most of all of the boundaries depressing these numerous types of mental freight, the distinctions between them, crumbling away until she was no more certain what has happened to her and what to other people she knew
This feeling of being negated as I was being exposed has had a particularly powerful effect on me I said.
He hasn't realised how many English meanings came from Greek compounds. For instance the word ellipsis, he'd been told, could literally be translated as to hide behind silence.
I don't compose myself from other people's ideas, any more than I compose a verse from someone else's poem.
I waited for him too ask me a question, which after all would only have been polite, but he didn't, even though I had asked him many questions about himself. He sealed himself in his own view of life, even at the risk of causing offence, because he knew the view to be under threat.
She had sat there, she said, and thought about her own lifetime habit of explaining herself, and she thought about the power of silence, which put other people or of one another's reach.
Outstanding and innovative novels, the first two parts of a planned trilogy.
The books are narrated by a writer and now creative writing teacher, a recently divorced mother of two boys – this together with her name (Faye) mentioned only once in each book is almost all we know about her. Instead the book, narrated in the first person, is the record of various conversations with she has in which she plays a typically passive role listening to the other person’s life story and perhaps making a few comments and questions.
In the first book she visits Athens to teach a creative writing course, those she talks to include her neighbour on the plane (ex a successful shipping owner), the attendees at her creative writing course, friends, fellow teachers. The themes explored in the stories include the unreliability of other’s stories, storytelling itself, female identity, progression and improvement (and its inadequacy) but often basically people’s relationships with family.
All of the stories feature protagonists in not dissimilar positions to Faye and we realise that in some ways the stories and her reaction to them tell us about Faye by a process (one that Cusk in interviews refers to as “annihilated perspective” which is made explicit at the end of the book, when another teacher tells Faye about a conversation she had with her neighbour on the plane “the longer she listened to his answers, the more she felt that something fundamental was being delineated, something not about him but about her. He was describing … what she was not …. This ant-description … had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition; while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank ….(which) gave her … a sense of who she now was”. In the book’s last paragraph, the Greek seat-neighbour contacts her and says (as she does not want to meet” that he will spend the day in “solicitude”, which she corrects to mean “solitude” – again a key part of the book’s theme.
The second book contains some slightly weaker elements – a key part of the book is Faye’s decision to buy a very run down flat and to bring it builders to renovate and soundproof it – her elderly and hostile neighbours downstairs are unconvincing and one dimensional (and oddly do not have any story of their own – almost uniquely across the two novels), however the overall effect is still compelling. Faye’s intervention in people’s accounts of their lives (her hairdresser, her builders, one of her students, some recently divorced and remarried friends), deliberately adding her own views and seeking their perspective on it, is much greater in this book – and as a result the accounts have more of a common theme looking at change and reinvention and its interaction with freedom. She also meets a man with whom she starts a tentative relationship – and has a feeling of pulling away from a precipice....more
Outstanding novel about a landowner in Lincolnshire – Buccmaster of Holland – set in the years 1066-1068. Buccmaster, even before the Norman invasion,Outstanding novel about a landowner in Lincolnshire – Buccmaster of Holland – set in the years 1066-1068. Buccmaster, even before the Norman invasion, is apart from his fellow fen dwellers, still, like his grandfather but not his father, a follower of the Old Gods and a rejecter of the Church; also someone convinced he has through his Grandfather been chosen and marked out by the legendary blacksmith Weland (whose sword he believes he owns).
At the start of 1066 he believes he sees various ill omens – he refuses to participate in the fights against either the Danish or Norman invasion, his children do fight and are killed in the second and shortly after (as reprisals for not paying taxes to the French and while Buccmaster is absent) his farm is burned down and his wife killed. He escapes to the woods, joining up with a servant and then a young boy – initially avoiding the French, the boy’s hero worship challenges him into killing a French knight (leading to vicious reprisals on the village) and in turn gathering a small band of outlaws around him. His band kills various Frenchmen over time, but Buccmaster is clearly reluctant to commit actions to match his words and even his self-image, he is challenged verbally by his band (keener to join up with Hereward the Wake) and in his head by conversations with Weland Smith. As the book draws to a close the gap between Buccmaster and his followers grows, particularly when his embrace of the old Gods lead to try to carry out a ritualistic killing on a French knight – we also find out (as do his followers) that after having been expelled by his father for attempting a pagan style bural for his Grandfather, he returned several years later and likely murdered his father and sister in an “accidental” fire.
The book is written in a “shadow tongue” – a version of Olde English updated to be readable but respecting many of the rules of that language. Crucially this adds seeming authenticity to Buccmaster’s first person tale and it’s clear that the constraints of the language force the author to more closely imagine the actual thoughts and attitudes that Buccmaster may hold. This relates to a wider theme which its clear Kingsnorth feels strongly about and which he puts into Buccmaster’s mouth, that the true soul of a country is completely bound up in its land, its farming, its language, its ways and the interactions between those – Buccmaster often states that the foreign ways and names for things which change England for ever, that Christianity is destroying the uniqueness and essence of Englishness (themes similar to the author’s non-fictional polemics around the commercialisation of English town centres and villages).
What is perhaps most interesting about it is that Buccmaster himself, despite representing the author’s views, is a self-obsessed and delusional character.
I am not sure if is self-aware or self-delusional that a character who clearly represents the author’s views is themselves self-delusional.
A clue may be that a self-proclaimed English nationalist and follower of traditional pre-Christian English rituals actually lives in the West of Ireland and says he is a Zen Buddhist....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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Books:
2014-goldsmith-shortlist
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