Stories exist in the moment when you have no way of knowing how you got from the past to the present. We never know at first why they continue to s
Stories exist in the moment when you have no way of knowing how you got from the past to the present. We never know at first why they continue to survive, as it in hibernation, despite the erosive power of time. But as you listen to them, you feel like they have been woken up, and up breathing them in. Needle-like, they poke along your spine into your brain before stinging you, hot and cold, in the heart.
I read this book after seeing its longlisting for the 2018 Man Booker International – the combination of literature from (for me) a new literary country but one I encounter in my day to day work, and the history of bicycles seemed irresistible.
The book itself is both beautifully produced (an evocative cover, and inside illustrations which were produced by the author himself) and beautifully written.
Part family memoire, part biography, part novel, part homage to the key role of the bicycle in Taiwanese society, part cultural history of the 20th century in Taiwan, part an unfamiliar geographical and cultural slant on World War II.
Highly recommended.
Behold I ride before you on an antique bike built up with body parts stripped from meat bikes or bought from collections. I’m just a lonely rider who set out alone on this road, on the journey that became this story; but if, when you open this novel, you are willing to come along for the ride, you will meet many others riding down unfamiliar roads, all alone but all pulled by an invisible force that gathers them into the massive and mysterious flows of history.
I didn’t write this novel but of nostalgia but out of respect for an era I did not experience, and reverence for the unrepeatability of life ……a quest for a bicycle that ends up involving the history of an epoch.
Hadi’s listeners were completely wrapped up in the story. New listeners risked missing the pleasures of the story if they insisted on challenging i
Hadi’s listeners were completely wrapped up in the story. New listeners risked missing the pleasures of the story if they insisted on challenging it right from the start. The logical objections were usually left to the end, and no one interfered with the way the story was told or with the sub-plots Hadi went into.
This book won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction which for the still Iraqi based author gave him $50,000 and, for English readers, the guarantee that this vitally important novel would be translated to English.
It has now, unsurprisingly, been shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize - and must have a strong chance to win (or failing that to win the 2019 Best Translated Book Award in the US).
The book is set in the Al-Bataween district of Baghdad, and which I think is in itself a key character in the novel and certainly some understanding of the nature of this district helps in comprehending the book. From my limited internet research, my summary would be as follows.
Al-Batween was at one stage an affluent Jewish quarter, but after 1948 (and the creation of Israel) was taken over by mainly-Armenian descended Christians; before in the 1970-80s subject to large scale immigration from Sudan and Somalia, although many of these immigrants fled Iraq for their home countries up to and after the American invasion. The past-affluence of the district is reflected in its (now crumbling) art-deco buildings, but overall the once prosperous area is now more of a site for prostitution and other criminal activities.
One of these buildings is occupied by Elishva, mother of Daniel who was forced into fighting in the Iran/Iraq war by the local barber – an ex-Baathist – and who has not been heard of since. Elishva’s daughters have long fled to Australia, but she refuses to follow them, convinced (partly due to conversations she has with a painting of St George) that Daniel is alive and will one day return. One of her neighbours is Hadi – a local junk-dealer and well-known teller of tall stories.
Hadi would later narrate these details several times, because he loved details that gave his story credibility and made it more vivid. He would just be telling people about his hard day’s work, but they would listen as though it were the best fable Hadi the liar had ever told.
Hadi was a liar and everyone knew it. He would need witnesses to corroborate a claim of having fried eggs for breakfast, let alone a story about a naked corpse made up of the body parts of people killed in explosions.
He has (as this quote implies), seemingly driven by grief and anger after the car-bomb death of his business partner, secretly been (as part of his scavenging) taken to finding human body parts after explosions and assembling them into a complete corpse – with an undefined aim to give the corpse some form of burial. Deciding to abandon this plan he finds to his shock that the corpse - which he names Whatsitsname - has disappeared and then to his horror that it has come to life – from what we read animated by the otherwise disembodied soul of another car bombing incident and sheltered by Elishva who believes it is Daniel – and is carrying out a serious of murders in the area.
Initially Whatsitsname’s avengance is directed at those responsible for the deaths of those whose body parts make it up, at which point the respective body parts die. But over time its murderous spree grows, assisted by a group of adherents that follow Whatsitsname, and develops a terrible but unstoppable logic of its own
My list of people to seek revenge on grew longer as my old body parts fell off and my assistants added parts form my new victims, until one night I realised that under these circumstances I would face an open-ended list of targets that would never end.
Whatsitsname’s adherents grow in their fanaticism some prepared to sacrifice themselves to provide new body parts, and splitting into factions who then turn on each other in a series of battles, and Whasitsname itself can no longer distinguish between the innocents it is trying to avenge and the criminals who caused their death.
There are no innocents who are completely innocent or criminals who are completely criminal.
Its clear that Whatsitsnam – its multiple body parts, the civil wars between its followers, the apparently self-sustaining series of killings – is a metaphor for occupied Iraq, the terrible atrocities and civil war that followed the American invasion, and for the darker side of human nature it has uncovered.
Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds – ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes – I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citixen, he (the Whatsitsname) thinks.
Fear of the Whatsitsname continued to spread. In Sadr City they spoke of him as a Wahhabi, in Adamiya as a Shiite extremist. The Iraqi government described him as an agent of foreign powers, while the spokesman for the us state department said he was an ingenious man whose aim was to undermine the American project in Iraq.
He told her it would be about the evil we all have inside us, how it resides deep within us, even when we want to put an end to it in the outside world, because we are all criminals to some extent and the darkness within us is the blackest variety known to man. He said we have all been helping to create the evil creature that is now killing us off.
All of the above is wrapped around with the story of an up and coming reporter feeling his way in occupied Iraqi society, and with the activities of a bizarre Department of the Iraqi civil administration which exceeds its brief by employing astrologers and fortune tellers to predict atrocities.
But perhaps more impressively and memorably for me, the novel is also woven through with the story of the Al-Bataween district and its inhabitants. I was particularly impressed with: the way that the book conveys the terrible reality of living in a City where terrible and seemingly random atrocities are both a day to day occurence and yet still profoundly shocking to those who witness them; the way that for the inhabitants one of the most terrifying sights is an American armoured car or government forces and threat of seemingly arbitrary detention, interrogation or worse; the tensions it shows between those who decide to stay in Baghdad and try to carry on life there, and those who flee elsewhere in Iraq or even abroad; its conveying of the multi-faith heritage of the area – in one series of I think importance scenes, a Quran verse that Hadi’s partner had glued to the wall is ripped off to reveal a hidden alcove containing a statue of Mary, which is later decapitated to reveal some Hebrew wall inscriptions.
Overall an excellent book. Sadaawi names two literary influences as Hemingway and Marquez – and these influences are clear in the combination of tight prose and magical realism in this novel, although the lack of affect in the prose was for me the weakest element of the novel and has caused me to round my 4.5* down....more
In the spring, when I decided to write about white things the first thing I did was to make a list.
Swaddling bands. Newborn gown. Salt. Snow. Ice.
In the spring, when I decided to write about white things the first thing I did was to make a list.
Swaddling bands. Newborn gown. Salt. Snow. Ice. Moon. Rice. Waves. Yulan. White bird. “Laughing Whitely”. Blank paper. White dog. White hair. Shroud.
With each item I wrote down, a ripple of agitation ran through me. I felt that yes, I needed to write this book, and that the process of writing it would be transformative, would itself transform, into something like white ointment applied to a swelling, like gauze laid over a wound …… I step recklessly into time I have not yet lived, into this book I have not yet written
Now (and not surprisingly) shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
This book was started by Han Kang during a period living in Warsaw (not identified in this book as such) – a period which enabled her to reflect on a story she had known (and had been part of her identity) all her life: that her mother’s first child died .. less than two hours into life.
Walking Warsaw, after seeing a film of it obliterated in 1945 she realises that
In this City there is nothing that has existed for more than severnty years. The fortresses of the old quarter, the splending palace, the lakeside villa on the outskirts where royalty once summered - all are fakes. They are all new things, painstakingly reconstructed based on photographs, pictures, maps. Where a pillar or perhaps the lowest part of a wall happens to have survived, it has been incorporated into the new structure. The boundaries which separate old from new, the seams bearing witness to destruction, lie conspicuously exposed.
And that further reminds her of her sister A person who has met the same fate as that city. Who had at one time died or been destroyed and the way in which her own life is somehow bound with the life her sister would have lived had she survived and is in some ways built on the broken pediment of the sister’s life – in the same ways Warsaw is built on the ruin of its former self.
This causes her embark on an journey of the imagination I think of her coming here instead of me. To this curiously familiar City whose death and life resemble her own.
That journey, this book, consists of 60+ titled but unnumbered short chapters – each a reflection on a white coloured object, including those in the list above which opens the book.
The book itself is beautifully presented – with (performance) artistic black and (mainly) white photos, and with acres of blanks pages and white space. These features serve to further enhance and place focus on the meditative quality of the prose poems which make up the text.
Overall a moving and beautiful book from a wonderful author, brilliantly and sensitively translated by Deborah Smith (winner with Han Kang of the 2017 Man Booker International Prize) and founder of Tilted Axis Press....more
Am I doing the right thing be telling stories? Wouldn’t it be better to fasten the mind with a clip, tighten the reins and express myself not by me
Am I doing the right thing be telling stories? Wouldn’t it be better to fasten the mind with a clip, tighten the reins and express myself not by means of stories and histories, but with the simplicity of a lecture, where in sentence after sentence a single though gets clarified, and then others are tacked onto it in the succeeding paragraphs. I could use quotes and foot notes …. I would be the mistress of my own text …. As it is I’m taking on the role of midwife, or of the tender of a garden whose only merit is at best sowing seeds and later to fight tediously against weeds. Tales have a kind of inherent inertia that is impossible to fully control. They require people like me – insecure, indecisive, easily led astray
This book is published by one of the leading UK small presses, Fitzcarraldo Editions an independent publisher (their words) specialising in contemporary fiction and long-form essays ….. it focuses on ambitious, imaginative and innovative writing, both in translation and in the English language . Their novels are (my words) distinctively and beautifully styled, with plain, deep blue covers and a "French-flap" style. They are also (my experience) typically complex, lengthy and dense and as a result more admirable and worth than truly enjoyable.
This book – a translation from the Polish by Jennifer Croft (and so smoothly translated that it reads like a book originally written in English) is the winner of the 2018 Man Booker International prize.
Overall this book is difficult to categorise – its effectively a mediation on transitions – particularly modern travel but also on fluidity and mobility, but with some lengthy historical diversions (typically relating to anatomical themes – the human body and the historical parallels between mapping the complexities of the body and mapping the world is a key theme) and with some even more lengthy fictional tales. These include: a series of stories about a man Kunicki whose wife and children temporarily leave him on a small Croatian Island they are visiting on holiday; as well as the story which gives the book its English title about the Russian mother who on an impulse flees her disabled son and war veteran husband to live a life as a drifting vagrant on the Moscow metro inspired by a member of a movement-fetishing sect which gives the book its original, Polish title.
The book has interesting parallels with many other books, the number of parallels showing how wide ranging the author’s meditations travel from their centre (itself of course an embedded metaphor).
For example the narrator’s early experiences of the River Oder which seemingly plant in her the idea of travel versus stasis are very reminiscent of passages in Esther Kinsky’s River (by the same publisher). Also early on the narrator (whose voice largely disappears for much of the book) talks about her studies in a passage:
I studied psychology in a big gloomy communist city … that part of the city had been built up on the ruins of the ghetto, which you could tell if you took a good look – that whole neighbourhood stood about three feet higher than the rest of the town. Three feet of rubble.
Which reminded me of Han Kang’s The White Book (also longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International), a book written in Warsaw and whose central conceit is that the narrator’s live is somehow built on the “broken pediment” of the life her sister would have lived, had she not perished as a very young child, in the same ways Warsaw is built on the ruin of its former self.
The frequent visits to and obsession with anatomical museums (the back of the book includes a list of those visited) is very reminiscent of Jessie Greengrass’s Sight: A Novel (longlisted for the 20918 Women's Prize).
A very interesting angle I found was in a discussion on how the concept of linear time is associated with the move from a traditional agricultural to a mercantile economy:
Sedentary peoples, farmers, prefer the pleasures of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death. But nomads and merchants, as they set off on journeys, had to think up a different type of time for themselves, one that would better respond to the needs of their travels. That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress towards a goal, a destination … And yet the innovation is a profoundly bitter one: when change over time is irreversible, loss and mourning become daily things
Interesting to me because my book of 2017, Jon McGregor’s 2018 Reservoir 13, explicitly looks to reinsert the concept of circular time into literature by examining how quotidian dramas play out against the rhythmic seasons of village life and the natural world, while time continues to pass incessantly.
Overall the parts of the book I most enjoyed were those relating to 21st Century travel – partly I believe due to identification with its theme (given my frequent transatlantic flights on which much of my reading takes place) and partly due to the brevity and focus of those sections. I particularly enjoyed for example
Whenever I set off on a journey I fall off the radar. No one knows where I am …………… [those like me] show up all of a sudden in the arrivals terminal and start to exist when the immigrations officers stamp their passpots, or where the polite receptionist at whatever hotel hands over their key”
She falls asleep too fast, exhausted from jetlag, like a lone card taken out of its deck and shuffled into another, strange one.
The other sections at times dragged – summed up I think best by a section "A VERY LONG QUARTER OF AN HOUR" which in its entirety says
“On the plane between 8.45 and 9 a.m. To my mind, it took an hour, or even longer.”
Some of the pages and sections of the book felt very much the same to me – too discursive and unfocused. In particular I would unfavourably contrast the book with Charco Press’s Fireflies by Luis Sagasti which manages to roam across 20th Century history (particularly the history of flight) and 20th Century art in only 85 pages.
Overall though as the quote at the start of this review makes clear – the discursive, flowing style is very deliberate here and associated precisely with the state of fluidity and transition that the book is exploring, or to give another quote.
There are different kinds of looking. One kind of looking allows you to simply see objects, useful human things, honest and concrete, which you know right away how to use and what for. And then there’s panoramic viewing, a more general view, thanks to which you notice links between objects, their network of reflections. Things cease to be things, the fact that they serve a purpose is insignificant, just a surface. Now they’re signs, indicating something that isn’t in the photographs, referring beyond the frames of the pictures. You have to really concentrate to be able to maintain that gaze, as its essence it’s a gift, grace.
NOW LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKED INTERNATIONAL FOLLOWING ITS SHORTLISTING FOR THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE
Charco Press is a newly established NOW LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKED INTERNATIONAL FOLLOWING ITS SHORTLISTING FOR THE REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE
Charco Press is a newly established small UK publisher which “focuses on finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world”
Ariana Harwicz was born in Argentina and Lives in France. She studied screenwriting and drama in Argentina, and earned a first degree in Performing Arts from the University of Paris VII as well as a Master’s degree in comparative literature from the Sorbonne.
“Die My Love” was published in 2012 as “Matate, amor” and has been jointly and wonderfully translated by Sarah Moses and Caroline Orloff (joint founder of Charco Press).
On a recent interview on Jackie Law's excellent neverimitate blog the author explained in answer to a question about her background:
I always say that I was born when I wrote Die, My Love. Before then, I was alive, in the same way that everybody is alive, yet for me that is not really being alive. I had recently had a baby, I had moved to live in the countryside next to a forest. I would watch the thunderstorms, I would go horse-riding, but that was not life for me. And then I wrote Die, My Love, immersed in that desperation between death and desire. Die, My Love comes from that. I wasn’t aware I was writing a novel. I was not a writer, rather, I was saving myself, slowly lifting my head out of the swamp with each line.I always say that I was born when I wrote Die, My Love. Before then, I was alive, in the same way that everybody is alive, yet for me that is not really being alive. I had recently had a baby, I had moved to live in the countryside next to a forest. I would watch the thunderstorms, I would go horse-riding, but that was not life for me. And then I wrote Die, My Love, immersed in that desperation between death and desire. Die, My Love comes from that. I wasn’t aware I was writing a novel. I was not a writer, rather, I was saving myself, slowly lifting my head out of the swamp with each line.
The book itself is therefore strongly autobiographical. The opening paragraph immediately sets the scene and the tone for the rest of the book, narrated by the mother of a small child.
I lay back in the grass among fallen trees and the sun on my palm felt like a knife I could use to bleed myself dry with one swift cut to the jugular. Behind me, against the backdrop of a house somewhere between dilapidated and homely, I could hear the voices of my son and my husband. …. How could a weak, perverse woman like me, someone who dreams of a knife in her hand, be the mother and wife of those two individuals? What was I going to do
The narrator we quickly realise seems to be suffering from Post Partum Depression,
I’ve been needing the loo since lunch but it’s impossible to do anything other than be a mother. Enough already with the crying. He cries and cries and cries. I’m going to lose my mind. I’m a mother, full stop. And I regret it, but I can’t even say that .... Mummy was happy before the baby came. Now Mummy gets up each day wanting to run away from the baby while he just cries harder and harder. I need the loo, but his interminable clucking and grousing makes it impossible.
Or perhaps more strictly peripartum depression, since it's clear her symptoms were already severe and causing concern among her in-laws at the Christmas just before the birth.
The advice I was given by that young social worker who came to our house when my mother-in-law called, alarmed: ‘If your child cries so much that you feel like you can’t go on and you’re about to lose control, get out of there. Leave the child with someone else and find a place where you can regain composure and calm. If you’re alone and there’s no one to leave him with, go somewhere else anyway. Leave the child in a safe place and take a few steps back.’ ........ But I’m thinking about pacing up and down with the baby in my arms, hour after hour of tedious choreography, from the exhaustion to screaming, screaming to exhaustion. And I think about how a child is a wild animal, about another person carrying your heart forever
The narrator is a foreigner, from a City background, well educated and with a taste for classical music, all of which causes her to be openly scornful of her country dwelling, closely knit in-laws and their decent lives and conventional tastes, which she sees as beyond mundane.
If I could lynch my whole family to be alone for one minute with Glenn Gould, I’d do it.
Later on I saw [my father in law] him sitting at his desk, going over last month’s supermarket receipts. He read the price of each product and then checked the total with a calculator. By the time he’d finished recording the sums in his log of monthly expenses, the desk lamp was no longer giving off enough light. We ate dinner, all of us together again, and I can still remember the tired, backlit image of an average man who thinks he’s exceptional. After that, he cleaned his dentures and went to bed. And this is a day lived? This is a human being living a day of his life?
On rainy days in the city, people consume films, plays, restaurant meals. Out in the country they tell each other stories, thinking they can fight off the boredom that way
Here we are, one more family going out to watch the sunset. As though we had no idea that the sun came up and went down again. I mean, seriously, it does this every day
Even their concern for her, only increases her rage at their predictability – she resents the well-meaning advice of her mother in law, and says of her husband: My better half had been listening in from behind the door – yes, the playwright of my life is that mediocre.
What also came across to me was how the very act of motherhood, has fallen shorts of her hopes and expectations for it. Of her son she remarks
I hope the first word my son says is a beautiful one ... And if it isn’t, I’d rather he didn’t speak at all. I want him to say magnolia, to say compassion, not Mum or Dad, not water. I want him to say dalliance.
Me, a woman who didn’t want to register her son. Who wanted a son with no record, no identity. A stateless son, with no date of birth or last name or social status. A wandering son. A son born not in a delivery room but in the darkest corner of the woods. A son who’s not silenced with dummies but rocked to sleep by animal cries
In practice though the opposite occurs and the claustrophobia she feels from the interference of her neighbours and from the assumption of her in-laws that she will adapt to become part of their family, is only magnified as the existence of the child, in their eyes, legitimises the active intervention of nurses, social workers and locals and the advice of her family. This only drives her to further extremes of behaviour:
When my husband goes away in the middle of summer I leave a plastic doll on the back seat of the car and wait for the alarmed neighbours and state employees to come running. I love watching them react like the good citizens they are, like heroes who want to smash the window and save the little one from suffocating. It’s fun to see the fire engine arrive in the village, its siren sounding. Morons, all of them.
One senses also that the reality of the countryside has also fallen short of her own fantasies of it – or perhaps more accurately that the banality of life there does not match her own more dramatic, and artistically and sexually charged views of the growth, reproduction and decay at the heart of nature.
And then I saw the air saturated with invisible sexual tension. Rembrandt. The acorns fell and fell and fell so lazily, so heavily between the treetops and the earth that they seemed to be asleep in the air. To be cutting the air with golden rays. Caravaggio. That spell, that somnolence that comes over you as you watch leaves twirl once, twice, a third time before reaching the ground. One leaf falls, then another and another. An atmosphere that leaves you open-mouthed, that turns your saliva into fresh water. Farewell to mould and darkness. The death of summer turned the woods into silence and sighs
And, once a writer and it seems literature student, she is bought up with a jolt listening to a radio critic discussing literature in words she has not heard for years, and contrasting it with the banality of her own life.
I wonder what I’d make of this very woodland, this rustic setting, the half-built house, the man nailing down planks of wood, if a critic said my writing dealt with ‘the interconnectivity of human existence
The narrator is frustrated at her partner's apparent low libido; however it's clear a large part of that is caused by his fears over her mental state and that the narrator herself is perhaps more interested in being sexually provocative and explicit in her speech than in sex itself.
I like thinking about sex, not having it. I was always good at the theory and a failure at the practical bit, that’s why I don’t know how to drive even though I’ve learnt the traffic laws by heart.
The second part of this quote again gets to some of the heart of the breech between the narrator and her in-laws; her husband convinced that if she simply put some practical effort into learning to drive and so gained some increased freedom and mobility that in itself would go a long way to improving her mood, she railing at his inability to understand her much deeper frustrations and furies.
In the neverimitate interview, Ariana Harwicz calls the book not just a novel, but also a mournful poem, a song, a sonata by Schubert or Rachmaninov mixed with ‘Stronger than me’ by Amy Winehouse - Winehouse's debut single and one described at the time in a Guardian review as a "bold assault on New Man and his values".
Her views on sex however, do not prevent her from fantasising about a married neighbour (to the extent she starts imagining him fantasising about her), and then it seems (albeit with the instability and unreliability of our narrator distinguishing fact from fantasy can be as hard for us as it seems to be for her) having a brief affair with him, which later disintegrates into stalking on her side and into the climax of the book.
Finally one element of this book is that none of the family characters are named (although three of the neighbours and a bit at a party are). This is not done in a way to draw attention (as occurs in books where only one character is not named, or where characters are labelled as Mr. A etc.) but is a clear part of the book – with characters simply described as my son, my husband, my father-in-law etc.
The implication of this to me, is that identity (particularly within the family which the narrator has joined) is defined by status and role – something that others seem contended to embrace but which the narrator pushed back against, rejecting the traditional concepts of mother or wife.
I was recently able to discuss this aspect with the co-translator of the book (also co-owner of Charco Press). Incidentally it is a great advantage of small presses that you can directly engage with them. Her views:
None of the main characters in Ariana’s three novels have names. And this is due to several reasons, I think. On one hand, they tend to be antisocial, a-social rather, they are pariahs. They are not protected by legality. They are on the margins, and not just in terms of their class –although that too- but mostly in philosophical terms. Secondly, their namelessness has to do with the theatrical dimension of her prose. They are mere characters, pawns of the story, theatre elements. They are characters that respond to roles, not to names, because they are not people, they have not been born per se. Thus, they respond to mother, husband, father-in-law, lover, and not to names. Through this, Ariana shows the artificiality of the roles imposed by society (like Becket does with these characters ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’), the artificiality that lies inherently in every love relationship, in every family relationship, and so forth. Finally, it is also an aesthetic choice. This is part of her aesthetics, of her style, something that defines her prose.
I found the book a compelling portrait of peripartum depression, the first clinical diagnosis of which I found seemed a great summary of the narrators situation Peripartum depression should be distinguished from the baby blues, which is characterized by short duration, mild symptoms, and minimal impact on functioning. Women with peripartum depression should be evaluated for bipolar disorder, postpartum psychosis, and suicidal risk.
It also summarises our concern as readers, that a book which starts with such violent imagery can only end in harm for the narrator, her husband, her baby or perhaps all of them and so the menace which lays at the heart of this book as the narrator’s mental state disintegrates and her family “gradually succumbs to the radiation of infidelity.
Overall a vivid, powerful and disturbing read.
My thanks to Charco Press for a review copy....more
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 first volume Outline 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 the first two volumes.
In those days he was a sketch, an outline; I had wanted him to be more than he was, without being able to see where the extra would come from. But time had given him density, like an assist filling in the sketched-out form.
They had arrived ... At the place where for each of them a relationship usually ended, and set out from there.
It's a bit like a revolving door ... You're not inside and you’re not outside
Reality ... could serve in the place of fantasy as a means of distracting people from the facts of their own lives
I said that if she was talking about identification, she was right - it was common enough to see oneself in others, particularly if the others existed at one remove from us, as for instance characters in a book do
They were more like thoughts, thoughts in someone else's head that she could see. It was seeing them that had enabled her to recognise that these thoughts were her own.
Sometimes it seemed that the junction was a place of confluence; at other times, when the traffic thundered constantly over the intersection in a chaotic river ... It felt like a mere passageway, a place of transit.
The translator was a woman of about my own age .... I had watched her create her own version of what I had written ... Sometimes talking [with her] about certain passages in the book, I would feel her creation begin to supersede mine, not in the sense that she violated what I had written but that it was now living with her, not me. In the process of translation the ownership of it .. had passed from me to her. Like a house.
My eye continually drawn ... To the strange cloudscape that appeared to belong neither to night nor to day but to something intermediary and motionless, a place of stasis where they was no movement or progression, no sequence of events that could be studied for its meaning
It suggested that the ultimate fulfillment of a conscious being last not in solitude but in a shared state so intricate and cooperative it might also be said to represent the entwining of two selves. This notion the unitary self being broken down, of Consciousness not as an imprisonment in one's own perceptions but rather as something more intimate and less divided, a universality that came from shared experiences at the highest level
For a long time, I said, I believed that it was only through absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality
I like it that you ask these questions she said, but I don't understand why you want to know
I remembered the feeling of tension in the room, which seemed to be related to the provisionality of the situation
When he thought about his life he saw it as a series of attempts to lose himself by merging with something else, something outside him that could be internalised
It was hard to listen while you were talking, I had found out more by listening, I said, than I had ever thought possible
I felt change far beneath me, moving deep beneath the surface of things, like the plates of earth blindly moving in their black traces
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
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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Books:
2018-mbi-longlist
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