Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2018-republic-of-consciousness-long‎ (13)

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

- It is quite obvious that we do not all of us inhabit the same time
- It is q

- It is quite obvious that we do not all of us inhabit the same time
- It is quite obvious to me that we do
- We don’t
- We do
- This is going nowhere
- Can we agree on a point of intersection
- Shshshhhhhhhh!

In the dining room, in the yard, in the auditorium, here on the page, wherever and whenever we read, we experience the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous

Tenses are mythologies, futile attempts to fix time and sequence, faked co-ordinates for points that do not exist. Tense past and tense future present as imperfect

- What’s your source? Do your dates tally?
- It’s pastiche. Don’t underrate it

90 years after the first publication of The Waste Land- and perhaps far too late – a modern day protagonist seeks proof of a murder and flight. A fictional investigator pursues a fictionalised – and murderous – T.S. Eliot from London towards a perhaps fictitious night spent at a hotel in Whitstable in 1922. The aftermath of his deed may have been immortalised in a suitably shocking painting by possible accomplice Otto Dix

Thomas enters a smoke-shrouded chaos: coal porters, luggage porters, rough sleepers, horses and distressed livestock, automated announcements, mailsacks, uniformed staff, sushi bars, label stickers, Southern Rail apologists, queuebusters with wifi dispensers, fruit sellers, trolley pushers, commuters, milk cans, Chinese tourists, commercial travellers, an Italian crocodile, clover kickers up to haggle mortgages, womankind with hatboxes, rent boys in designer swag, parasols and bonnets, police officers in stab vests with strap-on semiautomatics, infantrymen slouched by carbine stooks.

The detective should be highly intelligent but not superhuman. We should be able to follow his inferences and almost, but not quite, make them with him

It was revealed that the poem was originally to be called He Do the Police in Different Voices, and this was soon identified (TLS January 1, 1969) as derived from Chapter XVI of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, in which Sloppy, a foundling, is employed by Betty Higden as a boy-of-all-work and reads aloud to her from some paper like the Police Gazette, apparently imitating the characters ………….. But the result of this new discovery was to give a new priming to the pump of the Eliot industry. It was now said that, in order to grasp The Waste Land properly, it would be necessary to study not only the books which Eliot mentions in his notes, but to reread the whole of Our Mutual Friend. Is Sloppy the same person as the Tiresias of the poem? Does not water, especially the Thames, play a recurrent part in both Our Mutual Friend and The Waste Land? Is the dust mentioned in The Waste Land not connected with the dust piles of Mr. Wegg?

A great deal of criticism of Eliot assumes that a quotation from another work implies that the whole of that work is to be borne in mind while we read the whole of the poem and that a complex unity will finally emerge from this accumulation of associations…. My argument is that Eliot often uses the quotations and echoes more locally than this

But we bought our war with us. The shrapnel that had gone into Father’s legs, in 1944 in the painful retreat when the war was lost, had somehow worked its way into his children. Each of us carried a shard of that iron in our hearts. We would never be at peace. Not in Sweden. Not anywhere.

We were now what mother called ummikko. We were people who could only speak our own language and we could not understand the language around us. And the people around us could not understand us. It was a terrible fate to be ummikko. It was like being deaf and dumb mother said. Outside our own home we were like cows that could only stand and stare.

I had heard several of the anecdotes in it, told in various ways, by my Dad when I grew up. I have always been interested in the way people tell or remember things …… … my art often relates to childhood and storytelling ….. Arja gave me some old photographs for inspiration, and I also had my Dad’s, rather thin photo album to look at … I tried to make illustrations that would work with the text but also as separate pictures that could somehow tell a story of their own … I appreciate pictures that have both seriousness or a sort of darkness, combined with humour or absurdity in them. That is something I strive for in my art. Arja’s novel has all of those components and so I had a really good time working with it

At the time of his death, I was a thirty-two-year old woman, single, childless, irregularly menstruating …… If I looked in the mirror, I saw something upright and plain. Or perhaps hunched over and plain …………. Over time, I became a genius at being ethical, I discovered that was my true calling

I was chewing the apple thoughtfully when I bit into something soft with a very fine granular texture. I spat it out into my hand: pieces of black worm. Of course the apples in my adoptive parent’s refrigarator would be mealy and filled up with worms .. it made perfect sense for this disgusting house

Thomas looked down to the floor. He no longer looked sad and allergic, in fact, he looked upset, and I recognize immediately a face of disgust ……..

Is something bothering you? I said.

Well its just I don’t understand why you had to tell me all of that. What did any of that have to do with …….. anything?

Wait a second. I’m not done. I didn’t even get to the good part, there’s more

I should get going. I don’t feel very well

The weight of this sad time we must obey.
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most. We that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Now the most winning stories always have the same cast of characters in one form or another. There is a set of twins, or double beings, a trainee architect, a father, an uncle, a brother, a desirable sister with no self-control, and of course incestuous love. There is always a narrator: an old-man in a pickle factory, sitting on his chutpoy reading Dickens in the English language, framed by a picture of the Taj Mahal. The settings are new worlds, the language tricksy. Pah. Making up words and full of doubt. What is the value of such stories? Expensive papers and lies. My story is a simple one, come closer if you can. The language you understand it in is not the one I am speaking. It contains elements of truth, the genius of ancients, and some more modern influences. It is priceless and therefore free for all

Jivan used to watch these hokey Indian serials on Star Plus TV, sitting with Ma in the afternoons when he got in from school. She loved them all: the family dramas with cardboard villains and handsome heroes, non-stop cases of mistaken identity, masters for servants, good girls for bad. Brothers disguised as each other, lovingly beating sisters, wives and mothers-in-law fighting over sons. In the end the good would get rich and the bad were punished. The lovers would be united with parental blessing, kneeling for hands to be raised over their heads in benediction, the parents would kneel and beg their children to bless them right back. It was always happily-ever-after-the-end.

My story is a simple one … the language you understand it is not the one I am speaking. It contains elements of truth, the genius of ancients, and some more modern influences. It is priceless and therefore free for all

This is why I rite these werds down for you new becors historee is only ever remembured by the powerfull and the welthy the book lerners in the big howses with thur fancy kwills … to these .. I say this is my story not my confeshun My story as I sor it These are not the werds of a man turned sower with regret and if I had another chance Id do it all the sayme again but bigger and better

Winter has just released its frosted grip on the valley and the sky was heavy with clouds that dragged themselves across it like broken animals behind him

Over the top of the trees smoke settled itself like tangled dirty white shearings of a summer flock not yet dipped and combed and dried

Autumn arrived like a burning ghost ship on the landscape’s tide to set the land alight. The fire of the trees’ turning spread far across the flanks and the ravens took flight to the highest climes as leaves fell like flung bodies. September had long slipped away. It was a charred thing now. Gone

Finally the sky was free of clouds and the stars cut through the night like smashed quartz sprinkled and thrown aloft to stick there.

The earthy sky was swollen grey. Soon it became too heavy to hold itself and it sagged through the night, finally falling apart in fragments of sleet

At first light fresh snowdrops quivered like rung bells … their delicate oversized white crowns hung heavy on thing green stems like the heads of newborn babies

Sycamore and silver birch, he said. Beech and goat willow. Oak and Ash. Because this is our kingdom of Jorvikshire and time was the whole island was like this once. It was coast to coast with trees, all the way up to these higher lands of ours. The wildwood they called it. We lived as clans then. Under the trees when the trees were worshipped as Gods. Under the great rustling canopy. Tribal, like. Maybe a few of us still do. It was the way of the land then. You protected you and yours. You still do. Protection was our purpose. Protection from any incomers. That and the providing of food and fire, and seeding your women. You banded together close then and you hunted and you defended and you fought for your corner of England.

Because viewed from afar night after night the solitary orange flame that burned tiny on the horizon had become for William Deighton a symbol for society’s undoing. It represented lawlessness. England’s downfall. The home of Hartley was a fertile bed for criminality and barbarism. Theft and forgery. Violence and mendacity. It was against progress. It was anti-empire, anti-monarchy, anti-government. No county or country could ever hope to flourish as long as people like Bell House’s inhabitants and their many pin-eyed, low-browed, dirty-fingered acolytes continue to ply their illicit trade without redress.

This lawmen thinks there is only one king worth recognising. But what does this man do for us and our families? What has he done for this valley, but help carve it up and sell it off? What have any of them done? Because it is lawmen and money men like this Robert Parker and flunkies like William Deighton who serve the wealthy bastards who for years have now staked a claim on these moorlands, these woods, these waterfalls. The same rich pheasant-fattened bastards who’ll have us out on our ears when the cotton men come. And they are coming – mark my words. The machines and the mills are coming, but it’ll not be enough for them to have us living in hedgerows and ditches like the cursed Diddakoi of the road. No. They won’t even let us make a penny to put a scran in our cupboards. They care nothing for the people of the valley like we do. [Everyone] that has given up their coin has made it twofold. We share our gains with the people because they are our people. We do not take our money and build castles to keep them out. We welcome them in

The sky-line is thick with factory smoke now …. The land is being sold off. They’re putting up great chimneys of stone that are twice as tall as any tree and there are machines that do the work of a hundred men, and it takes mountains of coal to feed them. They’re sinking mines to get thje dusky diamonds from the ground to fuel the mills. Children are in their employment now ….. There are men who are said to be making fortunes far greater than anything we can imagine …. The weaving is finished and the farming is finished and the clipping is finished

What we regard as Oriental is in fact very often the repetition of a ‘western’ element that itself modifies another previous ‘Oriental’ element, and so on … the Orient and the Occidental never appear separately, they are always intermingled, present in each other and ..these words – Orient, Occidental - have no more heuristic value than the unreachable directions they designate.

What an atrocity to think that some people find dreaming pleasant .... It's so tiresome

I'll try to reduce my thoughts to silence, instead of abandoning myself to memory

Sarah talked to me about her thesis ……. , Hedayat, Schwarzenbach, her beloved characters; about those mirrors between East and East that she wanted to break, she said by making the promenade continue. Bring to light the rhizomes of that common construction of modernity. Show that “Orientals” were not excluded from it, but that, quite the contrary, they were often the inspiration behind it, the initiators, the active participants, to show that in the end Said’s theories had become, despite themselves, one of the most subtle instruments of domination there are: the question was not whether Said was right or wrong in his vision of Orientalism; the problem was the breach, the ontological fissure his readers had allowed between a dominating West and a dominated East, a breach that by opening up a well beyond colonial studies, contributed to the realisation of the model it created, that completed a posteriori the scenario of domination which Said’s thinking meant to oppose. Whereas history could be read in an entirely different way, she said, written in an entirely different way, in sharing and continuity. She spoke at length on the postcolonial holy trinity – Said, Bhabha, Spivak; on the question of imperialism, of difference, of the 21st-century, when, facing violence, we needed more than ever to rid ourselves of the absolute otherness of Islam and to admit not only the terrifying violence of colonialism but also all that Europe owed to the Orient – the impossibility of separating from each other, the necessity of changing our perspective. We had to find, she said, beyond the stupid repentance of some or the colonial nostalgia of others, a new vision that includes the other or the self. On both sides.

The workers were returning, holding tall white tubes of coffee. They would join those who had stayed all night working on refractory problems, moving in minutely close or stepping back to a global distance to review risk or loss, to find resolutions that would cause money to leap free from wherever it was trapped: in bodies, components, minds or ore; in ideas, longings, irritations, bare possibilities. Everyone labouring to add more to the much

Hayden describes this process of defamiliarisation as a “peeling back”, a way to make the stories stronger both as stand-alone texts, and as a complete collection.

“When I took that specificity away, I ended up with something that became much, much more interesting, more uncanny, and more generalisable to people’s experiences of different kinds of discomfort,” he says.

“Taking the specifics out, the recognisable accents and language, for me anyway it made it more interesting, it made it stronger, it made it possible to develop the theme of the story more strongly .....

“When I read through a story, if I find anything that sounds overfamiliar, unintentionally, then I’ll rewrite it,” Hayden says. “I’ll take it out because it weakens the lines."

Sometimes when Mommy or Daddy are very tired, they’ll stumble over the words. Say them in the wrong order. Miss a page or two. Fall asleep drooling so that you have to shake them awake and, if you’re lucky, they’ll start over from where they left off and, if not, they’ll say: “Look Max. I have to make supper and clean the kitchen and write a report for work. So I can’t go on reading. Sorry

Paradoxically Pichard stresses the essentially embodied nature of play. On investigation this turns out to mean nothing more than that one needs a body in order to be able to play. It is the kind of dressed –up statement of the obvious that is represented as an intellectual breakthrough but is, in fact, a banal utterance with no analytical power whatsoever

Books might well be the worst of the household ephemera: dry husks that, slab by slab rise in great, whispering walls, entombing their owners. The essence of the book is another thing entirely, not the words as such but what lies beneath the words, that is what can set you free. That is why libraries are so important, as long as one does not linger too long in them. If I have to buy a book I give it away immediately after I’ve finished reading