Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2018-women-longlist‎ (16)

[Svetelena said] I lived by aesthetic principles, whereas she, who had been raised on Western philosophy, was doomed to live boringly be ethical pr

[Svetelena said] I lived by aesthetic principles, whereas she, who had been raised on Western philosophy, was doomed to live boringly be ethical principles. It had never occurred to me to think of aesthetics and ethics as opposites. I thought ethics were aesthetic. “Ethics” meant the golden rule, which was basically an aesthetic rule. That’s why it was called “golden” like the golden ratio. “Isn’t that why you don’t cheat or steal – because it’s ugly” I said

[it] reminded me of pre-school where you also had to stand in a circle and clap your hands. I began to intuit dimly why people drank when they went dancing and it occurred to me that maybe the reason preschool had felt the way it had was that one had to go through the whole think sober”

whether you can be sincere without being pretentious. It’s something Selin thinks about a lot. It’s like there are two poles: one is being totally lucid but not conveying anything, just stating completely obvious things, and the other is being completely impenetrable. Sometimes you have to risk going one way or the other. Selin decides she would rather risk being impenetrable than being obvious and lame.

I was interested when the nuns sang about solving a problem like Maria. It seemed that “Maria” was actually a problem they had – that it was a code word for something

“Right” I said, nodding energetically and trying to determine whether any of the rectangles in my peripheral vision was a box of tissues. Unfortunately, they were all books. The professor was talking about the differences between creative and academic writing. I kept nodding. I was thinking about the structural equivalence between a tissue box: both consisted of slips of white paper in cardboard case; yet – and this was ironic – was there was very little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn’t yours. Those were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant or useful. I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.

Why did every story have to end with marriage? You expected that from Bleak House or Crime and Punishment. But “Nina in Siberia” had seemed different. Of everything I had read that semester, it alone had seemed to speak to me directly, to promise to reveal something about the relationship between language and the world

It was decreasingly possible to imagine explaining it to anyone. Whoever it was would jump out of a window from boredom. And yet there I was watching the accumulation in real time, and not only was I not bored, but it was all I could think about

I had no understanding of the drive to exhume that now turns my quiet moments into imperfect acts of reminiscence: how it is to feel that one must note each detail of one’s thoughts in case that thing should pass unseen which might otherwise provide the key, laying out the shadows of the bones which rib and arch and hold the whole together

It strikes me as extraordinary, now, that we should be so hidden from ourselves, our bodies and our minds so inaccessible, in such large part uncharted: but there is a thrill to it, too: that same mixture of terror and quickening which confronts us where underneath the sea the light gives out and unnamed creatures float

Known by her maiden name, Louisa Benson, my mother was not Burman, the majority race in Myanmar. Her father was Sephardic, and her mother was of the Karen ethnic nationality, one of Burma’s indigenous and chronically oppressed people.

She was born on the eve of Burma’s involvement in the Second World War, when the Japanese invaded, led by a band of Burmans wanting to oust the British.

“Don’t you see” his searching glance seemed to tell her “All of that – that suffering you put yourself through – it came out of a need not to offend. And as long as you concern yourself with upsetting others, you’re in prison.” And “As I see it, you are your father’s daughter. He was a warrior, too, in his way. Trust him to endure this”

“Don’t speak” she said “Don’t immediately deny it. Just listen to me, and let me read your eyes”

How very Western to trust the word of a man who speaks fluently, intelligently, even brilliantly. How very Western to trust that he has the same code of honour. How naive to think that because he makes one gesture towards Western democracy he couldn’t possibly at the same time be plotting a systematized form of inequality – a state in which one “dominant” race rules and is sanctioned to discriminate against others – against “minorities”.

I am the woman who has tried to shield herself from the pain of the first person singular …. I am the woman who stands in place of the woman who lo

I am the woman who has tried to shield herself from the pain of the first person singular …. I am the woman who stands in place of the woman who loathes to enter this story in any of its narrations … because that woman has struggled so hard and long to wriggle out of it – and now when asked to speak, she would much rather send a substitute. Sharing stories might be catharsis, but to her it is the second, more sophisticated punishment. I am the woman deputed on her behalf.

When I talk to people about writing my story, the first response is often: have you found the writing cathartic? Not at all. Catharsis is about purging emotions. That was never my aim. Instead, I wanted to take all that hurt and pain and shame and suffering, and distil it and transform it into something beautiful. The process of writing was a kind of alchemy-to take the horror of the violence, to dwell in it and shape that into an intense, moving sentence. I did that until every shard of my sadness caught the right amount of light, and every word shone on the page. I made an abusive marriage into an art object, and that is how I left it in the end

It’s called sheltered accommodation, but I’d never quite been able to work out what it was we were being sheltered from. The world was still out there. It crept in through newspapers and the television. It slide between the cracks of other people’s conversation and sang out from their mobile telephones. We were the ones hidden away, collected up and ushered out of sight, and I often wondered if it was actually the world being sheltered from us

It didn’t take them long to undo my life, I had spent eight year building it, but within weeks, they made it small enough to fit into a manila envelope and take long to meetings …. They hurried it away from me when I least expected, when I thought I could coat myself in old age and be left to it

We explored pockets of the past. Favorite stories were retold, to make sure they hadn’t been forgotten. Scenes were sandpapered down to make them easier to hold … There were people missing from our conversations, and others were coloured in and underlined

We [The Young] were given just enough c

We [The Young] were given just enough choices to make us feel as though we were free, but not so many that our minds (our still-fragile intellects) became overloaded. Doubt ended. The information stream was purified ……….. We live Now. We live in Light. And when darkness threatens (darkness? Can there ever truly be darkness again?) they simply adjust the chemicals. Sometimes – while we sleep, as we gently dream – they remind us of how it used to be so that we appreciate how good things are now. Now that we are Free From Desire. And we are H(A)PPY to be reminded of this because it reinforces our sense of peacefulness, of calm, of conformity, of equilibrium. They tell us about the lies of The Past. Of how The Young were told that the needed to rebel against the norm in order to feel Whole. That creativity is dependent on struggle and suffering.

In the past, The Old were completely awash with facts and non-facts. They asked a question and it was properly answered. A fountainhead of information was released. But was the water clear. Did it quench, revive or simply deluge?.

Of course you will be familiar with the narrative form ….. those curious narrative structures employed so often and so successfully in the past. The narratives of family and romance and adventure, the masculine and the feminine narratives, the narratives of class, of nationalism, of capitalism, of socialism, of faith and myth and mystery, historical narratives, science fiction narratives, experimental narratives, horror narratives, literary narratives, ‘reality’ narratives,
crime narratives. The Sensor automatically deconstructs those stories for us, so that we may fully comprehend their full meaning, their immense reach and their invidious power, their ultimately deeply conservative urge to comfort and pander and bolster and reassure.

I have inspected [your] narrative …. Its flow is, well its plodding – pedestrian – fluctuating - halting – occasional. It’s intermittent, at best. Narratives are not your speciality …… The real danger with your narrative … is that it is lazy. …. You are idly playing with random details. You are forcing things together. You are making strange connections. And you are struggling to make a kind of sense out of them

In the stories of wicked tyrants men and women are punished with exile, bodies are kept from their families –their heads impaled on spikes, their corpses thrown into unmarked graves. All these things happen according to the law, but not according to justice. I am here to ask for justice

“His companion leant against the counter behind which the shopkeeper was standing, and flipped his phone from hand to hand while looking at the other customers. They filed out quickly in response, leaving the two men and the shopkeeper alone in the cavernous store. ‘Look at all this!’ the younger one said. ‘The Røde SVMX. The Sennheiser MKH8040. The Neumann U 87.’ ‘Uh huh. Just get what Abu Raees asked for, and let’s go. I’m starving.’ The shopkeeper reached beneath the counter and pulled out a box. ‘The Sound Devices 788T. Didn’t Abu Raees receive my message? I’ve had it for over two weeks.”

And if the hare was made of myths then so too was the land at which she scratched. Now pocked with clutches of trees, once the whole county had been woodland and the ghosts of the ancient forest could be marked when the wind blew. The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives. Tales of green men peering from thickets with foliate faces and legs of gnarled timber. The calls of half-starved hounds rushing and panting as they snatched at charging quarry. Robyn Hode and his pack of scrawny vagrants, whistling and wrestling and feasting as freely as the birds whose plumes they stole. An ancient forest ran in a grand strip from north to south. Boars and bears and wolves. Does, harts, stags. Miles of underground fungi. Snowdrops, bluebells, primroses. The trees had long since given way to crops and pasture and roads and houses and railway tracks and little copses, like ours, were all that was left.

He wanted to be an honest man who shared what he knew with his children, imparting details of his current and former lives, knowing that if any of the details were too much for us that was the very reason for imparting them. Everything he did now was to toughen us up against something unseen. He wanted to strengthen us against the dark things in the world. The more we knew of it, the better we would be prepared. And yet there was nothing of the world in our lives, only stories of it. We had been taken out of our school and our hometown to live with Daddy in a small copse. We had no friends and hardly any neighbours. We obtained a form of education from a woman who dropped books lazily into our laps from a library she had developed to suit only her tastes and her own way of thinking. She probably resented our presence. She probably thought we were filthy and stupid but gave us her time out of some obligation to Daddy.

You have to appreciate that I never thought of myself as a man. I did not even think of myself as a boy. Of course, if you had asked me I would certainly have replied that that was what I was. It is not as if I had ever actively rejected that designation. I just never thought about it. I had no reason to think about it. I lived with my sister and my father and they were my whole world.

‘I think I were too angry to sleep,’ she said. Her statement shocked me. I asked her why she was angry. ‘I’m angry all time, Danny. Aren’t you?’ I told her that I was not. I told her that I was hardly ever angry and then she told me again that she felt angry all the time. She told me that sometimes she felt like she was breaking apart. She told me that sometimes it was as if she was standing with two feet on the ground but at the very same time part of her was running headlong into a roaring fire.

I wondered if she thought about it too. Or if the boys did. Or if any of the other small people at the far reaches of my recollection spent the time that I had thinking about the bits in which they played a part. It seems to me that so much of everything came from this, and that if anyone thought about moments like this enough, the future would be done before it had even started, and I mean that in a good way.

As she cried she spoke: ‘I felt so helpless, Daddy. I felt as if there wandt owt I could do that would change them. Or hurt them. Not really hurt them like they were hurting me. I could hit them all I liked but it woundt change a thing. They were so nasty to me, Daddy. Not the pain, Daddy, I dindt mind that, but the way they made me feel inside. No matter what I do, I can never win.’ ‘You did though. You fought them and beat them. You protected your little brother. What more could you do?’ Daddy ran his hands through his hair and then his beard as if searching for an answer there. ‘I mean it doendt matter, does it? I mean that things will always be as they are now. I mean that there will always be more fights and it will just get harder and harder. I feel like I’ll never just be left alone.’

Later, Daddy told us that after he had heard the teacher’s comments on the conduct of the boys he saw that there would be no real use in responding with his true thoughts. Mrs Randell’s assessment was simply the way people saw things, he told us. It was the way the world was and we just had to find methods of our own to work against it and to strengthen ourselves however we could.

‘I dindt buy land,’ answered Daddy. ‘I dindt win it in a fight neither. As far as Price is concerned we don’t own it, not in the way he sees ownership, at any rate.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘Your mother lived round here. When she fell on hard times, Price seized a lot of what she had. But when your Granny Morley died it seemed like the right place to come, to build a home, to live as a family. Because of your mother. And because I knew we would care for this land in a way Mr Price never could, and never would. Mr Price does nothing with these woods. He doendt work them. He doendt coppice them. He doendt know the trees. He doendt know the birds and animals that live here. Yet there is a piece of paper that says this land belongs to him.’

I half listened to the plans that were being made now in this lounge between my father and these new friends. I could not help but feel that they too were dancing in the old style and appealing to a kind of morality that had not truly existed since those tall stone crosses were placed in the ground, and even then only in dreams, fables and sagas. Only then in the morality of verse.

‘It wasn’t all that wonderful, all the time. Those men who would come together so naturally to support one another would go home drunk and beat their wives.’ Ewart was caught for a moment. Vivien continued, ‘There are dreams, Ewart, and there are memories. And there are memories of dreams.

They drove over a … flyover as wide as a wheat field, with twenty lanes of cars whizzing over it and towers of steel and grass growing on either side of it. But when they took an exit road off it, they saw that the world underneath the flyover was an entirely different one – an unpaved, unlaned, unlit, unregulated, wild and dangerous one - , in which buses, trucks, bullocks, rickshaws, cycles, handcarts and pedestrians jostled for survival

Death was everywhere. Death was everything. Career. Desire. Dream. Poetry. Love. Youth itself. Dying became just another way of living … As the war progressed in the Kashmir Valley, graveyards became as common as the multi-storey parking lots that were springing up in the burgeoning cities in the plains

From what little he knew, Naga sensed there was a substantial piece of the puzzle that had gone missing in the newspaper stories – a sort of epic Macondo madness, the stuff of literature not madness.

I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens, there’s lots to write about. That can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated what happens here. There’s too much blood for good literature.