Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2019-republic-of-consciousness-long‎ (12)

Tiger laugh ‘Arima Champion? What kind of jackass name is that boy? Them name eh good

Tiger laugh ‘Arima Champion? What kind of jackass name is that boy? Them name eh good’ He laugh like the laugh been sitting in the back of his throat since morning and only now decide to come out. ‘Listen in kaiso you have to have better name than that. This is big man thing. Tests will merciless you if you sobriquet weak ………… From now on you must call yourself “Lord Kitchener” … I give you that [name] because I feel you could be a real general in calypso”

Now that she was

Now that she was open the room had filled up with the tearing sound, the clotting was given off a smell of blueberries left to long on the stove. I started humming, feeling my way towards the pitch of her hurt. The baby was sleeping; I could see its little shoulders through the curtain of her womb when I lifted the bladder aside.

Once the humming and the tearing blended, I slipped my hand around the clotted blood and clucked at it until it shrank and slid away. I turned from crimson to purple in the shadow of my hand, and left her.

Quiet now, aside from the rain. I listened hard: I’d left a bowl under the couch, just in case, but hadn’t heard it land there.

I bought the skin back together, smoothing away any puckering with the flat of my hand. It pinkened some, once re-joined, and I waited for the rosiness to fade before waking her….

A very accommodating cure.

"Sick is sick, and it has to go somewhere, and some sicknesses are dangerous when taken out of a body."

At Istros, we

At Istros, we believe that high-quality literature can transcend national interests and speak to us with the common voice of human experience. Discovering contemporary voices and rediscovering forgotten ones, Istros Books works hard to bring you the best that European literature can offer. After a great deal of thinking about the areas of Europe we wanted to cover and the image we wanted to create, we came up with the name Istros Books. Istros is the old Greek and Thracian name for the lower Danube River, which winds its way down from its source in Germany and flows into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and goes on to cross many of the countries of South-East Europe: Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. Its watershed also extends to other neighbouring countries, with one of the main Danubian tributaries, the Sava, serving Slovenia and Bosnia/Herzegovina, while also feeding the waterways and lakes of Macedonia and Montenegro and Albania. These are the countries of focus for Istros Books, evoking the image of the Danube river flowing carelessly across the borders of Europe and encapsulating the ideal of the free-flow of knowledge and the cultural exchange that books promote

She gave clear indications that the translation of her works into other languages should not stray from her intention, form or style. Dialogue is in italics, always. Inverted commas are reserved for irony, ridicule. Word order is carefully chosen, for stress, and should not be transposed. There should be few commas and even fewer semi-colons. ‘I evade semi-colons when I want my protagonists to speak in a breath – so, comma, comma, comma.’ She often talked about dialogue this way, as a breath. Sentences should not be broken up; she was not in the business of making things easier for the reader: ‘The rhythm and repetition are meant to irritate.’ She abhorred qualifiers which might ‘sweeten’ the text. Her language was not to be sweet, nor soft, nor ornamental, because her subjects were not sweet, and she rarely used ellipses, let alone exclamation marks. Everything should be said, not evaded, and the simpler, the more concise, the better: ‘I weigh words, I respect them, I work with them. Where there are repetitions, they are there for a purpose (rhythm and context).

Oh, there is one little book (we laugh). Yes, there is one little book that I love and nobody likes it. Well, let’s say that not many people like it. I don’t know why. Of course, it hasn’t been translated. There were good critiques of it, but it is, probably, a disturbing book. It’s called Doppelganger and it’s about two old people who meet on New Year’s Eve. Both are incontinent, they have diapers and, when the New Year’s Eve ends, they have manual sex through these diapers. But, in the background, you have the stories – one was a naval army officer from the Yugoslavian army and the woman was a Jew with some Austrian descendants and she came to live to Croatia – well, the country isn’t specified. While they’re meeting each other, you have, in the background, this police dossier story. It ends with their suicide. It’s grotesque, in a way. They told me it’s reminiscent of Beckett’s characters. These people, the police, the sex, it was all, probably, repulsive for readers. But it’s my favorite, I would really like to push it outside Croatia. Maybe just because not many people like it, as when you have a disabled child, I don’t know.

Replay the major scene; get on top of it. Take your life into your

Replay the major scene; get on top of it. Take your life into your own hands. Your past belongs to you. Explode the ambient discourse: spit in their soup, which was already pretty murky. Weave your monologue my dear, that’s what I told myself”

“you can always carve wood, mold clay, or polish marble better than anyone, but what good is it if you don’t tell your own story … [which] is not the one they’ve told you, the one they wanted to make you believe”

“The artist Louise Bourgeois, for example, was suddenly all the rage in her last years and finally allowed to come out of the closet and be seen, when her male counterparts had been on the public stage all along, entertaining people with their grandiose and self-destructive behaviour. Yet if one looked at the work of Louise Bourgeois, one saw that it concerned the private history of the female body, its suppression and exploitation and transmogrifications, its terrible malleability as a form and its capacity to create other forms ….

“The ungifted tend not to like themselves very much, and they often don’t like their work either. And so they work feverishly in an unconscious attempt to flee success when they glimpse it, unwittingly protecting their work. Their power to touch viewers, to say something, stays more alive by being constantly put off until later. And it’s precisely in this later that their force resides, Later may well never arrive, but it retains a potential that right now quickly exhausts”

“all fathers are vain braggarts and vacillators, particularly mine and all presidents of absolutely anything .. are ineffectual and pretentious, strutting about … all Don Quixotes … All .. who flaunt their authority, who hide behind their authority, who constantly convince themselves of the sold basis of their authority are ridiculous balloons that we pop like the plump paunches that constitute their entire catechism”

“As an adolescent, you developed a passion for geometry. To be mentally present at the unfurling of a curve, at the turning of a sphere, at the intersection of a plane and a figure filled you with calm. Above all you wanted an abstract character, all affect stripped away, all passions hidden, just geometry. As well as security, with everything predictable, a code that nothing could disrupt, happiness. It’s a domain beyond authority – paternal, professorial, social …”

“It’s a cultivated, refined, intelligent happiness, at that – with references to the history of art and sciences [my note – I would substitute “geometry”] thrown in”

“Oh there were questions you could ask if you wanted to, bodies that begged for someone to ask why, what’s all that about. That long thin scar, running along the inside of your thigh, lady in the grey cashmere, what caused that? Those arms like a box of After Eights, slit slit slit, why you doing that, you with your lovely crooked smile, why you doing that? The woman with the bruises around her neck, her hand fluttering to conceal them … is your fella strangling you? But you don’t ask, why would you?”

“And then with no more ado, the people’s centre became part of the backdrop like everything else, and in the untended patches at the back of the building, knotweed grew towards the sun”

“It just, what it does is, it just – penetrates to the heart of what it means to be lonely, or in love or to feel a failure … a total affirmation of what it is to be alive …. There’s warmth there and there’s strangeness there”

Yesterday was an uneventful day. Today I have vomited on a dead man, been pursued by th

Yesterday was an uneventful day. Today I have vomited on a dead man, been pursued by the ghost of my mother and experienced a married man trying to pair me with his wife in name of song. And fallen in love.

I was excited by the idea of what might have happened on the day after the now iconic 16 June 1904. Had Stephen had a secret punt on the Gold Cup and won? After leaving Bloom on Eccles Street does he do what he says he's not going to do and spend another night at the Martello Tower? Does he revisit the prostitute in Monto who he owes money to and pay her back? And despite his crippling hangover does he make it to teach in the boys' school, hitting the bottle again in the afternoon (it's a Friday after all)?.... Pursued by the ghost of his dead mother and of Hamlet, things kept happening to Stephen in ways that surprised me and made me laugh. It might also be that Stephen could fall in love on the day after Joyce had first gone out with Nora Barnacle.

In my Wandering Rocks section I used a ‘chain’ technique to bind the characters through language rather than time: specific word in each section is used to transitions the voice to the next character who picks up the same theme. In the way that the internet allows for both fictional and real – dead and living – to live side-by-side, I placed contemporary Dubliners alongside Joyce's characters and added comments found on Twitter. Joyce would have loved Twitter I think, it added to his notion of the litter in 'Litterature'

For my response to Sirens I created a series of sound poems that recycle the language of each section of Dedalus (my own novel) up until this point. The opening section is an overture of the corresponding section in Ulysses and captures the sound of Bloom urinating in a public toilet at Temple Bar. Each section then recycles the language of the sections of Dedalus, playing the sounds of: Bloom zipping up his trousers; whistling; coins rattling in his trousers; the sound of a trumpet; throwing cash to a busker; a literal gust of wind; the bells of the church sounding out Bloom’s relief that he’s spoken to Molly earlier that morning; a seagull over the Liffey and Bloom’s double-checking that he has Molly’s lotion in his pocket, which he's just collected from Sweny's.

In the Oxen of the Sun episode Joyce famously used George Saintsbury’s Specimens of English Prose Style to pastiche the history of literature up until he was writing his own book. In Dedalus I have continued this experiment using the first pages of fiction writers who wrote in the decades following Joyce, selecting one writer from each decade up to 2014: Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913); Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925); Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (1936); George Orwell, 1984 (1949); Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955); Williams Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959); Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963); Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973); Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985); Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (1996); Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006) and Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013).

"the case of a great-great-great-grandmother who waster away, starving herself out of love for a man, an episode my mother considered romantic ........ But I don't know why I'm going back over these trajectories, why I'm spreading myself so thinly among all these unnecessary details, which are as distant from our own lives as any novel"

In the one life are many lives. Alternative lives. Some are lived and others imagined. That is the absurdity of biographies he would say, of novels

In the one life are many lives. Alternative lives. Some are lived and others imagined. That is the absurdity of biographies he would say, of novels. They never take account of the alternative lives casting their shadows over us as we move slowly, as though in a dream, from birth to maturity to death

Sometimes you also went to concerts, his wife - his second wife - would interrupt him. And he seemed to need these interruptions, was adept at incorporating them into his discourse, using them as stepping stones to the development of his theme.

You are dead, oh my life, and I breathe on?
You have left me
Never to return and I remain
No…

“By talking to his absent friends, du Bellay begins to understand who he is. Without them there would have been no Regrets. Without them he would have remained mute. For you never talk to yourself. You have to have another to talk to, even when you are alone”

“Unlike later opera composers, Monteverdi did not pause and repeat himself for emphasis but let his music, like life itself, move on”

One sprouts so many lives, he would say, and look at her and smile. One is a murderer. One an incendiary. One a suicide. One lives in London. One in Paris. One in New York”

“It was the quiet precision in the writing and profound despair in what was being written about that never failed to move him …… despair and love and resignation all yoked together in fourteen lines ..”

The young nurse [who many years later - perhaps - becomes a leading literary author, only denied the Man Booker and Miles Franklin Prizes by her insistence on anonymity] likened her own personal experience of reading to the shuffling of a caterpillar, which first drags its back half up, then extends its front to advance. It had something to do with the burden of her mind, her cautiousness, and her desperation to comprehend everything around her before moving on. At the end of every page she .. glanced over to confirm the page number. Then she checked the number on the next page, to ensure that the one correctly followed the other

Even the most highly channeled mind is a relentless assembler of information, a stubborn maker of stories.

I was indeed a proof reader. But even within that specialisation I was a specialist, capable of living for hours, days, weeks or even months among the fine structural details of a text without once concerning myself with its ultimate relevance or value or meaning.

Ursula did not read in the conventional fashion of left to right, top to bottom. Instead, she merely opened a page and scanned, seemingly randomly, her eyes following no obvious pattern ........... She is looking for proof of her own life there, as a bee looks for flowers that resemble itself. Which is to say, not by visiting each flower on a single plant in a meticulous and ordered and exhaustive manner.

Given that writing and reading are the reflection of each other (like throwing and catching, speaking and listening....) the phrase “I am reading someone” ... must imply a kind of uncreation (anticreation) or else negation (obliteration?)

First came the men who were not chefs but attendants in a clinic for nerve cases, then came some non-descript men of middle-age and middle-class with nothing to distinguish them fro any other men of their type, then came the man who was burned on the left side, but who smelled of lemons and flowers, and then the doctor, clutching his bag to his chest in which was vials of serum derived from the organs of foetal calves, and then the maker of delicate mobiles, and the man who loved another woman. an the man who was raped by a dog in a fantasy, and the dentist who removed the teeth of old women, and the men who bear down on one at Christmas, amongst the discarded wrapping paper of one's presents, and the intern who burns one's letters and photographs on the lawn in the hope of impressing his employer.

When they were all out, like the animals who left Noah's ark, Stephen said:
- Nonno where are all the girls

If there are those of you reading this who know Giorgio, you might say that this never happened. But how do you know? How does one ever know what it is that occurs outside the range of one’s experience? You may not know that it did happen, but that is not the same as knowing that it did not happen. Perhaps if there were documentary evidence; but who keeps such records? Is it even possible to keep evidence of things that might happen that someone wishes to keep secret? If one has secrets, and then burns the evidence of those secrets on a pyre, one invites speculation, and speculation is infinite in a way that the truth is not. Speculation is limited only by the sick imaginations of those who speculate, where truth is not. Why shouldn’t Giorgio have tortured Lucia’s rabbit to prevent her from speaking? All things that are possible are, in the absence of facts that have been destroyed that might have proved them incorrect, equally correct.

This woman had gone into the afterlife friendless and I resolved to address that lack.

These are, or were, the contributing circumstances. I view them unsentimentally. It is interesting that I do not consider their rehearsal to be a serious kind of thought. Underneath them runs echoes and rills of different order, however, the inner murmur, and these I take to be true thinking, determinate but concealed.”

“It is strangely more instructive, for me, to imagine other conditions, other lives”

“Things seem to be sadly lost, put to bed, left on top of golden summits in the past, trailing away until we see what the lines of event and memory have traced: a plane. A loop that encloses all loss, has no beginning and end”

“It is akin to asking … at what point unconscious material become conscious. Where does one cross over into the other? If the tesselation of forms is perfect, do they divide? Or are they one?”

“I don’t have any kind of social life. It’s topologically invariant under many deformations you might say, although probably only someone without a social life would say that.”

“I have the conviction I am now something like x – a variable. We discuss dreams and in the course of these discussions I have come to see dream figures as other sets of variables”

None of this fantasy, none of the objects in this inner room are memories or perceptions. They’re nether past not present, yet they form a kind of boundary. They’re states of mind and real appearances and I think of them …. as a book of mathematical puzzles

At first glance this novel depicts a troubled mother-daughter relationship set in the Soviet-ruled Baltics between 1969 and 1989. Yet just beneath the surface lies something far more positive: the story of three generations of women, and the importance of a grandmother in giving her granddaughter what her daughter is unable to provide – love, and the desire for life