Book Review – British Women Writers Special – The Language of Others by Clare Morrall

I got Clare Morrall’s ‘The Language of Others’ a few years back while browsing in the bookshop. I liked the description of the story and so thought I will get the book. Morrall’s first book ‘Astonishing Splashes of Colour’ was shortlisted for the Booker prize. ‘The Language of Others’ is her third book. I have wanted to read it for a while now, and so now I thought I will read it as part of the British Women Writers series. Here is what I think.

‘The Language of Others’ is a story which has plot strands set in three time periods and tells the story of Jessica, who at the present time is in her forties, and who is a librarian and also a musician who gives piano concerts with her friend Mary. Jessica has a grown up son who is in his middle-twenties, has his own business and lives with her. Jessica is single. One day Jessica gets an email from her ex-husband Andrew, who says that he wants to meet her. After this the story moves back and forth between three time periods – the present, the past when Jessica is a young girl living at her parents’ place, when she is shy, introverted, likes being left alone with her piano and doesn’t like talking to her parents, sister or cousins and a third time period which is in between these two times, when Jessica is in college studying music where she meets Andrew and falls in love with him. What happens between Jessica and Andrew and why they have reached the situation they are in today, why Jessica is working as a librarian when she trained to become a musician, why Jessica’s grown up son still lives with her, why Jessica was quiet and introverted and wanted to be left alone when she was a child and whether she is still like that now – the answers to all these questions form the rest of the story.

 

I loved ‘The Language of Others’. Clare Morrall’s description of music is very beautiful and one of the most natural that I have read. Most of the time, when an author writes a book which has a classical music backdrop, I find that the description of music is very general and very soon the story explores love, death or other themes and the music part of the story is ignored. I suspect that this might be because the author doesn’t have expertise in music and for a non-expert it is difficult to write about music naturally and authentically (beyond mentioning a few composers, a few musical instruments and then saying that the music was divine or heavenly or enveloped the audience warmly like a cloud). But Morrall’s passages on music are brilliant, authentic and natural – they have enough technical information without intimidating the musical novice and they are also beautiful and transport the reader inside the story into the music scene. It is a difficult art and Morrall is an expert at it. It must have helped that she is a music teacher too. This was one of the first musical passages which made me fall in love with the book.

 

The violin player started to play sections of concertos – Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Beethoven – carelessly, tossing them off into the air like quick flurries of rain. Each one swirled around in the wind for a few seconds, sharp but brilliant, uncertain whether to settle for a serious downpour or move away and give up.

 

For a book which I fell in love with, it also made me angry, quite angry. There were many scenes in the story where the heroine Jessica gets bullied by different people and it continues till the end, till she learns to resist them and fight back. I hate bullies and I hate nice people being bullied and the scenes where Jessica suffers at the hands of bullies were quite realistic and they made me quite angry. I am normally quite calm and never get angry when I read a book, but this was an exception.

 

I liked the old-fashioned way of storytelling that Clare Morrall had adopted. It almost read like a Victorian novel written in modern language. I don’t think that there was a word or a sentence or a scene wasted and the sentences were constructed beautifully and they all made the story move forward. All the characters were well fleshed out. My favourite characters were Jessica, her friend Mary, her son Joel’s girlfriend Alice, her mother Connie and her piano teacher Thelma Gulliver. Jessica’s ex-husband Andrew and her cousin Philip were two characters that I didn’t like (and who made me angry) but they were important characters in the story. Traditional storytelling, interesting characters, beautiful prose, musical backdrop, powerful scenes which make one angry and happy and sad, an ending which had a surprise but which was also very satisfying – what else does one need? ‘The Language of Others’ is a perfect novel. I can’t believe that I waited for so many years to read it. I know we have not reached the half way point of the year yet, but I can safely say that ‘The Language of Others’ is and will be one of my favourite books of the year. I can’t wait to read other books by Clare Morrall. I want to read all of them.

 

I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.

 

I couldn’t really understand what Andrew saw in me. It was as if a shaft of brilliant sunshine had decided to push its way into a dark corner of the house where it wouldn’t naturally go, turning a corner to get there, penetrating walls that obstructed its progress, breaking all the laws of physics.

 

I was fascinated by the way people changed when they dressed up, became someone different. They shimmered and glittered and it was like placing them in front of a mirror, turning them through 360 degrees, and finding them altered when they came back. The same people, the same features, but subtly different. The nose that had seemed too big became elegant, the lips that protruded too much became full and individual. Skinny people became slim, fat people warm and shapely. I began to see what attracted people to each other. A glistening aura that was not normally on show.

 

Her left hand started to stroke the repeated A flats with a gentle insistence, establishing a constant presence, but taking a passive role, hardly there at all. The right hand sang out, cantabile, easing its way through the simplicity of the melody. Rubato, indulgent, taking its time. Each phrase rose and fell, shaped and polished with love. This was how you played Chopin. It was music for the nineteenth-century salon, a piece to impress George Sand and the cultured circles of Paris, who, like Thelma Gulliver, were all slightly in love with the consumptive, temperamental composer from Poland.

 

Pretence gives you room to get round obstacles without touching them, the space to observe that there are other sides to people, not just the abrasive, challenging attitude that you can’t cope with. You have to view people from new angles, see where the light falls, discover which edges have been worn down and softened with time. Otherwise you get so caught up in the negatives you can’t see anything else.

 

I want to hear the echo of nothing for miles around. I want to be the only person who can disturb the air when I walk through my house. I can feel it parting to let me through, closing up again behind me. The silence soaks into my mind, an invisible medicine that drips down, melting hardened arteries, easing its way into neglected and forgotten places.

      Apparently, loneliness is a twenty-first-century disease which leads to alcoholism, drug-taking, depression, suicides. It’s better to be married if you want to live longer. I defy all of this research. I thrive on the emptiness of my house.

 

Have you read ‘The Language of Others’ by Clare Morrall?

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Book Review – British Women Writers Special – The Whole Wide Beauty by Emily Woof

While browsing through my book collection, I discovered an interesting trend in it. Across the years, I had collected books by British women writers, writers who were probably well known in their circles, but who were all new-to-me. In the case of most of these books, I picked them up because I liked the plot. In the case of some books, I picked them up, because there was something about the writer that I found interesting, and in some cases, the book had won a literary award. Some of these books were also long / shortlisted for the Booker prize or the Orange prize. So, a few days back when I thought I will pick a new book to read, I decided to take all these books I have by British women writers and read them together. I thought it will be fun to compare their different takes on life and their different writing styles if I read them together.

The first book that I picked up for reading, in this series, was ‘The Whole Wide Beauty’ by Emily Woof. I bought Emily Woof’s book because I had discovered her through a different context. A few years back I had seen the movie version of Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Woodlanders’. It is about a young woman who wants to grow out of her village roots and become a sophisticated person, but she keeps getting pulled back to her village by her childhood sweetheart, while the doctor that she is in love with, though he is sophisticated, is not exactly the nice person she assumes him to be. This young woman’s search for love and how circumstances and the social setup of that time foil her plans form the rest of the story. Emily Woof played the role of this young woman and I loved her performance. So, when I saw ‘The Whole Wide Beauty’ and discovered that it was written by the same Emily Woof, I couldn’t resist getting it. I have a soft corner for artists who are talented in multiple fields and who find expression for their creative impulses in diverse ways. ‘Have a soft corner’ is putting it mildly. I love these artists and am extremely jealous of them. I am especially biased towards actors and actresses who write novels. I have read and loved novels by Steve Martin (‘Shopgirl’) and Ethan Hawke (‘Ash Wednesday’) in the past. So I had to read Emily Woof’s ‘The Whole Wide Beauty’. I finished reading it yesterday. Here is what I think.

 

‘The Whole Wide Beauty’ is about Katherine who teaches music in a school for special children and her life and loves. Katherine used to be a dancer before, but she has given up dance after she got married to Adam. She and Adam have a son called Kieron. Adam’s parents David and Kay are very literary – David is a poet and also manages a foundation which is attempting to preserve the literary heritage of Northumbria, while Kay teaches literature and poetry at school. David organizes a fundraising dinner which also features poetry readings. Stephen, a poet who is mentored by David, is one of those who participates in the readings. The audience loves his poetry. And Katherine falls in love with him. How Katherine manages her relationship with Stephen and that of her family form the rest of the story. This is, of course, summarizing the plot simplistically. The novel is also about David’s attempts at raising funds for his literary foundation and the problems in doing so. It is also about the complex relationships that David has with May (his wife), Gregory (his brother-in-law), Katherine, Stephen and other characters in the story. From one perspective the novel is the story of Katherine. From another perspective, it is also the story of David. Though the novel is just around 300 pages, like George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’, the book has many characters, many stories, interesting surprises and beautiful prose. The main characters were all fully fleshed out and complex and flawed and humanly beautiful. Though I liked Katherine and Stephen and some of the other main characters (I didn’t really like David much) my favourite characters in the story were May and Ken (David’s gardener).

 

Some of the interesting things I noticed while reading the book were these : one of the characters was called Kieron (Katherine’s son) and the word ‘pollard’ was used (in the sentence ‘the pollarded plane trees seemed to push up…’ – if you are a cricket fan you would probably know about Kieron Pollard); Katherine looks at her mobile phone to find out the time (which seems to be a very contemporary practice – I remember reading about this in two other novels recently); the singular form of the verb is used with the noun ‘a couple’ (in the sentence ‘A couple was crossing a side street.’ – today the plural form is used quite regularly though it is grammatically incorrect and it has even started sounding right to our ears, for example, if we say ‘A couple were crossing a side street’).

 

I liked ‘The Whole Wide Beauty’ very much. I read some parts of the novel rapidly and I now regret doing that, because it is a novel which needs to be read slowly because only when we read it that way, the novel rewards us with its magic. I can’t wait to find out what Emily Woof comes up with next.

 

I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.

 

May knew that he was reassured by her mischievousness, as she was by his indignation.

 

When he spoke to Katherine about May, David always referred to her as ‘your mother’ rather than the familiar ‘Mum’ which presumed an intimacy he resisted. It was part of his stubborn Northern heritage. ‘Your mother’ was used by men to distance themselves from the family; ‘your mother’ seemed to Katherine to mean, ‘she’s your mother and neither of you have anything to do with me’.

 

Once people were introduced to poetry, they would change forever. Poetry was a quiet permission for people to embrace their own mystery.

 

David : His work is conceptual, very abstract.

Christopher : Art has to look like something for me, I’m afraid.

David : Artists like George Gull need you.

Christopher : What on earth for?

David : They need to be rejected.

Christopher : I see. The perversity of the artist. Longs for success but thrives on disdain.

 

They probably took their dog on the same walk every afternoon. May imagined their lives, conventional, their marriage so faithful and unchallenging. They were perfectly moulded to each other, like two bowls on a kitchen shelf. She could never have chosen a life like theirs, but as she got in her car to drive to Carlisle, she wished for a small measure of their contentment.

 

The poem held a new intelligence. The language was arresting, almost disturbing, s though he had pounded and bullied the words, pushing them to the limits of making sense. It was a raw excavation of the human need for love and the struggle to sustain it.

 

Have you read Emily Woof’s ‘The Whole Wide Beauty’? What do you think about it? Do you like reading novels by actors / actresses or creative artists from other fields?

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Book Review – The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

I have heard of Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ before – as an interesting retelling of popular fairytales and legends – but hadn’t got around to reading it. When the book club I am part of, decided to read it this month, I was quite excited. I finished reading it yesterday and here is what I think.

‘The Bloody Chamber’ is a collection of ten stories. All of them are retellings of (probably) popular fairytales, folktales and legends. I could recognize ‘The Beauty and the Beast’ in a couple of stories and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in a couple of stories. ‘Bluebeard’ is also there and there is a vampire story as well.

 

The first story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ gives the name to the book and is a retelling of ‘Bluebeard’. It is about a young girl who marries a strange count and goes to live in his castle. Her husband gives her the keys to all the rooms in the castle, and tells her that she can explore all the rooms but one. Of course, that forbidden room is what grabs our imagination and that of our heroine’s. What happens when she decides to explore that room and what horrible secrets she finds there and the aftermath of her discovery form the rest of the story. This was my most favourite story in the book. At forty five pages, it was the longest story in the book and had enough room for wonderful descriptions, beautiful prose, character development, plot twists and a thrilling ending. The story had references to Huysmans’s ‘La-Bas’ and Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ which made me like it even more. My favourite character in the story was the heroine’s mother whom the heroine describes like this – “My eagle-featured, indomitable mother; what other student at the Conservatoire could boast that her mother had outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand and all before she was as old as I?” Though the heroine’s mother appears in only a couple of scenes in the story, she is a really cool character. The last scene in the story where the heroine’s mother rides a horse furiously through a storm, clasping her gun, desperate to save her daughter, is one of my favourite scenes in the story.

 

The other stories I liked in the book were ‘Puss-in-Boots’ and ‘The Lady of the House of Love’. ‘Puss-in-Boots’ had my favourite last paragraph out of all the stories in the book – “So may all your wives, if you need them, be rich and pretty; and all your husbands, if you want them, be young and virile; and all your cats as wily, perspicacious and resourceful as Puss-in-Boots”. I liked Puss and his girlfriend cat Tabs more than the main characters. ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ is a vampire story, but in which the vampire doesn’t like being a vampire and killing people but she can’t help it, and then one day a young man enters the vampire’s castle and the vampire falls in love with him. ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ had some of my favourite passages.

 

The other stories were interesting retellings. There were two stories which were retellings of ‘The Beauty and the Beast’ – ‘The Courtship of Mr.Lyon’ and ‘The Tiger’s Bride’. The first one had the traditional ending while the second one inverted the ending and made us look at things with new eyes. ‘The Werewolf’ and ‘The Company of Wolves’ were retellings of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ but again they had different endings and surprises and made us look at this traditional fairytale in new ways.

 

I found ‘The Bloody Chamber’ quite interesting. I wouldn’t say that I loved it, but I liked very much some of the stories. Angela Carter’s prose is beautiful and lush and is a pleasure to read. The cover and inside flaps of the edition I read had illustrations by tattoo artist Jen Munford which enrich the reading experience. And the fact that I liked the longest story the best, might mean that I might like one of Carter’s novels more.

 

I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.

 

…that castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and the waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rock and waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned far away, long ago. That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place! (from ‘The Bloody Chamber’)

 

my spite was sharp as broken glass. (from ‘The Tiger’s Bride’)

 

She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness. (from ‘The Lady of the House of Love’)

 

To ride the bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm? (from ‘The Lady of the House of Love’)

 

Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair. (from ‘Wolf-Alice’)

 

Have you read Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – A Virtual Love by Andrew Blackman

One of the books I eagerly awaited this year was Andrew Blackman’s ‘A Virtual Love’. I read his ‘On the Holloway road’ sometime back and liked it very much. So when ‘A Virtual Love’ came out this month, I couldn’t wait to get it and read it. I finished reading it in a couple of sittings during the last two days. Here is what I think.

‘A Virtual Love’ is about Jeff Brennan and his life and loves. Jeff works as an IT consultant during the day. He spends a lot of time with his friend Jon in the evenings and during weekends playing computer games. The way he spends time is not necessarily by going to Jon’s place – why does one need to do that in today’s online world – but by having video chats with him online. Sometimes Jeff also goes to protests which are organized by another of his friends Marcus, against big corporates. During one of these protests, Jeff meets a young American woman called Marie. Marie works for a home shelter which helps who live in the streets. She also takes part in protests. When Jeff and Marie get introduced to each other after a protest, Marie mistakenly thinks that Jeff is the famous blogger who blogs on political and social issues. Jeff doesn’t do anything to correct that opinion. Jeff and Marie fall in love and after a time start living together. Jeff manages to juggle his different identities and impersonations, and only a few people know about the truth. But then one day suddenly the real blogger Jeff Brennan decides to turn up at a protest. And all hell breaks loose in our hero Jeff’s life. Will Jeff survive this storm? What will happen to Jeff’s and Marie’s relationship? Can Jeff continue to juggle his real life and his online selves and impersonations and deceptions, successfully? The answers to these questions form the rest of the story.

‘A Virtual Love’ has an interesting narrative structure. Though it is about Jeff Brennan, it is told through multiple narrators who all play important parts in Jeff’s life. One of them is Jeff’s grandfather, whom Jeff visits every weekend. Marie is also one of the narrators and the other narrators include Jeff’s friend Jon, Jeff’s protestor friend Marcus and the real blogger Jeff Brennan. Our hero Jeff Brennan is not one of the narrators and we get to know about him only through what other people think about him. This narrative technique made me think of Roberto Bolano’s ‘The Savage Detectives’ in which also the main character’s life is portrayed through the eyes of his friends and acquaintances.

My favourite narrator and character in the story was Jeff’s grandfather. He is the opposite of the modern, online person – he doesn’t have a mobile phone, he struggles to use the computer, he is not on Facebook, he is able to sit quietly and contemplate for a long period of time, when he wants to write something he never uses the computer but he either uses pen and paper or types it out using the typewriter. He is the kind of character who is the counterpoint to the other characters in the story and I totally fell in love with him.

The book captures the social lives of the people of the 21^st century quite well – how most people spend a lot of time online updating Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites, blogging, reading and replying to comments, how people buy more and more things – books, clothes, shoes, gifts, food – online thus converting the computer into a marketplace, how friendships are built online, how online friends sometimes feel more real and authentic and intellectually sophisticated than real-world friends, how relationships are nurtured online and how breakups can happen online too. This is the kind of portrayal that a modern reader (who spends too much time online for his / her own good, if I may add – and I am the first guilty party here) will totally identify with. Jeff’s grandfather’s perspective on online life is quite interesting and provides a fascinating counterpoint to what the rest of the characters think and in some ways shows that some things don’t change.

Andrew Blackman’s trademark prose is spare and beautiful and it rises to sublime heights in the chapters which the grandfather narrates (Sorry I can’t stop mentioning my favourite character again and again – his thoughts are wonderful to read). The place where the grandfather says that he likes typing on the typewriter and then putting his written work together and tying it up with a rubber band vertically and horizontally made me smile and think of my own father (my father used to write, not type. But he definitely used rubber bands.).

The conclusion of the story was a little open ended and even sad for me. But it is interesting and throught-provoking in the context of the story. It makes us think and question the online identities we all have and how they might be similar or different to the identities we have in the real world. It also makes us wonder whether any of our identities are real or whether it is all an act or as some might put it, whether they are all valid identities highlighting different facets of our personalities to the world.

‘A Virtual Love’ is an interesting take on today’s world in which online identities of people sometimes submerge their offline ones. I enjoyed reading it. I can’t wait to find out what themes Andrew Blackman will explore in his next book.

You can find Delia’s review of the book here.

I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.

Of course, I am accustomed to mobile phones by now, but the idea of them ringing in my own house still bothers me. It diminishes my role as host. I’m used to the idea that in my own house everything is under my control. If the phone rings while I have company, I can decide whether or not to answer. Now it’s out of my hands. You bring your own world into my front room, and I am reduced to the role of a passive observer.

      Since it was the first Sunday of the month, I’d spent the morning cleaning. As usual, I started with the toughest task. It’s an old, unbreakable habit, instilled by my father from an early age. ‘Face up to the devil, and the rest is child’s play,’ he used to say. He would constantly ask me my worst fear and make me confront it immediately, whether it was a spider, a girl, a history essay or a bully at school. The old man wouldn’t let me rest for a second until the toughest thing in my life at that particular time had been accomplished. In cricket practice, he used to rip out two of the stumps, leaving only one to bowl at. ‘It’ll be easy when you come to matches,’ he’d say. ‘Having three to aim at will feel like child’s play.

      He was right, of course, and I would later thank him when I became, for a time, one of the most feared medium-pacers in the north London leagues. But somehow, no matter how many tough tasks I faced, there were always more awaiting me. The golden age where everything was finally child’s play always remained my father’s broken promise. After the bullies and the girls and the history essays came work, tax returns, marriage, a baby, a mortgage and a thousand other tough tasks. I threw myself at all of them, patiently waiting for everything to seem like child’s play, but the easy life always remained tantalizingly just around the corner. Finally I focused all my hopes on retirement, feeling sure that then I could finally ‘put my feet up’, as everyone said. But after a brief respite, I found myself once again paying bills, worrying about my pension, filling my life with tasks. And then Daisy got ill, and my arthritis got worse, and our only child died, and tough tasks seemed to take up the majority of my life once more. Now I am well aware that life will never seem like child’s play. But a habit is a habit, and so I still handle the toughest tasks first.

Anybody who saw the inside of the clock, the elegant machinery of springs and weights, wheel trains and escapements all intersecting in perfect harmony, would understand why I could never let it be sullied by dirt from the outside world. When I am cleaning it, I slip into a trance. Time stops, my thoughts fly away, the world around me fades, and all that exists is the familiarity of the movements. My hands seem to act from memories of their own, without the need for conscious thought. I always remove the parts in the same order, squirt on the same cleaning fluid to remove solidified oil, use the same cloth to wipe the metal clean, and apply the same amount of fresh oil in the same places, before slipping everything firmly back together in the reverse order. There’s a neat circularity to it, progress of a kind. The metal gleams brighter than before, the parts have been checked and the possibility of a catastrophic failure averted. That’s about the only kind of progress I can believe in these days.

Have you read Andrew Blackman’s ‘A Virtual Love’? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – My Year of Reading French Literature – The Mark of the Angel by Nancy Huston

After reading Nicole Brossard’s ‘Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon’, I thought of exploring more works by French-Canadian authors when Caroline from Beauty is a Sleeping Cat recommended ‘The Mark of the Angel’. I got it recently and finished reading it today. Here is what I think.

The story told in ‘The Mark of the Angel’ starts in 1957 in Paris. It has been twelve years since the end of the Second World War, but some things don’t seem to have changed much. There is trouble in Algeria and French troops are trying to get the situation under control, sometimes by violence. A young German woman, Saffie, lands up in Paris. She goes to work as a maid at the home of a young flautist, Raphael. Raphael falls in love with her at first sight. After a few months, he proposes to Saffie and she accepts his proposal. Raphael’s mother doesn’t like Germans because of the happenings during the Second World War and disapproves of the match. Still, Raphael goes ahead and marries Saffie. But there is something about Saffie. She is detached about everything. She doesn’t show any emotion. She doesn’t seem to love Raphael as he loves her. Raphael feels that things will change after a while. But they don’t. Then Saffie and Raphael have a son. Raphael feels that now that Saffie has become a mother she will change and genuine warmth will blossom in her heart. But still nothing happens. One day Raphael sends Saffie to a workshop to get his flute repaired. Saffie meets András at the workshop and it is love at first sight for her. Her heart opens to him. And András responds back. And Saffie blooms like a flower. Raphael notices the change. He concludes that being a mother and a wife has finally made his wife open her heart to the world. He is delighted. Saffie and András start meeting regularly. Saffie brings her son Emil everytime. She also continues to be a dutiful wife to Raphael. She lives these two parallel lives – as a wife to Raphael out of necessity, and as a lover to András out of choice – without much trouble. It works for her. Meanwhile the trouble in Algeria explodes and it ends up with violence in the streets of Paris. During this troubled time Saffie and András share secrets about each other, about their past. Saffie is German and András is Jewish and so some of the secrets they share are not going to be comfortable. But still their love binds them together. And Emil loves András like his own father. And then András starts collaborating with some of the Algerian freedom fighters. And things take a turn for the worse. What happens to Saffie? Why was she detached before she met András? What secret was she suppressing? Will she find happiness with András? What happens to Raphael? The answers to these questions form the rest of the story. (This is probably a spoiler. So please be forewarned. As you might have guessed, a love story like this where the heroine leads parallel lives, never ends well. There are some surprising revelations, a shocking discovery, some partings, a heartbreak and some unanswered questions in the end. To find out the nature of these, you should read the book.)

I liked ‘The Mark of the Angel’. Nancy Huston’s prose is very conversational and in many places she talks to the reader directly while telling the story. It is like sitting in front of the fire on a winter night, listening to a story told by our favourite aunt. There is also a gentle sense of humour throughout the book, even when it talks about serious topics like war, the holocaust, violence and death. Saffie is a fascinating character and her detachment from the world and the weight of sadness that she seemed to carry in her heart made me fall in love with her. When Saffie meets András and falls in love with him and opens up to him and her heart starts blooming like a flower, one can’t help but feel happy for her. Even though one is worried about the consequences and one fears whether their love will survive the situation and the damning revelations that follow. I liked most of the characters in the story – there were no good and bad ones, but most of them were normal people trying to find a little happiness and a little peace in the middle of a chaotic world. The book also portrays Paris of the ‘50s and ‘60s and the culture of those times quite well. I learnt a little bit about the Algerian issue of the ‘50s and ‘60s after reading this book – it didn’t show the French in good light. The way the books weaves the stories of Saffie, András, Emil and Raphael and the people in their lives with the story of the fight for Algerian independence and the way it shows how the weight of history changes and distorts individual lives is quite interesting. It also made me feel sad, because it showed how difficult it is to find happiness and freedom in the world, even if we try our best.

I enjoyed reading ‘The Mark of the Angel’. I would love to read more of Nancy Huston’s books. I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.

For the first time in his life, he feels that beauty and necessity are converging in his heart, as they do in a Bach fugue.

Raphael plays the flute. His playing is getting better by the day, as anguish has come to lend added complexity to his ingenuous, overly optimistic nature – enhancing rather than supplanting his mad love, slipping into the interstices of his music and giving it new shades, denser and more subtle shades than ever before. In the adagio movements in particular, every note he produces is like the shimmering surface of a pond beneath which dark treasures lurk.

Yes, adultery can give you wings. As a general rule, the flight is brief and the fall brutal. And yet, watching the young woman move off towards the Seine with her pram, Mademoiselle Blanche’s heart warms in spite of herself. It’s not easy to advise caution to a person in the thrall of such blatant happiness. All you can do is hope the damage will be limited.

In every tale of passion there comes a turning point. It can happen sooner or later but as a rule it happens fairly soon. The vast majority of couples miss the curve and go careening off the road, flip over and crash into a wall, their wheels spinning madly in the air. The reason for this is simple. Contrary to what you’d believed during the first hours, the first days, at most the first months, of the enchantment, the person you love hasn’t radically transformed you. When you miss the turn, the wall you run into is the wall of your Self. Yes, there it is again – every bit as nasty, as petty and as mediocre as it was before. You haven’t been magically healed. Your wounds are still raw. Your nightmares begin again. And you’re filled with rage at the other person – because, as it turns out, you haven’t undergone a metamorphosis, love hasn’t solved all life’s problems, and you’re not floating ecstatically heavenward – but rather, as usual, pulling your own weight down here on Earth.

“You know, Mama,” says Emil as they head home, “every time the rain falls on my cheeks, it feels like I’m crying. Did that happen to you, when you were little?”

“Yes, Schatz. Yes, it did.”

Have you read Nancy Huston’s ‘The Mark of the Angel’? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

I read Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Prodigal Summer’ last year and liked it very much. I had wanted to read other books by her since that time. When I discovered that she has come out with a new book, I couldn’t resist getting it. I finished reading ‘Flight Behavior’ yesterday and here is what I think.

‘Flight Behavior’ is about a farm wife, Dellarobia, and her life. Dellarobia lives near the mountains alongwith her husband and works in the farm of her in-laws. When she was in high school, she had wanted to go to college, but she got pregnant and so got married to Cub. Unfortunately, her child is stillborn, but she stays married to Cub and later has a son, Preston, and a daughter, Cordie. She is not very happy with her life though she loves her children. She likes her husband, but she feels that she and her husband are different in many ways and her parents-in-law aren’t really nice to her. One day, to escape from her dreary life, she drives up the mountain to meet a young man and have an affair with him, unmindful of the consequences (It is the first scene in the story. The first sentence in the book is a beautiful, trademark Barbara Kingsolver first sentence – “A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.”). When she reaches the top, she sees a glorious sight. The valley seems to be filled with a lake of fire. Dellarobia is astounded and she thinks this is a sign. She comes back home without meeting the young man. Meanwhile her father-in-law signs a contract with a logging company to cut down the trees in the mountain. When his family protests, he refuses to listen to them. Dellarobia tells her husband to first checkout the mountain before deciding to cut the trees. The whole family goes up the mountain. And they see what Dellarobia had seen earlier. The only difference is that the scene is not a lake of fire. It is an ocean of monarch butterflies – millions and millions of them – which give that illusion. Soon everyone in the town is talking about how Dellarobia had this vision. TV channels arrive for her interview. A scientist comes with his assistants and starts research. Dellarobia becomes friends with him and after a while gets to work in his team. She discovers that the presence of so many monarch butterflies is not a good sign. It is probably because of global warming which might lead to the extinction of this butterfly species. What happens next – to the butterfly species and to Dellarobia – forms the rest of the story.

 

‘Flight Behavior’ is an interesting story which deals with two themes – the travails of a farm wife and the issue of climate change. Barbara Kingsolver blends the particular and the general quite well and weaves these two diverse strands into a beautiful whole – while one strand of the story depicts how the monarch butterfly faces challenges posed by the environment and tries to adapt to change, the second strand shows how Dellarobia faces the challenges posed by her restraining circumstances and how she adapts herself to face them and overcome them. Though climate change plays an important part in the book, I think what stands out in the story is the travails of the farm wife – how Dellarobia is talented but she is restrained by her circumstances which stunt her from growing as a person and prevent her talents from flowering. There are no ‘bad guys’ in the story who are preventing her from realizing her potential – it is just the way things are. The trademark Barbara Kingsolver sentences keep appearing throughout the book. The farming parts of the story are described in detail. One of my favourite scenes in the book is the one where a ewe gives birth to a baby sheep which seems to be stillborn and Dellarobia revives it and get it to breathe. Small town scenes are painted beautifully throughout the book – like getting children ready for the school bus in the morning, shopping at a second hand goods store, going to church on Sundays, how neighbours influence each other and intrude into each other’s lives, how the local pastor plays an influential role in the lives of people.

 

When I read ‘Flight Behavior’ I couldn’t resist comparing it with ‘Prodigal Summer’. Both of them have some common themes – preservation of wild life, life of a farm wife, in-law trouble, small town issues. ‘Flight Behavior’ had a traditional, straightforward story with a beginning, a middle and an end with one main heroine unlike ‘Prodigal Summer’. However, I felt that Kingsolver’s prose in ‘Prodigal Summer’ was more beautiful. There were many beautiful lines and passages in ‘Flight Behavior’ but the focus was more on the story rather than on the beautiful sentences. However, for some reason, inspite of the focus on the story, the pages moved very slowly and it took me quite a while to finish the book. Also, in ‘Prodigal Summer’ the coyote and the luna moth were more like characters in the story, while in ‘Flight Behavior’ I didn’t feel the same way about the monarch butterfly. Maybe because there were millions of them out there in the valley, I didn’t really fall in love with them, though I liked their story.

 

I found ‘Flight Behavior’ quite interesting. It was a slow-read for me, but I liked the stories and the characters and the family scenes and the themes that the book addressed. It has been shortlisted for the Orange prize this year and it will be interesting to track its progress there.

 

I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.

 

The way he closed his fingers in a bracelet around her ankles and wrists marveling at her smallness, gave her the dimensions of an expensive jewel rather than an inconsequential adult.

 

People automatically estimate a mom’s IQ at around her children’s ages, maybe dividing by the number of kids, rounding up to the nearest pajama size.

 

Having children was not like people said. Forget training them in your footsteps; the minute they put down the teething ring and found the Internet, you were useless as a source of anything but shoes and a winter coat.

 

Dovey : “Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behavior in children, and medicate it in adults? That’s so random. It’s like this whole shady setup.”

Dellarobia : “True. At what age do you cross over the line and say, ‘Now I’ll face reality?’”

Dovey : “When you get there, send me a postcard.”

 

Dellarobia : “I don’t know how a person could even get through the day, knowing what you know.”

Ovid : “So. What gets Dellarobia through her day?”

Dellarobia : “Meeting the bus on time. Getting the kids to eat supper, getting teeth brushed. No cavities the next time. Little hopes, you know? There’s just not room at our house for the end of the world. Sorry to be a doubting Thomas.”

Ovid : “Well, you’re hardly the first. People always want the full predicament revealed and proven in sixty seconds or less.”

 

“Now, see, that’s why everybody wants Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy. The trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn’t agree with you, all that’s left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.”

 

It was hard to feel the remotest sympathy for any of the different fools she had been. As opposed to the fool she was probably being now. People hang on for dear life to that one, she thought : the fool they are right now.

 

Have you read Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Flight Behavior’? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Irish Literature Month – In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu

In ‘Middlemarch’, at one point, George Eliot starts a chapter (Book III, Chapter XXIX, first paragraph, in case you are interested) with this sentence : “One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea…”. And then immediately she asks – “but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one…?” And then she promptly goes on to tell us about other characters and Dorothea doesn’t make an appearance for a long while. Something similar happened to me when I was trying to decide on what stories / books to read for Irish Literature Month hosted by Mel U from ‘The Reading Life’. Initially while thinking of what to read, I thought I will read one of James Joyce’s stories, maybe his long short story ‘The Dead’. Or maybe a John Banville novel or an Oscar Wilde play (that is really stretching the definition of the short story, but we can do that while reading, can’t we? ). Or maybe some prose pieces by Seamus Heaney. While I was thinking about this, I suddenly thought, “Why read only serious works? Is that the only way of doing justice to Irish Literature Month? Why not read some fun stories?” And immediately Sheridan Le Fanu’s name popped up on my mind. I have been having a book of his for a while now, and I thought it was the right time to read it. (You must be thinking, “Yeah Vishy, nice story!” You are right. Things didn’t happen exactly this way. But like all good stories this has a good combination of facts and imagination woven together )

 

So I picked up Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘In a Glass Darkly’ last week. I stayed up late and finished reading it yesterday night. Isn’t it fun to read a horror story in the middle of the night and imagine and sometimes actually hear all kinds of strange sounds outside?

‘In a Glass Darkly’ has five short stories. Three of them are really short stories. One of them at around a hundred pages is really a novella. Another at around seventy pages is between a short story and a novella. They are case histories taken from the papers of Dr.Martin Hesselius, a scientific doctor who investigates strange incidents and psychic phenomena. The first three stories follow this theme more or less.

 

The first story ‘Green Tea’ is about a priest, who one day sees two eyes following him and then sees an outline of a monkey. This monkey doesn’t seem to be visible to anyone else. This monkey keeps following him, enters his house and stays there, and one day starts speaking to him. It disturbs him, doesn’t allow him to work, interrupts him when he is giving a talk to his congregation and tortures him verbally. This priest meets a doctor and asks for help. Whether the monkey is a real thing or is a product of the priest’s imagination, and what happens to the priest forms the rest of the story. The second story ‘The Familiar’ is in some ways similar. In this story a former navy officer walks on the streets late in the night while coming back from his friend’s place and he hears footsteps after him. He doesn’t see anyone. This strange thing starts happening everyday whenever he walks through a particular street in the night. Then he gets a letter warning him not to walk in the street. The torture that these footsteps give increases by the day leading to some disastrous consequences for the officer. In the third story ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’, the judge of the title is ruthless and influences juries and lawyers to get his way. But, unfortunately for him, one day he gets a letter that he has been guilty of doing that and he will be prosecuted against and if found guilty he will get the death penalty. The judge has a dream in which he is prosecuted against and is found guilty and a date for his punishment is pronounced. Is it all a dream? Or will the judge be really punished? We know more about this when we read the rest of the story.

 

The fourth and fifth stories in the book are different from the first three. In the first three stories it is sometimes not very clear whether the strange events are actually happening or are the product of the main character’s imagination. Sheridan Le Fanu is deliberately evasive about it. In the fourth and fifth stories strange events do happen and either there is a logical explanation for them or there are clearly supernatural elements involved. Also the fourth and fifth stories are closer to horror stories than explorations of psychic phenomena. The fourth story ‘The Room in Le Dragon Volant’, at around a hundred pages, is the longest story in the book. In this story, a young man goes to Paris to experience the pleasures of the city. He meets a mysterious person on the way and both of them make the journey together. This mysterious person who says that he is a Marquis says that he will help the young man make the most of his time in Paris, though he himself cannot join in, for most of the revelries. On the way to Paris, in an inn, the young man has an opportunity to help an odd couple – an old man who is a count and his young and beautiful wife the countess. The young man falls in love with the countess, at first sight. Then he meets a friend of the countess at a masked ball in the outskirts of Paris. And this friend tells our young man that the countess likes him and would like to meet him. And strange things start happening from then on.

 

The fifth story ‘Carmilla’ is narrated by a young woman who is living with her father in a castle. One day they have some unexpected visitors. A noblewoman and her daughter have a problem in their coach and the daughter is not well. The noblewoman leaves her daughter at the castle under the care of the narrator and her father. Then strange things start happening in the castle. In the night when the narrator is asleep, she has a dream that a strange creature has entered her room and hovers around her and then she feels a sharp sensation like two sharp needles being inserted near her throat. You can guess now what kind of story this is – it is a vampire story. Who is the vampire and what happens next, and whether the narrator and the peace of the castle survive these strange events form the rest of the story.

 

For a book which was a collection of horror stories, there were many passages in it which made me smile. Like this one :

 

What a fascination a title exercises upon the imagination! I do not mean on that of snobs or moral flunkies. Superiority of rank is a powerful and genuine influence in love. The idea of superior refinement is associated with it. The careless notice of the squire tells more upon the heart of the pretty milkmaid than years of honest Dobbin’s manly devotion, and so on and up. It is an unjust world!

 

And this one :

 

What a fool I was! And yet, in the sight of angels, are we any wiser as we grow older? It seems to me only that our illusions change as we go on; but, still, we are madmen all the same.

 

And this one :

 

A man young, handsome, generous, brave as you, can hardly be rich.

 

 ‘In a Glass Darkly’ is my first Sheridan Le Fanu book and I liked it very much. It was interesting to read different kinds of stories in one volume – three stories on psychic phenomena, one story where strange events happen which have logical explanations and another which is a vampire story. My favourite story out of the five was ‘Carmilla’. ‘The Room in Le Dragon Volant’ was a close second. I am glad that I stumbled upon Sheridan Le Fanu’s book and got to read it for Irish Literature Month. Many thanks to Mel U for hosting Irish Literature Month.

 

Have you read Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘In a Glass Darkly’? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – My Year of Reading French Literature – Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon by Nicole Brossard

I discovered Nicole Brossard through the book ‘One Hundred Great French Books’ by Lance Donaldson-Evans. Brossard’s ‘Baroque at Dawn’ was one of the books featured there. I found the description of the book interesting. Unfortunately, the English translation of the book was out of print and used copies were difficult to come by. So I did some research on other books by Nicole Brossard. I liked the plot outline of ‘Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon’. I got a used copy and finished reading it yesterday. Here is what I think.

 

Before I tell you what I think about the book, a few words on the author and the edition of the book I read. The first passage below is going to be a long rant. Pardon me for that.

 

Nicole Brossard is French Canadian. When one thinks about Canadian literature and Canadian writers, the name which comes to the top of one’s mind is Margaret Atwood. And then probably L.M.Montgomery, Alice Munro, and Carol Shields. And maybe Michael Ondaatje and Rohinton Mistry. I also think about the Spalding mother-daughter duo, Linda and Esta, David Gilmour and Miriam Towes. (This list of names says more about my own ignorance of Canadian literature than anything else. Canadian literature is alive and kicking, rich and thriving. Me on the other hand – I need to read more and learn more.) Of course, the one thing common between all these writers is that they write in English. And so one normally assumes that Canadian writers write in English. One conveniently forgets that Canada has one province – Quebec – where the first language is French. Or atleast I do. When I discovered that Nicole Brossard was French Canadian and she wrote in French, I was quite excited. I have never heard of a French Canadian writer before, leave alone read one. So I was looking forward to reading one of her books very much. While pondering on Nicole Brossard’s background, I also wondered about something. I wondered what kind of literary prizes a French Canadian author can aspire to and win. Eventhough Canada is part of the Commonwealth, a French Canadian author is not eligible for prizes like the Booker, the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, the James Tait Black memorial prize and other similar prizes because her / his books will be in French. Someone like Nicole Brossard won’t be eligible for the Orange prize because that is given only to women writers writing in English, irrespective of their nationality. I wondered whether a French Canadian writer would be eligible for the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Femina, the Prix Medicis, the Prix Renaudot and the like. I suspect all these prizes are awarded only to French citizens. This made me think of a larger issue – that a writer, who produces great works of literature, might not be known outside her immediate environment because she is not eligible for many of these international literary prizes. It is a real shame, isn’t it? Nicole Brossard has been writing for nearly fifty years (yeah, that is right! It is forty eight years to be precise – she published her first book in 1965), and I don’t know anyone who has read her books. And most of her books are not easily available in English. Which is a shame because she writes quite beautifully (more on this later). She deserves a wider readership.

 

Now on the edition of the book that I read. It is an English translation made in 2005. (The original French book came out in 2001). It is a beautifully produced edition. The paper is thick with horizontal stripes (it can be seen only when you notice it carefully – do you know what this kind of paper is called?). The fragrance of the paper is like that of a new book. The used copy I read came from a library which had given it away. Why would a library give it away? Did no one want to read the book? (The book looks practically unread). The good news though is that if the library hadn’t given it away I wouldn’t have been able to get the book. So that was good for me. Atleast one good thing came out of it.

 

Now on the actual book. ‘Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon’ is made up of six parts. The first part which runs for nearly half of the book follows the lives of four different women. One of them is an unnamed narrator who works in a museum. She talks about her life and about her feelings for her mother whom she lost sometime back. The narrator also talks about a writer she meets regularly at the bar called Carla Carlson. Carla always comes to Quebec city (where the story is set) to finish the current novel she is working on. The narrator and Carla have long conversations at the bar while they discuss about their lives – the narrator talks about her mother and about her work while Carla talks about her father and about her novel. The other two characters whose lives the book follows are Simone and Axelle. Simone is the director of the museum in which the narrator works while Axelle is Simone’s grand daughter. Simone’s daughter Lorraine leaves her home and city many years back when Axelle was a child and so Simone and Axelle haven’t met for many years. Both of them somehow get in touch and plan to meet at a restaurant for dinner. The second part of the book goes for around ten ages in which Simone is walking around in her museum admiring different art objects when she receives shocking news. The third part is structured as a play and is set in a bar where the four characters meet, two of them – the narrator and Carla – by design and the other two by coincidence. The fourth part takes the story to Carla’s room and the story continues as a play and reaches its conclusion. The fifth part contains ‘Chapter Five’ of the book that Carla is working on. The sixth part has notes which are found in the room at the Hotel Clarendon. There is an appendix after that which has the English translation of a Latin scene in the fourth part of the book and a list of books that Carla mentions in that part.

 

When we look at the plot, the story told in ‘Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon’ seems simple enough. There are four women whose lives the book tracks and whose lives come together in some interesting way. Maybe there are a few surprises in the end. (I am especially intrigued by the identity of the narrator.). Though this is an important part of the book, this is not the whole book. The book is also about a few other things. Interesting things. The book is almost Joycean in its experimental structure. In one of the initial chapters, the unnamed narrator talks about James Joyce and how he refused to use quotation marks in dialogues. Then in one of the next chapters we see a dialogue where there are no quotation marks. This is the beginning of the Joycean game. Later in the book, something interesting happens. Though the narrative is linear, in the third and fourth parts the story is structured as a play – clearly inspired by Joyce. Towards the end of the fourth part, the four characters of the story get transformed into four characters in the novel that Carla is writing which is based on the life of the French philosopher Descartes. And that scene is enacted in Latin. When that scene gets over, the four characters get back to their normal selves. But one of the characters, Carla the novelist, speaks in two voices – as herself and as the Cardinal in the novel on Descartes. The fifth part which is ‘Chapter Five’ of Carla’s novel, doesn’t read like Carla’s novel at all. It reads like a piece written by the narrator because of what it says and some of the clues that the author gives. When I read again this passage from the early part of the book (told by the narrator), after finishing ‘Chapter Five’ I saw things in a totally different light.

 

Our every encounter disturbs the meaning of Carla’s novel. Refreshing it without her awareness. Even here in the bar at the Clarendon, in what Carla calls the mystery of a city that gives insight into the continent, her novel rips us out of history, out of the quiet temporality of bell towers and convents.

 

The sixth part which contains notes seems to be written by the author. But one of the scenes which it describes is the same scene which the narrator of the main novel is part of. It makes us wonder whether the author is the narrator of the novel and whether she is a part of the story. Then when we step back and think it comes to our mind that if the author is a part of the story and is the narrator in the story and the author meets Carla and has conversations with her and the ‘Chapter Five’ which Carla is supposed to have written seems to be written by the narrator and hence it seems to have been written by the author herself, we start wondering whether the narrator and Carla are the same person in actuality but separated into two characters in the narrative. And what about Simone and Axelle? When we start thinking more, our minds start spinning…

 

I liked the inventiveness that Nicole Brossard cunningly employs in the book but this inventiveness hit me only after I finished reading the book and started to think about it. The thing which I totally loved while reading the book was Brossard’s gorgeous prose. It was sublime, lush, delightful, transcendent, luscious, intoxicating. After reading a particular passage and falling in love with it, I thought that this was it. Now Brossard will get back to business and get on with the story. And then followed another intoxicating passage. And then another. And another. It was the kind of intoxication that one gets while listening to classical music, the kind which is pleasurable but on which one never gets drunk. Nicole Brossard is also a poet and it shows in her prose. I want to read this novel again just for Brossard’s prose. As a sample, I will give below some of my favourite passages from the book.

 

While others march gaily toward madness in order to stay alive in a sterile world, I strive for preservation. I cling to objects, their descriptions, to the memory of landscapes lying fully drawn in the folds of things around me. Every moment requires me, my gaze or sensation. I become attached to objects. I don’t readily let go of days by banishing them to the blank book of memory. Certain words ignite me. I take the time to look around. Some mornings, I yield to the full-bodied pleasure of navigating among seconds. I then lose my voice. This doesn’t bother me. I take the opportunity to lend an ear to ambient life with an eagerness I never suspected. The idea of remaining calm doesn’t displease me. Some days I make sure everything is grey, like in November, or somber, for I like storms.

 

Some time ago, while looking for a book in the museum library, I came upon a typewriter page sticking out of a book about diamond cutting. Prompted by curiosity, I read the first lines. I read and reread. Ever since then, this page is always with me. I sometimes read it several times a day Its meaning varies, depending on whether I read it when I get up in the morning, in the afternoon when the sun floods my work table or when I get back from meeting Carla Carlson. I don’t think the page was part of a personal diary. Perhaps of a novel. Some days the meaning of the page seems obvious, on others it wavers like a conversation by the seashore where syllables are drowned out and pronouns merge with the noise of wind and surf. Today I memorized the page. Now it’s part of me and can surge into my thoughts at any time. Whole or in parts, slowly infiltrating my everyday life.

 

When Mother died, I knew every feature of her face by heart. It’s crazy how we never look at faces when we’re speaking with people. As if, from not looking into the eyes too much or seeming not to want to insert ourselves into the other’s thoughts, we end up seeing nothing. Mother couldn’t defend herself. Her whole face was vulnerable to my worried gaze discovering the curve of her nose, of her eyebrows, eyelashes so short, wrinkles not as deep as I’d thought.

 

For a long time I believed it was good to let fiction into one’s life. That this would make it possible to reframe existence, to unfurl landscapes so stunning that afterwards one couldn’t help but love the most ordinary gestures and objects, for, once fiction had traversed them with its kaleidoscopic brilliance, everything comprising reality would shine with a thousand intriguing fires. Fiction was my foothold for touching light

 

Yesterday, Carla called me a passionate reader without knowing a thing about my reading habits. I think she meant I’m a passionate person and the word reader escaped her like a glass slips out of a hand. It’s true that reading is part of my life, that it brings me pleasure, but at the same time it burns me. From the inside. As if, encountering m nostalgia, it ignites an unbearable elation in me.

 

It took me a long time to understand that human beings could find pleasure in one another. I long believed that only necessary things like work, sexuality and providing aid in times of emergency, in times of great disaster and uncontrollable fear, were at the root of all conversations. I always felt I was living in the margins of friendships, which must, they say, be cultivated and maintained with precautions infinitely more subtle than those required for love. Just like the word agony was unknown to me, friendship is, in its essence, I believe, foreign to me. This I discover while talking with Fabrice and Carla. Increasingly, Fabrice is something like a friend. He has that anxiety that often makes men worried and bony yet philosophical. Fabrice transforms his anxiety into a generous tenderness. He knows how to distinguish between true knowledge and the danger of half-baked knowledge rotting in the interstices of lucidity.

 

What, in the end, is a life? What one has seen and told, what one avoids talking about or simply what one has invented and which has been lost over time, unbeknownst to us, very slowly just as one says a week has gone by already, the last day before your departure, three whole years of mad love, seven years of misery, a quarter of a century of war or a quarter of an hour spent waiting on a winter street corner for someone, something, that doesn’t come, that won’t come.

 

People think a ten-year old child is unable to think or to really want. Something. At that very moment, more than anything, I wanted my mother, her rough and busy gestures, her worried look, her blue eyes which, even when she was angry, always seemed soft. Looking in her eyes was like going to the movies. I always tried to do it as long as possible. Children rarely look into parents in the eye, but I always looked at my mother right in the eye. Eventually she’d laugh and say, ‘Hurry up and look at me, we’re leaving’. When I looked at her I felt like I was honouring her and getting closer to her dreams, to her real dreams.

 

To continue the rant from one of the earlier passages above, I just found two reviews of this book on the internet and both of them were in Canadian literary magazines (if you are interested, you can find them here and here.) There was just one review in Goodreads and the first line of it read – “I just can’t stand this book anymore.” Really? I am sad at all this.

 

I loved Nicole Brossard’s ‘Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon’. The inventive structure was quite interesting and intellectually engaging, but what I loved most was Brossard’s sublime and intoxicating prose. I want to read this book again, just for that. I know that it is early days yet and we are just in March, but I have a strong suspicion that Brossard’s book will be one of my top favourites this year.

 

Have you read ‘Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon’ or other books written by Nicole Brossard? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – My Year of Reading French Literature – Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux

‘Simple Passion’ by Annie Ernaux was one of the books mentioned in Lance Donaldson-Evans’ ‘One Hundred Great French Books’. I haven’t heard of Annie Ernaux before and so I decided to try this book. I read it in one sitting and finished it yesterday. Here is what I think.

‘Simple Passion’, at around sixty pages, is not really a novel. With wide spacing between lines and with luxurious space on the borders of the page, it could be called, at best, a novella or probably a long short story. It is not clear from the book whether it is fiction or a memoir. The classification on the back cover says ‘Literature / Memoir’. The narrator of the book describes the affair she once had with a married man from a different country who was working in Paris. The only way they communicated was by phone when the man called her and told her he was going to visit her. She then waited for him to visit, anxiously preparing herself – getting the right clothes, wearing the right makeup, getting food and drink for the evening, preparing herself emotionally – but also looking forward to the visit with a lot of excitement. But then he comes, they have intimate moments together, he leaves and then she is worn out. And she starts the long agonizing wait for the next phone call from him. At some point she stops seeing her friends, going out for movies or having any kind of social life as she is waiting for her lover’s phone call, when she is not working (this was during the days before the advent of the mobile phone). The narrator’s thoughts about this whole affair comprise the rest of the book.

 

‘Simple Passion’ is an interesting book. There is not much of a plot here – the plot can be told in two lines. The book is mostly about the narrator’s thoughts on life, love, longing, waiting, the agony of parting. I am pretty sure it will deeply resonate with anyone who has had an affair or even with anyone who has ever been in love. Annie Ernaux’s prose is spare and simple, but there are beautiful sentences in every page. Though I read it in one sitting, I read it very slowly and enjoyed lingering over those beautiful sentences. For example, she describes the brief time she spends with her lover as :

 

An interval of time squeezed in between two car noises – his Renault 25 braking, then driving off again

 

And she describes her feelings after her lover leaves like this :

 

As soon as he left, I would be overcome by a wave of fatigue. I wouldn’t tidy up straight away. I would sit staring at the glasses, the plates and their leftovers, the overflowing ashtray, the clothes, the lingerie strewn all over the bedroom and the hallway, the sheets spilling over on to the carpet. I would have liked to keep that mess the way it was – a mess in which every object evoked a caress or a particular moment, forming a still-life whose intensity and pain could never, for me, be captured by any painting in a museum.

 

In another place the narrator describes how she used to shop for new outfits to look beautiful for her lover when he visited her the next time :

 

In his absence, I was only happy when I was out buying new dresses, earrings, stockings, and trying them on at home in front of the mirror – the ideal, quite impossible, being that he should see me each time in a different outfit. He would only glimpse my new blouse or pumps for a couple of minutes before they were discarded in some corner until he left. Of course I realized how pointless new clothes were in the event of his feeling desire for another woman. But presenting myself in clothes he had already seen seemed a mistake, a slackening in the quest for perfection for which I strove in my relationship with him.

 

In another place the narrator talks about the imperfection of communication with her lover and how paradoxically, this imperfection is sometimes perfect.

 

At first I was discouraged by the obvious limitations of our exchanges. These were emphasized by the fact that, although he spoke fairly good French, I could not express myself in his language. Later I realized that this situation spared me the illusion that we shared a perfect relationship, or even formed a whole. Because his French strayed slightly from standard use and because I occasionally had doubts about the meaning he gave to words, I was able to appreciate the approximate quality of our conversations. From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end : the man we love is a complete stranger.

 

Sometimes we think that writing about something which affected us deeply helps us make sense of it and is therapeutic, but the narrator of the story says something different :

 

I know full well that I can expect nothing from writing, which, unlike real life, rules out the unexpected. To go on writing is also a means of delaying the trauma of giving this to others to read. I hadn’t considered this eventuality while I still felt the need to write. But now that I have satisfied this need, I stare at the written pages with astonishment and something resembling shame, feelings I certainly never felt when I was living out my passion and writing about it. The prospect of publication brings me closer to people’s judgment and the “normal” values of society. (Having to answer questions such as “Is it an autobiography?” and having to justify this or that may have stopped many books from seeing the light of day, except in the form of a novel, which succeeds in saving appearances.)

      At this point, sitting in front of the pages covered in my indecipherable scrawlings, which only I can interpret, I can still believe this is something private, almost childish, of no consequence whatsoever – like the declarations of love and the obscene expressions I used to write on the back of my exercise books in class, or anything else one may write calmly, in all impunity, when there is no risk of it being read. Once I start typing out the text, once it appears before me in public characters, I shall be through with innocence.

 

Annie Ernaux ends the book with this beautiful passage :

 

When I was a child, luxury was fur coats, evening dresses, and villas by the sea. Later on, I thought it meant leading the life of an intellectual. Now I feel that it is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman.

 

I have to say that I have got the ‘leading the life of an intellectual’ part right – so I can say that my life is filled with luxury, in a way

 

‘Simple Passion’ is a beautiful, slim gem. It is a book to be savoured over a winter evening warming oneself next to a fire having a drink. Or alternately, it can be savoured on a warm summer evening, watching the sun set, while sitting outdoors in the garden and sipping a delicious cup of tea. I want to read other books of Annie Ernaux now.

 

Have you read ‘Simple Passion’ by Annie Ernaux? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – My Year of Reading French Literature – Nadja by André Breton

When I read the book ‘One Hundred Great French Books’ by Lance Donaldson-Evans recently, one of the books from Donaldson-Evans’ list which intrigued me was ‘Nadja’ by André Breton. It intrigued me because of two reasons. The first reason was the story – it was about the narrator meeting a strange woman in the streets of Paris and carrying on a conversation with her everyday. The story appealed to be very much, as it reminded me of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s ‘White Nights’ which I like very much. The second reason was the fact that this was regarded as the first Surrealist romance ever written and probably the best. I wanted to see how a Surrealist romance looked like. (I think Mansoura Ez Eldin’s ‘Maryam’s Maze’ is also surrealist, but it is probably not a romance.) So I got ‘Nadja’ a couple of weeks back and finished reading it a few days back. Here is what I think.

 

‘Nadja’ has three parts, each spanning around fifty pages. The first part doesn’t have a story – in it, the author, who is also the narrator, describes images of people, places and things that he encounters in early twentieth century Paris. He also describes some events. This part of the book was extremely hard to read. After I read the first two pages, I realized that I can’t read this book like a regular novel. It required lingering on sentences and meditating on words and the images they were trying to paint. Still, I read the first fourteen pages like a regular novel and then went back and read them again from the first page. Then I read the hard paragraphs again, starting from the first one.

 

The first part of the book was not uniformly difficult – some passages, which described people and events, flowed smoothly, while others, which described ideas, required a lot of intellectual effort and moved slowly. The first passage went like this :

 

Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I “haunt”. I must admit that this last word is misleading, tending to establish between certain things and myself relations that are stranger, more inescapable, more disturbing than I intended. Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am.

 

Difficult to read, but also very beautiful, isn’t it? So far, so good. How I wished most of the pages were only as difficult as this. Ten pages later, I encountered this :

 

We might establish a number of intermediate steps between such slope-facts and such cliff-facts. Between those of which I can be only the agonized witness and those others about which I flatter myself I possess the full details, there is perhaps the same distance as between one of those declarations or series of declarations which constitutes the sentence or the text known as “surrealist” and the declaration or series of declarations which, for the same observer, constitutes the sentence or the text whose every term he has fully weighed and measured. He does not consider his responsibility involved, so to speak, in the first case; it is involved in the second. On the other hand, he is infinitely, more surprised, more fascinated by what happens in the former than in the latter. He is also prouder of it, which is certainly remarkable, and feels the freer for it. This is the case with those privileged sensations I have mentioned and whose share of incommunicability is itself a source of pleasures that have no equal.

 

Harder, isn’t it? But also very beautiful. This passage was like reading a text version of a complex computer program. The love of French writers for long sentences with multiple clauses, made it harder for me to read the book. But when I was able to penetrate the meaning of those long, labyrinthine sentences, it was very rewarding. I also thought that it was good practice before starting to read Marcel Proust

 

The second part of the book was about how the narrator met Nadja in the streets of Paris one day and how they started meeting regularly everyday taking long walks, having conversations and sometimes sitting in a café and talking for long hours. Nadja appears to be a very unique woman. She is a free spirit, she roams the streets, she has a few friends who are all very unique and she discusses art, literature and poetry with the narrator with her own unique insights. Nadja lives in a hotel and it is not very clear how she earns her living. Once she confesses to the narrator that she tried smuggling in cocaine from Amsterdam for one of her friends but she got caught by the police. But the fact that Nadja leads an unconventional life appeals to the narrator even more. At some point, the narrator and Nadja stop meeting and then the narrator discovers that Nadja has been committed to a psychiatric ward. The narrator doesn’t believe that Nadja is mad but he believes that she is just different. This part of the book was an easy read compared to the first part, because most of the pages here were filled with conversations between the narrator and Nadja or described their meetings.

 

The third part of the book has reproductions of paintings and sketches that Nadja has done and given to the narrator. They are all surrealistic with unconventional, powerful images. The narrator also describes these paintings and sketches and gives his own interpretations of their themes.

 

I don’t know how to describe ‘Nadja’. I liked the first part of the book very much, though it was hard to read, because after I learnt to penetrate the meaning of those long sentences, I found it very rewarding. The second part of the book was the story part and logically this should have been the most interesting part of the book. I went into this part expecting delightful conversations like in Dostoevsky’s ‘White Nights’ and the movie ‘Before Sunrise’, but for some reason the conversations didn’t have the sparks that they had in these other works of art that I love. I think that if Dostoyevsky or Chekhov or even Somerset Maugham had written this part of the book, it would have been a roaring success. The third part of the book had a lot of pictures and their descriptions and interpretations – it was like reading a critical appreciation of someone’s work of art. The whole book is interspersed with paintings, sketches and photos of different people and places that the narrator mentions or discusses about in the book. These images are either an integral part of the book or enrich our reading of it.

 

‘Nadja’ is not a book for everyone. It is a challenging read and while there were parts of the book that I loved, there were parts of the book that I wasn’t sure about or which I felt could have been written better. I will however keep coming back to the first part of the book again, because I want to read all those beautiful sentences (which taxed my brain so much) again.

 

I will leave you with some of my favourite lines from the book.

                                              

…let no one speak to me of work – I mean the moral value of work. I am forced to accept the notion of work as a material necessity, and in this regard I strongly favor its better, that is its fairer, division. I admit that life’s grim obligations make it a necessity, but never that I should believe in its value, revere my own or that of other men. I prefer, once again, walking by night to believing myself a man who walks by daylight. There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning – that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself – is not earned by work.

 

We are in front of a fountain, whose jet she seems to be watching. “Those are your thoughts and mine. Look where they all start from, how high they reach, and then how it’s still prettier when they fall back. And then they dissolve immediately, driven back up with the same strength, then there’s that broken spurt again, that fall…and so on indefinitely.”

 

I envy (in a manner of speaking) any man who has the time to prepare something like a book and who, having reached the end, finds the means to be interested in its fate or in the fate which, after all, it creates for him.

 

“…each man hopes and believes he is better than the world which is his, but the man who is better merely expresses this same world better than the others.” (this is a quote from Hegel)

 

Have you read ‘Nadja’ by André Breton? What do you think about it?

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