End of year review, 2020

I started my end of year review last year by calling 2019 an annus horribilis.

What a melon!

There is no need to rake over how bloody awful the pandemic has been. The other day someone on Twitter said: “The worst thing about writers is that they think they’re the first person to experience everything they experience”, and I don’t have anything new to say about the year we’ve all lived through. I’m lucky enough to have not gotten ill or to have been in work that’s exposed me to risk; as for most other people, 2020 has just been really exhausting. Let’s hope 2021 is more invigorating – that there are more chances to do things, to see people, to make changes. Now – the reading.

At the beginning of the lockdown, I managed to keep a good habit of reading for an hour or so in the morning in the time that had previously been my commute. Having a read in bed with a tea is much better than reading in the Tube crush, with one eye on getting a seat after Bank. By the summer, my attention span and my drive to work completely packed in. I managed a handful of articles for the blog but really I’ve neglected writing all year, and I’m a bit disappointed. I owe lots of people reviews and I’ve got a shamefully big backlog of Advance Reading Copies to get through. I have still enjoyed dozens of really funny, absorbing and fascinating books this year, and lots of my reading was in preparation for one article or another that I was either too lazy or too overwhelmed to write.

But I think we’ve all earned some slack. So instead, I’m going to view my reading in 2020 as a gigantic pre-reading to all the superb, Witty, Original and Viral (👉👈🥺) content that I’m going to do, I promise, in 2021. You have been warned. And really, I can’t sing the praises enough of the books below. They really have been the highlight of my year.

Books that I loved…and which really deserve reviews

I had a long list of debut titles and new releases that I was hyped to read this year, as well as loads of debuts from 2019 that I was late to the party for. An early favourite was Candace Carty-Williams’ funny, truthful Queenie, which lifted my spirits in January after a rubbish Christmas election. I loved the run-down, almost noir vibe of Elisa Shua Dupin’s Winter in Sokcho, a slim novel translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. It’s the story of an intelligent, overlooked French-Korean girl working at a guesthouse near the North Korean border in the middle of a bleak winter. An unexpected guest arrives, a French cartoonist determined to cross the border, and they strike up a sort-of-friendship that unfolds with a sly conclusion. The setting is cinematic and striking; I went through this one in two sittings.

Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid’s sharp satire on race politics in America and the double-standards of liberalism, was entertaining and thought-provoking. It’s 2015 and Emira is a young black woman who works as a babysitter for Alix, a feminist blogger who’s looking forward to helping coordinate Hilary Clinton’s campaign. A white police officer accuses Emira of ‘kidnapping’ Alix’s daughter whilst grocery shopping. Footage of the incident goes viral, leading Alix to feel duty-bound to intervene and ‘help’ Emira in any way she can. But Emira is wary of this help, and Alix has her own reasons for wanting to make friends with a woman she really knows nothing about. I loved how Reid gets inside the heads of her characters, and exposes their prejudices, blind biases and their virtues; she’s also great at building tension, and some of the messy confrontations between Alix, Emira and their friends were priceless.

I finally got around to Girl, Woman, Other, too (another fresh take: Bernadine was totally robbed last year) which for me read like a marvellous state-of-the-nation novel. Although you should rightly shudder at the thought of something like a Brexit novel, Girl, Woman, Other takes on the questions of identity, politics and race that have defined the last few years (although Bernadine Evaristo and lots of other Black writers have been doing this for years anyway). On the day that Brexit has finally passed into law, and in the wake of a year that’s seen mass protests for racial equality, police violence on both sides of the Atlantic and a government that refuses to admit even that institutional racism exists, it’s important to read novels that feel properly, directly political.

One debut that really got in my head was Eliza Clarke’s Boy Parts. I had actually been anticipating Boy Parts for something like seven months before it was published by the inimitable Influx Press this summer, and, unlike basically everything else that you hype up for yourself for that long, Boy Parts was even better than I hoped it’d be. Irina is a 20-something artist in Newcastle who takes explicit photographs of average-looking men that she picks up, who are desperate to please her. She’s been offered a solo show at a gallery in London, just as she’s found a new model: the deliciously naive and gawky checkout boy from Tesco. Irina is really grim – which is hilarious, and following her nasty monologue as she schemes, manipulates and photographs her way around her friends and subjects is like riding a rollercoaster. If you have a strong stomach and a taste for sociopaths, Boy Parts is great fun and a brilliant inversion of the male gaze. I think I’m going to re-read it and write something in the new year. Much To Think About.

Speaking of strong stomachs, I was blown away by Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, a story of black magic and ultraviolence in rural Mexico that unfolds with a hypnotic speed. One memorable tube journey I re-read an opening of a chapter over and over, thinking, how did she do that? In the village of La Matosa, the Witch is dead – her body found mutilated in an irrigation ditch at the height of a boiling, intolerable summer. Melchor writes in breathless paragraphs, with very few breaks or full stops, and as we move between people connected with the Witch and her murder we slowly learn what violence, cruelty and magic have led to her death. I think, objectively, there’s more twisted violence and terrible things in Hurricane Season than anything else I’ve ever read (Blood Meridian has been staring at me from the shelf for years). If you’re a fan of folk horror or True Detective, then get on this. All credit to Sophie Hughes for her excellent translation.

The final, most magical novel I wanted to write about this year was the slim Piranesi, the latest book by Susanna Clarke. At the moment I’m re-reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which is an absolute favourite of mine, and Piranesi doesn’t disappoint: another weird, pretty tale of magic. The House is an endless labyrinth of vast, empty halls filled with thousands of crumbling statues and populated by birds, fish and bones. Piranesi has lived here alone forever, maybe, visited only by the mysterious Other, who wants to unlock and harness the power of the House. Is he a friend or a foe? A melancholy meditation on loneliness, with an abundance of Gothic Wonders. What’s not to love.

Non-fiction

As anyone who saw me before lockdown and my Twitter avi will attest, my January was consumed by Helena Atlee’s The Land Where Lemons Grow. I got this as the ultimate escapism and wholesome content from the wretched mess that was December 2019 and the prospect of another four years of listening to Boris Johnson; how naive I was. The Land Where Lemons came out in 2015: an expert on Italian gardens and culture, Atlee takes us on a surprisingly fascinating and richly interesting tour of Italy and the country’s rich appreciation and culinary heritage surrounding citrus fruits. A nice mix of history and culinary memoir, I especially liked reading about Sicily, where it’s the cold of the mountain air around Etna that makes the blood oranges so…orangey. The Land Where Lemons Grow also prompted me to make some shite gloopy marmalade, and proved my belief, from Umberto Eco, that every subject in the world is fascinating when looked at and written about in the right way.

Another book that fits that mould is Owen Hatherley’s Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London. London – the home of the overpaid and out-of-touch metropolitan liberal elite – is far more complicated and neglected than the tabloids and rural Tories might have you think. In fact, despite the fact that it’s the heart of central government and home of some of the wealthiest people in the country, most Londoners suffer from some of the very worst wealth inequality and housing that a decade of austerity have inflicted upon the UK. Hatherley, an architectural critic and culture editor of Tribune, investigates London’s surprisingly left-wing history, from the decent council housing built by the Greater London Authority to the radical legacy of Red Ken, Boris Johnson’s typical uselessness and what Sadiq Kahn can do to put the city on the right tracks again. Since moving to London, I’ve worked hard to learn as much as I can about our capital and its contradictions, and Red Metropolis has ignited my interest in architecture, council housing, and municipal local socialism. With the Mayoral elections coming in May 2021, we can all do with a more nuanced understanding of our capital city, and the ways that we should govern the entire country better.

Another really important study of social welfare in Britain today that came out in 2020 was Feeding Britain, by Tim Lang, a former policy advisor and currently Professor of Food Studies at City University. The food system in the UK – what food we eat, where it comes from and how sustainably it’s sourced – is in perilously bad shape. We need to rethink how we feed ourselves and how we can make sure that food policy creates an equitable, truly fair society. As Marcus Rashford’s campaigns over the summer have shown, food is about so much more than hunger – it’s about opportunity, and fairness, and only a properly resilient and locally-driven food system will make sure that everyone in Britain eats and lives decently. I have no brain for figures or statistics, but Feeding Britain is replete with diagrams, tables and percentages, and Lang’s straight-speaking, plain prose does a fantastic job of explaining the knotty worlds of food supply and social change. If you want to understand the full impact of austerity and what we can do to make social life fairer and more decent, start with Feeding Britain.

For lighter reading, I can’t recommend more highly Tete-Michel Kpomassie’s An African in Greenland, which I reviewed back in June. A remarkable true tale, An African in Greenland is a young man’s story of how in the 1960s he ran away from his home in Togo, West Africa, and went to live among the Eskimo of Greenland, who welcomed him with open arms. It’s a surprisingly upbeat and innocent story, perfect as we won’t be travelling abroad anytime soon. I also only have good things to say about Brian Dillon’s Suppose A Sentence, from the same publisher as Hurricane Season, which is a series of essays investigating twenty-seven sentences: what makes them brilliant, and how grammar, language and syntax can elevate prose.

Journalism

I’ve been paying more attention this year to which journalists I’m reading and where I’m reading them. One of my favourite stories this year was Tom Lamont’s ‘The invisible city: how a homeless man built a life underground’, about a man who dug a bunker under Hampstead Heath. It totally grabbed my attention and didn’t let me go until I realised I’d lost a whole day I was supposed to be writing something. I religiously read The Guardian‘s Long Reads, but it was a few more months until I realised all my favourite long reads of the past few years – including ‘Speed kills: are police chases out of control?’, and the spellbinding ‘Dulwich Hamlet: the improbable tale of a tiny football club lost its home to developers – and then won it back’ – were all from Tom Lamont. Spend a day or two going through his backlog, you won’t regret it.

Food writing has occupied a lot of my time and reading this year, and Jonathan Nunn’s newsletter Vittles has been a firm friend throughout the year. Nunn, a food writer (who had the great twitter handle of @aadril), started Vittles back in March as a way of covering the anxious, terrible condition that the food world found itself in during the first lockdown – not to mention the troubles it still faces, many of which have been evident long before Covid. Written by chefs, critics and community leaders, you’ll always find something new and different in Vittles – from a guide to foraging in the city to an appreciation post of the UK’s regional chip shop vernacular. You can subscribe for very little, and support the future of good, open food writing.

The Crumbs of One Man’s Year

What is going to be hard about 2021 is that nothing about it is certain. During the first lockdown, you could console yourself with the knowledge that, eventually, the restrictions would be eased and life would start slowly going back to normal. But after the second lockdown, and Christmas being cancelled, and the likelihood of a third lockdown in the next fortnight or so, we don’t even have the security of an end in sight. It was going to last three weeks, then it was going to be over by Christmas, and now we’ll be lucky to go outside next April. Although no one can make the virus less contagious or deadly, there is absolutely no excuse for the way that the government has handled the crisis, and many hundreds of lives, not to mention jobs, businesses and social services, have been lost as a direct result of the current administration. For some reason, many millions of people in Britain refuse to hold the Conservatives responsible for anything they do, and that has to change. Honestly, we just love being miserable too much.

One more book that it’s nearly impossible to characterise: Etty Hillesum’s diary. I’m grateful to a Twitter mutual for making me aware of this book. Published by Persephone under the title An Interrupted Life, Etty was a young Jewish woman living in Amsterdam during the Second World War. She lived on the other side of the city to Anne Frank and had a very different life: a graduate student, she spent most of the first part of the occupation studying Russian, visiting friends and cycling around the canals. When the Nazis began introducing antisemitic laws, Etty bears each humiliation with courage and dignity, more than you can easily conceive. After a German soldier threatens her in the street, Etty is steely calm, channeling her fear into a commitment to bear witness to the horror around her:

I am not easily frightened. Not because I am brave, but because I know that I am dealing with human beings and that I must try as hard as I can to understand everything that anyone ever does…What needs eradicating is the evil in man, not man himself.

Etty’s courage was superhuman, and when the Nazis began rounding up Jewish people in preparation to deport them to the camps in the East, Etty volunteers as a go-between for other Jews who are less well educated and less able to get around the bureaucracy. She does what she can, from inside a camp, to make life more tolerable for her people. Of course that doesn’t save her. Although it sounds bleak, An Interrupted Life made a deep impression on me, and before the pandemic I managed to visit the house where Etty lived in Amsterdam. I don’t want to make a sham connection between what Etty went through and the experience I’ve had of the pandemic: all I can say is, in a year that has been full of frustrations, tragedy, fear and anger, I learnt a lot by reading and thinking about what Etty Hillesum wanted to tell us about her life.

Well there it is – lots of great novels, and fascinating non-fiction. Let’s hope for a better 2021 – it can’t be worse than 2020, right…? (please say right). Exciting, interesting stuff on the horizon.

Searching for sensibility: Brian Dillon’s SUPPOSE A SENTENCE

Great sentences are like earworms: they stick with you, sometimes without consent. I am an inveterate earworm sufferer. If I’m stuck with a song (one day of Northwest Passage is great, three or four days are more than enough) I find the best way to rid myself of it is to listen more closely, to think about the lyrics and the rhythm and try to put my finger on what it’s holding over me.

It’s the same experience if you’ve ever scribbled down a line from a book or a quote from an author. You might not really know why you like the line so much, but you’re still compelled to collect and keep the sentence. If, as Virginia Woolf tells us, words themselves are ‘highly democratic’, believing (amongst themselves) that ‘one word is as good as another’, why are some sentences so much better than others? And how do the writers we idolise pull it off?

As with an earworm, the way to answer these questions is to pay close attention. In his essay on Claire-Louise Bennett from his new book, SUPPOSE A SENTENCE, Brian Dillon talks about the idea of writerly ‘sensibility’ – the thing that distinguishes a writer’s voice and style:

Old-fashioned word, but how else to describe this fog of feelings, attachments and fantasies […] express[ed] so precisely and yet so enigmatically in her prose?

It is this often-intangible quality that Dillon is looking to unpack and introduce to his reader in SUPPOSE A SENTENCE, the thing that turns a good sentence into a welcome earworm, the sort of thing worth copying into and between notebooks and that rewards twelve pages’ close reading. Each of the twenty-seven essays collected in SUPPOSE A SENTENCE examines a single sentence that has stuck with Dillon throughout his time as a reader and a writer.

Some essays stretch to ten or fifteen pages, others cover little more than a page. We move from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, starting with Shakespeare and ending with Anne Boyer. Often they come from a writer’s B-side: we’re read to from John Ruskin’s diary; Joan Didion’s Vogue captions; John Donne’s funeral elegy and Shakespeare’s early drafts. (Even they had howlers.) In some essays, Dillon focuses on a single word choice, or possible word choices, examining the etymology and history of the verb or noun upon which a sentence hinges; in others, he considers how different clauses are weighted and stacked against one another and how this shapes meaning and expression. Dillon is a knowledgeable guide, and alongside the practical criticism his asides about how he came to each author give SUPPOSE A SENTENCE a personal, persuasive tone. Here is an interesting friend talking you through something cool he once read, oh, years back now.

With each sentence acting as a roundabout introduction to a writer, I ended up treating SUPPOSE A SENTENCE as a collection of biographies-in-miniature, a set of potted histories that introduced me to a handful of new writers I’d never heard of and whetted my appetite to finally take a punt on a few others I’ve been neglecting. This was something I enjoyed most about SUPPOSE A SENTENCE, the sense of discovery; I’m grateful for the tip-offs, and I will look out especially for Whitney Balliet and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

More than this, Dillon illustrates how each writer’s prose style typifies their anxieties as writers and the conditions under which they wrote. The extreme rigour of Joan Didion’s editors at Vogue in the 1960s, who pared down her captions to the minimal and often left journalists in tears – ultimately this experience taught her to write well and better. John Ruskin’s cloud-diaries reveal more than anticipated about his mental anguish and the encroaching terror of modernity. Woolf’s thought on illness is etched into the rhythm and grammar of her language. And has anyone ever been so bodied in prose as Norman Mailer when James Baldwin called him “a real sweet ofay cat, but a little frantic”? These sentence crystalise the essence of how great writers write so well, and go some way to illuminate the greatness of their works.

From Trump’s loggorea to the wording of a user license agreement, the language we use matters as much as what we mean to say by it. Looking at how some talented writers have wielded the nuts and bolts of language, Dillon raises compelling questions about where the sentence has been and what we can do with it next. That essay on James Baldwin introduced me to the word ‘ofay’, which I hadn’t heard before. Ofay is an offensive term for white people but, as Dillon reveals, its origins, meaning and the rudeness have never been fixed. Baldwin’s using it to describe (indirecily) Norman Mailer, a witless cultural appropriator of the Afro-American jazz scene, is a brilliant taste of how a writer like Baldwin can break down and remake language and make words do something new and interesting.

These sentences have been collected over a lifetime’s reading, sifted from the hundreds of lines and phrases that Dillon has copied into the A5 commonplace books ‘at home in the hand or on the desk’. It is a novel constraint for an essay collection; Dillon’s earlier collection ESSAYISM (2017) touched on a similar idiosyncrasy in considering how to critically approach, somewhat paradoxically, the tricksome essay form. I was prompted to look back over my own A5 notebooks and see which sentences have stuck with me over the years. I want to give this a go myself. Whose sentences would I choose; whose would you? Dillon surprised himself with who he left out – no Melville, Sebald, Joyce or Burton (‘No Proust – no Proust!), and other writers didn’t make the cut, whether because working on them was too dull or because Dillon felt ‘shamefully, in at least one case, I found I was not up to the task’. But the sentences which did make it into the final manuscript are those worth the time. These are Dillon’s earworms, and SUPPPOSE A SENTENCE is a delightful exercise in taking pleasure in writing and good craft.

Brian Dillon’s SUPPOSE A SENTENCE is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Buy it from their website or from Foyles or Waterstones.

Travel in lockdown: Tete-Michel Kpomassie’s ‘An African in Greenland’

Very few people have their arrival announced on national radio when they come to a new country. Unless you’re royalty, a celebrity or a wanted murderer, it’s unlikely that anybody would consider your touching-down on a foreign land remotely newsworthy. Yet this was exactly what greeted Tete-Michel Kpomassie when, after eight days at sea from Copenhagen and eight years journeying from his native Togo in the west of Africa, he stepped off a boat in Greenland in the mid-1960s. In those days, crowds gathered at the docks when ships landed because they brought everything that Greenlanders couldn’t get at home: tobacco, coffee, alcohol. Almost nobody standing on the dock had ever seen a black person before – they were stunned. It was only later that Michel learnt that in the capital, Nuuk, they’d broadcast the story of a black man’s arrival in Greenland on the evening radio. He was described as ‘a very tall man with hair like wool’. Michel himself wrote: ‘I had started on a voyage of discovery, only to find that it was I who was being discovered’.

Even more remarkable (for the mid-1960s) is how well the Greenlanders treat Michel – he’s their honoured guest, and by evening the villagers are fighting for who gets to put him up for the foreseeable. Taller than most Greenlanders and Danes by a fair bit, Michel is soon dubbed Mikili – Big Michael – and everyone wants to know him. He is charming, attractive and intelligent, having taught himself at least four languages (and picking up Inuktitut, the language of Inuit peoples, fast). Michel’s lifelong dream had been to visit the Greenlanders in the far north and, against all the odds, his experiences would largely live up to his expectations.

An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie

It feels like a cruel joke that the weather’s been so good for the majority of lockdown. So many bank holidays have gone to waste. Like most people, I reckon, what gives me a lot of solace right now is planning the trips I’ll make when lockdown is over (or rather, when it’s properly safe): the pub, day trip to Brighton, visit to Norfolk seaside, the pub, seeing some friends in Cambridge, the pub…

For escapism there are still travel books, and few are as singularly memorable as An African in Greenland. Every travel book is essentially a story of culture shock, a question of how far the visitor is willing to do as the Romans do. What’s unique about An African in Greenland is that Michel understands Greenland very much through an African upbringing, not a wholly Western one. 

Michel and Alfred. “From the second day of my visit, he called me Uncle”.

Now 79, as a teenager Michel harboured the dream of travelling to Greenland and living among the Eskimos (more properly, Greenlanders or Kallallisut). One day, climbing a coconut tree, Michel was bitten by a snake and taken to a cult of snake-worshippers to be made well again. The snake-worshippers promised to heal Michel on the condition that he join their religion when he recovered, which Michel’s father begrudgingly agreed to do. Resting up, Michel read a book in a French bookshop about Greenland – a country unimaginably cold, but without a single tree, snake or overbearing father. Not content to sit around and wait to be sent to the snake-worshippers, Michel ran away from home on the back of a jalopy to Ghana, where he found work and started saving for the next of many trips which would eventually take him north.

It seems a strange way to start a book about Greenland, a sixty-page description of life and customs in 1950s Togo and a whistle-stop tour of Africa and Europe. Yet the narrative is energised by Michel’s indefatigable sense of optimism, his openness to the new cultures he comes in contact with and his willingness to throw himself into life wherever it takes him. To Michel, the social niceties of the French are as exotic and peculiar as any French person (or Greenlander) would find his own. There are no wrinkled noses in An African in Greenland; the best kind of traveller, Michel is just excited to learn and see.

But even he is freaked out at first by some of the ‘queer customs’ in Greenland – especially their food. The first dish he tries is mattak – slices of raw whale skin dipped or spread with yellowy seal blubber (and blood):

We took each slice and clamped it between our teeth; then, holding the other end in one hand, with a knife we cut off a bite, Eskimo fashion – that is, cutting upwards close to the lips, so that you run a great risk of slicing off your nose.

It’s understandable that Michel needed some time to adjust. He is a fresh, witty narrator, who soon gets over his culture-shock and earns the ‘precious friendship’ of his hosts. As a guide to Greenland customs, An African in Greenland probably isn’t the most comprehensive – the joy is found instead in hearing about Michel’s experiences learning to ice fish or dog-sled, and all the long, polar nights he spent drinking and dancing with the Greenlanders. 

Robert Mattaq’s cottage in Thule, plastered with news clippings of the Western world.

Michel’s breezy positivity was just what I needed in April, when I read An African in Greenland. This is a land before modern conveniences were widespread, before any mention of climate change or glacial retreat (though at one point, to illustrate the gargantuan size of Greenland, Michel tells us that if all the ice were to melt the sea would rise ten metres – which just felt like a cruel joke). All travel is done by boat or sled, and from Michel’s perspective the Greenlanders seem to struggle to live a modern lifestyle, or simply don’t care to. Fishing and hunting is done for subsistence, and subsidy money from the ruling country, Denmark, supports citizens with income enough to undermine a capitalist work ethic. One of Michel’s last hosts, an old Kalaallisut man called Robert Mattaq, has papered the walls of his igloo with newspaper clippings of the West, the countries that he is fascinated with but which he will never live to see or experience beyond his black-and-white pictures. The Greenland that Michel describes is a vanished world, where for the relative poverty and the lack of modern conveniences life had a genuinely simple, uncomplicated feel.Some of the book’s most heartfelt scenes depict the Michel and his hosts doing the rounds at friends’ houses:

Soon afterwards, the door opened again: another visitor. Then a fourth and a fifth, and so on. The visits has begun and would continue without interruption all day long… Each time new visitors arrived, Paulina put fresh cups on the table and also served me, herself and Hans. As I wanted to find out the local people’s capacity, I never refused a fresh cup.Before leaving [to see more friends], Paulina made a fresh pot of coffee, which she left on the stove, and set cups and saucers on the table for any visitors who might arrive (since the door stayed unlocked) during our absence.

The Greenlanders’ openness towards a traveller, the likes of which no one has ever seen before, recalls the Greek value ofs of Xenia, the quality of “guest-friendship” which measures a host’s decency and civility by how well they treat a stranger far from home. Michel’s blackness is never not a source of novelty to the Greenlanders, and yet by the sixth month of his stay he is at home in this baffling country – ‘A True Greenlander’.

Sledding with Huskies, near Thule – in the furthest north of Greenland.

Gift-giving is a big part of guest-friendship and, to commemorate Michel’s chops as a man of the Arctic, he obtains a snow-white set of dogskin clothes and kamiaks (sealskin snow shoes). In the Kalaallisut cosmology, most objects and things in the world have a life-force, or inua. Though Michel and his friends are carefree enough with beer, coffee and sex, I was often struck by the care and respect that Michel and his hosts afforded certain objects. Be it a weatherbeaten canoe, a pair of kamiaks or the scraps of newsprint that Robert Mattaq plasters around his bedroom walls, each of these things is a lifesaving tool that guarantees a family’s survival. Living through freezing polar dark probably teaches you to respect the things that matter – other people included.

I’ve never read a travel book like An African in Greenland – the story of a truly singular cross-cultural connection. It is a remarkable document and a witty, entertaining piece of writing, though as a guide to Greenland the country or its customs it is probably too anecdotal. It’s a charming book that evades Eurocentric perspectives of Africa and Africans as much as Greenland and the Arctic. Lockdown feels like a good time to be reminded of the friendship that can blossom when you make the right connections.

Tete-Michel Kpomassie’s ‘An African in Greenland’ was translated from French by James Kirkup and is published by NYRB. It’s no longer in print and so can be a bit difficult to find, but there are loads of copies available second-hand. 

• Pictures taken from ‘An African in Greenland’, the author’s copyright.

A Taxonomy of Melancholy – ‘Ducks, Newburyport’

You’ll have heard of it by now. Ducks, Newburyport: something of a dark horse in last year’s Booker Prize, the 1,000 page novel made up of one quite long sentence, with no paragraph breaks, following the thoughts of a middle-aged housewife. Each new thought starts with the phrase ‘the fact that’, and interspersed every sixty pages or so is the story of a mountain lion raising her cubs, written in tight, economical prose.

Ducks was released on the 4th July last year. Early reviewers cast it as something like a writer’s writer’s novel, something that you’d enjoy if you were committed enough to see the project through. In The Guardian, Alex Preston said: “98% who pick it up will think it unspeakable guff, [but] the 2% who get it will really get it”.

Setting aside the slight undertone of gate-keeping in a claim like that, it’s a fair point: it takes a lot of time, thought and effort to get through Ducks and most of us can’t commit that. There are no apologies, though, for the novel’s style or its length – you know what you’re getting into when you read it. And Ducks is worth getting into.

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (2019).

The unnamed narrator of Ducks, Newburyport lives in rural Ohio. She runs a business selling pies and other baked goods to local restaurants and stores; before this she was a History lecturer at a university, a job she quit after surviving rectal cancer. It’s no easy task running a home business and raising four children, especially as her husband travels for work. There is so much to worry about – from her youngest son’s refusal to eat foods without holes in them to the pollution in the Ohio river, from the senseless slaughter of indigenous Americans to the awkward exchanges with other parents. An extract, nearly at random:

the fact that Leo and I both like Katherine Hepburn and I was sure her reminiscences would be an interesting read too, but I put my foot down for some reason, I’m not sure why, “Guess Who’s Coming to Write Her Memoirs”, fifty-foot totem pole, windshield wipers flapping, Pop-tarts, upstarts, ramparts, lion rampant, sejant, sergeant, run the gantlet, gauntlet, consensual sex, tic-tac-toe, don’t sweat the small stuff, the fact that I keep thinking about that little girl who wouldn’t drink her milk and died, the fact that she was thrown out of her house at 3 a.m. because she wouldn’t drink her milk, and she wandered off and got lost, the fact that it sounds almost like a fairy tale, scrimshaw, squaw, loose pages…

It took me six months to read Ducks from cover to cover! I stopped twice, first for about a month and the second time for a few weeks, and many more times I put it on hold to read other books that I wanted to review or talk to friends about. Hopefully it wouldn’t take a more devoted reader six months to get through the book. I bound my copy in manila envelopes (which had to be repaired a lot) so that should tell you about how long i was expecting to spend on Ducks.

I thought that, given how long it'll probably take me to get through, it made sense to make a protective cover for Lucy Ellmann's mammoth Ducks, Newbury port by @GalleyBeggars… pic.twitter.com/1ADhzRtcZh

— Jon Petre (@JonPetreDish) July 22, 2019

Since then, what I’ve found interesting about Ducks and what I’ve thought worth writing about it has changed a lot. Ellmann’s publisher, Galley Beggar Press, are a two-person indie based in Norwich. Galley Beggars published Eimear McBride’s first novel in 2013, A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing – and there was incredible excitement around Ducks’ being shortlisted for the Booker Prize (although no one was happy with the Booker last year. No one). Ducks went on to win the Goldsmiths Prize, however, which is awarded to fiction which ‘breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form’. That seems appropriate. If Ducks is one thing, it’s proof that indie publishers are bringing out the best stuff these days.

A lot of people have talked about Ducks as a modern Ulysses – and, while I think there’re fruitful discussions to be had about Ellmann and Joyce, I don’t have much to say that hasn’t been already said. (In capturing every facet of life, good, bad and mundane, Ducks is more like Proust anyway.) Nevertheless, Ducks is what a classic Modernist novel would look like if it were written in the 21st century. I’m ever skeptical of using genre labels arbitrarily – but what I admire most about the best Modernist writing is its intention to connect people, and the use of experimental forms and styles to find a new way of communicating something profound about modern life. In a promo video for the Booker, Ellmann said:

I wanted to trace someone’s thought patterns, and I don’t think thinking is punctuated in the brain.

What is good – and at times very sad – about Ducks, Newburyport is how accurately Ellmann conveys probably the defining emotion of the 21st century: anxiety. The narrator worries about everything, and in daily life there is rarely time to sit and digest a thought before you need to rush into thinking about cooking, money or family life. Ducks is centred around the defining problem of an age where we can know everything from the computer in our hand. How do you worry about so much stuff, all at once?

By making lists! Ducks is filled with lists: shopping lists, recipes, lists of all the creeks and waterways in Ohio, catalogues of films and TV – the narrator is a serial list-maker. Worrying about everything all at once is chaos, and reading Ducks often means being mired in chaotic detail. But putting these items into a list and reeling them off is one way to make chaos into order. If you listed everything in your life – your objects, friends, work and worries – you’d be overwhelmed in minutes. By following a narrator who does just that, Ducks achieves a Modernist hyper-realism that feels fresh. It’s as if that sentence never stops because the narrator can’t catch her breath, can’t get to grips with her anxieties because they never stop multiplying. Besides this, the pared-down language of the mountain lion’s story is almost a parody of straightforwardly “realistic” writing.

In the narrator’s relentless quest to catalogue everything, Ducks strongly resembles The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton’s mammoth tome of the 1600s that’s often regarded as an “encyclopedia novel”. Burton was a scholar who suffered from melancholy, a generic term for depression, and he set out to write a definite guide to melancholy: where it comes from, what it’s like, what you can do to get over it. Feeling depressed is part of being human, and so to catalogue every facet of melancholy Burton tried to catalogue every facet of human life, from Greek and Roman classics to French kissing and whether elves really exist. Despite its gloomy subject, The Anatomy of Melancholy is quite funny, a catalogue that throws all the wisdom and learning of the 17th century at the timeless problem of how to be happy.

A long image of the frontispiece to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).

The narrator of Ducks often fails to block out the melancholy. As in real life, grief comes like a stranger in the night. Isn’t that the weirdest thing? When you’re washing up, or thinking about bus schedules, suddenly the memory comes back of how a relative died, or how awfully human beings treat one another sometimes:

hamsters never seem very happy, hurricanes hardly ever happen, but it’s hard to tell with a hamster, hampster, “Buck up”, the fact that I think they’re nocturnal, Mommy, the fact that i miss her, the fact that I never got over her illness, the fact that it broke me, the fact that you gotta live in the here and now, the fat that the sun still rises every morning, and there is twilight, when the sky glows, the fact that it happens twice a day, the fact that…

‘I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy’, wrote Burton. When you’ve got too many worries to list, well, start a new list, re-arrange the heap, and see if you can walk a little further before it crumbles again. It was moments like the above that stayed with me in Ducks, and which persuaded me to keep reading: you have to imagine Sisyphus happy in his task, because otherwise there’s only despair.

The catalogues in Ducks, Newburyport are double: they exemplify the unmanageableness of modern life and the necessity of putting your problems in order before they drown you. Despite what I’ve said, Ducks isn’t an especially gloomy book. Around page 645 the melancholy reaches a fever pitch, and the narrator forces herself to think positively, cataloguing about thirty pages of things you can depend on. This was a rewarding pause in Ducks, something I was grateful as a reader to have earned:

Beethoven quartets will remain Beethoven quartets

emojis will multiply

children will roller-skate

the sky will often be blue

bees will buzz

my cinnamon rolls will generally be a hit

bureaucracy

will scare everybody

There are at least some anchors. Like The Anatomy of Melancholy, Ducks is an encyclopedia of an entire person’s internal universe. The narrator is fighting a war on all fronts – from microscopic worries about faux pas to existential dread about global warming – and there is heroism keeping your head above the water when other people rely on you.  Sometimes it takes a very big book to remind us of small joys.

Everyone has an inner life as rich and bizarre as the narrator of Ducks, Newburyport: remember that, Ellmann seems to suggest, and we might start talking to each other again. This is a catalogue that worries about not knowing enough, an incredibly specific narrator whose day-to-day obligations and fears are universal. Getting absorbed by the deep interior world of Ducks is a good tonic to the melancholy world. But however pleasant it might be to float away on a stream-of-consciousness, Ducks doesn’t let you forget that melancholy is just beneath the surface.

‘Ducks, Newburyport’ is published by Galley Beggar Press. Order a copy from their website here. 

Quotes:

• Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport (Norwich: Galley Beggar Press, 2019).

 

Image Sources:

• Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy from its Wikipedia page.
• Ducks, Newburyport from Galley Beggar Press website.

Any copyright concerns, let me know.

End of Year Review, 2019

I think 2019 has been something of an Annus horribilis (horrible arsehole). I’ve passed a few important milestones in 2019: I graduated my MPhil from Cambridge, I got my first full-time job in Communications at a local charity, and in the summer I cycled one-hundred and thirty miles around Suffolk and Norfolk – not a world-shattering feat, but one that brought me a lot of joy and fulfilment. Yet for all that it’s been hard work. My master’s has made me a better learner, writer and editor, and I will feel fonder towards the experience of being at Cambridge etc. when there’s more distance between then and now. But Cambridge is badly run and its environment of learning isn’t accommodating. I will say more about Cambridge at some point, but this isn’t the place for all that. Suffice to say that I wouldn’t be talking honestly if I reviewed 2019 without acknowledging that it’s been tough year.

But the books! I’ve read more books in 2019 than I ever have before (sixty to be precise). We as readers are really lucky at the moment because there have been some phenomenal books out in the last couple of years. From smart non-fiction to the emergence of new, more diverse novelists, we’re spoiled for choice. At least for readers, the book world is more exciting than it was a decade ago, when everyone was predicting the death of the novel.  I’m really looking forward to seeing how culture shakes up and evolves in the 2020s.

Because I’ve read quite a few more books than in 2018, and because I’ve read so many good ones, it’s a tough and also slightly futile job to try and judge or compare them against each other. Instead, I’m going to walk through what I’ve read and what’s stood out for me in 2019.

The Books of 2019. Blank books represent books from libraries or that I’ve loaned to people; yes, I’ve cheated by reading lots of little ones and short stories…

Fiction

2019 started strong, with me burning through a load of course books for my last two modules on the MPhil. This brought me back to one of my favourite periods in British writing, the 1950s (also subject of my undergrad dissertation) – I particularly enjoyed John Berger’s A Painter Of Our Time and Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy. We had some great discussions about how realist writing can address political and social fracture: I wonder how contemporary writing will evolve and do the same, without relying on stylistic experimentation. It was Anna Burns’ Milkman, however, that took the crown and set the stage for most of my reading in the early part of 2019. “Complex without being complicated” is what I called Milkman in my review: at times seriously chilling, Milkman is easily one of my favourite books I read this year. Anna Burns builds up a weird, uncanny setting which her characters populate in a believable way – it feels like a world which makes sense according to its own rules – and once you’ve begun to accept the reality of those rules, the rug is pulled from you and the real terror sets in of what it’s like to live in a world where silence and suspicion are the norm.

I went through a bit of a French period in March, reading Les Grand Melaunes, Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby and Édouard Louis’ (then-latest) novel History of Violence in quick succession. Reviewing History of Violence started me on a trend of new releases about trauma and recovery, related, I suppose, to the research I was doing on art and trauma for my thesis. I burned through Edward St Aubyn’s ‘Patrick Melrose’ novels in about two weeks as well, and that has got to rank as one of the sharpest, most brutally engrossing series about addiction and recovery that I know. Talking about identity troubles in Melrose was one of my favourite things to write in 2019.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

A new release from 2019 that hit hard was Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which I reviewed in August, and which has got me seriously excited to read more about recent and contemporary immigration to America. On Earth was a strong start, but I need to read more queer writing in 2020 – recommendations, as always, are actively encouraged. Will Eaves’ Murmur was a brilliant re-imagining of Alan Turing’s queer experience, and I’m curious about how you depict the lives of real people in a way that’s tasteful and illuminating.

One of best things I discovered in 2019 was the amount of great literature being published by independent publishers in Britain and Ireland. I don’t know why – maybe it’s because, at smaller presses, editors have more freedom (and risk) over what they commission and how they work with authors – but publishers and authors at Galley Beggar Press, Influx, Fitzcarraldo and Salt have been smashing it recently. Like many others, I ploughed through Lucy Ellman’s Goldsmith-winning Ducks, Newburyport, a process which took me nearly six months and which I’m still digesting.  It’s proved difficult to write about Ducks because, as it took so long to read, what I’ve thought is worth saying about it has changed a lot since I started it. Expect a full review/think-piece on Ducks in the new year. For now I’ll say that I liked Ducks very much, and I definitely think everyone should have a crack of it – if only to join the conversation.

Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport. 

Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead was another triumph from small publishers – big congratulations to Olga for her Nobel Prize win. Of this year’s two awards, Olga, at least, really deserves the recognition. I was a huge fan of Gareth E. Rees’ Car Park Life, and I can’t wait for more Influx titles in 2020 like Eliza Clarke’s Boy Parts and Anne Vaught’s Famished. If 2019 started on a high with Milkman, I’m happy to say that it’s ended on one too: Toby Litt’s novel Patience (also from Galley Beggars) was phenomenal. From the perspective of a physically disabled boy unable to communicate with his carers, Patience was heartbreaking, smart, and stylistically inventive (in the best way!). This is the book I’ve been giving out for Christmas.

So many great novels in 2019!

Non-fiction

I’ve been big into literary biography this year. Once again, this came from my studies: I read Thomas Dilworth’s biography of David Jones (David Jones: Writer, Painter, Engraver, Poet) which is unfortunately the only Jones biography yet written but which suffers from the author’s clear, often clouding attachment to Jones. I read Jonathan Coe’s inventive biography of B.S Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, which really started the biography hype. Johnson was such an unusual person, and because he allowed his life to totally govern how he wrote and what he wrote about is really worth your time if you’re a Johnson fan. I followed this with Bernard Crick’s classic George Orwell: A Life, and I’ve got a few other biographies ready to go next. It’s probably for the best if I start reading about the lives of people other than white British male authors who died before I was born.

I’d recommend No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference, Greta Thunberg’s speeches from her various protests and strikes since 2017, as an appetite warmer to educate yourself about climate change. It’s happening whether you like her or not, and, though Greta’s not exactly Martin Luther King, her straightforward, no-bullshit speech cuts through about the reality of global warming.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey, by Robert Macfarlane.

Perhaps if you want something a bit more engrossing, definitely read or listen to Robert Macfarlane’s magnum opus, Underland, an epoch-spanning survey of how the human race lives in relation to the underground world. We bury our dead, extract our treasures from and hide our crimes in the underland: what does that say about us, our times, where we’re headed as a species and where we’ve been? Underland is always clear and digestible, whether Macfarlane is talking about literary theory or geological history. The best non-fiction is like Underland: it’s direct without skimming details, and it inspires in the reader the same passion and fascination that so clearly drives the author. The last chapter gave me chills.

Poetry, Philosophy and Food

I never read as much poetry as I’d like. I’ve been lucky to review two books of poetry this winter for SPAM, one of my favourite poetry zines that you should definitely be reading. Get following SPAM and look out for my reviews of Rowan Evans’ The Last Verses of Beccan and Cathy Galvin’s Walking The Coventry Ring Road With Lady Godiva in the new year. I hope I can write more about poetry in 2020, and in more interesting ways.

Philosophy? Who do I think I am? I haven’t read philosophy in a serious way this year, but one book that’s stuck with me (I read it for my thesis) was Rowan Williams’ Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love. Based on a series of lectures Williams delivered in 2005 on David Jones and Flannery O’Connor, Grace and Necessity is an extraordinarily universal insight into what makes art good or bad. To distil this in one sentence: “bad art is art that does not invite us to question our perceptions or emotions”. I’m grateful for it and, alongside On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Grace and Necessity has had a big impact on my taste and critical judgement this year.

Another huge impact on my life in 2019: Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver’s The Complete Nose to Tail Eating, a cookbook-cum-food philosophy that is said to have revolutionised British cooking. Henderson and Gulliver are the founders of St JOHN, a restaurant which has (if food writers are to be believed) resurrected traditional British cooking and the use of offal and off-cuts in fine dining. Expect pigs’ trotters, oxen tongues and potted goose alongside favourites like cabbage, parsley sauce and new potatoes. Trust me, it’s better than it sounds! I’ve been working my way through the recipes in Nose To Tail Eating for a few months now and it’s immensely satisfying to make these complicated, vile-sounding dishes, which haven’t yet failed to be delicious. The St JOHN cookbooks have been a much-needed salve in 2019.

The Complete Nose to Tail and The Book of St JOHN, in all their glory. Easter egg: spot the shadow of my hand and phone over The Book of St JOHN!

Closing Thoughts & Resolutions for 2020

I need to read more diversely! There’s no excuse really: I haven’t read enough non-white authors, but at least I’ve got some great reading ahead of me. I’m going to start with authors like Bernadine Evaristo (of course!) and Jeffery Boakye and then add to my 1950s repertoire with The Lonely Londoners and The Pleasures of Exile. Stormzy does so much good with his platform and influence – after he told people to register to vote on Instagram, 45,000 people registered in ten minutes. Stormzy’s imprint, #MerkyBooks, is publishing some great stuff, and I’m looking forward to reading their writers.

I have to mention politics, sadly! The election has got to be one of the bitterest and worst-fought in generations. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the People’s Prime Minister, lied through his teeth in the election, because there’s a difference between making a promise that you know you can’t keep and saying something that you know is untrue, like 88% of Conservative Party adverts did. They have already walked back about protecting the environment, they’re still selling off the NHS piece-by-piece, and we will continue to turn away child refugees (something we were proud to do in 1939).

Regardless of your stance on Brexit, or anything else, the facts are obvious – the people in charge have attacked the courts, the Royal Family, Parliament, and the other institutions that safeguard Britain’s democracy, and that is cause for alarm. It’s going to get worse before it gets better (and I’m not talking about Brexit) and now, more than ever, we need to be wise to the efforts of the far-right to destroy anything decent, progressive or morally admirable about Britain.

Paul Klee, The Twittering Machine (1922). Just a piece of art I like; Hitler called it “degenerate”.

All the more need for robust criticism and good books. I want to do a series on responses to totalitarianism in literature, how writers who have lived under different despots have found a way to articulate their outrage and fight back against tyranny. With the rise of Modi, the repression of Uighurs in China, Bolsonaro in Brazil and Salvini in Italy, fascism is on the rise around the world and I want to learn how it can be stopped. At the moment I’ve got Hannah Arendt, Etty Hillesum and Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the reading list – exciting stuff ahead!

To end on a happy note: I have some really fantastic books to read in the new year and I can’t wait to share my thoughts on them with you. I want to do more creative writing and I want to write more about food. Something I love about not being a student is that all of my reading, learning and writing I do for my own pleasure. I really do feel freer now than last December. Let’s keep our chins up and think of all the brilliant books that are going to be released in 2020. It’ll be our year, lads!

 

Images:

• Image of Ducks, Newburyport, came from the Galley Beggar Press website.
• Images of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Underland belong to Penguin Books.

Contact me for any copyright infringement.

Who is Patrick Melrose?

Although Edward St Aubyn’s ‘Patrick Melrose’ series goes to some pretty harrowing places, there’s something arrestingly funny about the opening scene of the first book, Never Mind. Early morning in gorgeous South France and David Melrose, with his shades, cigar, and dressing gown hanging open, is drowning ants with the hose. It’s a cruel, slightly pathetic gesture, one which sets the tone perfectly for a novel cycle that perpetually teeters between horror and humour.

Never Mind takes place over a summer’s day in the eighties and follows the Melrose family – chronically apathetic, cruel David, alcoholic Eleanor, and their five year-old son Patrick – as they prepare for a dinner party in the evening. At only 150 pages Never Mind is a svelte page turner, and Edward St Aubyn has a wonderful talent for writing with a distinguished sense of beauty and an absolutely ruthless irony:

[David] had stopped his medical practice soon after their marriage. At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.

Jesus Christ! Into this horrorshow of a household comes little Patrick, consumed by the villa’s magical garden and largely oblivious to the psychological torment that his father inflicts on his mother. Edward St Aubyn is quick to draw you into the story and, because they’ve got less of the reader’s time to work with, short novels need immediacy, focus, and a plot that goes like a train (compare: We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age). Like the best short novels, Never Mind gives that pleasurable feeling of knowing that a dull afternoon is going to be filled with some phenomenal reading.

David Melrose is a monster, an upper-class doctor who has replaced his failed marriage and career with nihilist philosophy and the brutal domination of his wife and son.

‘In his world – a world of pure imagination – it was better if a person “could have been” Prime Minster than if he was Prime Minister: that would have shown vulgar ambition’.

David doesn’t blame Patrick for his failures; that doesn’t stop him from punishing his son anyway, rationalising the abuse as a perverse education. Certainly Patrick “learns” from his experience. Something terrible happens to Patrick in Never Mind, a violence that comes to define his life and which will haunt him for the next four books.

There are five books in the Patrick Melrose series: Never Mind (1992), Bad News (1992), Some Hope (1994), Mother’s Milk (2005) and At Last (2012). Shorter than Proust, and I imagine punchier, it is hard not to feel for Patrick’s story of childhood abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, self-discovery and self-destruction. All five books except the fourth cover only a day or two in Patrick’s life, centering around some ghastly social occasion to be suffered through as a minor member of the British upper-class: a funeral, a garden party with Princess Margaret, collecting your father’s ashes. Even at their bleakest the Melrose books never lose their sense of humour, and ordinarily heavy events – shooting-up in a Men’s Club or being brought to the wrong corpse at the funeral home – are instead moments of intense black comedy. None of the novels push three-hundred pages, so don’t be put off by the commitment of having to read five novels. St Aubyn definitely has the leg over Proust there.

Yet there’s a surprising amount of philosophical depth to the series. After a while I felt that the books seemed to be asking one question: who is Patrick Melrose? Or – putting it more existentially – what is the nature of identity? What makes a person the way that they are?

The Melrose books, arranged slightly asymmetrically.

Patrick’s story becomes more shocking when you learn that St Aubyn based the novels directly on his own life. All the abuse, heroin addiction (and, thankfully, Patrick’s attempts to recover) are subjects with which the author has first-hand experience. As an adult, Patrick struggles to decide how to live with his trauma – how far it should define who he is, whether his sarcastic attitude and chronic insecurities are attitudes that he’s adopted or whether they’re inescapably part of who he is.

It’s a good question though, one that’s worth stopping and thinking about for a moment. Am I the way I am – do I like the things I like, do the things I do – because I was born this way, or have I been shaped by my parents and my upbringing to be who I am? Maybe the more important question that Patrick (and we) should ask is: are we able to change who we are?  This is what Patrick wrestles with, throughout his drug-fuelled twenties and alcoholic thirties, into fatherhood and right up until his mother’s funeral in At Last. 

What we might call ‘the problem of identity’ crops up throughout the books, in different moments and characters. The first of these is Victor Eisen, one of the dinner guests in Never Mind, an Oxford don who’s trying to find a non-psychological approach to identity (ha). Unsurprisingly Victor doesn’t have the answer – after a long day’s thinking and not-writing he’s still no wiser, and he still needs his wife to cook for him. More prominent across the five books  – also more stupid – is the opinion of Nicholas Pratt, another dinner guest and a bitchy snob, who makes the tenuous claim that:

nothing that happens to you as a child really matters.

Which most people would instantly disagree with; anyway, the evidence of the next four books proves otherwise. But by refusing to see the infant Patrick as a fully-fledged person – in other words, a person with a strong sense of identity – Nicholas doesn’t have to empathise with him. It becomes easier to be cruel if you don’t think your victims as much a person as you are. There’s no surprise that in Bad News, the second book in which Patrick is sent to New York to collect his father’s ashes, a character quotes Larkin’s famous lines: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to but they do’. When he becomes a father Patrick is tormented by the fear that the memory of his childhood will mess up how he raises his two sons, and the constant presence of people like Nicholas Pratt at important occasions don’t help Patrick’s attempts to let go of his past.

A moody Benedict Cumberbatch on the new edition of Never Mind.

I’m not a psychologist, and I don’t want to diagnose Patrick Melrose like he’s a real person. I read a lot of trauma theory as part of my Master’s, however, and I want to use some of what I know about war trauma to understand how “the problem of identity” is approached in the Melrose books. Memory is flexible and changeable: every time we remember the past we remember it a bit differently, and when we look to our pasts (private or historical) for answers this is because we’re looking for a precedent of how to act in the present. Therefore, when Patrick Melrose struggles to decide what kind of a person his childhood abuse has made him, this dilemma – and his recovery – is all about understanding the past and learning how to grow from his memories. Look at how Patrick, in Mother’s Milk, describes his anxiety and self-hatred:

That was depression: clinging to an out-of-date version of yourself.

I should mention again that these books are really funny and entertaining. I felt that by Mother’s Milk and At Last – the fourth and fifth installments – the fast-pace had gone out of the story a little; but the characters are strong enough and the story still compelling that they carry forward the momentum of the first three books. Zadie Smith has talked about Edward St Aubyn’s masterful way of writing and his supremely English style of black humour, and to be perfectly honest getting over one’s childhood is an experience that I think everyone can relate to.

For all these troubles of identity the Melrose books aren’t heavy, in the way that Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or History of Violence are when talking about trauma and sexual abuse. What I find so compelling about the Melrose books is their light touch – how the books interrogate knotty ideas about what identity is and how abuse affects survivors, without miring the reader in the technicalities I’ve laid out above. There’s no “correct” way of talking about abuse – but I think St Aubyn’s way of doing so is one capable of reaching a very large audience, which is good. The HBO adaptation is also pretty good, too.

By the time Patrick’s children are old enough to be telling their own stories (book four) St Aubyn offers another perspective on what identity is: speech. Part of what’s called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argues that the way that we use language dictates the way that we think. Because our speech is the main way that we express who we are, how we feel and what the world is like, then our experience of the world is shaped by the structure of the language that we use. If our language is skewed in some way then our perception of ourselves and the world will be skewed as well; that’s why, in 1984, the government of Big Brother wanted to erase the word ‘bad’ from the English language. If there’s no word for something then it doesn’t exist.

As Patrick’s eldest son Robert grows up and acquires language – learning the names of things, being told how to behave around the world – he mourns the pre-verbal freedom that he felt when he was first born:

Something had started to happen as he became dominated by talk. His early memories were breaking off, like slabs from those orange cliffs behind him, and crashing into an all-consuming sea which only glared back at him when he tried to look at it. His infancy was being obliterated by his childhood.

No child has ever had the inner voice of Robert Melrose, but still. Patrick is a better father than David; and yet his son is equally ‘obsessed with his past’. Maybe that comes with being a member of the English nobility – you need to be obsessed with the past, if you’re going to go around boasting about how important your grandfather was. Aware that he’s coasting on the past, Patrick feels ashamed when he realises that he’ll remain rich for the rest of his life because his great-grandfather invented something a century ago. The past is inescapable, and it’s unsurprising that there’s an echo of the nihilistic philosophy of Robert’s grandfather in ‘an all-consuming sea’ which only glares back. Remember Nietzsche:

when you gaze long into the abyss […] the abyss gazes also at you.

A more positive echo is of Virginia Woolf, who similarly conjoined language with identity in the opening chapters of her novel The Waves. Woolf tried to depict the stream-of-consciousness of five young people as they learn language and grow up. As so common in Woolf’s novels, language is the answer as well as the problem – if only our language were better at letting us say what we want to say, then our lives would be more harmonious too. And that is what Patrick wants: better understanding through better communication, an end to the repression and stiff upper-lippedness so common to the British upper class but so counter-productive to overcoming trauma.

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931).

The Melrose books tackle all this and more, whilst remaining wittily entertaining to the core. As a cultural form the novel excels at introspection and the kind of self-interrogating of which Patrick is a typical example. In a way that makes me feel anachronistic the Melrose books feel very nineties – I’d be more skeptical of five books’ worth of self-reflection if they’d been published in 2019 . As much as I think that contemporary fiction should be trying to tackle external ideas and real-life threats (like totalitarianism and wage slavery) the Melrose books are some of the finest novels I’ve read in a long time, both well written and pleasurable to read. And they’re relatable. After all, doesn’t everyone wish they could be a different kind of person?

Words Cited

• Phillip Larkin, ‘This Be The Verse’, in Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 142.
• Friedriech Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Value Reprints, 2018)
• Edward St Aubyn, Never Mind (London: Picador, 2012)
• Edward St Aubyn, Bad News (London: Picador, 2012)
• Edward St Aubyn, Some Hope (London: Picador, 2012)
• Edward St Aubyn, Mother’s Milk (London: Picador, 2012)
• Edward St Aubyn, At Last (London: Picador, 2012).

If anyone’s interested, here are the books that gave me the backbone of my knowledge about trauma:

• Nigel C. Hunt, Memory, War and Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
• Patrick S. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover: University of New Hampshire Press, 1993)
• Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (London: Pandora, 1992).

Image Credits:

• Amazon and Fifty Books Project. Please contact me for any copyright concerns.

Review – ‘No One Is Too Small To Make a Difference’, speeches by Greta Thunberg

Almost everything is black and white […] What we do, or don’t do, right now, will affect my entire life, and the lives of my grandchildren.

Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year old climate activist and winner of the Prix Liberté this year, doesn’t mince her words. Climate change (or climate breakdown, catastrophe or emergency as we should probably be calling it) is the biggest threat that we currently face and not enough is being done about it. That may sound like hyperbole but it isn’t. That is most of the message of No One Is Too Small To Make a Difference, published last month by Penguin. At seventy pages, this little book collects the speeches that Thunberg has delivered in the past two years at climate protests, UN summits, and the British Parliament.

Thunberg made international headlines last year when she started a school strike in Sweden. She sat outside the Swedish Parliament and explained that she was refusing to go to school until politicians started taking climate change seriously. What are a few missed lessons, she says, when almost nothing is being done to prevent an oncoming global catastrophe. ‘I want you to panic’, she declares in the speech ‘Our House is On Fire’. Because to panic when your house is on fire is actually quite a logical thing to do, in the circumstances; and our house is burning down. The protests snowballed into something big, with millions of children in Sweden, the US and the UK joining Thunberg to tell the rest of us: for God’s sake care! She’s gotten a lot of media attention for her activism and not all of it positive, and so it’s both canny and encouraging that this publication will get the word out there even more widely.

Source: Penguin Books.

Thunberg’s speeches are plain, to the point – unless we act immediately and reduce carbon emissions by 50% in the next ten years we will reach a point of no return, where the global temperature of the world will rise by over two degrees Celsius. If the earth warms much more than that then the ice caps will melt, and low lying cities like Amsterdam, Venice, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Osaka will drown under rising sea levels. It will be catastrophic. And although that ten-year time limit is an estimate, Thunberg is very clear that this is roughly how long we have. In the speech ‘Almost Everything is Black and White’, Thunberg is clear about who will suffer the consequences of what we and our political leaders do and don’t do now: the unborn. To do nothing – to not panic – is tantamount to moral failure in Thunberg’s opinion. If we choose not to act we will be taking away the future from our children and grandchildren, denying them the right to live the way we live now.

No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference was published in the same week that the Trump administration has decided to re-brand fossil fuels as “freedom molecules”. You have to laugh; but then that is a true fact, a terrible act of short-sightedness and stupidity. I have always been hesitant to make oblique political references on my blog – I try to avoid them altogether, because I don’t believe that I write about subjects that frequently require heavy-handed political intervention – but climate change shouldn’t be a political opinion. I am not a scientist, so I trust the opinion of people who have dedicated their lives to finding out if climate change is as bad as it looks. No one wants this, but it’s what will happen, and that’s all there is to it. You can’t poke holes in the logic of a forest fire. You can’t argue with a hurricane.

Thunberg is no great rhetorician but she is also sixteen and writing in a second-language, so fair play. What we need is clarity and plain speaking, anyway. In the final speech, ‘Can You Hear Me?’, delivered at the Houses of Parliament on the 23rd of April this year, Thunberg says that she’s refused help to write her speeches and that she’s never accepted money for the activism that she leads. In several speeches key phrases are repeated or re-drafted, mostly the key points of her story:

if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school for a few weeks, imagine what we all could do together if we wanted to.

Even if she’s no Churchill or Sojourner Truth (have those two names ever been used together?) Greta Thunberg’s words are her own, and like the greatest orators she appeals to our emotions, swaying us with arguments that appeal to the heart as much as the head:

I want to challenge those companies and those decision-makers into real and bold climate action […] I don’t believe for one second that you will rise to that challenge […] I ask you to prove me wrong. For the sake of your children, for the sake of your grandchildren. For the sake of life and this beautiful living planet.

Emotional arguments seem to be the only thing that people listen to these days; at least Thunberg’s ones are backed up by proven climate science and real facts. Although her message is alarming it should inspire hope in a pessimistic reader that the next generation are so committed to safeguarding the future. Thunberg doesn’t want to inspire us, though – she wants to get us to do something, because if we don’t soon it’ll be too late.

Something else I wanted to point out comes from the speech ‘I’m Too Young For This’. Thunberg claims that she was motivated to use school strikes to raise awareness for climate change after seeing the Parkland students do the same to draw attention to school shootings in the U.S. Two cheers for schoolkids collaborating for social change, but this is the political landscape that today’s children will inherit: a world of school shootings and environmental disaster. As much as anything else in No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference that the eggs we lay today will be tomorrow’s chickens coming home to roost.

Greta Thunberg, ‘School Strike For the Climate’.

Thunberg also has an Asperger’s diagnosis, which she links to her pragmatic attitude towards climate change: ‘Everything is Black and White’. Thunberg also addresses the criticism that for being someone with Asperger’s and only sixteen – being called a ‘retard’ and a ‘bitch’. And I must say that I find it incredibly disheartening that some people find a person’s intellectual diagnosis or their age a good reason to not listen to them. Doesn’t matter if you’re a politician, a media pundit or a Facebook user: if you’ve reached the point where you’re criticising children for trying to make the world a better place then perhaps you should take a look at your own priorities before criticising someone else’s.

Nevertheless, this is a good little book. It’s not a manifesto, or a political tract, nor is it supposed to annoy or scare you. It doesn’t have all the answers but it does a good job for three quid. Regardless of the grim prognosis about climate change there is a hopeful message, too. Just because we don’t have all the answers about how to reduce carbon emissions and prevent environmental disaster doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t start now. Instead we need what Thunberg calls ‘Cathedral Thinking’. Cathedrals can take hundreds of years to complete, and although the builders who lay the foundation may not be able to imagine what the ceiling will look like that doesn’t stop them, because they can dream big. The best time to plant a tree was twenty-years ago, they say; the second best time is today. Let’s lay some foundations.

 

Sources:

• Greta Thunberg, No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference (London: Penguin, 2019).

 

Images are from Penguin Books and Wikipedia. Please contact me for any copyright concerns. 

Ekphrasis and the Ephemeral in Donna Tartt’s ‘The Goldfinch’

Donna Tartt, the wisdom goes, leaves literary critics in an awkward position. That she writes bestselling thrillers seems excuse enough to have kept her away from high-falutin fancy book talk; but because her books are so good, and read by so many, maybe there’s a dereliction of duty if we don’t take them seriously. Perhaps I’m just late to the game. Searching Tartt’s name on the Cambridge University Library, however, turns up slim results, which seems to prove my point. The middlebrow is where it’s at, dear reader, and Donna Tartt’s third novel The Goldfinch does plenty of interesting things with ekphrasis, a fascinating and obscure type of writing.

The Goldfinch – presumably a superb, heart-rending masterpiece.

Ekphrasis – from Greek, meaning something like ‘to call out and proclaim an object’ – is a Classical rhetorical technique present in all ages of art and literature, from the Greeks to The Goldfinch. Simply put, ekphrasis is a detailed description of visual art, most commonly a poem about a painting. Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn is probably the most famous example; Keats describes a Greek urn as a way of thinking about history, art, how people from the past tried to communicate with the future through the things they made. Another iconic ekphrasis from the Romantic period is Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias, where Shelley uses a description of a ruined statue in the British Museum as a way of saying that, no matter how mighty, all tyrants fall in the end.

Ekphrasis is a brilliant method of reflection because it responds to something that already exists, in this case an artwork: look at the painting while you read the poem, and you’ll see it in different way and gain a greater insight into what it’s trying to say to you. Ekphrasis is often a bit more flashy than normal prose; according to the critic Ruth Webb,

what distinguishes ekphrasis is its quality of vividness, enargeia, its impact on the mind’s eye of the listener who must […] be almost made to see the subject.

What does it mean to look through words? When we look at a painting, what are we supposed to see – the thing represented, or how the artist sees the world? Something like Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss is not powerful because it shows two people in an embrace, but because it gives us a new way to visualise how we feel about someone we love. Art is a way of seeing rather than a thing to see; ekphrasis in writing, then, is about examining how we relate to art and how it affects us.

The Kiss, Gustav Klimt, oil and gold leaf on canvas (1907-8), Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

Which brings us back to Donna Tartt and The Goldfinch. The novel is about a real-life painting – also called The Goldfinch, painted by Carel Fabritius in 1654 – and one man’s obsessive relationship with it, an obsession which comes dominate every aspect of his life. Theo Decker is only thirteen when his art-loving mother takes him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to see Fabritius’ Goldfinch. Theo idolises his mother, and through her he loves the art – especially after a terrorist bomb destroys the Met gallery and kills Theo’s mother.

In a state of shock, Theo ends up walking out of the gallery holding The Goldfinch, which he takes home and hides, ready to give to her when she walks through the door. In the days to come he is too traumatised by his mother’s death and the blast to tell anyone about his mistake. When he realises the seriousness of what he’s done, it’s too late to claim innocence. By not coming forward Theo becomes a criminal, a guilt made all more acute by his desire not to lose the last connection to his dead mother.

If The Goldfinch is a novel about a character with an obsession, Donna Tartt clearly has her own fixations as a writer. Right from the beginning of The Secret History – Donna Tartt’s phenomenal first novel, which I wrote about here – the murderous narrator Richard confesses a ‘morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs’. You could say that Theo in The Goldfinch suffers from the same affliction, except here the picturesque is literally a picture.

The Goldfinch, Carel Fabritius, oil on panel (1654). Mauristhuis, The Hague.

There’s a clever parallel in the way that the novel’s plot revolves around a calamitous explosion at an art gallery: in real-life, The Goldfinch was one of the only artworks to survive the Delft Thunderclap of 1654, a gunpowder warehouse explosion which killed over a hundred people including Carel Fabritius, who was inside his studio with all his other (now destroyed) paintings at the time. Seeing The Goldfinch in the Met gallery, knowing that it’s survived three hundred years’ decay and destruction, Theo’s mother remarks:

…it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things […] I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

Which is exactly how Theo views his pilfered painting: it’s a kind of bulwark against history, a guarantee that, even if people die and let you down, then at least some things endure. As he grows older, leaving New York to live with his deadbeat dad in Las Vegas, Theo’s view of the world becomes increasingly pessimistic. He falls in with a capricious Russian boy called (predictably) Boris, and together they get drunk, smoke weed, steal things from supermarkets – a far cry from the clingy mummy’s boy Theo’s implied to have been in his “old life” before the explosion.

I actually found this part of The Goldfinch the most enjoyable – Boris is a great character, and their misadventures in the Mojave are great fun to be part of. As I say, Tartt does a great job of contrasting their picaresque youth with Theo’s close dependency on his mother as a younger boy – a change that leaves you with the feeling that, with the vodka hangovers and enough cigarettes for a French bordello, Theo might be going down the wrong path. But he’s too pessimistic to care – an attitude that certainly doesn’t help him lay to rest his trauma. Without his mother he’s lost; there’s no meaning in life, so why take it seriously? Which is where I want to draw this distinction between the ephemeral and the ekphrastic. If Tartt typifies Theo’s real life by change and impermanence, then the still-life of the painting anchors him, gives him something solid and reliable to hold onto.

And yes, art can do that for people. But The Goldfinch brings no comfort to Theo. He can’t share his terrible secret with anyone for fear of retribution, and so his guilt and shame grow. For years, in fact, he’s too terrified to even look at the painting or take it out from the layers of paper that it’s wrapped in. He is much like the feathery prisoner in The Goldfinch, chained to a wall for the remainder of his life: that anchor to the past is more like an albatross around Theo’s neck, or a millstone.

Perhaps there’s something about Tartt’s epigraph to the novel – a quote from Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus – more meaningful than just a punchy opening. Camus boldly declares:

The absurd does not liberate; it binds.

This of course applies to Theo’s painting, which brings danger with its sort-of-psychological safety. In Sisyphus, Camus maintains that it’s not enough to realise that life might be meaningless, you have to make meaning for yourself, even if you know that we’re all going to die and nothing really matters in the end. You get the sense that, if someone were to come along and steal the painting, Theo would be a lot happier. He’d see that living in the past is unhealthy, that the life he ends up with as an antiques dealer living with a kindly old craftsman (Hobie, an unusually decent character for Tartt) is not such a bad one, and that holding onto our traumas only makes them more damaging and more traumatic.

I don’t think that Donna Tartt wants us to think that Theo’s obsession is anything but toxic, but the novel’s use of ekphrasis – Theo’s relation to The Goldfinch – is all the more compelling because it’s so skewed. Everything we need to need to know about Theo is wrapped up in Tartt’s use of ekphrasis. It’s quite ironic that the bare fact of The Goldfinch‘s survival is a testament to human fragility – that our greatest treasures are only what we can save from the passage of time – and yet Theo can’t take that as a cue to live while he can.

A lot of the novel’s key ideas are brought into play in its final chapter, which functions as more of an essay than a conclusion. Granted, some of The Goldfinch’s best passages of ekphrasis come from here, but to be perfectly honest I found the ending to The Goldfinch a bit weak. My rule is to never give spoilers in an article so I’ll leave plot concerns aside (basically, I thought the ending was a wet firework) and focus on Tartt’s choice to shine a light directly on the novel’s Big Ideas in the last twenty pages.

Donna Tartt.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – plenty of novels leave the knockout punch for the finale – but I don’t know. When you’ve kept the reader’s attention for pushing 800 pages I’d be tempted to focus on the characters, not the ideas. If Donna Tartt were a lesser novelist you’d think that she were afraid we’d miss the point; but I was so impressed with The Secret History‘s subtle riffing on Classical themes that I think Tartt knows exactly what she’s doing, which makes me question why she’s done it. Novels aren’t essays – they’re more like thought experiments, running through ideas, or at least that’s what Camus used them for. I don’t know. Maybe I’m being a little unfair. Even if for me The Goldfinch ends on the wrong key I’m still enamoured with Tartt’s ekphrasis.

By far the most powerful message of The Goldfinch is to not take for granted the friendships that you make. Boris and Theo make a good team of misfits and as I say, the middle portion of the book set in Las Vegas is where Tartt’s eye for the complexities of relationships really shines. The characters often reference Dostoevsky’s The Idiot: a book I haven’t read but I’m sure there are all sorts of undertones that I’m missing there. Aside from the bond between Boris and Theo The Goldfinch is a rather gloomy novel, but then ekphrasis often is quite nihilistic – see for example Auden’s Musee de Beaux Arts, with the cheerful opening:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters […]

A poem that Theo thinks of more than once in The Goldfinch. Because ekphrasis is all about how we look at art it’s an excellent method of self-reflection. It’s a really useful way of underscoring how narrators, writers and readers alike relate to others because it uses art as a catalyst for these relationships. Ekphrasis in The Goldfinch shows the irony – and finally the tragedy – of how Theo’s got it wrong, about art and life. Change is a natural part of life; if the Richard in The Secret History is doomed because he desires perfection, maybe Theo is doomed because he can’t – won’t – let go of a perfection that he’s made for himself. There’s no such thing as the perfect painting, even less so than a perfect life.

 

 

Sources

• Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus [1942] (London: Penguin, 2005)
• Carel Fabritius, The Goldfinch, oil on board, 33.5 cm × 22.8 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague, 1654.
• Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 180 cm × 180 cm, Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, 1907-8.
• Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (New York: Little and Brown, 2013)
• Donna Tartt, The Secret History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992)
• Ruth Webb, ‘Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre’, Word and Image, 15 (1999), pp. 7-18; p. 13.

 

Image Credits

• Amazon.com
• Wikipedia
• Little and Brown.

 

Please contact me regarding any copyright infringement and I will gladly comply.

W.G. Sebald, Ulysses, and Babylonian tablets: pattern and coincidence throughout literature

Just before Christmas I was given W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995) to read by a friend. The friend had read Sebald last summer in preparation for a module he wanted to take, about literature’s role in surviving the oncoming plastic apocalypse, but in the end neither of us got a space in the class. Nevertheless, so full of Sebald’s praises my friend was that he bought every copy of The Rings of Saturn he could find and parcelled them out to his friends to ensure that we all were duty-bound to read it. Without hope or despair, I dutifully started reading, and to my surprise I felt compelled to keep going. The Rings of Saturn starts like this:

In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.  […] in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.

Originally written in German, The Rings of Saturn is the account of a walking trip Sebald made along the coast of Suffolk, passing through Lowestoft, the Orfordness nuclear testing site, and ending at The Mermaid pub in Ditchlingham. As he wanders, Sebald narrates the history of the landscape and its inhabitants, past and present. We’re shown that the apparently ordinary countryside has a rich, intricate life of its own. The drab streets of Lowestoft reveal the vanished history of the North Sea herring fleets; the iron railway bridge over the River Blyth has a distant, improbable link to the last Dowager Empress of Imperial China; and so on until the cows come home. Sebald’s digressions often seem to come out of nowhere:

I sat down on a beach on the green called Gunhill and looked out on the tranquil sea, from the depths of which the shadows were now rising. Everyone who had been out for an evening stroll was gone. I felt as if I were in a deserted theatre, and I should not have been surprised if a curtain had suddenly risen before me and on the proscenium I had beheld, say, the 28th of May 1672— that memorable day when the Dutch fleet appeared offshore from out of the drifting mists, with the bright morning light behind it, and opened fire on the English ships in Sole Bay…

In German, The Rings of Saturn is subtitled as “An English Pilgrimage”; indeed, walking with Sebald is like walking through history, time, and across the world all at once. The Rings of Saturn leaves a powerful impression on its readers in a way that I find difficult to express. I’m usually suspicious of postmodern books that try, usually with pretension and without success, to market themselves as “not quite memoir, not quite fiction, not quite fact”. Instead of ticking all the boxes you can risk getting them all wrong. But Sebald nails it without seeming pretentious or looking like he’s trying too hard. If you’re not a fan of fiction this one’s worth reading if only for the fascinating sections on history, wars, and the natural world.

Sebald is interested in patterns, and finding them wherever they may be in the world around him. It’s not that his journey through Suffolk is particularly special: any journey, big or small, can remind us not only of our connection to the world but of the world’s connection to itself. This map of Sebald’s route in The Rings of Saturn shows us exactly how many connections and links Sebald can find along his wanderings. One of the central images of the book is the quincunx pattern – a geometric shape that can be found repeated throughout art, science and nature. Early modern philosophers like Thomas Browne (discussed in The Rings of Saturn) saw the quincunx as evidence of ‘the wisdom of God’; if Sebald thinks the same he’s not telling.

The Quincunx pattern, as mentioned in The Rings of Saturn.

Which all leads me to a lecture I had a few weeks ago, called ‘Chance and the Contemporary Novel’. Through a discussion of the rather tedious work of Ali Smith (the lecture was good though; look, I’m writing an essay inspired by it), the lecturer made an interesting claim. Contemporary novels are more interested in ideas of chance, coincidence, accidents and random occurrences than they had been in the 20th century. Or, at least, our interest in the accidental is coming back into fashion. This is because, at a time when fewer and fewer of us feel like we have agency or control over our lives, the unpredictable elements of life deserve to be taken more seriously. The world is frightful and complex and people need to find meaning in it, whether from religion, Communism, chakra alignments or Brexit. We imagine that the universe is necessarily teleological – that it has a design and, if we could only find the right way of looking at it, all the pieces in the puzzle would fall into place. That desire to look into coincidences and off-chance encounters is fascinating, because it demonstrates our need to make the meaningless meaningful; there can be no such thing as coincidences, just happy little accidents.

The same impulse – to investigate the spontaneous, untraceable, thousand-thousand variables which cause each and every interaction of our lives – crop up across literature. It’s not just Ali Smith (The Accidental, 2005), WG Sebald (The Rings of Saturn), or that Frenchman who wrote The President’s Hat (Antoine Laurain) who are after such answers. Almost all of the great Modernist novels experiment, in some form or another, with chance and coincidence and pattern-finding. A running intrigue in Ulysses (1922) is guessing the favourite runner of the Gold Cup race. When Leopold Bloom bumps into a friend and offers him his ‘throwaway’ paper, this is interpreted to be a coded tip-off about the name of the horse – Throwaway – that goes on to win the race at five-to-one odds. Bloom’s friends then hold a grudge against him for not letting them in on the secret. Even though this was nothing more than an off-chance coincidence it creates ripples anyway, taking on life and significance of its own.

Dublin in 1904. Image credit: The Irish Times

Perhaps more importantly, the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses follows nineteen different people going about their daily lives in the Dublin high street, with the narrative perspective flitting – seemingly at random – between unconnected bystanders. These characters are from all walks of life: boozers, a Catholic priest, even the man banging Leopold Bloom’s wife. Yet our movement through the city is not at all random, as Fritz Senn and others once proved by acting out in real-life each of the different scenes in ‘Wandering Rocks’. They realised that wherever Joyce leaves each wanderer and moves to the next was always the moment where the next character would have come within the eye-line of the person before them. The episode doesn’t bounce around like a stray tennis ball, as this wonderful map by Amanda Visconti proves: ‘Wandering Rocks’ is in fact a finely tuned balancing act, like a relay race. Look deeper beneath the surface of something as uncontrolled and unpredictable as a crowded city street and we find an intricate, finely-balanced network of chances and causality, all intimately linked. And even a bouncing tennis ball would have a trajectory that you could plot.

Other Modernist novels in with a chance: Mrs Dalloway is largely predicated on the ordinary and spontaneous circumstances Clarissa Dalloway experiences on a day (supposedly) like any other. In fact, most of the Modernist ‘day-novels’ – Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, John Rodker’s Adolphe 1920 and (at a push) Andre Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja –  confront the accidental because they’re concerned with the stuff the makes up our everyday lives. For the Modernists, thinking about chance and accidents was more a way of making their novels more realistic than anything else. So much of the day-to-day is unpredictable and out of our hands that, if you’re going to write a novel about everyday life, then it’s important to consider the different ways that people can find meaning in the apparently meaningless.

I don’t just mean novels which feature coincidences or accidents as mere plot points. By nature nothing in a conventional novel really is unplanned. Someone’s sat down and worked everything out before hand. What I’m trying to get at is where and how authors try to replicate real coincidence; take the collage poetry of the Beats, or the exquisite corpse games of the surrealists. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac once tried to write a poem between them by each writing a random line without seeing what the other had put before them. The results – a poem called Pull My Daisy, which was put to music and sung at the start of this film – were negligible, but their hearts were in the right place.

A still from Ginsberg and Kerouac’s film, ‘Pull My Daisy’, 1959.

As with the surrealists, who tried to transcribe and recreate the stuff of dreams, the mere fact that poetry like this exists is as a reflection of the not-so randomness of the universe, which made such experiments worthwhile to their creators. It’s like how when a TV is tuned to no channel it gives you static, which scientists inform us is actually the cosmic background radiation, or the noise of the universe itself left over from the big bang. Okay, white noise might look or sound good, but my point is that even something as random and chaotic as static can make sense if we find the right way to interpret it.

And it gets stranger. At the risk of losing my point entirely permit me to digress even further. I recently visited the Ashurbanipal exhibition at the British Museum. There, I learnt about an ancient Babylonian “book” known as the Summa Alu (short for a very long name). The Summa Alu is, I suppose, a kind of almanac or book of superstitions written on 120 cuneiform tablets (which I’m thinking of as chapters), each detailing a different omen to be spotted and taken care of in the daily life of Nineveh, King Ashurbanipal’s capital city. If the astute Babylonian knows what it means when two people cross the street at noon, or what to do if a house is built at a wonky angle, or if a crow is spotted drinking marsh water before dawn, then a great many calamities can be avoided by the consulting of the mighty Summa Alu. If we can just find the right way of looking at things then daily life might just start to make sense.

A cuneiform tablet of the Summa Alu, British Museum.

Ascribing meaning to accidents and coincidences enables us to give meaning to our lives because it assures us that, even if we can’t always spot it, there is something much larger than ourselves at work. It allows us to confront the essential madness of the universe with a measure of comfort when we know that, alright, there’s not much I can do to affect it, but at least there is an ‘it’ in the first place. And – as a book like the Summa Alu proves – once we start believing there’s a pattern in place the sooner we can start trying to recognise it, start making predictions; we have the chance to take back control.

Which brings me all the way back to Sebald and The Rings of Saturn. Before the book begins, Sebald gives us a brief dictionary description of what the real-life rings of Saturn are:

The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet’s equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect.

The rings of Saturn are fragments of a larger whole; though almost completely unrecognisable to us, there is an overall pattern and shape that they binds them altogether. The idea of this moon having been broken up by ‘tidal effect’ suggests an inevitability to decay, as though all orders eventually give way to chaos. Yet Sebald has his preoccupations. More than once in The Rings of Saturn he returns to the same place, the same time: the Third Reich. As a German born in 1944, Sebald struggled to express the guilt and the burden of responsibility that Germans of his generation must come to terms with. He didn’t realise until he was a teenager, for example, that his own father had participated in the invasion of Poland in 1939. Sebald’s method of spotting patterns and detailing coincidences is not itself accidental: he is searching for the myriad factors which could make something as horrific as the Holocaust a factual truth. As Mark O’Connell says:

this is not so much a way of understanding the Holocaust, so much as it is a way of making us think about how we can’t understand the Holocaust.

Truthfully I don’t know enough about Sebald to say whether or not he was trying to prove there was a design and a pattern and all that other stuff (I think he wasn’t, to be honest) but he was certainly someone who wanted to look to see what he could find. On the Holocaust and a thousand other things, he was looking for answers. I’m not sure what I’m trying to say with this disjointed ramble across literature and history. I’m definitely not as good at it as Sebald was. I am using this as a space to think through some things that interest me. A lot of these ideas about pattern recognition and analysing multiple factors to determine causality and outcome can probably be applied to fields like mathematics and computer science; fields that I’m more hopeless than fiction with. Isn’t this how Cambridge Analytica and Facebook like to help liars trick us about politics?

There is so much more to be said, but in the interests of finding a conclusion I am fascinated by the continued and varied ways in which writers of all stripes – be they Babylonian stargazers, German hikers, or even Ali Smith – share a common interest in exploring the logic of the unpredictable. I’m not really sure what to do now. Although I’m desperate to read the Summa Alu I can’t track down a translation. I think someone did one for their PhD in 2000 but I can’t access it anywhere. Maybe I should contact the British Museum? It’s title sounds like an Italo Calvino novel: Summa Alu — means “If a city is built on a height…”. I think I would like to talk to someone who believes in horoscopes next. Different kinds of logic are worth exploring, even if you don’t necessarily think they’ll hold water. The mere fact that I had a lecture on coincidences in fiction while I was reading Sebald and then I visited the Ashurbanipal exhibition (!) itself is probably more like all the stuff I’m writing about than my writing itself. Now that’s a coincidence.

Quotes

• W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (London: Vintage, 1995)
• Mark O’Connell, ‘Why you should read W.G. Sebald’, The New Yorker, 14th December 2011.

 

Image Sources

• Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Cyrus

 

• British Museum https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?partid=1&assetid=1490125001&objectid=279109

 

• The Irish Times  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/james-joyce-s-dublin-a-city-of-contrasts-1.2243035 

 

Please contact me for any copyright concerns and I’ll be very glad to comply.

 

End of Year Review, 2018

It’s been a long old year. Take this post to be my Christmas letter, New Year’s speech and quarterly confessional all rolled in to one. Come and listen to me talk about myself. A lot’s happened, politically and that, in 2018, but it’s also been a busy year for me in my personal life as well. I graduated my English Literature degree from Nottingham this year, then I went travelling for a month and a half in Japan, Hong Kong and Thailand. I attended the James Joyce Summer School in Trieste and spent ten hours waiting for a delayed flight; I read some pretty big books.  I turned twenty-one and did less creative writing than I would have liked. I moved to Cambridge and started an MPhil in English Lit there – a learning curve and a huge leap that hasn’t always felt like the best decision. I had to say goodbye to my friends and to the way of life that I’d gotten used to for three years, and in all honesty I sometimes doubt how much I have to show for all that at the end of this year. I suppose that I’ve grown up a bit more, though, which is probably all you can ask for.

Before we get too confessional. As a way to round up the year I’m going to go over my reading of the last twelve months and think about it a bit. Last year, in 2017, I read fifty-two books – two less than 2016 – and this year I managed thirty, so my reading has taken something of a nosedive. That’s mainly because I have been just so massively busy; it’s also because I read Infinite Jest, which took me months, clogging up the ‘to be read’ pile. Mainly it’s the workload though, and I’ve been looking forward to Christmas for weeks so that I can squeeze in a few more novels before the end of ’18. Still though, I’ve enjoyed nearly everything I’ve read this year – one of the advantages of only reading stuff you know you’ll like – and thirty good books is nothing to complain about.

My system for counting books is based on physical books read: a booklet of poems counts the same as a thousand page door-stop novel. One of the reasons I managed so many books in 2016 and 2017 is because back then I was reading more plays, which I haven’t done this year. I also don’t include textbooks and academic stuff because I rarely read them cover to cover, nor do short story collections count unless I read the whole lot. So to be clear: I read widely but I’ve only completed thirty books this year.

I’ve rambled enough already: short of going through each book one by one, here are some highlights. Eagle-eyed readers and superfans will notice that in many cases I’ve written about some of these books or mentioned them before. On to the listlicle.

Best non-fiction: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)

I have this terrible disease with Virginia Woolf where I only read her books if I can find really nice copies of them, and then only if they’re at a good price (second-hand). As a result, my Ginny-lore is a bit weak; even so, I found a good copy of A Room of One’s Own back in April and I now know that Woolf’s essay deserves its place in the canon of feminist writing. Woolf is funny in a wry, guarded way, while at the same time remaining deadly serious. She questions the accumulated (and jealously guarded) wealth/ resources of Oxbridge, something that’s stuck with me as I’ve started my Masters at Girton College, the first place where women could get a higher education in England. It should be self evident by now, but in the 1920s, Woolf’s insistence that women needed independence – both financial and social – from men in order to gain control of their own histories is required reading to understand the Modernist period. It’s an entertaining tour through British literary history, fun as well as informative.

A Room of One’s Own also includes some of the best food writing I’ve ever read, contrasting a sumptuous lunch at King’s:

Lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe. […] how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one’s kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat.

with a miserable dinner at Girton:

It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that. […] Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes.  […] Biscuits and cheese came next, and here the water-jug was liberally passed round, for it is the nature of biscuits to be dry and these were biscuits to the core. That was all.

The food’s not that bad anymore.

Best poetry: Calamiterror by George Barker (1936)

George Barker, painted by Patrick Swift in 1960.

I read Calamiterror because I was planning to write an essay on it this semester. I ended up not doing it, but I enjoyed the rigmarole of tracking down the poem because it’s out of print, so reading it wasn’t a complete waste of effort. Barker was a neo-romantic, as well as a bit of a surrealist (what I ended up writing about instead), and Calamiterror is a long poem (40-odd pages) loosely about the Spanish Civil War. It’s curious that Barker wrote about Spain – most writing about that war was done by people who were actually there – but nonetheless Calamiterror is quite unique, a special find. It’s loosely in the style of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, charting the development of an unnamed narrator from innocence to experience. Instead of Wordsworth’s verdant hills and lonely clouds, however, Barker’s narrator is lost in a landscape of scarred mountainsides and sudden air raids.

Calamiterror tries to replicate the calamity (and terror) of escalating violence through a chaotic poetic structure and evocative imagery. It’s a vortex, full of swirling movement and sometimes frightening metamorphoses: a shadow might reveal itself to be an arm, which is then stripped of flesh and peeled to the bone. Barker doesn’t always fire on all cylinders – he can be a bit clumsy and ham-fisted with what he’s trying to say – but when he writes well he’s very impressive. You can buy Calamiterror online, or else DM me and I can send you my photocopied-copy.

Most talked about novel: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1997)

I’m cheating a bit here by breaking up the novels into more than one category. I would make a terrible judge for any meaningful literary award. Still though, it would be wrong of me not to mention David Foster Wallace’s big-hearted brick of a novel Infinite Jest, if only because it took me such a bloody long time to read it. When I initially reviewed Infinite Jest, I predicated that the more time passed between the present and when I read the book, the more I would like it – and my prediction has come true, because right now I have only good things to say about Infinite Jest. (If you want to read my thoughts on Infinite Jest in full, do so here). In actual fact, I’m currently reading Wallace’s next book after Jest, the short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I’m enjoying it so far, and if Wallace keeps up the pace he’ll be making next year’s list too. Infinite Jest is, ostensibly, concerned with pleasure and how we consume it in a consumer society, but at its core it’s a book that’s trying to be sincere, and, I think, one that’s informed by a deep moral conscience. It’s a book worth working for.

Most enjoyable novel: Zama by Antonio di Benedetto (1956)

Like Infinite Jest, Zama is one that I’ve written about before. The film magazine Little White Lies called the cinematic adaptation the best film of 2018 – and good! Zama is easily the most entertaining thing I read this year. Zama is historical fiction, focusing on the thwarted ambitions of Don Diego de Zama, a middle-ranking servant of the Spanish Empire in 1790s Paraguay. Zama is chief justice of a small trading outpost on the jungle frontier, a position which he hates: yet every attempt that he makes to change his situation – to leave the backwaters for Buenos Aires, or, better still, Spain – is met by an increasingly absurd and unfair series of setbacks and reversals. Both the original novel (translated only two years ago into English) and Lucretia Martell’s Spanish-language film do an excellent job of conveying the frustration and absurdity of Zama’s life in the colony. Zama is a pathetic, mean-spirited little man who, for all of that, doesn’t deserve what’s happening to him. There are a few lines at the back that make the whole thing even more worthwhile. Zama is a very weird book, and the film left me dumbfounded when I first saw it – but now I’m convinced it’s a masterpiece. Benjamin Kunkel of The New Yorker said that

The belated arrival of Zama in the United States raises an admittedly hyperbolic question: Can it be that the Great American Novel was written by an Argentinean?

Not so sure about that one, but definitely the most fun book I’ve read this year.

Best novel to recommend to a friend: The Waves by Virginia Woolf (1931)

I didn’t want to have the same author appear twice in this list but I can make an exception for The Waves. This one I read during a typhoon at Mt Fuji and finished on a plane back from Bangkok. I don’t think I’ve read something more quotable than The Waves, on everything – Virginia nailed it with this one, which approaches the style of poetry in the beauty and deftness of its phrasing. It is a joy to hear Virginia Woolf describe something – from kneading bread to the sparkling, almost transcendental feeling of talking with old friends and eating good food – The Waves is good for the soul. It’s so good that I’m willing to say soppy stuff like that about it. The Waves follows the lives of six friends, three men and three women, through their earliest days to the ends of their lives. The story is told in the form of interlinking monologues, told by the characters themselves, broken up by nine short descriptions of a beach at different times of the day – dawn till dusk. Woolf said that the six characters are supposed to be different facets of the same person, like the cut-glass sides of a diamond, but I preferred thinking of them as six individuals rather than as one whole. Still though, books like The Waves go to show that people are greater than the sums of their parts. The Waves affirms the best and brightest theme of Modernism: connection.

Strangest novel of the year: The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille (1928)

To lighten the mood: this is a really bizarre book. Someone recommended it to me to see what I thought and, though a mere 80-odd pages, I struggled to finish The Story of the Eye. An erotic fantasy, The Story of the Eye is the memoir of a sexual deviant looking back at a teenage relationship that involves egg-cracking, bull-fighting and lots of piss. I really can’t see the point of this book – and please, if you can, tell me – because it’s not supposed to be sexy or arousing. Nor can I find any literary value in it, even as some kind of exploration of mankind’s perverse subconsciousness. It’s worth it for a laugh though!

Closing Thoughts

I didn’t include any plays or short stories because I didn’t read very many collections of either this year. This list is far longer than I’d intended it to be. I struggled, as you can tell, to decide between my favourite novels this year, and I resisted the urge to type out an exhaustive list of each of the thirty books that were up for “nomination”. You’ll notice that most of these books are from the 1920s/30s, and that none of them were written this century: my abiding interest remains with Modernism, and that’s unlikely to change – and I don’t want it to. I try to read as much contemporary fiction as possible, and I did read a fair bit of it – but none of it made the cut.

Next year I would like to read and talk about new publications more, especially as I enjoyed writing about Normal People (Waterstones Book of the Year) so much – although I freely admit that my thoughts on that bestseller were a bit overblown. I’d also like to read more women writers and stuff by non-white people, if only for some variety. I regret not reading more widely – although I’ve done better with the women (not literally) this year than I have done before. Please, please, send me recommendations, as long as they’re not Bataille. Expanding your horizons can only be a good thing. Although I know what I like, I am always up for something new and different.

Finally – a big thank you to people that do actually read my blog. I often feel conflicted about who it is that I’m writing it for, and I tell myself that I write stuff for my own sake rather than any specific audience, which is to say any specific kind of approval. While that is true, it still means the world to me that there are people that do read me now and then, when they’re interested and when they’ve got the time. I’m aware that my interests and my reading are quite specific, and I sometimes feel a conflict between my wish to be clear and plain-speaking in my posts, and a desire to delve deeply into whatever it is that I’m talking about. Thoughts are always appreciated and I do hope, if you’ve stuck with me over my first year or so as a petit blogger, that you’ve found something here that entertains you.

Happy New Year

 

Image credits: Wikipedia and Goodreads.