Eve's Alexandria

What The Dead Want

Milk and honey, wine and barley are all very well. They are right and proper. They are due. But they are not what the dead want. Now that the blood is soaking into the earth tank, making a rich mud of the floor, the flavour trickles down into Hades.

Last week,  Vicky mentioned that she has a slight, instinctive aversion to short books. In many ways I share it. I like the idea of short books - and I read quite a lot of short stories - but very often I'll find myself passing over the novellas on my shelves in favour of something (apparently) meatier. Novels, for me, should be something that I can dig into, get involved in, spend time with. There's always a lingering suspicion, with me, that a slender novel will also prove to be a slender reading experience: interesting, pretty, but not perhaps all that memorable. I've been proven wrong on several occasions, some documented in the lifetime of this blog (although, tellingly, after several minutes' reflection I can only think of those two); but it doesn't stop me seeing short books as, fundamentally, nothing but a quick read.

So Achilles (2001), by Elizabeth Cook, is not really the sort of book I tend to pick up. I can't actually remember, anymore, how it came to my attention, except that I added it to my Amazon wishlist without noticing how short it was, and when fellow Alexandrian Jo bought it for me for Christmas one year, I was surprised by its appearance. Not only was it hovering around the 100 pages mark, it was also more poetry than prose; clearly, the gods of synchronicity had slipped and sent me Esther's book by accident...

Despite these stubborn obstacles, and despite my suspicion that as a reader I'm simply not equipped to get as much from this sort of book as others (e.g. Esther) are, I did find Achilles an intriguing read.

The book is split into three, uneven parts: the first, and largest, centres on Achilles' experiences at Troy (primarily the period covered by the Iliad); the second explores the aftermath of Achilles' death, notably through the eyes of his mother Thetis, and Helen; the third - which, I confess, lost me a bit - breaks out of the Trojan War setting to examine the impact of the story as poetry, as it is read two and half thousand years later by John Keats.

Cook is intensely interested in physicality, both in life and in death. Bodies - what they feel, what they represent, and of course how they are treated after death - are referenced repeatedly. Achilles thinks of the different areas of his life and his identity in terms of "the bodies [he] knows"; the third, literally embodying memory, is his father's:

In his mind he cast a net over Peleus' body. Where the lines joined there were scars. He learned how to spin a story from link to link, from scar to scar. These, the stories of his father's body, were his first.

At every turn, bodies are presented as central to how characters experience their selfhood. In some cases they act as sort of mnemonics: in one sequence, Hector recalls episodes from his past in time with the beat of his feet hitting the ground as he runs, and imagines "his life spread out before him like a great sheet in the sun".

In other cases, the physical experience teaches, and in so doing broadens the character's sense of self. As a youth, Achilles "completes [his] education" by taking on elements of female physicality. Disguised, for his protection, as a girl named Pyrrha, Achilles gradually also develops a feminine identity. He "becomes adept as Pyrrha"; accepted as one of the girls, he explores the meaning of all this through some of the social markers of girlhood, the physical accoutrements:

He borrows Deidamia's dresses, wanting to feel how her body feels - not just to his hands but to herself - when her soft silks drift over it. He uses her sweetest oils in his skin and hair.

Emotional states, too, are expressed and explored through their physical effects.  The mourning dirge for Achilles, for example, is not merely heard; rather, it "burns in the veins of all who hear it [...] stronger than unmixed wine". The most dramatic example of this comes when Cassandra is gifted with a prophetic vision of Troy's destruction:

Cassandra is sick with crying; her whole body attempts to extrude what she has seen.

They hold her down; clean up the mess of mucus, vomit and faeces that spurts and dribbles out of her, but her large, shouted words drift away unheard. Helen alone recognises the truth of Cassandra's cries. But she says nothing, her perfect composure the exact opposite of Cassandra's disarray.

Everyday sensations are frequently highlighted by overtly sensual language, with verbs filling in where we might expect adjectives; in a flashback to Achilles' conception, for example, we are told that the nymph Thetis emerges from the sea to lie "slabbed on a rock while the sun licks her dry". While 'slabbed' is expressive of her implacable opposition to men's advances ("No one has shown her one good reason why she should let some mortal enter her"), the lascivious 'lick' of the sunlight on the skin of this woman who believes herself alone, hints at what will soon undermine her autonomy: she is being watched.

Peleus - for it is he - sees Thetis' self-determination as a challenge - "so he stalks her" (the phrase is repeated three times in the space of a page, each time given a line to itself), as a hunter does his prey, until he is able to take her by surprise, and by force: "tip[ping] her back into an arch, hold[ing] her steady while he scabbards himself". She reacts by shapeshifting to get away from him, and again the emphasis is on her physicality rather than her chain of thought:

Her arched back held, she arches more
                                                                           and bucks.
Her body now one sentient muscle:
    A HEART,
    AN EEL,
    A FISH.

Given the importance of bodies, and the ways in which patriarchal power is expressed in the myths upon which Cook draws, rape and sexualised violence are present in the histories of most of the female characters. Amazon Queen Penthiseleia, shortly before dying in a visceral struggle with Achilles, sees her own violation mirrored in the ocean; far from absorbing blows, or being indifferent to them, the sea, too can be physically damaged:

She was watching the sea which today is breaking and breaking in little white waves, each a gash in the sea's body, a wound which heals till the skin breaks open again somewhere else.

Iphigeneia escapes by being sacrificed to the virgin goddess Artemis; her acceptance of this is signalled, again, through physical sensation rather than dialogue: "the way to make fate your choice is to choose it, fearlessly, your lungs drinking the air". Other women are tied the fate of their bodies, or even betrayed by them: Cassandra's helpless vomiting in the face of the truth-telling that will be ignored is one example, but the most pervasive is the figure of Helen, who becomes a target of jealousy and aggression precisely because her body is never marked by what happens to her:

But the lovely tautness of her flesh never slackens. Her skin continues to exhale light. Maybe the albumen did it. Or having Zeus for a father. The fact is that nothing that happens to her - nothing that has happened to her - shows.

And that is enough to make them hate her. Her beauty is like a smooth wall that resists all impressions.

And men do, repeatedly, batter themselves against that wall in an effort to leave their mark, just as - through their presence at Troy - they hope to leave their mark on history. It is not about her beauty, but about displaying their power. For Helen, as for Troy, the effect is disastrous: as a ten-year-old she is raped by Theseus (an upsetting scene, for all its poetic brevity), and later, of course, she becomes the object of a tug of ego war between Menelaus/the Greeks and Paris/the Trojans.

Achilles' funeral - told, strikingly, in second person - is the centrepiece of the book. The preparation for it, and the rituals of which it is composed, are extensive. Here it is the treatment of his body that is the marker of his stature and reputation in death ("Great Ajax staggered under the weight of you"), as well of the dutifulness of the characters left alive: even when they have left their bodies behind, the dead's thirst for the blood of sacrifice is strong. It is a longing that, for Achilles, "hooks into his heart", leaving him no choice but to be "dragged, helpless as a fish".

After Achilles' body has been burned, there is a lengthy, loving tally of his bones, as Thetis "gathers them all and cradles them", noting the weight of each and identifying them closely with the pyre that separated them from his flesh - leaving behind arm and leg bones "like wands of peeled wood", and ribs that resemble "a precious bundle of kindling". The whole scene is a little bit too ghoulish - and languidly beautiful - to be tender, I think, although there is something very touching about the fact that she then mingles Achilles' bones with those of Patroclus, "his beloved throughout eternity".

Not the kind of book I usually read, no; but food for thought, all the same.

~~Nic

"Who said fashion was easy?"

It feels smooth and heavy and warm when I stroke it because I've been sleeping with it between my legs. I like to inhale its grey infinite smell for a while before I pass my lips down its length, courting it with the tip of my tongue, until my mouth has come to the wider part near the tip. This I suck, and blow gently into the hole. It becomes wet in my mouth but doesn't soften. It remains achingly solid and I put it between my legs.

Tricia Sullivan doesn't really do slow build-ups. Maul (2003) hits you right between the eyes with its opening paragraph - quoted above - and then runs off, cackling. Three pages and two more sucker punches later (I won't spoil them), you'll either by throwing the book aside in disgust or - as I was - laughing in dazed delight at Sullivan's audacity.

Which essentially describes the whole experience of reading the book: equal parts glee and bemusement.

I thoroughly enjoyed this dual-strand tale of warring schoolgirls and future!genetics, but there were substantial chunks of it, towards the end, where I had only a very fuzzy idea of what on earth was going on. Every time you think you've got your bearings, off goes another narrative cluster bomb (as I put it in a discussion about her most recent novel, Lightborn, here): Wait, the stand-off at the make-up counter turned into a shoot-out? How on earth did he just escape? She stashed an Uzi in Laura Ashley? His sperm carries immunity to the plague? So now she's controlling the whole mall via an arcade game? OMG everyone's gone crazy and now they're wrestling on the floor of the lab! ("wtf" appears quite frequently in the notes I took while reading.)

And so on. Even when the plot isn't lurching off into headfuck territory for the fourth time that chapter, Sullivan revels in the non-sequiturs of her information-saturated world(s) and her attention span-challenged characters. Dialogue and narration alike flit restlessly from topic to topic, as Sullivan throws out ideas as fast as she does the real and invented brand names; characters lose their train of thought and don't regain it, distracted by adverts and data feeds and horniness and interruptions from other characters:

"So, if that's solved, should we talk about the--"

"Carrera has testicles the size of ellendales. He masturbates five times a day. There's something about him."

LOSE WEIGHT AT SKINNYBITCH. ENTER OUR VIRTUAL COOKIE SIMULATOR OR HAVE YOUR THIGHS ZAPPED WITH OUR REVOLUTIONARY LASERS WHILE YOU EAT NOCALORIE CAKE.

"Should I try going to Skinnybitch?" Maddie asked with her mouth full. "You're so slim, Kaitlin, how do you do it?"

"OK, wait. Wait just a cottonpickin' minute. In the antiparasite war waged by multicellulars against bugs, sex creates human culture and intelligence, which then tries to subvert and overturn sex. Right?"

Even if it gets difficult to follow, at times, though, it does mean that Sullivan gives good teenager. One strand of the novel belongs to Korean-American Sun, a pitch-perfect blend of smart and smart-aleck, bravado and self-consciousness. Like all the best fictional teenagers, she’s essentially the much quicker-witted version of you at that age, all melodramatic-ironic pretend nihilism ("In disaster movies I'm always rooting for the tidal wave" sounds like something I wish I’d said) and feeling overshadowed by the inevitable much prettier/funnier/cleverer/weirder best friend [delete as applicable according to the circles you moved in…].

In Sun’s case, the best friend is flighty but well-meaning Suk Hee, a girl who even manages to make teen sullenness look pretty (rather brilliantly, when we first see her she’s sporting "a fetching scowl"). Suk Hee is "just beautiful, end of story", and Sullivan is insightful on the traces of admiration and envy woven Sun’s devotion to her friend, without ever letting the friendship tip over into the parasitical self-esteem killer of, say, Jennifer's Body. "I want to stand next to her as if it will somehow rub off", confesses Sun, and immediately we’re being invited to share the constant sense of measuring yourself against others, and through others’ eyes, that lies behind so much of being a teenager. But it is also made abundantly clear, throughout the novel, that the two girls care about each other a great deal. It proves to be a useful emotional hook, grounding the novel when everything else is going completely off the rails.

Because while Sun might look like a fairly ordinary teenage girl, sulking and snapping at her parents before heading out to the 'maul' with her friends Suk Hee and Keri of a Saturday afternoon, there’s something more than just chipped-black-nail-polish edgy about her:

After I leave I feel guilty because I used to be nice, or at least some of the time I was nice, or at least I wasn't the complete mean bastard at all time like lately; but the weight of my piece drags at my thigh and I know it's just nerves. Nerves. I'll be better once today's over.

Sun is pretty ordinary - except for that opening chapter, and then the part where she straps on her pink ammo belt ("It's heavy, but who said fashion was easy?") before leaving the house. She’s in a gang. Kind of. It mostly seems to revolve around rival fashion blogs, except that on this particular Saturday they come face to face across the make-up counter with the Bugaboos, "the crew that outclasses, outguns and outbra-sizes us". After a stand-off, said make-up counter erupts in a hail of bullets, complete with loving descriptions of perfume displays exploding in the prose equivalent of action film slow-mo. It’s incongruous and hilarious, at least up to the point where actual people start getting shot.

Well, okay, I confess; it’s still pretty funny even then. Just in a wrong way.

"I sujjest you get a plan and quick or they be nerve-gassing us out of here." She sniffed and resumed filming.

"That's not nerve gas, that's Joy," Keri said.

I hollered, "DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT GAS BECAUSE HITLER--"

Keri grabbed me and pulled me back down.

"Shut up!" she hissed, her brown eyes going all adult and bossy on me. "This is fucked. I'm starving, I've got a major chocolate craving, I have to study for a physics test, and this is no way to spend a Saturday. Let's just turn ourselves in before somebody gets hurt."

"Somebody did get hurt," I retorted. "Did you see that guy's body out there?"

What keeps it from becoming fetishistic or downright traumatising is, as here, Maul’s irreverence: that delight in non-sequitur, the Buffy-esque commitment to expressing emotional seriousness through essentially ironic dialogue, and the use of irony and seriousness alike to completely upend the mood of a scene, mirroring the see-sawing emotional states of the protagonists. The passage above is a fine example. We get a repeated bathetic puncturing of tension - the ominous idea of nerve-gas is shown up as melodramatic silliness in the face of another snarky joke about cosmetics; Keri losing her temper with Sun’s wisecracks becomes an endearingly prosaic and childish list of complaints - before Sullivan delivers a punch all the more effective for the banality of the short speech that just proceeded it. This is not just a game; they cannot make the effects of their actions go away when they’re tired of playing.

Unless it is, and they can. Because it might – or might not - be all a simulation happening in the head of a character from the second strand of the novel. This part is set in a near-future in which most men have died from Y-chromosome specific plague(s), and women preserve the remnant of the opposite sex as primped, pampered and patronised ‘breeders’. Breeders are young men who increase the market value of their sperm by perform cartoonishly exaggerated masculinity - body-building, daredevil stunts, training as firemen to rescue kittens from burning buildings - on TV and at special, sell-out arena events. (Again, funny in a wrong sort of way.)

Insofar as you can summarise anything about Maul, this part of the story is an exploration, let’s say, of the idea that, given half a technological chance, women will happily let men slide into obsolescence. Or actively encourage it. Because of course straight women don’t actually like men, they only use them to get the babies. As one (male) character puts it:

"[Women] can do everything we can do. Thanks to assassin bugs they can even protect themselves against other men, which was always our big selling point as, like, a gender. We need them more than they need us. And that's why we're reproducing through pigs and they've got a thriving market in vibrators. We screwed ourselves, Squeak. All that technology made an end to us."

I can't really think of any better way to describe the resultant society than perfectly ghastly. The distillation of relations between men and women to the purely biological - functional, exploitative - seems to have turned every character in this half of the novel into complete basket cases. The least odd is career research scientist Maddie (who reflects that she "worked with bugs […] because she didn't like people"), but when push comes to promise of sex and/or sperm, she's scratching and kicking on the floor with the loopiest of them. I have to say I did quite a lot of eye-rolling over the way all of the women go crazy for the cock, and in general I was much less absorbed and entertained by Maddie's story than I was by Sun's - but, with some distance, I can see Sullivan is making important, challenging points, in a parodic way.

Sheri S Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country, mentioned in Sullivan's acknowledgements, is undoubtedly being interrogated here, with its gender-segregated society and secret women-led programme to selectively breed the violence out of mankind. It's been about fifteen years since I read The Gate to Women’s Country, but looking back it seems to me that Tepper portrays women's impending victory in the sex wars as rather more Pyrrhic than is sometimes acknowledged. "There’s no fucking in Hades" is bittersweet at best; more regretful than triumphal, I think.

Nonetheless, Sullivan drags women's separatism out of the middle-class academic earnestness of Women's Country, and slams it up against a window onto the selfish middle-brow megalomania that we all secretly suspect would result:

"I think you'd like to detain him, take his sperm by force and use it to make... to make..."

"Say it, Maddie - go on. To make Chiefs. To make Boyz. Y-immune males, and they'll all have my genes. I'll be the new Eve."

Maddie hadn't gotten there yet, so when G-ma said it, she had to keep stroking the cat and trying not to laugh. Oh, fuck, was the only thing she could think.

Absolute power absolutely corrupts women, too; it’s not precisely a revelation, but rarely is it seen without coming across like an anti-feminist straw man. Because Maul also passionately critical – if still in a darkly humourous way – of the way toxic masculinity works at the expense of women's autonomy and safety ("I'm the little princess," reflects Sun, "They dominate, they aggress, they protect"), and the subtle but pervasive ways in which young women are trained to be compliant, to ignore their wants and needs for fear of seeming uppity or slutty and (horrors) scaring off that nice boy in their class. (As ever, the patriarchy hurts men, too: what could be more demeaning to men than women feeling they must coddle the fragile male ego by lying about their desires?)

One example is Sun's deeply disappointing sexual encounter with Alex, which she describes as "like a root canal". He is ecstatically "oblivious" – and, post-coital, predictably fluffy ("This is the most awesome day of my life") – while she, fearing to enhance an existing reputation as a slut, can’t bring herself to tell him that he’s, er, significantly less good at stimulating her than her own gun. Instead, she chooses to absent herself:

I just wanted it to be over. As Alex carried on enjoying himself I scanned the shelves, looking for something to focus my attention on.

But then, for all the examination of the gender divide, and the girls with guns turning shoppers into literal fashion victims, in many ways Maul is about experiences common to both boys and girls at Sun’s age. Sex as anti-climax; crush objects turning out to be crushingly dull; the fear that growing up might mean less anger and joy and colour and fun, not more. For that matter, Sun's heartfelt cry - "But I look around at this shoebox of a reality that somebody forgot to cut air holes in and contemplate my future existence and how can I not lash the fuck out?" - has gained some extra urgency and resonance in the light of the recent student protest movement here in the UK.

Finally, there is the sense that, for better or for worse, change is inescapable. Prone as I am to losing myself in nostalgia - sometimes even for things that haven't actually ended yet - passages like this did get me:

You can't be sixteen forever. I've read all about this phenomenon and I'm ready for it. You adapt or you implode. You say haha and get on with it. It's a weird feeling to know this is going to happen to you, to know the ironic raised eyebrows and stifled giggles you share with your friends in the back of Chemistry class are a limited-time-only offer. They'll expire with the season, like bikinis in December unless you shop really upscale where they cater to the cruise market. This awareness is going to end.

~~Nic

A light exists in spring

Now, don't laugh: I've just discovered Emily Dickinson. 

I know, I know.  My prior ignorance of her work reflects yet another yawning gap in my reading career: American classics.  American writers were woefully under-represented in English Literature at my school and at university.  In fact, I believe the only American classic I studied during my formal education was Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and even that was optional. 

I have a beautiful book called The World in a Frame to thank for the entrance of Emily into my life.  Esther picked it up in a remainder bookshop for £4, and it's simply beautiful.  Writing about it can't do it justice.  The book is a hardback reprint by Pomegranate Books of an edition first published in 1989.  It brings together charcoal drawings by American artist Will Barnet, with a selection of Dickinson's poetry.   The drawings are beautiful, clean and simple, while the poetry stands incandescent next to them.

I know so little about Emily Dickinson at the moment that I feel faintly embarrassed, and at a loss of how to talk about the experience of reading her work.  It seems to me that she writes poetry like someone who knows what poetry is by instinct alone.  Her language has great rhythm, characterised by the dashes that pepper her stanzas, so that it is the act of reading them aloud that gives them their form.  And her poems are full of  unremitting, forceful feeling, that bursts out alternately in cries of pain, and exclamations at beauty, and wry ironies.

There are two poems I particularly like. Number 657, which begins 'I dwell in Possibility', and number 341.  The latter is the one I have read over and over again:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes -----

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs -----

The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,

And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

 

The Feet, mechanical, go round -----

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought ----

A Wooden way

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone ----

 

This is the Hour of Lead -----

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow ----

First ---- Chill ----- then Stupor ---- then the letting go ----

 As if by perfect chance, Hesperus Press are publishing a biography of Emily Dickinson this month as part of their Brief Lives series.  This might make a good introduction to the longer biography by Lyndall Gordon - Lives like loaded guns - that came out last year.  Methinks a trip to the library is in order.

~~Victoria~~

A rose by any other name

I've mentioned my tendency to steer away from short books before.  Anything between 40 and 150 pages makes me feel instinctively uncomfortable, and no matter how many slim volumes I enjoy I simply can't shake the prejudice.  When Penguin books offered to send me a couple of their new mini modern classics I decided to test myself, despite my mental knee-jerk.  I also took the opportunity to try some new writers: Eileen Chang and R.K. Narayan. 

Chang is one of those author's at the very edge of my consciouness.  I had a picture of her in my mind; an enigmatic, imperious face, a sleek blouse and a cigarette, born out by the photo on the cover above.  I had a vague sense of her writing too, as laquered and sensual (probably because of a half glimpsed trailer to the film adaptation of Lust, Caution).  On the evidence of Red Rose, White Rose my vague sense is only semi-misplaced.  The scene is Shanghai, and our protagonist is the 'good man' Zhenbao, a middle manager in a textile factory.   He has a degree from Edinburgh University, a gentle, pretty, pure wife and a little daughter with excellent prospects.  In every sense he is a rising man, much admired in the outside world, his life a 'peach blossom fan'.

Beneath the surface, however, Zhenbao is conflicted, lonely and consumed by jealousy.  In his life he has had intimacies with four women: a nameless prostitute in Paris; the carefree, innocent Rose in Edinburgh; his voluptuous mistress, Jiaorui; and spotless Yanli, his wife.  These women have shaped him into the man he is. 

The prostitute appears something of an aberration, a way to pass the time in a foreign capital.  Chang describes an encounter not in the least laquered or sensual.   Although the woman's 'cheap perfume mixed with armpit odor and sour sweat' makes for a 'strange smell that he [Zhenbao] couldn't get out of his head', she is not attractive. Her eyes are 'two transparent glass balls', her face 'cold, severe, masculine...the face of an ancient warrior.'   The sex leaves Zhenbao badly shaken and ashamed, and 'detemined to create a world that was 'right' and to carry it with him wherever he went. Now he was master of his own world.'  An aberration perhaps, but the experience echoes throughout Zhenbao's subsequent relationships.

By contrast Rose is 'smooth and glistening as fleshly planed and oiled wood'; her body is open, youthful, for the taking, and perhaps because of it Zhenbao takes great pleasure in not taking it when it is offered.  Instead, he resists, and this restraint fills him with 'astonishment and admiration'.   Over the years he gains a reputation as 'a man who could keep perfectly calm with a beautiful woman in his lap.'   But being ultimate master of his instincts brings with it great regret.

Jiaorui is different, because Zhenbao can't resist her.  The wife of his friend and housemate, she swans around the flat they share together in nothing but a bathrobe or silk pajamas.  Pajamas which are everything I first imagined Chang would be: 'made out of a sarong fabric...the design was so heavy and dark that he couldn't tell whether it was snakes and dragons, or grasses and trees, the lines and vines all tangled up togther, black and gold flecked with orange and green.'  The sensuality drips off Jaiorui like water.  Zhenbao's lust overcomes his caution and, in contravention of every one of his firmly held beliefs, he embarks on an affair with her. 

It leaves Zhenbao bewildered, and more than a little frightened by the loss of self-control that sex with Jiaorui entails.   What terrifies him most, it seems clear is, intimacy.  Intimacy and instinct.  Zhenbao lives his life by a set of rules that ensure his success, and which conform to an ideal of goodness that he has developed.  Any action he takes which contravenes these rules is experienced at a distance, so that his relationship with Jiaorui is always through a veil.  They have sex, but he never really connects with her; he knows he wants her, but he doesn't know what the thing he wants is.  And when she takes the decision to leave her husband for him, and the threat of a scandal hoves into view, he quickly abandons her and marries a woman chosen by his mother, his 'white rose' Yanli. 

There is no love between Zhenbao and Yanli, and no lust either.  Their marriage is a sham, and Zhenbao is eaten away by the memory of Jiaorui, his 'red rose'.   While his career in the textile factory booms and his reputation in society grows, Zhenbao's emotional life is non-existent.  The undeniable intensity in Red Rose, White Rose is rooted in this inability to channel his desires; in the conscious and unconscious suppression of his feelings.  This repression is somewhat self-imposed, arising from his determination to master himself and subliminate everything that shamed him about his first sexual encounter with the prostitute in Paris. 

More subtlely, Zhenbao's relationship with his overbearing mother sets the tone for his 'romantic' relationships with other women.  His determination to master them and himself is perhaps related to his inability to master his mother, and the sense of filial duty to her that means he cannot.  There is incredible bitterness in the way Chang draws the relationship between men and women.  The opening salvo of the story seems to preclude the possibility of unconflicted love:

Maybe every man has had two such women - at least two.  Marry a red rose and eventually she'll become a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white one is 'moonlight in front of my bed.'  Marry a white rose, and before long she'll be a grain of sticky rice that's gotten stuck to your clothers; the red one, by then, is a scarlet beauty mark just over your heart.

Zhenbao's story is not unusual I don't think.  Literature, especially literature written by women, is full of men like him.  Men who sabotage their own happiness, and destroy women in the process, are a recognisable trope.  Chang's story is striking more for its narrative ingenuity, and the gravitas with which it alternates between, sensuality and the violence of repression.  I'm brought back to the Chang I had imagined - the laquered work - but more refined, with gravitas, and a measured eye for detailed.  Not quirky at all, but full of carefully tuned touches; a richly textured kind of writing.

So, yes, still suspiscious of short books, but learning to overcome it. Narayan next.

~~Victoria~~

 

Reading Notes: 12th February 2011

I, Claudius has resettled me.   I'm reading it for the next meeting of the Yorkshire Museum Bookclub - the group that I facilitate, which brings together reading and the handling of objects from the period covered in the novel.   I came to the book without preconceptions, with only the vaguest impression of Derek Jacobi at the back of my mind (I've never seen the famed BBC adaptation).   A member of the group warned me that the first fifty pages were 'a genealogical mire', and that I would have to grit my teeth to get through them, but the first sentence won me over so thoroughly that I've lapped it all up.   It establishes Claudius' tone, which is both self-deprecating and self-important at once:

I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other..., who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as 'Claudius the Idiot', or 'That Claudius', or 'Claudius the Stammerer', or 'Clau-Clau-Claudius, or at best as 'Poor Uncle Claudius', am now about to write this strange history of my life...

And it sets the tempo, which is leisurely and measured.  Measured, in part, because Claudius is a pedant, who takes chronology seriously as the order for his narrative.  He even helpfully inserts the date of the action into the margin of his text at intervals, so the reader can keep proper track.  I for one was grateful, as I'm only barely familiar with the story of Claudius' family: his indomitable grandmother Livia, his step-grandfather Augustus and the circle of uncles, adopted sons, sisters and favourites that circle them.

The measuredness would suggest a trustworthy telling of events, but Claudius is not an impersonal narrator, despite his efforts.  He eulogises his father, Drusus, in contrast to his uncle Tiberius, and he demonises Livia while apologising for the dictatorship of Augustus.  He's gossipy, and sometimes petty, and spices things up with snippets of reported speech.  The genealogical mire is actually quite soapy, and not very serious at all. 

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It's spirit contrasts very much with Daniel Deronda.  I'm almost 300 pages through Eliot's last novel now, and have been tackling it slowly at a rate of one chapter before bed.  I like it very much, but I'm finding it a claustrophobic read.  Middlemarch is a such an expansive novel, with a whole town for its subject, and the quality and density of its detail is relieved by variety.  Whereas Daniel Deronda is really a study of two people - the spoilt and beautiful Gwendoline Harleth, and the enigmatic, noble Daniel Deronda.   The epigram begins 'Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul', and the book is an intensely close analysis of interiority.   It is measured like I, Claudius, but entirely in earnest and not the least gossipy.  A whole chapter given over to Gwendoline's feelings as she waits for a visitor; another that follows Daniel as he rows down the Thames.  The omnipotent narrator has out her scalpel on them, and she probes.  What I like about Eliot is that her narrator's judgements are never final.  The narrator doesn't make statements about charactor; she makes suggestions, and then she probes, and then she suggests, and then expands, and then retracts before sallying forth again.   They give the impression of discovering characters, rather than of creating them. 

Gwendoline is difficult to like, and I'm finding Daniel difficult to trust (his motives can't be so innocent!); it makes them both equally as compelling.  In some ways the plot - the scenarios that Eliot contrives - get in the way of the characters, and I'm not entirely sure how the strand which places Mirah, a frail and vulnerable Jewish girl, under Daniel's protection will spool out, and how Klesmer the musician and his wealthy bride will earn their place. 

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Finally I've started reading Michael Pollan's book, In Defence of Food.  I didn't realise that it was a sort of sequel to The Omnivore's Dilemma, otherwise I would probably have read that first.  I'm sure it doesn't matter though.  It opens with the memorable assertion: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.  Pollan suggests that we should replace all the complex nutritional advice we're given with this simple mantra.  Food, he clarifies, means actual food and not the edible foodlike substances in packets that comprises an increasing proportion of the Western diet.  Mostly plants means not making meat the centre of every meal, but treating it more like a side-dish.  This sounds very sensible to me, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the book. 

In other news, I think the shortlist for the Warwick Prize for Writing looks very interesting.  I've put Derek Walcott on my library holds list; and the book about literary apartheid has been on my wishlist since it was recommended in the Guardian over Christmas. 

~~Victoria~~

Unsettled

I'm having one of those skittish times, when my reading brain won't settle.  I sit down to write about Independent People by Halldor Laxness, which I want to praise to the skies, and ten minutes later I'm up and at the bookshelf, unsettled.  You'd think I'd never strung two thoughts about a book together before.  So I pick up Daniel Deronda, which I'm enjoying, and twenty pages later I'm stymied.  I get up and make coffee, then open David Starkey's history of England's monarchy Crown and Country but I can't even get through one of its bite-sized chapters before I'm disturbed by something or other. The result is lots of hours spent thinking about reading, and very little actually read.

I think the blame must be laid on Independent People itself.  It has confounded me.  Does this ever happen to you?  You read a book that has a strong, personal impact, stylistically or morally or both, and it takes root and won't be displaced by what comes after it.   I've always had some difficulty beginning a new book on the same day that I finish another, but 24 hours is usually enough of a hiatus to clear the way; it's only now and then that a novel lodges in my reading brain and downright refuses to make room for weeks afterwards.  It's not that its presence is malevolent (although Independent People is a fairly malevolent sort of novel) but that it is so strong and willfull, that it overpowers anything put in its place.  The majority of my reading experiences are transient; books come and go.  The ones that stick like this are  a bit unnerving.

Independent People is a book about ghosts, sheep and love; and also the wearying of a proud and unyielding man by harsh realities and his own mistakes.  It's author, Halldor Laxness, was just 22 when it was published in his native Iceland in 1934, which is astonishing given the book's thematic maturity, and its insight into the experiences of age.  The English translation I read by J.A. Thompson first appeared in 1945; it was Thompson's first and last work of literary translation, and everyone seems to agree that it is a triumph. 

Bjatur, our thoroughly flawed hero, is a sheep farmer.  His life altogther has been a succession of long white, howling winters and short, bright summers, spent almost entirely in the company of his dog and flock.  The first eighteen years of his adult life have passed in the service of the largest landowner in his corner of northern Iceland, the bailiff, Jon of Rauthesmyri.  It is a service that he has resented and chaffed against, in the determination that one day he will be an independent man, with his own sheep and his own land.  As Independent People opens Bjartur is about to embark on this long awaited and highly valued independence: he has taken a mortgage on a remote valley croft, Winterhouses, and has married Rosa, the plump daughter of another crofter.  He envisions their life as one of utter independence, without luxury or comfort or strong feeling (except, perhaps, pride), and without any debt owing to others.  They will raise sheep, and children, and, perhaps, build a house.  In what appears to be an uncharacteristic fit of sentimental optimism Bjartur renames the croft Summerhouses.

But, wait a moment.  That isn't actually how the novel begins; I'm ahead of myself.  Actually it begins with a ghost story, like this:  Gunnvor, the witch who sold her soul to the devil Kollumkilli, and lured men to their deaths to suck their marrow, casts a shadow over all of Summerhouses.  Bjartur's croft is infamously haunted by the spirit of this murderess, Gunnvor, whose stone cairn marks the entrance onto his land.  Over the past seven hundred years men and women have endeavoured to build a life there, and been driven out, apparently by her malign spirit.  Which is no doubt why Bjartur can afford to buy it in the first place.  The land on which he intends to graze his flock is generally believed to have been a battleground in a monumental struggle between good and evil, in which evil has repeatedly won out.

Only Bjartur himself is unperturbed by this.  His very first act on taking possession of his property is to piss to each of the four winds, and counter-curse the cursing spirits.   He is determined never to stand beholden to anything, especially not other men's superstitions.  He won't allow Rosa to stand beholden either.  When they arrive at Summerhouses after their wedding she wants to place a stone on Gunnvor's cairn, as an offering to placate her rage.  To her horror, Bjartur refuses to allow it.   It opens a rift between them that never heals.  As the months pass, Rosa becomes silent and unresponsive.  Often left alone while her husband hunts for sheep in the mountains, she grows paranoid.  Loneliness and terror eat away at her.   She and Bjartur barely speak; he does not acknowledge the fact that she is pregnant, even when it becomes clear that she is too far gone for him to be the father.   Now and then he shows some small tenderness, the most that his unbending pride will allow: leaving her a lamb or his bitch for company, or milking one of the old ewes. 

Bjartur leaves his dog behind with Rosa on the stormy day that he sets off to hunt down a lost lamb (a lamb which she has, in fact, killed and eaten without his knowledge).  She protests that she is too near her confinement to be left alone; he responds that no child of his is due to be born for another two months at least.  When he returns, after a gruelling three day odyssey on the mountain which he survives only through dint of will, he finds his wife dead.  She has given birth and then bled to death alone.  The weak girl-child is almost dead, only kept alive in the sub-zero temperatures by the warmth of his mangy dog lying over her.  Whether out of guilt, or out of some deep-buried goodness, or from a perverse pride in its survival, Bjartur accepts the child as his own and humbles himself before his former master to buy her some milk and a future.  He calls her Asta Sollilja, a compound name that brings together the Icelandic words for star, flower and sun.   He eulogises her mother as a saint of independence - so independent that she did not even seek help in her time of greatest need.

This could be the whole novel, but is in fact only the first (and most powerful) third.  The remainder charts Bjartur's fortunes over the next 25 years at Summerhouses, with which comes a second marriage and three sons.  The power of the book, however, remains steadfastly focused on the implications of his first year on the croft, and on his moving, unsettling love for 'Soli', the flower of his life.   He shares with her the only other great loves of his narrow life: the poetry of the Sagas, which he knows by heart, and his sheep.  Perhaps he sees in her, from the moment of her unlikely birth, the mirror of his own chilling stubborness and extraordinary will to independence. 

My memories of the book are dominated by Laxness' dogged journey into the heart of Bjartur's difficult, stunted soul.  He is, in some way, the archetype of a hero: handsome, rugged, honourable.  And of a villain: implacable, cruel and heartless.  He is unpleasant, and only just sympathetic.  He is the kind of character that many novels aim at, and fail to hit on.  Laxness success, I think, is that Bjartur is not simply flawed, and is not changed by the hardships and tragedies of his valley life.  He is well adapted for his environment and his nature is perfect for the life he must lead; and when he does act against his nature, the changes bring nothing but greater despair.  There is no sentimental moral driving the book.  That said, its theme throughout is compassion.  Laxness is fascinated by the minute gestures that bring compassion and love into the world.  The picture he paints is one of such terrifying hardship, that the tiniest gesture of tenderness is amplified into something of enormous beauty and importance.  So when Bjartur rests his dirty great hand on Asta Sollilja's head in passing it resonates for pages and pages; such an insignificant thing to restore the reader's belief in humanity. 

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Reading back over what I have just written, I realise that I'm making Independent People sound like a very lean and focused novel.  In some ways this is true, certainly of the first 300 pages.  It isn't spare by any means - the prose is expansive, descriptive and repetitive in a way that reflects its inspiration in the narratives of the Sagas - but it has underlying muscle.  These early sections of the book are like Bjartur himself.   The beauty of the natural environment is marvellously invoked:

The farm brook ran down from the mountain in a straight line for the fold then swerved to the west to go its way down into the marshes. There were two knee-high falls in it and two pools, knee-deep. At the bottom there was shingle, pebbles and sand. It ran in many curves. Each curve had its own tone, but not one of them was dull; the brook was merry and music-loving, like youth, but yet with various strings, and it played its music without thought of any audience and did not care though no one heard for a hundred years, like the true poet.

The final third of the book, however, is very different.  Whereas the first and second part are concerned with the isolated fastness of Summerhouses, with only the occasional and brief foray into the outside world, the third part is concerned with the encroachments of the modern world.  Politics, economics and world trade enter to confound Bjartur's simple vision of life in the valley.  The narrative expands and slackens to admit them; the emotional intensity is reduced, at least until the final pages.  It doesn't spoil the overall effect of the book - thematically it is essential, because it reinforces Bjartur's growing alienation and displacement - but it did detract a little from my pleasure.  The first two-thirds of the book are a literary high, and I didn't want to come down.

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One last final thing:  I am a little vexed at the jacket quotes Harvill Secker have chosen to champion the book.  It is sold as though it were a comedy; and even compared to Wodehouse.  This is downright puzzling to me.  Don't get me wrong; Laxness never misses the opportunity to have a sardonic dig at sheep farming, and sometimes he attacks his characters foibles with an acute sarcasm.  But I would stop short of calling it a 'clever, witty, sardonic and funny book' (the front cover quote chosen from Annie Proulx).  The humour is a byproduct of something hard and unyielding; and the dominant note is almost unremittantly dark.

One day I will read it again, when I am feeling stong.

~~Victoria~~