Eve's Alexandria

Holiday Haul

You know when I said no more book-buying till Christmas, except while I'm on holiday?  Well, I'm now back from said holiday with a pretty little haul and definitely satiated until the New Year.  Suffolk, I salute you: you are quite definitely a county of excellent independent bookshops. It seemed as though every historic market town had at least two shops.  One selling very expensive kitchenware; and one selling glorious books.  What more could a discerning holiday browser want?

The National Trust were to blame for my first purchases on day one. We went to visit Sutton Hoo Anglo-Saxon burial mounds - windy, and less atmospheric than I had hoped - and found a fantastically cheap second-hand bookshop there too, all proceeds to the Trust.  Practically a public duty to buy something don't you think?  Or four somethings.  First, a rather battered Virago, The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman.  The familiar green spine caught my eye first, and then the synopsis (post-natal depression leads to incarceration ala The Yellow Wallpaper) confirmed the purchase.  After that an as-new Penguin Modern Classics edition of Primo Levi's short non-fictional stories Moments of Reprieve, recounting meetings with individuals in Auschwitz.  A companion to If This Is A Man apparently (which I will, of course, read eventually).  Then, just as we were turning tail to leave, I spotted a complete set of pristine Brontes, unread Oxford World Classics.  I'm at a loss to think how they found themselves there.  An unwanted gift?  An overenthusiastic university student?  Who knows.  I took the opportunity to complete my own collection with Charlotte's posthumously published The Professor, and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.  Total cost of all four?  £4.

The next day we sauntered through two of Suffolk's loveliest towns: Lavenham, an extraordinarily well-preserved 15th century wool-town (300 listed buildings!) and Long Melford with it's straight Georgian arrow of a high street.  The latter is home of Landers Bookshop, a lovely two-roomer.  In the first room: adult fiction and non-fiction, with a very good selection of new and classic titles; and in the second room: oodles of space for children's and young adult books.  I oohed over a couple of new titles (including Craig Brown's One to One, the book about meetings between the famous and infamous) but then settled upon a book that I've picked up a dozen times at home in York.  Ironic that I should buy it in Suffolk as it is about a Yorkshire family, the Fitzwilliams, and their mining empire.  Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty by Caroline Bailey has been recommended to me by friends and, since I've often walked the family dog over the reclaimed and wooded slag heaps of the Fitzwilliams' collieries, seemed like a must read.

Then to Bury St. Edmunds where the Oxfam Bookshop offered up unexpected booty: Persephone classic No.18 with bookmark intact.   Every Eye by Isobel English is a slim one and sounds every page a Persephone.  First published in 1956, it follows its heroine on a train journey to Ibiza as she reflects over the course of her life.  Muriel Spark liked it very much when it first appeared; and I'm sure I will too.   By the till I spotted another treasure.  A perfect reprint of Patrick Leigh Fermor's classic travel narrative, The Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople.  I was so happy because I've been keen to read this for ages (and am even keener now that I've read the prologue in the car on the way home).  It looked like the copy had never been read before, and the evidence on the inside cover seems to support that.  There is a gift inscription, dated 15th October 2011 (less than two weeks ago).  Which makes me sad: what led someone to give it away so soon after it had been given to them?  Had they read it before?  Or did they read it quickly and ever so carefully but then decide not to keep it? 

Finally, another four book spree at the Dedham Bookshop (which is actually in Essex, just over the Suffolk border).  I absolutely loved this bookshop. Loved, loved, loved.  It was everything that a small bookshop should be - plenty of stock, and new stock at that, but displayed lovingly with space for each book to breath.  The fiction section was tiny, but each and every book in it I either had read, had already bought or wanted to read.  Plus a display wall of beautiful, muted Persephone Classics.  The most Persephones I have ever seen in one place outside of the Persephone Bookshop itself.   Red flag.  Bull.   Three found their way into my hot little hands.  A Woman's Place: 1910-1975 by Ruth Adam (No. 20), The World That Was Ours by Hilda Bernstein (No.50) and The Sack of Bath by Adam Fergusson (No. 93).  The second one sounds absolutely *amazing*, being the memoir of a communist who lived in Apartheid South Africa.  Bernstein was a near contemporary of Doris Lessing and I think her book will make an interesting comparison with the first volume of Lessing's autobiography.  As I was waiting my turn to pay (because this bookshop was small but busy; when we first walked in there were two families inside, one with a child clutching a copy of a Julia Donaldson book and wailing 'I need it, I need it!') I impulse-snatched my first Georgette Heyer novel from a side table.  A clever bit of positioning methinks.  Get them to the cash-desk with their sleek dove-greys and then hit them with the Georgian romance!  In this case, Arabella which promises an enchanting debutante and a benevolent godmother and (and!) an eligible rich chap.  Can't wait.

What should I read first?

~~Victoria~~

Library Loot #3

Bit of a pale washed out me in this vlog!  Also, I fear that I rattled on a bit fast, and that the audio was once again too low. Unsatisfactory all round really.  Eep.  But I've been trying to discipline myself to blog more regularly and to do things at first go (to save the oodles of time that I spend revising everything), so I'm posting it anyway.  If there are any bits you'd like subtitling, let me know!

 

 

Books I talked about:

Boxer Beetle by Ned Beauman

The Water Table by Philip Gross

Tempest-Tost by Robertson Davies

Remains of Elmet by Ted Hughes

The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Greenvoe by George MacKay Brown

Faulks on Fiction: Great British Characters and the Secret Life of the Novel by Sebastian Faulks

The Short Post

I don't want to ramble off on a long post about A.S. Byatt's slim Ragnarok.  It is the kind of book that is best met with on its own terms. I hestitate to call it a novel; better to say it is a gloriously sustained act of visual imaginings. 

Ragnarok is the fifteenth volume in Canongate's Myths series, wherein established writers recast, retell or rediscover a myth of their choosing. The series is as old as Eve's Alexandria, with the first three books coming out in mid-2006, and we have been avid followers from the beginning.  The output has varied wildly, from Victor Pelevin's labyrinth-as-internet-chat-room to David Grossman's treatise on Samson and Delilah to Philip Pullman's controversially titled The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.   The focus of Byatt's contribution is the apocolyptic Norse myth of the world's end: the slow, inexorable decline of the Gods in Asgard, their pitched battle against the monstrous children of Loki and the death of the world-tree Yggdrasil.  

Previous books in the series have contemporised the myths, or transposed them into the past or future, or told them in new voices from new angles.  Byatt simply repaints hers instead.  First, she recalls her own discovery of the Norse myths as a child during WWII, recasting herself as the nameless 'thin child'.   Evacuated from industrial Sheffield into the countryside, the 'thin child' first reads them in a late 19th century German translation with commentary - Asgard and the Gods - given to her by her mother.  The stories take up residence in her: 'things, creatures, stories inhabiting the mind.  They cannot be explained and do not explain; they are neither creeds nor allegories.  The black [the nothingness left after Ragnarok] was now in the child's head and was part of the way she took in every new thing she encountered.'   They filter through her conflicted thoughts about Christianity, and her dread that her pilot father won't return home from the fighting.

Byatt interweaves this story of discovery and child-philosophising with powerful retellings of the originals.  These are the reason to read the book.  The prose is, in a word, extraordinary.  Discovery of it should be all your own.  I don't want to pre-empt with extended quotes, tempting as it is to copy out huge pleasurable slabs.  No surprises here I suppose.  Byatt is a wonderful, wonderful writer.  Do you remember that extract from The Children's Book I quoted a couple of years ago, the one describing the vase?  Ragnarok is 154 pages of that fluid, gloriously rhythmic writing that I admired then. There is something pecularily Northern about the the Norse aesthetic (and, inevitably now I suppose, Tolkien-esque).  Byatt captures the raw, all-consuming power of it in her beautiful nightmare visions: of the Fenris-wolf bound and eternally struggling against the sword thrust down his throat; of the world-snake girdling the earth; of Hel in her ghostly kingdom. 

The jury is out on whether the series is successful in doing something new with myths.  Of the several that I have read only Victor Pelevin's Helmet of Horror has succeeded in reinvesting the myth with power in my mind.  Byatt seems a little unsure about the enterprise herself, appending a short essay at the end of the book about what myths do and struggling to articulate the method of her own retelling.  Putting that to one side though, Ragnarok is worth every page simply by virtue of being a new piece of writing by A.S. Byatt. 

~~Victoria~~

 

Campaign for your library?

I'm becoming frustrated.

Today I read in the Guardian that a high court bid to halt library closures in Brent has been unsuccessful. Six branch libraries were boarded up immediately after the ruling. 

I'm sad about that and I wish those libraries could have been saved.  But I'm frustrated with what I hear of the arguments of the campaign to stop it, and with the many campaigns like it.  They seem to be overly focused on one key refrain: Think of the Children!  They are fronted by celebrity authors like Philip Pullman and Jacqueline Wilson who wheel out the same old stories about a childhood shaped by access to libraries.  Without libraries they wouldn't have become the best-selling writers they are today; without libraries children from low income families would have little or no access to books etc etc.  I heard a podcast of Zadie Smith saying pretty much the same thing; and I've read innumerable broadsheet articles about how important libraries are to children. It's the seeping nostalgia of the middle classes. I have a similar story to tell myself. 

It's an easy argument to make.  Why?  Because children *use* libraries, or parents use them on their behalf.  I work in libraries these days (though at a remove, in the Archives department) and I sit in meetings about membership, book issue figures and stock turn (i.e. how many times a book goes out in a year).  Children are by far and away the biggest users of libraries.  Children's books, and especially picture books for pre-readers, are the most popular books of all.  In our central library issues of children's books has soared over the last few years, and each book works incredibly hard, being borrowed again and again and again.  The branch libraries often complain that they don't have enough picture books.  Parents take out armfuls of 20 at a time.

It's a shame that those same parents don't borrow books for themselves.  There are very very few adult library users who take out armfuls of 20 books at a time.  The sad fact is that fewer and fewer adults borrow any books at all.   If adults borrowed books at the same rate as the under 5s believe me we would be choking on our delight.  As it is we spend endless hours talking about how we can convince more people to borrow and to borrow more.  Because if nobody is buying into your core product how can you continue to justify your existence?

This is the problem with the nostalgic rhetoric of the library campaigns.  They're about how libraries are important for other people - for children in particular, and those on low-incomes, and the unemployed - and how preserving them is simply right because they're the sign of a civilised society.  This is wrong-headed.   If we want to save libraries we have to recognise that they are important to us, the adults, the ones who can nip out to Waterstones on a whim and buy a book anytime we want.  We have to choose to *use* them, not just to save them.  We have to choose to borrow and not to buy.  There is no point wringing our hands about library closures if we haven't stepped foot in our own local library in years or ever. We shouldn't be surprised if they close when our actions suggest we don't want them. It's no use saying 'it's ok for me, I can pay for my reading, but what about the poor souls who can't?'

I'm not ranting at you blog-readers, because I know many of you do use your libraries.  The many wonderful library loot posts prove it.  We're such devoted readers that we'll take books anywhere we can get them: from book stores and libraries both.  But the point we have to make to anyone who will listen is that libraries are not just for people who need them.  We should be saying that constantly.  If we want libraries to survive we have to borrow books just because we want to (or might want to) read them.  Not because we're a bit short this month but because the library is the place where we can meet with books of all kinds - try new things; return to comfortable favourite things - for free.   We have to say loud and clear that libraries are not just places to inspire the love of reading in children; they're places to inspire that love in us all.

Anyway, that's what I feel.  Now I'm off to the library (and on my day-off too).

~~Victoria~~

Defeat

I've been at an impasse with my fiction reading for several weeks now.  We all have these times; these 'slumps'.  Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child engaged me closely for the first elegiac section, but the second and third have failed utterly to keep my attention. Such is my lack of interest that I've been chosing *not* to read rather than continue with it.  The little progress bar on my Kindle tells me that I'm exactly 50% through the novel, which given its size in paper is a fair chunk of 'pages' and I guess that if I'm not captivated now its unlikely I'll be captivated after 30, 40 or 50 more. 

It may be a matter of the moment in time.  I'm finding Hollinghurst's prose highly polished but stiff and his characters wooden and chilly.  Everything I liked about the first section of the book - which sees doomed poet Cecil Valance visit the family home of his lover George in the summer before the outbreak of World War I - is lost in the later sections set in the 1920s and 1960s respectively.  Where it is all subtly repressed passion and longing in the heat, light and air of 1914, what follows is pale and stifling.  Which, I suppose, may well be the point, as the world loses its colour and bite in the wake of senseless conflict but, function of the narrative or not, it makes it nigh on impossible to keep up my momentum.  That and the fact that the only character I really cared for - George - is utterly sidelined.  Again a function of the plot, but ultimately disappointing. Time to call it quits I think, at least for now.

My other recent attempt at contemporary fiction has been equally disastrous.  Like lots of bloggers I have recently discovered the joys of NetGalley, a website where you can request and download ARCs to your e-reader.  At the moment most of the publishers using the platform are American, but there are still lots of familiar titles available from the US divisions of the big houses.  Penguin USA and Random House USA, for example.   My first proof was Karin Altenberg's Island of Wings.  It was published in the UK is April this year and blurbed by Anne Enright.  I remember reading some positive reviews of it at the time, and it piqued my interest. 

The story is set in nineteenth century Scotland and belongs to Rev. Neil MacKenzie (apparently based on a real-life person), a missionary, and his young pregnant wife Lizzie.  They arrive on the lonely island of St. Kilda to bring the word of God to the Gaelic-speaking populace, and their relationship quickly comes under the strain of their isolation.  At which point I should stop synopsising and confess that I couldn't read beyond the first 50 pages of the book, and so can't presume to tell you more.   Except to say that I feel as though I must have been reading a different novel to everyone else!   Whereas The Independent called it a 'powerfully imagined debut' and The Scotsman thought it 'elegantly written', I was bemused by the clumsy style and unwieldy prose.  

Altenberg's descriptions of landscape and the natural world were either flat or downright odd.  The sea is 'limitless', 'the melancholy grey air' makes the Reverend 'sleepy', a giggle 'ripples' over Lizzie's face, the islands 'take on individual shapes in prehistoric shades of grey.'  (What shade of grey is that do you suppose?)  A bird is 'whitewashed and graceful with heads that looked as if they had been dipped in custard.'  The latter such a wrong-headed image that I read it half a dozen times just to clarify that, yes, I had understood the meaning correctly.  Am I the only one who thinks that whitewashed grace and custard should never meet in a sentence?  Then there are the awkward segues from present to flashback - '[Mackenzie] had not been at sea for over ten years, not since the night when William MacKillop drowned.  He did not wish to think of Will now.  He had met Will's father in Lamlesh the previous April...' - and the arbitrary changes of the omniscient narrator's point of view, from Lizzie to Neil and back again in a paragraph. 

Maybe there is a great story in here waiting to be discovered, and I'm missing out, but I can't go on with it.  There are too many problems in the novel's basic parts, with the texture and flow of the words on the page.  Has anyone else encountered it? 

 ~~Victoria~~