Books and reading – Page 3 – From Pyrenees to Pennines

Six Degrees of Separation: from Long Island to A Girl’s Guide to Winning the War

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

I haven’t managed to read this month’s choice yet: Long Island by Colm Tóibín. I want to, because I loved its precursor, Brooklyn.

It’s about a young Irish woman who leaves Ireland to have a fresh start in America. I’ll begin my chain with a young Irish woman who leaves Ireland to have a fresh start in London. As told in Christine Dwyer Hickey‘s Our London Lives. This could easily turn out to be my Book of the Year. It features three main characters: Millie, who’s run away from Ireland; Pip, an aspiring boxer who drinks at the pub where Millie finds work; and London itself, seen at its best and its worst – its vibrancy, its diversity, but also its expense, its violence and its diminution as a community in the face of capitalist redevelopment.The chapters pass between Millie and Pip. Millie’s story begins in 1979; Pip’s not until 2017 when, a recovering alcoholic, he’s just been released from prison. We don’t read a continuous narrative. Rather it’s a series of vignettes, from which we are able to work out the un-narrated years for ourselves. Real events pepper the narrative: the release of the Guildford Four; the Grenfell Tower disaster, and this contrubutes to the novel’s very real sense of place. Here is a story of flawed individuals who make, and fail to make choices; who miss opportunities and fall through the cracks, but about whom we come to care. I was involved for every one of the book’s 500 pages.

My next book starts with a young girl born in London, Frida -in Flatlands, by Sue Hubbard. A quietly powerful piece of storytelling, set in the flatlands of Lincolnshire near the Wash during WWII. The narrative is divided between 12 year old Frida, evacuated to an impoverished and unfriendly farming couple whose house is also remote: and the more privileged young adult Philip, who as a consciencious objector is working as a farm labourer while developing his painting skills in his spare time. Despite their differences, the two have much in common – their loneliness, their apparent abandonment by those who should love them, their poverty. The wetlands which are their temporary home is also a character: their savage beauty, their harshness. A moving tale, well told.

My next book is also deeply rooted in the landscape, whose main character, the author, has barely moved at all. This is an intensely personal and lyrical memoir from poet Wendy Pratt. The Ghost Lake is embedded in two things: her deep connection to the part of East Yorkshire where she has lived her entire life; and the death, at the moment of her birth, of her much-wanted daughter. She focuses each chapter on a different community surrounding the Paleolake Flixton. This now-vanished lake provides an epicentre to her story. Throughout the book she dwells on its own history; and her own – though not in order. Her father’s decision not to continue the family tradition of farming; her own ‘oddity’ and inability to mix, to shine – despite her intelligence – at school; her chequered job and personal life; her conversion from working class girl to educated and successful – though always working class – career as a facilitator and poet. And always, threaded through the narrative, the much mourned dead baby daughter. A haunting, powerful and poetic memoir, bringing to life the natural world and landscape of her home patch, as well as exploring belonging, and loss.

Death is central to The World After Alice, by Lauren Aliza Green. On page one of this book, teenage Alice stands on a bridge … jumps … and dies. Then the story proper starts, 12 years later. Morgan, once Alice’s best friend is to marry Benji, Alice’s brother, after a courtship long kept secret. In a series of visits to the present day and flashbacks to the period both before and after Alice’s death, we gradually build up a picture of the turmoil her death effects in two increasingly disfunctional families and those who are closest to them – that of Alice, and that of Morgan. This is a story of family dynamics, of love, of loss, of secrets, of individuals who have lost their ability to trust, to communicate. A deftly written and immersive book, and not at all as irredeemably depressing as I have undoubtedly made it sound.

Another story about how life is complicated, and about how past events can cast a long shadow. John Boyne‘s Earth. ‘I became a different boy than the one I was supposed to be. I wanted to be a painter. I wanted to be good. I wanted to love someone, and to be loved in return. But none of those ambitions came to be.’
This is Evan, a young Irish would-be abstract painter – only he wasn’t good enough; impossibly handsome; gay. He’s a top-class football player, against his inclinations – but it brings him money and lots of it. One of his (sort of) friends in the team is Robbie, an arrogant young man whom Evan can’t take his eyes from, as heterosexual Robie is well aware of. After a party in Robbie’s flat, Evan is accused of filming his friend’s rape of a young woman. This is far from a simple narrative. It explores several themes: the long shadow of upbringing; class; homophobia; moral corruption; the way the legal system treats alleged sexual offences. In doing so, it drops several bombshells into the narrative, none more shocking than the one revealed in the last pages of the book. A thought-provoking and well-turned out read.

I’m choosing my final book, because perhaps we need to lighten up a bit. Life doesn’t always turn out as expected, but it doesn’t have to be awful. A Girl’s Guide to Winning the War, by Annie Lyons. This was an entertaining read, and the pages turned themselves easily enough. It’s about how clever, bookish but working class Peggy, and her titled side-kick Marigold become the darlings of the Ministry of Information with their writing and photographic skills, producing heart-warming books about aspects of the war as experienced by ordinary peple, whether serving in the forces or on the home front. Although I enjoyed it, I found the characterisation a bit stereotypical. Warm, loving working class family. Formal, buttoned up, emotionless public school types. Everyone however, if you look hard enough, has a Heart of Gold. A book to curl up with and race through on a foggy winter evening. And to bring us back to London, where I began my chain.

We’ve had a bit of a gallop through a series of books that in different ways touch the heart strings. Next month the chosen book is Intermezzo by Sally Rooney.

A Bonus and Unexpected Seven

I volunteer at our local library most Monday mornings. First job of the day is the Pick List. A list of books reserved by readers in other parts of the county and held in our branch is circulated for types like me to find, then despatch in the next delivery van to the branches where they’re wanted.

And look what the first book on the list was yesterday. The Square of Sevens. Really? I knew nothing about it, but courtesy of Google, I can tell you that it’s a crowd-pleaser for lovers of historical novels, of crime novels and of thrillers. You can read all about it here.

Will Becky, Queen of Squares,put it on her reading list?

Six Degrees of Separation: from After Story to Beastings

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

I haven’t read this month’s starting book, After Story, by Larissa Behrendt. I understand it’s about a mother and daughter struggling to come to terms with the death of a sibling. They embark on a journey, visiting the sites important to their literary idols. Idols who include the Brontës. So …

Robert Edric‘s Sanctuary. You can’t be familiar with the brooding moorlands near Howarth and not feel as though you understand something of the Brontë family and their lives. Most of us think we know about them: the mother and sisters who died; the sisters who remained hewing their path towards immortality in slow, painful steps. And then there’s the brother, Bramwell, the black sheep, fighting his failures, his addictions, his inability to find a way to make something of his life. He is the subject, in fact the ‘author’ of this book. He paints a sorry picture of his stumbling path, in the final year of his young life, towards illness, addiction and death. I found the picture he painted of himself – hopelessly depressed, fault-finding, increasingly estranged from his family, increasingly self-deluded a fascinating one. In this book, Bramwell does not dig deep in his moments of introspection, but then you wouldn’t expect him to. He doesn’t favour us with pen portraits of his father, his sisters. Just tantalising glimpses of what they’re like. But nobody is more self-centred, less self-aware than Bramwell Brontë. Edric has carefully constructed this book in a series of vignettes that barely constitute a narrative, but which leave us feeling bewildered sympathy for an intelligent young man who has utterly lost his way. A beautifully imagined reconstruction of a life ill-lived.

Here’s another book re-imagining history. Carys Davies‘ Clear. This is a story about a vanished way of life. One which vanished during the devastating Highland Clearances in Scotland during the 19th century. A man Ivar, the sole inhabitant – with his few animals – of a remote island, is alive to the natural rhythms of the island – the many seasons, winds, mists, rains and tides that govern it. And when John Ferguson turns up to evict him, but instead falls into a concussioned coma from which Ivar nurses him back to health, he too falls under the island’s spell. Haltingly Ferguson begins to learn the vocabulary, then the language itself which Ivar speaks. The books celebrates that language and the fragity of life in such a spot, as well as asking questions about the future of Ivar, John, and John’s wife Mary, all of whom are in different ways implicated in the consequences of the Highland Clearance.

A forbidding terrain and climate are central too to Daniel Mason‘s The Winter Soldier. We’re in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the First World War early on in this book – well, Vienna rather than Easter Europe. Privileged Lucius Krzelewski, medical student, finds himself put in the role of fully-fledged doctor, with only a nurse who’s also a nun, and a few other men – a cook and general hand, in a woefully underequipped and isolated field hospital on the Eastern Front. He does his best to learn his craft, largely from nun Margarete, and has to make decisions about the onward fate of soldiers who leave his care. One such decision has lasting consequences for the soldier concerned, for Margarete and for him. And he falls in love, just before the war sweeps him up once more and makes decisions for him…. A heartfelt and involving story, bringing to life the appalling conditions which so many had to contend with on the Eastern Front.

Another book, another unforgiving landscape in Michael Crummey‘s The Innocents. Set in 19th century Newfoundland, this is the story of a brother and sister, aged about 12 and 10 at the beginning of the book, whose baby sister, then their mother, then their father die after a long period of illness. They are isolated. The nearest town is not near at all, and they get supplies only twice a year, when the ship Hope arrives to buy what they have produced and sell them what they need for the coming year. Evered and Ada cope. They have no choice. The landscape is harsh and unforgiving. Fish and seals are their natural resources. There are occasional adventures – to a shipwerecked vessel, where what they find at first delights, then horrifies them. There are occasional visitors from distant ships: well-drawn characters who add leaven to their lives. It’s the depiction of the landscape, then the story of the maturing of these two lonely, isolated yet self-sufficient children as they become adolescents that gives this book its unusual power. A gripping tale.

We’ll stick with contending with demanding circumstances and landscapes, and with not-so-recent history too by looking at The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore. In 1855, Sarah leaves her abusive husband and her child, to flee from Rhode Island to the American West, Minnesota: Sioux country. Resourceful, she quickly finds a husband, a doctor, who decides his calling is in a community where Native Americans live too. This is the story of a woman who becomes friendly with the indigenous population, and who finds her husband, herself and her children in danger when this population rises in revolt at the unfair treatment routinely meted out to them. In the ensuing uprising, she’s not entirely trusted by some native Americans, but thoroughly despised by her fellow whites. What should have been a gripping rendering of a rather terrifying and unedifying history based on known facts is rather prosaically yet choppily told. A slightly disappointing read, from which I nevertheless learnt a lot about this piece of pre-Civil War American history.

Uncompromising stories set in testing landscapes seem to be this months’s choices. Why change the formula? Beastings is by my current pin-up author, Benjamin Myers. A priest who’s no better than he ought to be enlists the aid of a poacher to pursue a mute young girl, the product of a brutal orphanage, who has made off with a baby whose parents – specifically the father – she mistrusted. Their pursuit takes them across an unyielding and elemental Cumbrian countryside which is itself a character in this austere, bleak novel. It’s not entirely clear when this novel was set, but it doesn’t matter. The Girl (no character is named) meets one or two helpful souls: a woodsman, a farmer, but on the whole she and the baby are alone, trusting to the landscape and the elements as they undertake their increasingly desperate escape from a life with few prospects into an equally bleak and impossible future. A shocking, absorbing, involving story.

My chain this month seems to consist of books which relate more to each other than to the starter book. Ah well. Next month, our book to begin the chain is Colm Tóibín’s Long Island, which has been on my Must Read list since the day it was published.

Photo credits: Me; Ed Philips; National Library of Scotland; Erin Minuskin; Jen Theodore.

Six Degrees of Separation: from The Museum of Modern Love to On Gallows Down

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s starter book is The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose, and I really enjoyed it. I’d like to thank Kate for drawing our attention to it. It’s an illuminating and satisfying examination of how we interact with art and what we get from it. It’s told from the perspective of Arky Levin, a composer whose terminally ill wife has forbidden him from visiting the hospital where she is dying, so he can get on with his career, and from a clutch of – very different – subsidiary characters. The real hero of the book is performance artist Marina Abramović, who in 2010 sat immobile in MoMa’s atrium while spectators queued up to take turns sitting opposite her while looking into her eyes.

Marina Abramović was an exhibit. So’s my next character. He’s an octopus in an aquarium, and his story is told in Shelley Van Pelt‘s Remarkably Bright Creatures. Seventy year old Tova Sullivan needs to keep busy since her husband died. She’s needed to keep busy for years in fact, since her son Eric was apparently drowned – his body was never found. So she works as a cleaner in the town’s aquarium. And it’s here she establishes a bond with an elderly octopus, who also gets to tell his story in short occasional chapters. Suspend your disbelief. This works. The other main character is Cameron, a man with a chip on his shoulder searching for the father he never knew. This book tells the story, the journey of each of them, with a light touch: with humour and with wit. A light, yet involving and engaging read.

From an unhappy octopus to an unhappy – and creative – man: Charles Rennie Mackintosh. He and his wife fetched up in a Suffolk coastal village at the beginning of WWI, to nurse his wounded ego, with commissions unforthcoming, and his Glasgow School of Art unrecognised. His story, and that of the community where he’s settled for a while is told through the voice of 11 year old Thomas Maggs whose own family life is difficult. This book – Mr. Mac and Me, by Esther Freud paints a picture of life in a working coastal village as well as that of the life of a poverty-stricken and disappointed artist. An absorbing story.

Two more disappointed people: in Ann Youngson’s Meet Me at the Museum. This book of considerable charm is told entirely in an exchange of letters between an English 60 year old farmer’s wife and the curator of a Danish Museum which houses the Tollund Man. Initially formal, the letters become more intimate. This busy outdoorsy farmer’s wife with her chintzy house couldn’t be more different from austere Scandinavian Anders. But both are lonely and have gaping holes in their lives. With every letter they disclose more of their joys, disappointments and difficulties and draw inexorably closer. At the end is a revelation. What effect will this have on them, on their burgeoning relationship? We can only speculate. A touching and intimate book.

These two characters are in different ways rooted in their local surroundings. Anita Sethi in a British born woman of British Guianan heritage who suffered a racist incident while travelling by rail which resulted in a conviction for the abuser. It prompted her to plan and execute a journey along the backbone of England – the Pennine Way – which she records in I Belong Here. This was for her, an inexperienced walker, a journey of healing and a time for reflection. It also became an extended metaphor for her feelings about her status as British person from an ethnic minority; the Pennines as ‘backbone’; of ‘making your own path’; of ‘ruggedness and strength’; of laws which protect landscapes and humans .. and so on. She muses on community, on history, on legislation as she walks an area I know well, and gave me, a white person with roots in this part of the country, plenty to think about. I’ll be interested in how the rest of the proposed trilogy develops.

Here’s another book which begins with a journey through northern England. Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers. I know little about Saint Cuthbert beyond the fact that he was a simple man, much venerated in his own time. Which explains why a motley band of monks and devotees intermittently spent years moving his remains around to save him from the depredations of Viking raiders. And we meet some of them here, in the first section of the book set in 995CE, where orphaned Ediva, in her breathless disjointed but poetic prose recounts their journey, the landscape, and her vision for his final resting place. In Book Two, set in 1346, masons are enhancing and repairing the mighty hilltop cathedral (Durham). The wife of one meets and succumbs to another …. Then we leap to the 19th century to meet the opinionated and cocksure Forbes Fawcett-Black who has been invited to join the team exhuming the saint to see if the legend that his flesh is incorruptible is true. And finally we are in 2019, where a young under-educated man who cares for his dying mother is employed as a gopher to the current restoration team. His eyes are opened to a world and a heritage he had not known about. How different and yet how connected the sections are to each other. The language of each couldn’t be more different one from the other: free-flowing yet poetic; dense blocks of prose; a pastiche Victorian ghost story; a rich narrative in which sense of place and societal deprivation are juxtaposed The kinds of story told are utterly different. Yet links are there – there’s always an owl-eyed lad in the narrative, for instance. A richly complex feast of prose and poetry, provoking thought and discussion long after the last page has been turned. This is a book inviting – and deserving – several readings.

My last book is also rooted in the British landscape. But Berkshire this time. On Gallows Hill, by Nicola Chester. Nicola Chester has lived her whole life in Berkshire. This area has had a history of rebellion by the under-represented. John Clare wrote his poetry here. The Civil War had bitter battles here. Tenants throughout the centuries rebelled against their landowner masters. It’s where Greenham Common, site of the women’s peace camps, and Newbury Bypass, a much fought-over project which destroyed so much natural and rural history when it was sited near her homes. Chester has been a tenant all her life, and understands powerlessness. She also understands the natural world, and deepening her understanding of it, spending time in it with her family, particularly her children, is her salvation. Her battles change to doing her part to save the natural world. She has her nature writing accepted by the RSPB, the Guardian, her local paper, and this becomes part of her fight. She writes with lyricism and passion, describing the seasons, the creatures that form part of her day-to-day environment with incisive, poetic words and concludes ‘Anyone could make a place their home by engaging with its nature’. A book to read slowly, and to savour.

I think we can link Chester back to Abramović, since both share a passion for the things that matter to them, and go to often uncomfortable lengths as they invite the world to share their compulsive interest.

Next month? Our starter book will be After Story, by Larissa Behrendt.

Several illustrations are via Unsplash: (i) K Mitch Hodge (ii) Pete Williams and (vi) Frances Synge. (iii) Tollund Man is in the Public Domain: Sven Rosbum . (iv) Durham Cathedral and (v) Pennines landcape in North Yorkshire, are my own.

Wuthering Heights: Tourist Destination

This week, A Canadian blogging pal, Rebecca of Rebecca’s Reading Room reflected on re-reading Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. It made me think of a post which I wrote six years ago, in which I described a walk in Emily’s footsteps. Now it’s not really playing fair to re-post something I published before for the Lens-Artists Challenge: Tourist Attractions Near and Far. But I’m going to do it anyway. How many walking routes does anyone know in the UK where the way-marking is in any language other than English? Here, they’re in Japanese. This wild and often unforgiving part if England has become an unlikely tourist Mecca for devotees of Brontë’s story of the passionate and tumultuous love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.

Wuthering Heights

28th July 2018

Haworth: a charming village on the top of a high and steep hill, in an area of high, bleak and steep hills; home to the Brontë sisters and the surrounding moorland countryside of Wuthering Heights.

Cottages near Haworth. Cosy now: possibly less picturesque back in the Brontë’s time.

Everyone knows that you can expect ‘weather’ when you come here, whatever time of year you arrive. As you stumble along the church path to leave the village, slashing rain tumbling from sullen hostile skies needles your skin, slicks your hair to your face and saturates your clothes. As you set your face against the wild wind, your boots sink into the sodden peaty turf as you trudge onto the moor. If you dare to glance up, you see unending moorland before you: bleak, barren and bare, with sheep huddled against the dry stone walls which march across the landscape. This is Nature-in-the-Raw, and we expect no different.

I went there earlier this week. None of the above applied.

We are in Week Five of a heatwave. I doubt if either the Brontës or even Heathcliff himself had ever seen the like. Brittle coir matting now carpets the brooding moorland fells: and several weeks early, the heather is almost in flower, rich and purple. Yellowing grasses replace the dense green turf the sheep prefer, whispering and rustling in the light breeze.

Beyond Howarth, coir matting stands in for moorland turf.

There’s a little brook in the valley here. Angry peaty water jostling officiously along its path has been replaced by still, clear shallow pools.

The Brontë sisters would cheerfully have paused here to rest, reflect and write a little. Then, like me, they would have slogged on, up the peat-and-stone pathway that leads upwards, ever upwards, towards Top Withens.

There’s Top Withens, up there. Beside that solitary tree.

Top Withens may have been the isolated upland farmhouse that Emily Brontë pictured Cathy Earnshaw and family living in when she wrote Wuthering Heights. It’s a ruin now, the roof torn off in a violent thunderstorm in the 1890s. Just as you’d expect.

It was the perfect picnic spot for me. The moorland stretched before me, its hillsides rhythmically rising and falling. The world was silent: not that silence in which there is no sound, but that of the living countryside: the low susuration of the swaying grasses; the humming of the wind in my ears; the occasional complaint of a bird sweeping overhead. Beyond the moorland, greener fields lay, chopped centuries ago into rough rectangles by drystone walls. Some held sheep, some cattle, others recently cut hay. The sun warmed my rocky seat, and I was perfectly content.

Except for the sky. The day was sultry, sweaty, but freshened by a soft breeze. I knew the sun might be chased away by gusty rain. Ash-grey clouds swelled and receded, revealing granite tones behind: and beyond that, cornflower blue once more. It was a signal. Haworth takes weather seriously. Never be tempted to climb these uplands without a very capable waterproof in your kit.

The moorland I saw this week was not the Brontë’s moorland. It’s been a little sanitised. There are helpful finger posts pointing the way at every junction, in English and … Japanese.

Top Withens or Top Withins? Take your pick. I don’t know which the Japanese choose.

The pathways the sisters trod are no longer springy peat tracks, or sticky muddy gullies. Instead, heavy slabs line the way, to prevent footfall damage to this fragile area from the hundreds of people who tramp these paths looking for the Real Brontë Experience.

My day was far too comfortable for that. I was not returning to a draughty parsonage with self-destructive brother Branwell to worry about. If you want to see the Brontë’s life through his eyes, read Robert Edric’s ‘Sanctuary’. You’ll be glad to get back to bustling tourist-destination Haworth for a nice cup of tea.

This post should qualify for a mention in Jo’s Monday Walk, I hope.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Kairos to The Little Man from Archangel

Kate W: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s chain began with Jenny Erpenbeck‘s Kairos, translated by Michael Hoffman, which as it happens I reviewed in my post in May. It gave me the idea though that I would make works in translation this month’s focus.

My first choice is Adania Shibley‘s Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette: another story about living with the consequences of war. The first part of this book is set in 1949, in Israeli- Egyptian border country, and a platoon of Israeli soldiers are seeking unsuccessfully for hidden weapons. They kill a group of Bedouin nomads whom they encounter. Only one young woman – a girl really – survives. She is taken back to camp, and systematically gang-raped before being killed. We hear all this from the point of view of the commanding officer – clipped, without emotion, without judgement. 25 years later a nervy young woman, living and working in Ramallah steps in and takes over the narrative. She’s read about this crime and wants to find out about it by travelling to and investigating it on site – difficult and risky to achieve. This quixotic journey doesn’t end well – how could it? This is – intentionally – an uncomfortable and unsettling read, written with suppressed passion by its Palestinian author.

My next choice is also about living in the aftermath of war. Philip Claudel‘s Monsieur Linh and His Child, translated by Euan Cameron. This is a haunting book that will stay with me. Monsieur Linh is in an unnamed country, living in a refugee centre for those who have, like him, fled on an elderly ship from his homeland which has become a war zone – surely Vietnam? His family members have all been killed – except for his baby granddaughter, whom he keeps close and cares for every second of the day and night. One one of his daily wanderings, he meets Monsieur Bark, similarly lonely and isolated since the death of his wife, and the two men, despite having no shared language, develop a deep bond of friendship. Then Monsieur Linh has to be re-homed … This is a restrained and simply told story, which evokes a compelling picture of a gentle man, deeply traumatised by the loss not only of his community and family, but of his homeland, landscapes and daily rhythms. A compassionate, moving book, with an unexpected twist that reveals even more about the losses this elderly man has sustained.

Guadalupe Nettel‘s Stillborn, translated by Rosalind Harvey also has a child at its heart. Two young women, Laura and Alina, know for a fact they don’t want children. So Laura, the narrator, has her tubes tied. While Alina enters a relationship, and changes her mind, even to the extent of having fertility treatment when pregnancy just doesn’t happen. Life gets in the way. Alina becomes pregnant but before the birth, is given the awful information that her grossly disabled daughter will not live. This book is one which looks a the wider definition of parenthood, through the omniscient eye of Laura, who seems to know every intimate detail of Alina’s life with her partner Aurelio and daughter Inés, as well as of their childminder who’s unable to have children of her own, and of Alina, of her own mother, and her neighbour Doris and son. It examines the emotional conflicts and burdens of motherhood: their overwhelming presence in each woman’s life. A startling and forceful story.

My next book also has children at its core. Homesick, by Jennifer Croft is not translated. She wrote the book first in Spanish, then in English … This book is a haunting one, presenting the childhood of Amy and her younger sister Zoe in a series of vignettes, often extremely short. We gradually build a picture of two extremely close siblings: the elder gifted, the younger dogged by frightening ill-health – a rare but benign brain tumour. Tragedy after tragedy strikes -indirect, but significant. Then Amy gets into University aged only 15. A much shorter section details Amy’s post-graduate life until her mid 30s. Like the earlier part of the book, it’s fragmented, yet intimate and sensitive. I was kept at a distance from the two girls: I felt something of a voyeur, though a sympathetic one. I was privy to some of the many disasters that had struck the girls, without really getting to know either of them. Which felt appropriate. Complex lives make for complex characters. How can we really know what goes on in someone else’s head?

We leave Amy as a young woman, and it’s a young woman who is centre stage in my next choice. I’m not normally a fan of dystopian fiction, but I found Yoko Ogawa‘s The Memory Police, translated by Stephen Snyder to be a powerful and unsettling read. Simply yet lyrically written , the writer – this is told in the first person – lives on an island in thrall to the Memory Police. Things comprehensively disappear: in the early days, simple things like roses, and the inhabitants soon lose any memories of the things that have vanished. Those unfortunate people who find they do not forget – and the writer’s parents seem to have been among them – simply are removed by the Memory Police and never seen again. The ‘writer’ of this book is herself a novelist, and we are privy to her efforts. We never find out more about the Memory Police, or know to whom they are answerable. But we are left with a lot to think about – totalitarian regimes, life, death and the process of letting go and of dying. I’ll go on thinking about this book.

My last book also looks at a life where things are not as they seem: Georges Simenon‘s The Little Man from Archangel, translated by Sian Reynolds. When Gina, the free-loving and much younger wife of Jonas Milk, Russian emigre, small-time bookseller and stamp dealer disappears, Jonas lies, and says she’s away visiting a friend. It’s almost immediately clear that this isn’t true, and Jonas has impotently to realise that his soon-disbelieved untruth has consequences. He’s increasingly made aware that his experience of being both Jewish and a migrant has accounted for his being less integrated into society than he had believed. A powerful evocation of 1950s small-town French life, which though bleak, is also atmospheric and elegantly told.

With my last book, we end where we began: the far-reaching consequences of long-over war. I’m aware that my choices this month have a touch of earnestness about them: they’re not beach-read territory. But they’re well-worth your time.

Next month’s starting point is Heather Rose‘s The Museum of Modern Love.

All illustrations are from Unsplash: Ben White; Jewad Alnabi; Redd F;Omar Lopez; Tom Morbey; Giuseppe Mondi.

Six Degrees of Separation: from The Anniversary to Romantic Comedy

Kate W: Books are my Favourite and Best

Yet again I haven’t read the starter book: Stephanie Bishop’s The Anniversary. I gather though that it’s a forensic examination of marriages and relationships.

That gives us plenty to choose from then. I’ll start with Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, a compelling story of a doomed love affair, set against the background of the crumbling of the GDR in the 1980s. A young student meets by chance a very much older married man and they fall into a tumultuous, torrid affair, fuelled by their love of music and art. He’s had several affairs during his marriage, but when she strays for a single night, he submits her to cruel and demeaning punishments, picking over her confession for weeks and long months. This is not a tidily wrapped up book, though we learn from the prologue and epilogue that the affair does in fact end. As did the GDR. Though that wasn’t tidy either. One quibble – in a society where spying on one’s neighbours was expected, how did this couple keep secret their affair, conducted in full public view?

My next choice might have had a married man having an affair as its subject. Not quite. How to Make a Bomb by Rupert Thomson was a surprise to read. Instead of full stops, there are line breaks. Sentences are often short – staccato even, giving the book something of a feel of a prose poem: this choppy presentation suits the book and its main unable-to-stick -with-an-idea protagonist well. Philip Notman is an acclaimed historian who’s been to a conference in Bergen. He’s happily married to Anya. From nowhere, apparently, he start to question life itself – it’s ‘artificial’, ‘unbearable’. His solution is to go away for a while – to Cádiz, where a woman – Inés – whom he met at the conference lives, and for whom he has formed an attraction. No adultery takes place, and soon he is off to Crete, because some chance acquaintances have lent him their holiday home there. He dabbles with integrating himself into local male society, with religion, before moving back to London, but not to his wife. He still loves her, still needs time. His rather self-indulgent and self-aggrandising quest to solve the ills of society via his Notmanifesto (see what he did there?) is rather a mish-mash of received ideas. His grandiose ideas amount to very little and we leave him on the last page no further forward than he was when he embarked on his unlikely quest. Unconventionally written, with its absence of punctuation, this is an immensely readable book whose subject is a Privileged White Male living out a cliche.

Next, Holly Williams’ The Start of Something concerns a group of people also exploring relationships. It’s a cleverly constructed novel – or is it a set of short stories? in which ten characters in turn have their inner stories revealed. Each character has slept with the one before. Several are exploring or questioning their sexuality: some are lonely, because or in spite of their relationship; some are heartbroken: all are seeking – something. One chapter is coming to an end for each of them, another is beginning. And at the end, there is hope for the two people with whom the book closes.

More exploration of sexuality in The Sleep Watcher by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. A young woman, Kit, uses this book to address her lover to explain how her teenage self has made her who she is. She lived with her parents and younger brother in an unnamed seaside town in southern England and became prone to out-of-body nighttime wanderings as she slept. This device should have had me slamming the book shut, never to open it again, but it worked. Able to travel round the town at will, she witnesses her parents in private moments and realises their relationship is increasingly fragile, her father not the happy-go-lucky man she thought she knew. She’s also exploring her own sexuality with her closest school friend, Andrew. The satisfaction of reading this book lies in the evocation in just a few phrases of her home town, her teenage companions, her family, and the things they did. Her conflicting feelings about her parents – especially her father – whom she thought she knew are well portrayed. Kit is a convincing, if enigmatic character. An intriguing read.

Here’s another book written in the voice of the main protagonist reviewing her past. Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain, of whose writing I’m usually a fan. But while this book was, as expected, a page-turner, I didn’t warm to it much. It’s written in the voice of Marianne, whom we meet as a 15 year old boarding-school girl, with self-obsessed parents whom I found to be caricatures. She’s helplessly in love with 18 year old Simon. She knows they’ll soon marry and she willingly loses her virginity to him. Life gets in the way, and he’s despatched to Paris when he disappoints himself and his parents. She never forgets him, despite a decent marriage, which is detailed in all is downs and ups. The denouement, when it comes, isn’t a surprise, to me at least. I found most of the characters to be ciphers, and the characters slightly unbelievable. An easily-read and well-written, but slightly unsatisfactory read.

There’s quite a bit of serious stuff here. Let’s finish in a lighter vein. Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy. An engaging and highly readable … romantic comedy. Sally is in a team of writers and other creatives who collectively and separately write a popular Saturday night TV sketch show. It feels as if Sittenfeld has accurately brought to life this high-octane, stressful environment where very close friendships sustain the team, and the lively portrayal of a-week-in-the-life-of was eye opening as well as entertaining. But this story is that which develops between Sally, and one of the guest hosts, wildly popular singer Noah. We follow their tentative first mis-steps towards romance, through an e-mail relationship that develops in lockdown through further mis-steps to … well read it and find out. The story is sustained by cameos of the relationship Sally has with her two closest women friends, and with her now-widowed step father. A rewarding romantic novel with the added edge of giving an insight into aspects of the world of show business.

That’s it for this month. My last book doesn’t link back to my first, but all of them this month deal with the search for, or life with A Significant Other. Next month’s starter is Butter by Asako Yuzuki. Apparently it’s a crime novel with a difference.

The first, second and fourth images in the text of this post are my own. The third is by Valentin Antonucci of Pexels. The sixth is by Penin Thibault of Unsplash, and the seventh is by This is Engineering of Unsplash.

Six Degrees of Separation: from India to the Arctic

Kate: Books are my Favourite and Best

This month’s Six Degrees of Separation Challenge invites us to start with a favourite Lonely Planet travel guide. I rarely use physical guide books any more, but one old friend I won’t be parted from, even though I’m unlikely to travel there again is their guide to South India. This was my bible when, newly retired, I spent a month there, largely solo, in 2007. My travels there began my blogging career, though on a different platform.

I’m taking an easy option for this month’s post. I’m whizzing us to six different countries or regions via a book set in each of them.

We’ll start not in Asia, but in Africa: Nigeria. Blessings, by Chukwuebuka Ibeh. Obiefuna is the elder son of a couple who had long waited for a child. He’s doing well at school, but isn’t the football-playing, loud and gregarious lad his parents expected. The arrival of a live-in apprentice arouses unexpected feelings in the boy, and his father catches them heading towards an intimate moment. We follow Obiefuna’s adolescence as he’s banished to a strict Christian seminary. We watch him grow into young adulthood where his homosexuality is always a source of shame, even danger in Nigeria’s deeply homophobic society. Obiefuna is a sensitively drawn and rounded character, whose future is uncertain as the novel ends. A compassionate, understated and beautifully written book.

I’ve chosen Happiness Falls by Angie Kim, because this too has a young person as its main protagonist, but her family, besides being American, is also of South Korean heritage. This story, ‘narrated’ by Korean-American Mia is hard to categorise. A young adult, she lives with her parents, her twin brother John and her younger brother Eugene who is both autistic and a sufferer from a rare genetic disorder, Angelman syndrome which leaves him unable to communicate verbally, and with severe motor control difficulties. Mia is very bright, intense, prone to careful analysis and scattering her writing with footnotes. She recounts the family drama in which her father disappears while in the park with Eugene, who arrives home bloodied and distressed. What’s happened? It’s complex, high octane stuff. And while I probably wouldn’t survive for ten minutes in Mia’s company face to face, she’s an engaging, thoughtful narrator with a passion for forensic detail and analysis. Provocative, heartfelt, compelling.

Another book with a family drama at its heart is by the Swedish author Alex Schulman (transl. Rachel Wilson): Malma Station. This was a book I had to finish and stand back from before I could appreciate it. Three sets of people are on a train heading towards Malma. We begin to learn their stories. And we begin to realise that these three sets are not travelling at the same time – years separate them. Yet these sets- father-daughter; wife-husband; daughter are all related. And the story slowly unfolds of how damaged they each are, and how this damage has passed – multiplied even – from one generation to another. It’s a tough, emotional read, with unlikeable characters whom we slowly begin to understand.

A story about a woman who’s a cemetery keeper in France – yes really – is a complicated family drama too. Fresh Water for Flowers, by Valérie Perrin (transl. Hildegarde Serle). Violette Toussaint had a childhood passed from foster-carer to foster-carer. Illiterate as a young adult, she taught herself to become a skilled reader. She married the sexiest man around, and had an unhappy marriage. The couple were level crossing keepers for many years, then they – and ultimately only she – became a cemetery keeper in the Bourgogne. It’s here that she gets over the tragedy that befell her, and finds friendship and meaning in life. There is a complex web of characters to become immersed in – or not. I think I’ll have to read it again, as I didn’t enjoy this book as much as its many devoted readers.

Now to another woman with a difficult life. Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville. Another work of fiction? Not quite. Dolly was born in the 1880s, at a time when women knew their place and had to stay there. But during Dolly’s life time, with two world wars forming part of it, things began to change. Enough to make her dissatisfied with her lot. But by sheer hard work and cussedness, she got herself and her husband on in life. It didn’t make her as easy person to get along with. Dolly was Kate’s grandmother, and this book is heavily based on the known facts of her life. An interesting exploration of the life of a woman during a period of huge evolution and change, written with sympathy and some understanding of a somewhat bitter, difficult individual.

Finally, another story – a true one – of a woman with a difficult challenge. Austrian Christiane Ritter wrote an account of her year in the Arctic in A Woman in the Polar Night (transl. Jane Degras).In 1934, Ritter, a painter, left her ordinary life with a teenage daughter to join her husband in his life as trapper in Arctic Spitsbergen. It turns out to be as cold and inhospitable as we all imagine, and twice as primitive. Seals have to be caught and processed: birds too, and these fatty unfamiliar meats form much of their diet. Husband and Norwegian friend and housemate are often out trapping, looking for animals whose fur they will sell. That’s enough to tell you what much of this book is about. It’s tough in this unforgiving climate. But it’s beautiful too, and Ritter dwells on this. Straightforwardly yet engagingly written, this book offers an insight into the strange world which she chooses for a year to inhabit, and leaves reluctantly.

I wouldn’t presume to connect my experiences in India with Ritter’s in the Arctic, but being a woman travelling often alone is what links us. The advantage I had was in owning a guide book. The Lonely Planet Guide to the Arctic wasn’t available then.

And next month? Our chain will begin with Stella Prize 2024’s long listed The Anniversary, by Stephanie Bishop.

All my illustrations this month, apart from the Indian photo, which is my own, come from Pexels. With thanks to the photographers Emmanuel Slope, Kindel Media, Koolshooters, Efrem Efre, Pat Whelen & Kristaps Ungurs.

100s of Books, 1000s of Books Revisited …

Here’s a post I wrote at the very end of February 2014, shortly before we moved from France back to England….

Hundreds of Books, Thousands of Books …

Facing the task of packing and moving our library, I was reminded of that wonderful book I used to read with my children, Wanda Gag’s ‘Millions of cats’.

‘Hundreds of ~~cats~~ books, thousands of ~~cats~~ books and millions and billions and trillions of ~~cats~~ books’.

Oddly, I no longer have the book, though I hope one of the offspring has. ‘Oddly’, because I seem to have most of the others that have accompanied me through life. Both of us is incapable of downsizing when it comes to books. Till now.

We realised that much of what we own has remained unopened since the day it arrived in France and probably for some years before that: our days of writing essays about mediaeval history are long gone. We realised something had to change. Jettisoning them was unthinkable. And where in France could we re-home so many books in English?

By chance, I was browsing on the web one day, and realised that many of these old faithfuls have a value. They could be sold. So that’s what we’ve decided to do. But it’s really not about the money. It’s about knowing that these books will end up with someone who has chosen them and wants them, rather than in some charity shop where, as we know from experience, some would simply moulder or even be thrown before reaching the shelves, even though many would be snapped up.

So…… we now have three kinds of book. The central core: books we can’t think of doing without – mainly reference books and other much-used non-fiction, with some of our best-loved fiction. The second kind, the saleable ones, are now boxed up to send to England. And the last, and smallest group: the ones we’ve decided to do without, and which have little apparent value. We’ve opened doors to all-comers who want to browse, and we’ve probably re-homed about half. There are still some 450 still remaining. They’re heading to Amnesty International in nearby Castelnaudary, who raise funds by selling to both English and French customers. We know how excited we get when we get the chance to browse a new collection of English books, so we hope they’ll be a good money-raiser for them. (Addendum, 2024. When they were collected, by a woman with her two teenagers, she filled her boot, the empty seats, and even slotted books in and about her passengers’ bodies. They finally drove off, the back axle nearly grinding the road beneath)

Come and look at some of our books – rejected and selected.

You can tell how long I’ve had this one: it was priced in pre-decimal days, before 1972, so even many British readers may have difficulty in deducing that this scholarly work of non-fiction cost me….. 57 ½ p.

This book was given to me as a leaving present from work back in the mid ’70s. It was a good read then, but even more so now as a history of the area we now live in.

A modern classic describing thirty years of the history of our own little corner of France.

This book belonged to my grandfather, a man who died long before I was born. Beautiful marbled end papers such as this often came as standard in the 19th century.

And finally, a book which though incomplete, is a real piece of history. It includes handwritten recipes for making ink, polish, peppermint cordial, stove-blacking. Here’s how to keep your brass and copperware in tip-top condition.

It includes just one newspaper cutting. By snooping around on the net and looking for this particular (and unsuccessful) cure for cholera, I surmise it comes from the 1820s.

Surely even the most die-hard minimalist will forgive me for keeping this book firmly among the family treasures?

And now the books are packed. Every single one – apart from a few bedtime stories for the next three weeks. One room done, seven to go.

And back in England, we realised we really did have to continue the downsizing. It took weeks and weeks. Some we sold, but most went to Oxfam books, and we still regularly get updates telling us how many have been sold and how much they’ve raised. The featured photo shows that we are running out of space again …

Six Degrees of Separation: from Tom Lake to Meadowland

Kate’s: Books are my Favourite and Best

I haven’t read the starter book, Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, which is set in small-town Michigan. Here’s how Book Browse summarises it: ‘Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart’. It sounds to me as though it also reflects upon how in the end we are alone, even if living in an established family or community.

Kent Haruf’s Plainsong is set in small town Colorado. This beautifully written, spare, stark book takes as its theme the loosely intermingled lives of various abandoned souls who live in the imagined town of Holt, Colorado. There’s teenage Victoria, pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend; Tom Guthrie, whose wife has retreated into deep depression, leaving him with the care of his young boys, Ike and Bobby; the elderly McPheron brothers; infirm Iva Stearn. These isolated people display dignity and stoicism in their difficulties, and struggle towards some sense of connection and community. Holt seems a pretty bleak town, and the landscape that surrounds it too. Haruf’s descriptions are always understated, always telling. His characters maintain their privacy, whilst allowing us to care about the ultimately optimistic conclusion of the book.

From a bleak town to a bleak continent: let’s go to the Arctic with Christiane Ritter: A Woman in the Polar Night. In 1934, Ritter, a painter, left her ordinary life with a teenage daughter to join her husband in his life as trapper in Arctic Spitsbergen. It turns out to be as cold and inhospitable as we all imagine, and twice as primitive. Home is little better than a shack, the stove is primitive and unreliable, and all fuel needs to be found and collected by them, The same applies on the whole to food. They have only a few basic supplies. Animals and birds have to be caught and processed, and these fatty unfamiliar meats form much of their diet. Husband and Norwegian friend and housemate are often out trapping, looking for animals whose fur they will sell. That’s enough to tell you what much of this book is about. It’s twice as tough as it sounds in this unforgiving climate. But it’s beautiful too, and Ritter dwells on this. Straightforwardly yet engagingly written, this book offers an insight into the strange world which she chooses for a year to inhabit, and leaves reluctantly.

Here’s another book about a woman alone: The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, by Vendela Vida. This book is written in the second person, and it distances us from a protagonist who wants to stay distant. She’s a young unnamed woman who’s come – fled perhaps – from Florida to Casablanca. Checking into her hotel, her backpack with all her important documents is stolen. The police ‘find’ it, but it’s not hers, the woman whose documents it contains is not her. But she accepts it. In many ways, losing her given identity suits her. She soon changes her identity again… and again. Her need for anonymity runs deep, perhaps partly from her wish to escape her own face, disfigured by teenage acne. Perhaps because of what we come to know of her story – no spoiler alerts here though. Through what little agency she has, she time and again shifts the ground beneath her feet. This is a novel of profound unease and bewilderment, and distancing our heroine from us by simply calling her ‘you’ is a part of that bewilderment. An unsettling reading experience – recommended.

Nahr is another isolated woman, who tells her (fictional) story in Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World. A powerful story, told by Nahr, a Palestinian woman in solitary confinement for an unnamed act of terrorism. Her time in the Cube, as she calls her cell is recounted in short chapters interleaved with longer accounts of her life thus far. Much of her early life was spent in a Kuwait ghetto where many Palestinian refugees, dispossessed by the Gulf War fetched up. After an unsuccessful school career, Nahr works hard at menial jobs to save up so that her brother can avoid her fate by going to medical school. She meets an older Kuwaiti woman who blackmails, prostitutes but also loves her, propels her into high-end prostitution. Marriage to a freedom fighter saves her reputation – and his – but he’s a closet homosexual who soon deserts her for his lover. I don’t want to reveal more of the story, but eventually she returns to Palestine and finds close relationships and a political awakening that changes her life forever. This timely read, detailing the brutal legacy of Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine is both powerful and thought-provoking. Though it is of necessity one-sided, it should be required reading for anyone wishing to understand recent Palestinian history. The shock waves of recent events continue and escalate.

Isolation seems to be developing as a bit of a theme here. Here’s isolation of a completely different kind. Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. Six astronauts (two of them are cosmonauts), all from different countries, some male, some female, orbit the earth in their International Space Station. We visit them for one day only, as they travel 16 times round the globe. We experience with them the wonder of this journey: the brush-stroke beauty of the landscapes they view from afar, as well as tiny detail – headlights, fishing boats. We accompany them as they go about their often mundane daily experimental tasks. Or using the treadmills that are part of their daily routine. Or we see their sleeping bags, billowing in weightlessness: the spoons they eat with, attached by velcro to the cabin wall. We perceive aspects of their life back on earth – children, a loveless marriage, a trusting partnership. The book moves through the spectacular and the ordinary, distance and intimacy and invites us, the readers, to wonder too.

Wonder at the earth? Let’s look at Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field, by John Lewis-Stempel. An utterly absorbing account of a year in the life of an English meadow. From harsh January, through the months in which warmth and life returns, to busy summer and autumn and back to chilly dormancy again, John Lewis-Stempel notices and absorbs everything. He sees birds, insects, animals and plants in microscopic detail. He relishes smells, tastes and sights. He enters fully into the life of his traditional meadow, one that may have existed for many hundred years. A celebration of traditional country scenes, leaving the reader with a campaigning zeal to preserve the rich variety of life it contains if sympathetically managed and left to itself. As he himself says: ‘To stand alone in a field in England and listen to the morning chorus of the birds is to remember why life is precious.’

Isolation seems to be a theme here. Will that continue next month, when we’re invited to start our chain with a favourite travel guide?

My first five photos come courtesy of Unsplash: Alexander Andrews; Levartravel; Vince gx; Annie Spratt; Gallindo Bailey. The final shot is my own.