Tag: Kent Haruf

Six Degrees of Separation: from Tom Lake to Meadowland

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’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.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Wifedom to Our Souls at Night

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 W: Six Degrees of Separation

This month’s chain starts with Anna Funder’s Wifedom, whose heroine is Eileen O’Shaughnessy,  George Orwell’s first wife.  She hasn’t had much of a press – good or bad. Orwell never acknowledged her in his writings, and his biographers have largely passed her by. Yet she was an Oxford graduate studying for a masters degree when this was still an unusual path for a woman. She gave it all up when she married Orwell to live in near poverty in a remote cottage. When they go to Catalonia for Orwell to participate in the Civil War, he never mentions in his writing Eileen’s significant role in the struggle or the risks she took. And so it goes on. This is a novel rather than a biography, because there are so few hard facts to rely on: mainly a few letters, so the book is perforce speculative. But enough is known about Orwell’s patriarchal attitude to women and their role to surmise that this is a reasonably faithful account. This is a shock to Funder, long-time Orwell admirer. He doesn’t come out of it well as a husband and father. An interesting and thoughtful reconstruction.

So let’s do a chain on relationships within a marriage, within a family, and start off with Stanley and Elsie, by Nicola Upson, because here is another fictionalised account of the lives of real people.  It brings before us the story of one of England’s most celebrated twentieth century painters, Stanley Spencer, and the women in his life, including the sensible, cheerful live-in maid Elsie, and his two wives, Hilda then Patricia in a most vivid and involving way.  Early twentieth century village life, an eccentric lifestyle, and the complicated lives of imperfect fractured people is brought to life in an entirely readable way.  This is a story of love, obsession, the thought processes of a painter, the English countryside written in a way that demands to be read, compulsively.

And now another book involving real people: a biography this time. There are so very many gaps in knowledge about the facts of John Donne’s life and work. Katherine Rundell, in Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne has done a fine job in meshing what is known with what can reasonably be surmised with an evaluation of the man. Born a Catholic, with all the dangers and limitations that presented, Donne early exhibited his dexterity with words and his sparkling intelligence. Initially successful in the law, an early and unwise marriage pitched him into prison, then penury. What with his wife producing twelve children, five of whom died in infancy, and being remote from the power-house that was London, his career stalled, though his creativity never did. Only when his wife, from whose day-to-day life as mother he was very often absent,  died as a result of childbirth (to a still-born child) did his career finally take off as Dean of St. Paul’s, and preacher extraordinaire. Rundell deftly deals with all this material, all the while offering a critique of Donne’s often dazzling and dextrous use of words. Frequently misogynistic, it’s his love poetry that we often remember him for. She argues that these frequently erotic poems were written not for his wife, but for the enjoyment of his male friends.  His wife seems to have had a raw deal.

Pure fiction now. Claire Kilroy, in Soldier, Sailor, examines two intimate relationships:  of a mother to her baby son (‘Sailor’), and as a wife to her husband.  Here is a book, an all-encompassing and visceral read that brought back almost fifty year old memories of the early days of motherhood. The overwhelming love for that new life brought into the world: but also the endless, utterly debilitating exhaustion, guilt, loneliness, confusion. The realisation that your partner is not, as you had believed, your equal partner, but someone who escapes every day – perhaps to an office, where normal life ensues. All-consuming love, combined with unremitting drudgery is woven through the book. As is reference to  the husband of the narrator who fails to understand, to help, to be truly involved with his son’s welfare. He resents the little that he does, forgetful of simple but important baby-related tasks – but remember, this is Soldier’s tiredness-sodden perspective. She is an unreliable narrator, but one who reliably conjures up early motherhood. We stay with Soldier as very early motherhood ends, but all-consuming love of her partner does not. A devastating book.

Charlotte Mendelsohn, in When We were Bad, is someone else who is good at complicated family situations. I struggled at first to get into this book. There were so many characters, all equally important: all so flawed: all so Jewish. That isn’t a criticism. Just an observation that understanding the Rubin family (and all the characters are family members) means getting to grips a bit with what it means to be Jewish too. I persisted. It was worth it. The lives of every family member begin to unravel as son Leo’s life very publicly does, the day he leaves his wife-to-be some 4 minutes before they take their vows. It turns out that he isn’t the only one in inner turmoil. By turns funny, touching and embarrassing, I was engaged with every character, despite their many and obvious flaws, long before the conclusion of the book.

What about a family that believes it has a trusted protector in its midst? Ricarda Huch’s The Last Summer was written in 1910.  Set during one summer round about that time, we are in Russia, in the country retreat of the von Rasimkara family. They are here because the father, as governor of Saint Petersburg has closed down the University in the face of student protests. The three adult children (a young man, two young women) send the letters from which the book is composed to various family members describing their lives and feelings, and the young man whom the mother has hired to protect the life of their father. Little do they know, as we find out almost immediately, that this young man sides with the student revolutionaries, and is here to do harm to von Ramiskara. And it’s this irony which fuels the book’s narrative. The whole family, for different reasons, believe in the young protector, even when his behaviour is, to say the least, odd. The tension builds until the final letter … An exploration of ideology and trust, and the complicated layers of family life. 

All of these couples, these families have been, in different ways, hard work.  Let’s end on a gentler, sweeter note and look at true love instead, in Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night.  This is a tender, gentle novella about two lonely neighbours who in later life find each other, and love. Their measured path towards new happiness, their discovery of and acceptance of their former lives forms the body of the book, even though always there in the background is the judgement of others, threatening their happiness. A delightful last work from the never disappointing Kent Haruf.

That’s my rather loose chain this month: more of a wheel really. Next month, our starter book is the classic I capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith. Why not join in?