Jump that horse

Reading 2012

2012-01-04T12:40:00.004+02:00

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking (Jan) Louis de Bernières The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (Jan) Muriel Barbery The Gourmet (transl by Alison Anderson) (Jan) Jane Campion and Kate Pullinger The Piano (Jan) Zoë Heller Notes on a Scandal (Jan) JRR Tolkien The Hobbit (Dec 2011-Jan) (again, after a long time)

What some days hold

2011-10-19T20:29:00.007+02:00

Today the air has swirled and spun.

I’ve been thinking of the Cape, where a windy day can be claustrophobic, when to open a window just a crack is enough to allow such a flush of air through it’s like a crazed creature racing around the room picking things up and flinging them above its head. Book covers flapped and snapped like birds’ wings, tissues danced, dust motes rode the rollercoaster currents. Outside, our hair was yanked from the roots and it was difficult to breathe.

Here in Joburg such tumult is far more unusual. Inside there has been quiet and coolness; two cycles of soft breathing. One body floated in light and twitchy sleep; the other mind watched and wandered. Outside, wind swept long fingers through branches and leaves, tangling and untangling. Plump bougainvillea bobbed. The windows are open just a crack, for the moment, to prevent another crazed creature from getting out, from leaping off high places and ensnaring himself in the shadowy webs of creepers. He’s only four months old, after all.

Still, some air entered. Along with the sight of greenery bending and swaying, it was the scents of wood smoke, dust, old furniture polish and, inexplicably or perhaps just wishfully, salt that triggered memories of that other day.

Two stories, one river

2011-08-07T16:26:00.008+02:00

Another litoverlap:

When I first encountered the Willamette I had no idea it was a river in the United States; the name was simply interesting and unusual. On the one hand, it brought to mind a kind of cloth that hard-working homemakers might have found revolutionary in the 1960s, while on the other it reminded me of my friend Will, and how long it has been since we’ve met.

In Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise (2010, Old Street), Chuck holds Winnifred in his open palm at his apartment window, and says, ‘Doesn’t the Willamette look inviting?’ (p 122). Winnifred is the diminutive tortoise of the book’s title. Chuck’s girlfriend has agreed to look after her while her owner and the book’s protagonist, Audrey Flowers, goes home to St John’s, Newfoundland to be with her comatose father. As an out of work actor Chuck has a lot of spare time, and he doesn’t really know what to do with a tortoise. Winnifred is nervous about his preoccupation with the river; she wonders ‘how long before he decides the tortoise is better off in her “natural” habitat’ (p 157). But in the end Chuck grows quite fond of her and the Willamette pretty much fades from the story.

1. Washington 2. Columbia River 3. Idaho 4. Nevada 5. California 6. Pacific Ocean 7. Oregon 8. Willamette Basin, through which runs the Willamette River

The name felt like an old acquaintance when it appeared again in The Jump-Off Creek (1989, Boston: Houghton Mifflin), Molly Gloss’s tale about a pioneering ‘westering woman’, Lydia Bennett Sanderson, who sets up home by herself on a smallish piece of Oregon land. In the late 19th century, the Willamette’s valleys are ‘gentler’ than the nearby Blue Mountains (p 69), but the strapped Sanderson must make her bleak new home in the latter area because Willamette country is by that time already ‘thickly settled’ and the price of the land is ‘very dear’ (p 106).

Now, in Winnifred and Audrey’s time, the Willamette seems to have a tendency to flood, and it’s the last remaining place on Earth where American Indians of the Pacific Northwest can find one of their food staples: the jawless, eel-like lamprey.

The litoverlap

2011-08-07T15:55:00.006+02:00

Litoverlap n. The unintentional, serendipitous and/or noteworthy occurrence of thought, word or deed in more than one place and time; usually, but not always, in the same field. Not to be confused with coincidence.

It’s the word I’m using until I find a better one, though I quite like this one, with ‘lit’ indicating literary and implying a sense of illumination both in the overlapping elements (they're briefly spotlighted) and in one’s discovery or experience of the overlap itself.

A wee one

2011-07-04T17:21:00.007+02:00

Just a little litoverlap:

Several days ago I finished reading Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, and the same day, at a site that I look at occasionally, I came across this.

IF PI

2011-02-13T10:53:00.006+02:00

(Illustration and heroine's name by Rico Schacherl)

Incognita Ferreira has finished school. Not just this year, all of it. She recently matriculated with an A in East London, otherwise known as Environmental Lifeskills, a few Bs and one C in a subject she manages to keep a secret forever.

Since the age of six, Incognita has been in the habit of enforcing her full name. ‘It’s In. Cog. Ni. Ta,’ she would say, hands on hips, staring any opposition down. ‘And not Cognita. Neeta!’ No one argued for long. Her brother, Octavius, the maturer of the two in age only, calls her Cog, as in ‘tiny cog in the great wheel of the world’, but by now she has learned to ignore it. He was optimistically named for the eighth child in the large family their mother had yearned for, though she and their father were blessed with just the two. No one ever asks where Incognita’s name originated, which is lucky; she herself is much loved, but the source of her name is a tale of woe and despair best forgotten.

‘Out with the old, in with the new’ is Incognita’s motto for this stage of her life. Her Goth phase is over, and she’s making plans for the future that may still include black clothing and furtive behaviour, but with a different purpose. Going away to varsity, bumming around overseas for a year, getting married – none of these are for her. She is finally going to put into action the career she has been dreaming of ever since she and Tavy used to watch Remington Steele on Tuesday nights. She is going to be a Private Investigator, right here in her beloved home of Jakkalsbessievallei, just west of the Kruger Park. It’s a small place, but as Miss Marple, another favourite of Incognita’s, frequently finds, a lot of mischief and malice is practised beneath the sun-dappled and apparently tranquil waters of a pond.

Incognita has no real experience, of course, but she feels she has the smarts that the job needs. After all, she’s aware that Mrs Taljaard next door often goes out at night, leaving her front door unlocked; and it has occurred to her to wonder why Jackie Ramsammy from down the road is the only blond child in the large Ramsammy family. And she has noticed that, since spring, Melody Smyth from the deli counter at Shoprite has been wearing a lot of long-sleeved t-shirts, and sunglasses indoors. What’s up with all of that?

Over the coming years, Incognita will discover how often there are four seasons in one day – life can be mysterious and mundane, fascinating and disappointing in the space of a few hours. Mrs Taljaard sleepwalks, and there’s nothing in her house worth taking. Jackie Ramsammy is Lola Labuschagne's child, the woman who had gone for an acting job in Jo’burg and never came back. Having slept over at his best friend Les Ramsammy’s house the night she left, Jackie simply stayed, and after a year, a letter from Lola and some legal gymnastics he received the Ramsammy name. And Melody ... well, Melody will marry her sweetheart, and so Incognita’s musings about bruises on arms and black eyes will come to nought, and she will never learn that in her late teens Melody had begun to suffer from a rare and chronic condition that afflicts her skin and eyelids for the rest of her life.

But all of this is in the future. Right now, Incognita is lying near the sprinkler in the garden on a blazing hot day in December. She’s letting her torso get a bit of the sun it has not seen in years. She is dozing and planning, planning and dozing. She got her driver’s licence recently, and for work will use the Mazda Midge her parents gave her, fixed up by her father and sprayed royal purple. She’ll also rely on the family cat. During her Goth years, Incognita had taken a brief plunge into the world of Wicca, and used the cat as her familiar. Now, though Liquorice won’t be accompanying her on cases, he will serve as a trusty colleague in thrashing out the findings on her return. Maybe she will offer to locate Mrs Taljaard’s ancient engagement ring, for a small introductory fee. Incognita’s school days – or nights, rather – have left her fearless of cemeteries and secluded spots, and she thinks she knows the best place to start looking.

Read 2011

2011-01-03T11:54:00.038+02:00

JRR Tolkien The Hobbit (Dec-Jan 2012) (again, after a long time) Adam Foulds The Quickening Maze (Dec) Ian McEwan Solar (Dec) Molly Gloss The Dazzle of Day (Dec) (eventually left off)

Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot (Nov) Lemony Snicket A Series of Unfortunate Events: Book the First The Bad Beginning, and Book the Second The Reptile Room (Nov) Lloyd Jones Hand Me Down World (Nov) Stef Penney The Invisible Ones (Nov) (resumed) AS Byatt Ragnarok (Nov)

Stef Penney The Invisible Ones (Oct) (interrupted) WG Sebald The Rings of Saturn (Oct) Ian McEwan Atonement (Oct) (again) Kazuo Ishiguro Nocturnes (Oct) Anne Tyler Back When We Were Grownups (Sep-Oct)

Michael Ondaatje The Cat's Table (Sep) Edith Pargeter The Brothers of Gwynedd Quartet (Sep) (again)

Ingvar Ambjørnsen Beyond the Great Indoors (transl by Don Bartlett and Kari Dickson) (Aug) (again, again) Salley Vickers Short stories in Aphrodite's Hat (August) (just a few) Molly Gloss Wild Life (Aug) William Horwood Hyddenworld: Spring (Aug) (left off) Marilynne Robinson Home (July-August)

Molly Gloss The Jump-Off Creek (July) Jessica Grant Come, Thou Tortoise (July) Kent Haruf The Tie That Binds (July)

Rumer Godden A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep (June-July) AS Byatt The Biographer's Tale (June) (stopped halfway) Kent Haruf Eventide (June) Kent Haruf Plainsong (June) Tracy Chevalier Remarkable Creatures (June) Nigel Slater Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger (June)
Kazuo Ishiguro When We Were Orphans (May-June) Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go (May) (again) Roberto Bolaño Monsieur Pain (May) (left off) CJ Sansom Dissolution (May) Tim Winton Scission (May)

Emma Donoghue Room (April) (resumed) Brady Udall The Lonely Polygamist (April) Christopher Isherwood A Single Man (April) Emma Donoghue Room (April) (stopped, might return to it)

Barbara Kingsolver Prodigal Summer (March) (yet again) Bruce Chatwin Anatomy of Restlessness (March) (left off) AS Byatt Babel Tower (March) Robert Holdstock Mythago Wood (March) (stopped halfway)

Louis de Bernières Notwithstanding (Feb-March) WG Sebald The Emigrants (Feb) Jeremy Mercer Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co (Feb) Virginia Woolf The London Scene: Six Essays on London Life (Feb) David Almond; illustrations by Polly Dunbar My Dad's a Birdman (Feb) John Berger HERE is where we meet (Feb) Ox-Tales AIR: Alexander McCall Smith 'Still Life', Beryl Bainbridge 'Goodnight Children, Everywhere', Helen Fielding 'Trouble in Paradise' (Feb)

Sebastian Faulks A Week in December (Jan) Andrea Camilleri The Patience of the Spider (Jan) Cormac McCarthy Child of God (22/01/11) Agatha Christie Three-act Tragedy (19/01/11) (again) Henning Mankell Italian Shoes (13/01/11) Sébastien Japrisot The 10:30 from Marseille (10/01/11) Per Petterson In the Wake (8/01/11) Colm Tóibín Brooklyn (5/01/11) Tim Winton In the Winter Dark (3/01/11)

Ups that are down, downs that are ups

2010-12-07T21:12:00.009+02:00

I sometimes cut pictures out of magazines of smiling faces – the ones that make me want to smile back. The litoverlap in the middle of this post is not cheerful. The first component is impressive in terms of literary form, but as to content both components are more than sobering. So as a fortifying frame for this litoverlap, I’ve picked a couple of other written things, passages from blog posts, that make me smile – mostly for their figurative language and aptness.

On 1 September 2010, Jane Brocket commented:

Yesterday morning, with a feeling of mild sadness, I threw away the amazing frilly-knicker, head-turning gladioli that have been centre-stage in the kitchen for a week – they had created their own space and the table looks so empty now.

I know just what she means in the conclusion of that sentence. And the pleasure in the language is to be had in the image of flowers personified, flashing their brightly coloured knickers like cancan girls would toss their petticoats and turn heads whenever they appeared, like Brocket’s flowers, centre-stage. They’re neat and precise, this sentence and its sentiment, ending where they begin: with absence, which recalls presence.

Here’s the litoverlap:

In Anne Michaels’ novel Fugitive Pieces (1996, New York: Vintage), the first narrator points out a ‘harrowing contradiction’ in the anti-Semites’ attempts at dehumanising the Jews during the reign of the Third Reich:

'When citizens, soldiers, and SS performed their unspeakable acts, the photos show their faces were not grimaced with horror, or even with ordinary sadism, but rather were contorted with laughter. ... This is the most ironic loophole in Nazi reasoning. If the Nazis required that humiliation precede extermination, then they admitted exactly what they worked so hard to avoid admitting: the humanity of the victim. To humiliate is to accept that your victim feels and thinks, that he not only feels pain, but knows that he’s being degraded.' (p 166)

François Gantheret points out the same thing in his novel Lost Bodies (2006, London: Vintage, transl by Euan Cameron). The book is about a man who was one of several political prisoners confined for years in a well in a desert prison camp. Some of the soldiers guarding these prisoners were ‘attracted by the easy opportunities for bullying’ – the man had often ‘seen them laughing’ as they abused the prisoners in various ways (p 18). But

'such acts were not approved of by the others: not so much out of any humanitarian concern, but because they violated the required indifference. To humiliate a man was to acknowledge that he was still a human being, and in their confusion the soldiers sensed that they could not feel at ease in a place like this if they treated those who survived beneath the ground as humans.' (p 18)

On 28 May 2010, Paul Edmunds described a flight home to Cape Town:

I knew the ’plane was headed home when I caught sight of a Sunday Times headline in the galley. It could have been from 2 months ago: threat of strike action during the World Cup. After a mad dash through OR Thambo and a little hitch at customs, we boarded our connecting flight to Cape Town to find in front of us Archbishop Emeritus Tutu and behind us Badhi Chaabaaan, reminding us of the tightrope we walk, tautly strung and twitching side to side from hope to cynicism.

It’s striking, the tightrope metaphor; it’s also one that fulfils the requirements, as pointed out by Michaels in her article ‘Cleopatra’s Love’ (1994, Poetry Canada 14(2)), of metaphor’s quiddity – each component must work in its own context so that the metaphor as a whole works authentically (p 14). Tutu represents hope, Chaaban symbolises cynicism. Impromptu TV news interviews of the South African man and woman in the street often show just such a veering between optimism and pessimism, characterised by just such an attendant tension. And Edmunds experiences the metaphor personally because it reminds him of South African attitudes that he may have forgotten or put to one side during his time in New York.

The next one

2010-09-06T21:48:00.006+02:00

Through the forest

How small are these steps
with which we inch forward;
and they are taken
over precarious ground
so that our eyes are
almost always lowered,
intent on our path,
and we tend to miss
what goes on around us.

Yet it’s progress that we make –
it must be,
because some time later
we look up and we see
that we are no longer where we were;
and the people
who were with us then
are not the ones
who are with us now.

(First published in New Contrast 150, Winter 2010)

Post-CTBF

2010-08-10T22:35:00.003+02:00

The CT Book Fair turned out to be a mixed bag of offerings, more lucky packet than treasure chest.

The downside

The CTICC hall was overheated, under-ventilated and glaringly lit, which made for soporific spectating; the acoustics were pretty bad and there was nowhere to sit unless you were attending one of the author appearances or book launches. The smaller meeting rooms upstairs were better in those respects, though the number of seats was limited and the door continually opening and closing, and people shuffling in and out, at the back of the room should have been better controlled.

The upside

Wole Soyinka was relaxed and friendly. He has a wonderfully deep, rich voice, and a good sense of humour. A sample of his views: A subtle communication can take place between the reader and the book. After a long or hard day’s work, after a day of soccer and vuvuzela*-blowing or -avoiding, you can turn to a book for solace or escapism, amusement or enrichment; the book doesn’t answer back but your reading process is two-way rather than singular, a silent interaction. He would hate the aesthetic of ‘the book’ (its scent, its weight, the texture of the pages, the design of the cover and the text) to be lost; books are from the Neanderthal world and we must defend them and fight to keep them in existence. He writes because he’s a closet masochist. Slightly more seriously, he feels the written word has the power to open doors and minds; we would be far the poorer without books.

* Not a soccer fan, he was unfazed at failing to pronounce the word correctly

Along with Sindiwe Magona and Elinor Sisulu, Antjie Krog took part in a conversation with Becky Nana Ayebia Clarke about African Love Stories. Ayebia Clarke worked for Heinemann Africa before branching out and forming her own publishing company, and achieving one of her goals: publishing this book of short stories by African women. Magona and Krog contributed stories to the volume, while Sisulu has written a biography of her parents-in-law, Albertina and Walter Sisulu. These women chatted about love affairs and relationships that existed behind the scenes in the southern African political arena in general, and those of their own families in particular. The final question from someone in the audience: ‘How do you have the courage to write about such intimate things?’ To which Krog replied with the suggestion that the more intimate and unique writers seem to be, the less they are being so. Because as soon as they are being unique and intimate they fail to reach their audience. ‘If you’re going to naval-gaze,’ she said, ‘your description of your naval must have similarities with other women’s navals. As soon as your naval becomes obviously only yours, your voice becomes yours alone and reaches no one’ (paraphrased). It’s an interesting idea. Poorly executed, such a story could simply be neutral and superficial; I guess the trick or the skill would be in infusing the story with universally resonant elements while making it appear particularised and extra-ordinary.

Jodi Picoult was clearly well seasoned in public speaking and appearing, and refreshingly down to earth. She brought one of her sons with her. The two of them blitzed the entire hall for a few moments with their wolf-call harmony, something they learned in England while she was researching wolf calls for one of her novels. Her average day sounds full – up at 5:30, taking a three-mile walk with a friend, getting the kids off to school, at her pc by 7:30 answering all her own fan mail, writing from 8:30 to around 3, being mom for the rest of the day; and her average year sounds thoroughly scheduled, with its set months for research and writing, editing and proof checking, and squeezing in book tours. She says she’s blissfully happy, and she looks it; I would baulk at knowing exactly what the coming year held, never mind the next and the next one. But each to her own.

Also, another litoverlap:* Recently I came across Petina Gappah’s blog, and walking into the hall the first book I saw on display at the Wordsworth stand was An Elegy for Easterly.

* Litoverlap n. The unintentional, serendipitous and/or noteworthy occurrence of thought, word or deed in more than one place and time; usually, but not always, in the same field. Not to be confused with coincidence. It’s the word I’m using until I find a better one, though I quite like this one, with ‘lit’ indicating literary and implying a sense of illumination both in the overlapping elements (they’re briefly spotlighted) and in one’s discovery or experience of the overlap itself.

Finally, personal highlights of the trip, among others: seeing friends, some unseen for absolute ages, and Noordhoek.

Before us, great waves bounced on the blanket of beach.
Briny air soaked us up, filled our lungs to bursting.
Behind us, the shimmering hill handled the vast whip of the wind.

The CTBF

2010-07-28T19:53:00.007+02:00

(Logo taken from www.capetownbookfair.co.za)

The Cape Town Book Fair has been running for five years. I’d heard mixed reports about it; this year I’ll be seeing it for myself. For a literary conference the programme is shamefully poorly presented – it’s full of typos!

Some world-renowned authors will be there. Wole Soyinka talks about his memoir. Antjie Krog participates in a discussion of Nana Becky Ayebia Clarke’s African Love Stories. And I’m not a huge fan of Jodi Picoult’s novels, but I was impressed by a radio interview with her a while ago. She sounded cheerful and engaging, and she was funny and unusually articulate, so her views on ‘issue-driven fiction’ may well be worth hearing. There’s also a workshop on right-brain creative writing that could be interesting (or kooky? Or both?).

But hopefully fun, the whole thing.

Small, but striking

2010-06-30T17:12:00.005+02:00

These two overlaps have the flavour of coincidence, but I prefer to think that when it comes to literature there’s more, and sometimes much more, to it than that.

The first happened a couple of years ago. A character in a novel that I was reading named a specific day of a particular month (sometime in August), and it was the very day and month I was reading it.

The second happened today, once I had decided what to read next. In my pile of unread books two caught my attention: Chris Bohjalian’s The Double Bind and Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down. I picked the Bind. And what do I find as its epigraph but a quote from the Hornby.

Another one

2010-05-23T15:09:00.013+02:00

The gift orbits us
For H, then and now

I searched the crevices of the chair,
putting my fingers where my eyes were reluctant to go,
and sat back on my heels
with two bent bookmarks
and an old pen with a tiny rose in its lid.

I’m telling you, I told you,
that chair has a throat and a stomach. If ever
I have it recovered, I will ask the upholsterers
to search for your rectangle of glittering stones.

And I will return it –
in two or twenty years’ time.
I know the worth of that now;
I look forward to it.

As well as to the next time I drive to you,
all of three minutes away;
one road linking our homes.
A dip and a slight climb
that takes me through sun shot off glass,
shadows loosed by walls;
often the single great plane of night.
Hard to imagine traversing such solidity,
effortless in practice.

It seems that much of my life,
this life I remember
after the one I inhabited as a child,
is being spent with you with me
or in my thoughts.

When your voice was remote
there was your handwriting;
the two so similar, fast flowing.
But now you’re here,
and though you say it may change any day,
we’ve slowed into deeper water:
it feels permanent.

(First published in New Contrast 149, Autumn 2010)

Dipping into 2010

2010-05-21T17:18:00.003+02:00

Molly Wizenberg A Homemade Life
Breyten Breytenbach Notes from the Middle World

Read 2010

2010-05-13T20:56:00.036+02:00

Barbara Kingsolver Animal Dreams (28/12/10) (again)
Agatha Christie The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (26/12/10) (again)
Alexander McCall Smith Corduroy Mansions (13/12/10)
Yann Martel Beatrice and Virgil (11/12/10)
Molly Gloss The Hearts of Horses (9/12/10)
AS Byatt Angels and Insects: The Conjugial Angel (6/12/10)
Roberston Davies The Salterton Trilogy: A Mixture of Frailties (2/12/10)
Helen Simonson Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (30/11/10)
Robertson Davies The Salterton Trilogy: Leaven of Malice (24/11/10)
Robertson Davies The Salterton Trilogy: Tempest-tost (21/11/10)
Audrey Niffenegger Her Fearful Symmetry (20/11/10)
AS Byatt Angels and Insects: Morpho Eugenia (18/11/10)
Zakes Mda She Plays with the Darkness (16/11/10) (left off)
Barbara Trapido Frankie & Stankie (14/11/10) (left off)
Henning Mankell Chronicler of the Winds (10/11/10)
Ellis Peters Brother Cadfael's Penance (6/11/10) (again)
Anne Michaels The Winter Vault (28/10/10) (again)
Tim Winton Dirt Music (23/10/10)
Alice Hoffman The River King (19/10/10)
Finuala Dowling Flyleaf (16/10/10)
Yann Martel Life of Pi (10/10/10) (again)
Agatha Christie A Caribbean Mystery (9/10/10) (again)
Henry James The Aspern Papers (1/10/10)
Nick Hornby A Long Way Down (27/9/10) (unfinished)
Molly Wizenberg A Homemade Life (22/9/10) (shifted to 'Dipping into')
Agatha Christie Sad Cypress (20/9/10) (again)
Agatha Christie Nemesis (18/9/10) (again)
Robertson Davies The Deptford Trilogy: World of Wonders (15/9/10)
Robertson Davies The Deptford Trilogy: The Manticore (8/9/10)
Robertson Davies The Deptford Trilogy: Fifth Business (1/9/10)
Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (26/8/10)
Andrea Barrett Secret Harmonies (21/8/10)
Per Petterson Out Stealing Horses (transl A Born) (18/8/10)
Petina Gappah An Elegy for Easterly (1/8/10) (left off)
Meg Rosoff The Bride's Farewell (29/7/10) (recommended by Heather)
Primo Levi The Truce (24/7/10)
Primo Levi If This Is a Man (20/7/10)
Antony Sher Primo Time (15/7/10)
Zakes Mda Black Diamond (8/7/10)
Chris Bohjalian The Double Bind (30/6/10)
Nancy Mitford Pigeon Pie (21/6/10)
Martin Cruz Smith Gorky Park (13/6/10) (resumed)
François Gantheret Lost Bodies (transl E Cameron) (12/6/10)
Martin Cruz Smith Gorky Park (8/6/10) (interrupted)
Ben Elton Meltdown (4/6/10)
Lynne Reid Banks Two is Lonely (31/5/10)
Lynne Reid Banks The Backward Shadow (24/5/10)
Colette Julie de Carneilhan (18/5/10) (again)
Marilynne Robinson Housekeeping (11/5/10)
Christopher Nicholson The Elephant Keeper (7/5/10) (stopped halfway through)
Malcolm Gladwell Outliers (3/5/10)
Barbara Kingsolver The Lacuna (22/4/10)
Rumer Godden An Episode of Sparrows (18/4/10)
Tim Winton Shallows (14/4/10)
Stef Penney The Tenderness of Wolves (8/4/10) (again)
Bruce Robinson The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman (4/4/10)
Adam Foulds The Truth about These Strange Times (30/3/10)
Tracy Chevalier Girl with a Pearl Earring (24/3/10) (again)
Sebastian Faulks Engleby (20/3/10)
Cormac McCarthy Cities of the Plain (15/3/10)
Michael Moorcock The War Lord of the Air (13/3/10)
Fiona Snyckers Trinity Rising (7/3/10)
Bram Stoker Dracula (27/2/10)
Ellis Peters The Holy Thief (23/2/10) (again)
Ellis Peters Monk's-Hood (19/2/10) (again)
Reif Larsen The Selected Works of TS Spivet (16/2/10) (couldn't get into it, try again another time)
Rumer Godden The Dark Horse (14/2/10)
Thomas Keneally The Widow and Her Hero (10/2/10)
Stieg Larsson The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (7/2/10)
Mervyn Peake Letters from a Lost Uncle (3/2/10)
Kim Edwards The Memory Keeper's Daughter (31/1/10)
Tim Winton Cloudstreet (23/1/10)
WG Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp Unrecounted (10/1/10)
AS Byatt The Children's Book (6/1/10)
Belinda Starling The Journal of Dora Damage (2/1/10)

Read 2009

2010-05-13T20:49:00.003+02:00

Alexander McCall Smith Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations (28/12/09)

Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot's Christmas (24/12/09) (again)

Esther Woolfson Corvus: A Life with Birds (1/12/09) (didn't finish it)

Marlene van Niekerk Agaat (transl M Heyns) (1/12/09)

Barbara Pym Excellent Women (29/11/09)

Neil Gaiman Coraline (25/11/09)

Claire Messud The Emperor’s Children (19/11/09)

Overlaps

2010-04-22T15:35:00.010+02:00

(This photo by Rico Schacherl. It and the others are from Nieu Bethesda, the Karoo, in which thoughts such as the ones in this post have ample space to breathe)

‘I break open stars and find nothing, and again nothing,
and then a word in a foreign tongue.’

George Steiner quotes these lines by Elisabeth Borcher in Language and Silence (1974, New York: Atheneum, p 51). Anne Michaels quotes the same lines as an epigraph to her poem ‘What the Light Teaches’ (Poems 2001, New York: Alfred A Knopf, p 117).

I’m intrigued by this kind of literary overlap. It’s not a coincidence; Steiner and Michaels are both speaking of language as traumatised by events like the Holocaust in the Second World War. ‘Because their language had served at Belsen, because words can be found for all those things and men were not struck dumb for using them,’ Steiner points out, ‘a number of German writers ... despaired of their instrument’ (p 51). (He acknowledges also that ‘the failure of the word in the face of the inhuman is by no means limited to German’ (p 51).) Michaels, too, refers to language – German, Polish, Russian – that has been stripped of its more humane meanings (her implication: by the Nazis), just the alphabet remaining the same, the victim’s language revealing only ‘the one who named him’ (p 124).

Behind these texts lies Theodor Adorno’s well-known injunction (which he later qualified) about the barbarism of the notion of poetry after an ‘event’ such as Auschwitz. Whether or not he would agree with the statement, Steiner does not suggest that writers stop writing; rather he wonders, in 1966, whether they are writing too much – people speak far too much and far too easily, he feels, ‘making common what is private’ and creating of their culture ‘a wind-tunnel of gossip’ (p 53). In his view, ‘silence is an alternative’ to this situation (p 54). Michaels, among many other poets and writers, chooses not to remain silent, and refuses to accede to the pressure that squeezes and twists language out of its ethical shape. For her, language can take a vitally recuperative form. Her conclusion in ‘What the Light Teaches’ is that language is ‘a country; home; family’; ‘for those who can’t read their way in the streets, / or in the gestures and faces of strangers, / language is the house to run to / ... when you have no other place’ (pp 128–9).

The overlap is also not a case of appropriation. Michaels’s research is meticulous; although she doesn’t list Steiner among her sources in the acknowledgements page of Poems (nor in the acknowledgements page of Fugitive Pieces, which deals slightly differently with the same theme), she may well have come across his reference to Borcher. But that’s not the point; Steiner and Michaels’s uses of Borcher’s poetry are independent and legitimate – I’m simply identifying their congruence as an interesting phenomenon in literature.

Here’s another overlap:

The concept of the ‘aha moment’ as used by Oprah is well known to her fans (not so surprisingly, there’s even been a court case over it). AS Byatt knows about it too: in an ‘aha experience’, she suggests, a ‘structure felt to be defective or inchoate suddenly appears formed and harmonious’ (Still Life 1985, New York: Simon & Schuster, p 260).

In Oprahdom, these moments are memorable, connect-the-dots moments when everything suddenly clicks into place.* For Byatt the moment occurs when a human being feels a relaxation, a ‘release’, of tension caused by desire (p 260). If someone is hungry, they will have an aha experience not through the final goal itself, not nourishment, say, but rather in the act of eating (p 260).

While Oprah and Byatt are not speaking of quite the same thing, in both cases it brings satisfaction.

* Among all the definitions of this concept on the internet, it's difficult to find the original

Here's to a voice

2010-02-26T09:42:00.008+02:00

‘your letter is delightful, larger and lighter
than thoughts of a flower when the dream
is the earth of the garden,
...
I fled to your letter, to read
that the small orange tree is a mass of white blossoms
opening with the sun,
...
as your letter opens
there is an unfolding of sky, of word from the outside’

(Extract taken from ‘Your Letter Is Delightful’, Breyten Breytenbach 1984, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Emmarentia, Jhb: Taurus, p 348. Photograph, by Philip de Vos, scanned from the back cover of my copy of Dog Heart)

In Standard Five, our class teacher – the woman who led us through each day – was also our Afrikaans teacher. She was the closest thing to a witch I’ve ever encountered, in looks and in manner. She scared us to death. For many years, I disliked that language intensely. It sounded so harsh, and though I didn't articulate the thought at the time, looking back the main things it seemed to express were disdain and cynicism, weariness and impatience. But then sometime in the late 90s I chanced upon a TV documentary on Breyten Breytenbach, in which he slides from English into Afrikaans and back again (as he also does here), and suddenly Afrikaans sounded wonderful – warm and courteous, at once mysterious and graspable. Since then, two friends have confirmed the impression.

Without Breytenbach (also without my two friends and one or two of the other Afrikaans-speaking people I’ve chatted with), I wouldn't have been able to enjoy the humour or the whimsy or the colloquial flavour of phrases like ’n helse fout and ’n engel uit die blou hemel (funnily enough both uttered by chefs in two issues of Taste), the latter of which Breytenbach seems to have had in mind too, for when ‘the showers abate and heavens suddenly expose a silk-blue underlayer’, the narrator of Dog Heart sees ‘angels walking hither and thither up there’ (Breyten Breytenbach 1998, Dog Heart, Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, p 105).

And without him, we would have the pleasure neither of thought-provoking ideas like 'When a language dies, the dead die twice', nor of poems such as the above-quoted one. There are many things to appreciate in that poem in print, but perhaps it achieves its full impact when spoken, as Breytenbach does here.

He’ll be launching his new book of essays, Notes from the Middle World, at Boekehuis, Auckland Park next week, 4 March, at 6:00. There’s also an interview with him about this book here.

The writer

2010-02-05T08:28:00.006+02:00

(Illustration by Rico Schacherl 4 Feb 2010)

Jean-Baptiste is being painted, in miniature. The image is to be reproduced on the back cover of each copy of his latest crime novel, The Bloodiest Rose. As he poses, pretending to be hard at work, he contemplates his successful career with something close to despair. He is living a bit of a lie. While the artist hums, and squints at him, he softly sinks into a cherished reverie, in which he stands at the centre of an admiring circle, the acclaimed and unabashed romance novelist who does not hide behind a nom de plume.

Detective Inspector Duchamp, JeanBap’s protagonist, is a loner, given to blunt, cryptic statements and the occasional moral stance. Men envy his insistent smoking and drinking, his lack of remorse and his silent suffering of chronic wind. Women, with no foundation, love him too. Each one believes that were he a real person – by the ultimate twist of fate, should he turn out to be real – she will be the one to break down his defences.

They have no basis for this conviction, that is, other than sixth sense, which if it came to it would turn out to be accurate. There is indeed a heart – warm and strongly beating – beneath both Duchamp and JeanBap’s impassive exterior.

As a child, secretly encouraged by the women in his family, JeanBap wrote little stories of love and tragedy, short-lived joy and untimely death.
‘Like Romeo and Juliet,’ his mother would sniff, putting down his latest offering.
‘Sadder!’ his aunt pronounced.
Or ‘Like that Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ his mother would chortle.
‘Funnier!’ his aunt proclaimed, dropping her knitting.
JeanBap would lower his head modestly and suck his pencil.

His father, involved not at all, exerted a powerful influence nevertheless. Should he have discovered his son’s favourite subject matter, there would have been hell to pay. Scorn would have dripped. JeanBap knew this without ever being told, and as he grew into the role of creator of the Duchamp cases – texts even his father admitted to enjoying on the rare occasion he had time to read – he, his mother and his aunt kept quiet as quiet can be. For his childhood yearning developed too, and over the years he has written copiously of the affairs of the lovely Dominique, former Duchesse de Deauville, under the pseudonym Jeanne Bécu. Which brings us to this day, and JeanBap’s despondence.

A fundamentally honest man, he is made tense by guilt. He wriggles in his seat, and yawns a great anxious yawn. The artist has to ask him to settle down.
‘Just relax,’ he tells the author. ‘Be yourself.’
Myself? JeanBap ponders. Do I know who that is?
But yes, he answers himself. It’s easy. You’ve always known.
So, he decides, one day, soon, I will stand up among my gathered devotees and say, I am Jeanne Bécu. I am the creator of your beloved romance series, les affaires de coeur de Domi.

It’s a decision he makes now for perhaps the fifth time in as many years, but it feels brand new.

What's out there so far

2010-01-06T17:05:00.014+02:00

(Design reproduced from the original by Jesse Breytenbach, with her kind permission)

The eye of the mind, the eye of the heart

In moments of ecstatic illumination,
brief and rare, but memorable,
it can be pitch dark and it wouldn't matter.
Seeing becomes perceiving
and evidence becomes understanding.
You don't need your eyes for that;
you could walk blindfold through an unfamiliar room
stacked with crystal glasses and not break a thing.

Moments like those,
when they do occur,
seem so illuminating that they make you think you see
everything else just as clearly, for a while.
But they're deceptive
as the afterimage of a flash lighting up your retinas;
and before you know it,
you're once again clumsy even in broad daylight
and spilling secrets as if you were drunk.

(First published in Carapace 62, March 2007; and then in A Look Away Issue 7, Quarter 4, 2007)

After as is before

When you go,

silence will fall with the rain

so soft and heavy it's

evident only when a drop

strikes a leaf,

strokes each place in me that is yours,

landing on gestures that

have people pinpointing parallels that

we know for what they are;

such is the power of assumption.

When you go,

I will lose and find and lose again,

I will find and lose and find again

in a process I've learned

can be endured,

can be the reward of endurance.

One way, I am here because of you.

And I'll remain, in a way because of you.

We know each other for who we are;

such is the power of belief.

When you go,

you will have known, perhaps best,

that there'll be at once so much

and nothing more to be said.

And in the ceremony of tears I will

stand and feel your falling

with the silence,

with the rain;

and be forever traced,

borne and bereft.

(First published in New Contrast 142, June 2008)

The weak spot

There is a place for him in her heart.

A weak spot

like a sprained wrist that

years later

gives way under an impromptu handstand.

(First published in New Contrast 143, September 2008)

Rest for the third eye

I want the sleep I used to have

when the fall was shorter

and the rise longer;

supreme sense of comfort in each -

a taste craved by the mind.

Tongue stilled,

silence gained.

A shift

to which gravity is beside the point

and thus is neither plummet nor ascension

but something in between -

a kind of suspension.

Movement enacted by thought in the vast velvet sea.

A kind of meditation, humbly meant.

Yet I continue to lie awake.

(First published in New Contrast 147, Spring 2009)

At table we met

At worst, and rarely,

you reached down into my throat

and pulled me inside out,

spreading every visceral element on the table before you,

pointing and identifying,

presuming the past, pronouncing the future.

At best, and much more often,

you opened the curtains,

your hands warm as the sun,

your gaze fixed on me.

From you, I received the gift of successive awakenings to joy,

invaluable breakfasts.

Burned but simmering,

you frog-leapt over the present and into the future,

asking what if again and again,

with the false certainty that a question sometimes brings;

trying to create what you had imagined,

trying to capture what you had created.

You didn't want information,

you wanted to be spoon-fed.

Like a child with Asperger's,

for you each morsel had to be laid out on the plate just so,

else the entire meal was inedible;

the whole less than the sum of its parts.

This is the role we sometimes play:

to be another's mistake.

We cannot help but learn from the lesson ourselves,

and if we're lucky

there is good in the good and good even in the bad;

and though the fairytale ends in nothing like happily ever after,

what comfort there is

just in the after;

what nourishment there is

in successive simple meals.

(First published in New Contrast 148, Summer 2009)

Every 19th of December

2009-12-22T12:07:00.005+02:00

One form of memory presents the past as photography - images of arrested experience. It shows how something or someone looks in the duration of its passage from is to was; it elicits its potential to be (again). And our eye sees this in the precision, or the haze, of a moment.

But what about tradition? Tradition isn't photographically preserved in our mind's eye. It seems more ingrained in our bodies. Yet it can be lost. From one generation to the next, it can fade like a lullaby for years sung soft and certain, then hummed, finally succumbing to silence. How do we save it? While some gestures remain, the words gradually slip away. The underlying reasons have long been unspoken. The intention endures, but reality intrudes because the circumstances have changed - borders crossed and re-crossed, countries departed from and returned to, reinhabited but not as home. Pains have been taken to establish a new life, in a new place. That doesn't mean that everything should be new. To some people, roots are valuable, even essential. Roots can tunnel across the earth from north to south, so strong that should they burrow downwards they would eventually meet at the core. Belief rises from depth as deep as this.

What happens, then, when the believers are gone? Perhaps the idea of the tradition remains, diluted, discernible. Like a break in a bone, a hairline gap that is evident even when the bone has healed. It endures in being passed on in those very sounds that fade and cease. They descend through the stages of articulation, through the layers of our apprehension, to the place where they become a type of memory like but not the same as the halted image: a progressive memory. In this place, we hear the believers' voices when they have stopped speaking. Along the way the words have travelled from is to was; now, in the country no longer new, we appreciate them and thus fulfil their potential to be (again).

Tradition progresses in us as fibres of the roots that stretch from there (the origin) to here (the continuation), and we extend roots of our own. Our words may not sound quite the same as the old ones, they may not be what they were, but they convey the belief that we have inherited and made our own.

I'm singin' in the sunshine

2009-12-17T13:36:00.005+02:00

Lightening the hues of the housework blues,
with a jazzy lilt
and a merry tilt to the chin,
here we go:

Summer sun

you are the one

for me.

Summer air -

from way up there

in the sky so truly hugely blue -

you float down

to me.

Your balmy embrace

soothes my upturned face,

and I'm in love with you.

My flat is clean,

my work is done.

For the next three weeks

all I'm gonna do is have fun.

This afternoon in the gathering gloom

clouds'll pleat,

lightning'll flash, thunder'll crash,

rain will rinse away the heat.

Oh, sunshiny day,

you're the best gift our climate can give;

you make everything wanna live, live, LIVE.

Your balm-y charms

fill my outstretched arms,

and I'm in love with you.

A mind like a museum, a manner like a friend

2009-12-11T16:13:00.010+02:00

One Saturday morning fairly recently, Willem Boshoff stood in the hot sun outside the new part of the Everard Read gallery, talking to a group of attentive-looking people. He mentioned ullage (the amount by which a container falls short of being full) and a Greek poet whose work he felt is instrumental in modern poetry - Constantine Cavafi (or Cavafy). How, on his death bed, the man's last words weren't words but a drawing of a circle with a dot in the centre. The great navel. How he (Boshoff) could not let that image go unrepresented, an urge he (presumably) satisfied in granite.

A few years ago I attended a poetry workshop with Boshoff. In one of the activities, we had to invent the title or first line of a poem and write it down on a scrap of paper. He collected the scraps in a bowl, which we passed around and from which we each fished out a scrap. We had to elaborate on the line in a poem of our own and read it out a few minutes later. My line was this:

When I was nine years old ...

and my poem was this:

I had a pony.

Rust red coat,

growing thick and woolly in winter.

Round brown eyes;

hard little hooves.

Greedy flower-eater.

(Illustration by Nina Aleksander Ristić)

Afterwards, I introduced myself to Boshoff. His huge hand enclosed mine. A warm and friendly touch for a stranger; kind eyes and focused attention. As his creative output shows, he has so much going on in his head, it's mind-boggling simply to witness - as is perhaps the same for him, in a different way.

A literate pachyderm

2009-12-04T14:57:00.010+02:00

(Illustration by Rico Schacherl 30 Nov 2009)

Phrederick was in seventh heaven. The sun was shining. He had finished his chores. His back was against his favourite tree and, best of all, he had Pachydella, Jungle Princess in his trunk. Pachydella was his favourite heroine. She was his only heroine. When he wasn’t reading her latest adventure, he dreamed of her, and in his dreams he was hers. Usually timid and reluctant to get more than his toes wet, with Della he bashes down trees, leads the herd in a trumpet dance, wallows deliciously close to her in the cool river.

Yellowbeak-blueness, Phred’s friend of the bird variety, was also enjoying the book. He’d come across the ellie in this very place some time ago, and been intrigued by his specs and reading matter. His air of concentration and suppressed excitement. Blue had flown to the branch above Phred’s head and started to read as well. The two never spoke; they wouldn’t have understood each other. But each afternoon of rest and shade, each book, drew them closer in companionable quiet.

Phred would have been surprised, but then not, to learn that Blue loved Pachydella too. In his dreams, Blue and Della race through the veld, scattering everyone in their path. They dive-bomb the matriarch. They watch the sunset from the top of the hill and get tipsy on marula fruit. Sometimes, she lets him sleep in a fold of her ear.

To both boys, there was no other creature so wonderful. But would they survive this shared adoration? Who knows? One thing we do know, love transcends all, as their friendship shows.

A cold coming on ...

2009-12-04T14:37:00.012+02:00

'I think he feels a cold coming on'

(Illustration by Rico Schacherl 5 Oct 2009)

... That's what we tend to tell ourselves. But should Jason catch a glimpse of himself in one of the freshly buffed shop-front windows, he would see the tell-tale flush on his cheeks, and have to admit to shame rather than illness. For weeks he's been building up the courage to approach his crush, the latest addition to the small law firm at which he works, and today, just now, he came upon her in a carefully staged chance meeting on the way to the cafeteria.

'Hi, Maggie ...' he practically shouted, interrupting her conversation with a friend in his eagerness.

She frowned. 'Margaret.'

'Um, Margaret ... Wanna slice of my salami?' He slapped the stick of salami he'd especially brought to work rather hard into the palm of one hand, making himself wince.

'I'm a vegetarian.'

'Right,' he mumbled. 'Don't worry.'

'I'm not.'

Upon which he turned tail and headed through the first door he could find. It was the main entrance door and led him out onto the street. Now he wanders along in a haze, slapping his head with the salami and muttering, 'Idiot fool.' He sneezes, and sighs. All his hopes have smashed around his feet and are leaving a glittering trail behind him. Which is what Maggie, feeling bad, follows. Poor Jason. He shouldn't give up hope and bury his face in a handkerchief - it's not a cold that's coming.

The gentlewoman

2009-11-25T17:28:00.010+02:00

One of our three dogs followed me all the way down the driveway. She needn’t have. No less loyal but not given to fond farewells, one stayed at the house. The other settled himself near the bougainvillea, the driveway spooling out to his horizon. As I reached the gate, I turned to see the eldest making her ponderous way towards me, tottering like a drunkard on her arthritic hip. I might have driven off without another glance, but on she came. At her age, at 98, I hope to have the same attitude. I hope I can do something difficult without making any kind of a big deal out of it.

Her spirit kindles, still;
each eye an ember
sufficient to sustain the body.

Further thoughts on the prompt

2009-11-20T12:58:00.003+02:00

At first, Byatt’s analogy doesn’t seem balanced, though. As forms of creativity, writing and painting share some characteristics, but not all. We can learn both from an early age. Adults and other children teach us to speak from the moment we use our voice. The teacher may give us brushes and paints on our first day of nursery school. In each process, interesting and unexpected things can happen, be they serendipitous or displeasing. Byatt’s artist uses oils or clay as his tools for producing an image; the writer uses language in the same way.

But we can’t say that in the situation of using language as we have learnt to use it and of using paint as we have learnt to use it, therefore paint = language, or language = paint. Language is a hinge. It joins painters and writers because it’s something they both use, in different contexts. Paint is a separate entity, unshared. While artists also speak, and can write if they choose, writers don’t (usually) paint.

So too Byatt’s medium that becomes second nature to the artist through experimentation is both not quite the same as, and similar to, the writer’s medium of language. The language that the writer chooses to write in is most likely their mother tongue. By the time they begin to write creatively, that language is already, in a way, second nature to them. They’re familiar with it. They’ve used it for years, in conveying meaning for practical purposes. Artists don’t usually paint for years for purposes other than producing fine art. In this sense, on starting to create, the writer has had more practice with language than an artist has had with paint.

But when writers do start writing – novels, poems, essays – they are using language for creative purposes. Then, experimentation helps to hone the writing, and it gradually becomes second nature to the writer. Here language is not only a hinge, it’s also a powerful tool, a producer of image, a way of representing in words what fine art represents in oil and clay. And so here language does = paint, and paint does = language.

The difference seems to lie in the nature of language and the way it’s used. Byatt’s analogy seems unbalanced from a literal point of view, from the view of a writer as a speaker. But it’s balanced from a metaphorical point of view, from the view of a speaker as a writer. Then the painter and the writer are both artists, wielding oils and words however they may desire.

The prompt

2009-11-19T19:07:00.005+02:00

‘A writer only becomes a true writer by practising his craft, by experimenting constantly with language, as a great artist may experiment with clay or oils until the medium becomes second nature, to be moulded however the artist may desire.’ AS Byatt Possession (Vintage 1990)

It seems so logical now, such common sense, but the point these words made was something of an epiphany for me the first time I read them. A light shone on a neglected part of my brain, joined not by a choir of angels’ song but just one voice, the inner, silent one, reasoning that this was the most logical way of making progress with one’s creative writing.