Read 2011

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

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

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)