Another Move

Hello all brave and stubborn lurkers! I've found a prettier room for my books, and sporadic posting will continue over here.

My other June reads

Hmmm, I was on a role there for a while wasn't I, then I forgot about this place... Anyway, to catch up... I picked up Kafka on the Shore by Murakami in an airport bookshop and absolutely loved it. Gripping and funny and elegant and strange. I read this in a hotel in the mountains. It seemed somehow appropriate. And then I read Leviathan by Paul Auster. As I went along I kept thinking it wasn't his best, but it got quite exciting and clever towards the end. Oh what wonderful nuanced reviews I am giving. You can see why I'm doing a PhD in English literature. Ahem. After that I was in Stansted again, waiting for my train up to Leeds, and bought a copy of The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. This was partly because I have a soft spot for Russian Literature, partly because I have been meaning to read it ever since I read an essay one of my cousins wrote about it for his year 12 English project several years ago now, and partly because it had a black cat on the cover, as did my copy of Kafka on the Shore. I read it on the train and then in Leeds in between packing up my English life into boxes. But I didn't finish it. I really liked the strange chapter on Pontius Pilate, but I got bored of the people disappearing for no reason and the rest of it didn't really grip me. I probably just didn't give it enough time and I'm sure I'll get back to it at some point.

The Book Thief

Marcus Zusak. Ok, I can see what all the fuss is about. Despite the serious subject, this book is just so much fun to read. It's an immensely comforting read, even though it had me bawling my eyes out in Stansted Airport as I finished it. The use of a rather world-weary death as narrator works well, and more effectively here than in Stow's The Suburbs of Hell. (Or is it just that Zusak's Death is a lot more friendly...) But the best thing is its deceptive simplicity, and its finely drawn characters, and its depiction of the normality of life throughout WWII. Which is, ofcourse, exactly how it would have been. I mean - despite violence, starvation, and rumours of atrocities, children still play on streets and grow up. It is a book filled with warmth.

My Antonia

Willa Cather. I picked this up as a respite from all the turgid, complicated male writers I had been reading. It was the right thing to do. Oh, it is gorgeous. Not in terms of plot or structure but in the way it creates a scene - the landscape, the characters, the way of life. The writing is beautiful but transparent, and the descriptions of the prairie grass are to die for. Can't quote you any because I left it in Norway. My Mum read it too (on my recommendation) and loved it just as much.

Baudolino

Umberto Eco. I finished this a couple of weeks back, but I must admit it took me about six months to read. My thoughts of the novel are summed up in the sentence: it's not The Name of the Rose. I loved The Name of the Rose. I found it utterly moving and compelling. I loved the way the story was encased by the monastery, and the relationship between the young narrator and the friar (read it so long ago that I can't remember names... ah, Adso and William, thank you Wikipedia). The friar William seemed to me unutterably wise, and a lot of what he had to say I needed to hear at the time (I read it at Christmas, four and a half years ago, in Berlin, three months into my masters at York, the same time I read and adored Slaughterhouse Five). And I loved the thought of Aristotle's lost work on comedy...

I enjoyed the beginning of Baudolino, but I got stuck three quarters of the way through. Eco doesn't skimp on detail and ideas! The book hinges on the search for the kingdom of Prester John, with some forgery of religious relics on the side. It's about the power of stories to influence political realities, and the way stories even hold power over those who make them up.

The New Life

Orhan Pamuk. I found this pretty slow going, especially in the first half. It's about a young man whose life is changed by a book, and by unrequited love, and who spends months of his life randomly boarding old and dangerous buses, searching for a mysterious angel. He's in several bus crashes, which I have a feeling are or were pretty common in Turkey, and it is in these brushes with death that he feels closest to the angel. There's an undercurrent of encounter between East and West, and a nostalgia for the old Turkish goods which are being replaced by new imports from the West. The one product that survives the transition is clocks:

'For our people, the ticking of clocks is not just a means of apprising the mundane, but the resonance that brings us in line with our inner world, like the sound of splashing water in the fountains of the mosques,' Dr Fine said. 'We pray five times a day; then in Ramadan, we have the time for iftar, the breaking of fast at sundown, and the time for sahur, the meal taken just before sunup. Our timetables and timepieces are our vehicles to reach God, not the means of rushing to keep up with the world as they are in the west. There was never a nation on earth as devoted to timepieces as we have been' we were the greatest patrons of European clock makers. Timepieces are the only product of theirs that has been acceptable to our souls.'

This process of exchange and transformation is quite interesting, really. I won't be in a hurry to read more of his books, but you never know.

The Penguin Book of Norse Myths

All I have to say about this is it's absolutely awesome. The myths are told lightly, with restraint, but with enough poetic details to keep me interested. In the past I've ploughed through the originals in the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, and this was much more fun. I was so impressed that I looked up Kevin Crossley-Holland, who wrote these versions, and it seems he's an utter legend. I fully intend to get my hands on his children's books, his collection of English stories, and his poetry.

Why you should read Francis Webb (with a medievalist interlude)

Because he's different from anything you've ever read, or ever will read. Because he fools you into thinking he's naive or obtuse before you realise he's something else altogether. Because he knits his stanzas together with rhyme schemes so cleverly that you don't even know they're there. Because - just sometimes - his words make your breath stop and your heart beat faster. He takes you to strange places that you recognise.

Take 'On First Hearing a Cuckoo', for example. Here I'm going to take a medievalist detour and talk about a different poem first - a very famous thirteenth century poem which he most likely would have been aware of:

Sumer is icumen in
Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu.
Sing cuccu. Sing, cuccu, nu.

Sumer is icumen in -
Lhude sing, cuccu.
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springeth the wude nu -
Sing cuccu.

Awe bleteth after lomb,
Lhouth after calve cu,
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth,
Murie sing, cuccu.
Cuccu, cuccu,
Well singes thu, cuccu -
Ne swik thu naver nu!

I first came across this poem in a small leather-bound anthology of English poetry with bible-thin pages, given to me by my Grandma. I remember sitting down in her spare room in summer and deciding to read all of it. I didn't get very far. This was the first poem. What a strange little thing, I remember thinking.

More recently, I discussed this poem with my students. We talked about how the 'u' sound holds it all together, and makes it wierd and wonderful. And about the internal rhyme in the 6th and 11th lines. My students loved 'icumen'. And one of them pointed out that the bucks are being a bit rude (read 'f' for 'v' in line 11 and you might work it out). The last line means: 'don't you ever stop', or 'don't you ever deceive'. 'Nu' means 'now'. Cuckoos, of course, deceive by nature, and the English summer sadly never lasts long. In the lecture, my supervisor pointed out that when it says 'cuccu', you can never be sure if it means the bird itself or the sound it makes. This poem is memorable because it is small, simple, secretly ambiguous, joyful, naughty, rueful, fun. And it has been claimed as quintessentially English - English enough to open a serious looking anthology.

Cross to an Australian poet in England in the 1960s. He's never heard a cuckoo before:

It was never more than two unchanging words
Heard in the first coming green of daybreak,
The sleepier green than sleep, with a sheer white
Between this yawning advancing green and the colour
Of all lights out. Not consciousness, the awakening early green:
For that was steep curtain, immediate
Structure of pain and learning, familiar rattlings.

In a Webb poem, there's usually a few phrases you don't understand on a first reading. What's this 'sheer white' doing, and why is he using the odd phrase 'all lights out'? But the image of the green dawn and the sound of the cuckoo is gentle and haunting. I love 'the sleepier green than sleep', and the idea of an awareness and a feeling of peace beneath a more frightened and confused 'consciousness' trying to come to grips with the surroundings and the self rationally. The poem goes on to twist around this image of green, and the 'two words' of the cuckoo, which enter through the window:

With this taut white wariness two words
Involved themselves, formed and changeless, cool and haunting.
. . .
. . . But they were quite apart,
So freely entering, so at home,
Not softening, not disturbing, but making distant.
Old-story-devious green, all shapes and sizes
Of illusion, turned right out of doors:
Two words, always the same words, freely entering.

It's so hard not to quote the whole poem. It continues through a single day. The speaker hears the cuckoo again whilst 'playing cricket at eleven', at dinner, and at nightfall. 'Voyaging green', 'robust green' and 'sleek green' give way to the 'dissolute green' of evening, and all the while the cuckoo speaks 'two level and small words/Never at odds with self, never with green'. Night approaches:

. . . Then the changeless words
Unelectric among the going green and the advancing
Colour of lights out and the nagging strands
Of an anger. And cool before the cavernous
Green of sleep which could alone lose them.

And you start to realise that the whole poem is about the triumph of colour and light against darkness and confusion. The words of the cuckoo, which embody colour and light, cut through the confusion of the self and the 'nagging strands/Of an anger'. They also cut through darkness. The poem never names darkness, it's called 'lights out' - a phrase that is repeated three times. Electric lights fail against the darkness because they are switched off. The cuckoo's words, however, are 'unelectric/Against lights out', which gives them their calm, persistent power. The poem ends:

What in themselves? Twelve hours shaken away,
Not the abandoned green remained, not self,
Not spring, not Surrey, no, nor merely
A dead word-haunted man. Two words remained -
The language foreign, childish perhaps, or pitiable -
Heedless of enmity, again and again coming
To a taut candour, to a loose warbling green.

Curiously enough, the last three lines could easily be describing 'sumer is icumen in'. The poem is edged by feelings of unease and displacement - England's excessive greenness is strange to Australian eyes and almost threatening. But the cadence of the cuckoo's words overcomes this, even if, like the thirteenth century poem, their language is 'foreign, childish perhaps, or pitiable'. 'Ne swik thu naver nu!'