The Little Book Room

Another Move

2008-08-05T16:58:00.002Z

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

2008-08-02T15:36:00.005Z

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

2008-06-06T16:09:00.002Z

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

2008-06-06T16:06:00.003Z

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

2008-05-15T09:03:00.002Z

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

2008-05-02T08:32:00.002Z

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

2008-04-26T21:06:00.004Z

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)

2008-04-26T21:01:00.001Z

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!'

The Secret River

2008-03-28T19:21:00.003Z

Kate Grenville. I finished this a while back and it completely blew me away. So much so that I didn't really know what to say about it. I started reading it in September last year, when I was leaving Norway for months and months and needed something to distract me. It was The Secret River or a medieval crime novel my friend kindly lent me. I thought I'd be in the mood for genre fiction. But - Grenville's prose was utterly captivating. It's hard to describe. As I'm back in Norway now and the book's in England, I can't quote you any. It's not jarring at all. It lets you in. It somehow captures the tonality of nineteenth century London - Dicken's London - while at the same time feeling like nothing you've ever read before. Strangely immediate. Strangely new. But comfortable all the same.

It tells the story of Will and Sal's childhood and young adulthood in London, before Will is sentenced to exportation to Australia. Sal and their children go too. I hadn't known that happened (families accompanying convicts, I mean), but I think Grenville has done some pretty substantial research. So it becomes a novel of the early settlement in Australia, and encounters with the Aboriginals.

I finished three quarters of the novel and then put it down for several months. I couldn't bear to keep reading. I knew something horrible would happen. When I finally picked it up again, of course it did. It was hard to read but I am glad that it is written. What impressed me most about the novel is the incredible way she captures the way Will feels about his new land - both alienation and belonging, and the difficulties and necessity of building a future around an unspeakable past.

The Black Prince

2008-02-20T23:59:00.005Z

Iris Murdoch. I couldn't go to sleep last night till I'd finished it. But all in all I'd say it's a pretty creepy book. And tedious at times. This is all part of the point, as the main character is creepy and tedious, and the plot outlines his literary and sexual fantasies. Still. Despite this, you get the sense when reading it that you're in the hands of a near genius. Sometimes the text flashes like a mirror or flicks around like a snake and bites you.

The Green Knight

2008-02-19T22:30:00.004Z

Illustration from the manuscript of the fourteenth-century poem. Sourced here. I love this manuscript, and have seen it with my very eyes!

Iris Murdoch. I finished this a couple of weeks back. It was my read-on-the-plane/bus/train book as I came back from Norway, and I was hooked straight away. On the cover it says it's a romance, and it reminds me a bit of Possession in this way (one of my all-time favourite books). Lots of characters and colour and mystery and happy endings. I've been meaning to read this for absolutely ages because I adore Gawain and the Green Knight, and this is obviously some kind of variation on the story.

I thought the way she alluded to the story was mysterious and convincing - she doesn't present an exact allegory, but rather captures some of the horror and strangeness and vitality of the original. There were a lot of characters and it was completely charming, in a very English penniless upper middle class sort of way. And that's all my brain can manage I'm afraid! I liked it so much that as soon as I finished it I bought a copy of Murdoch's The Black Prince. I chose this one because of the medieval connotations of the title. I've nearly finished it - it's not as light and playful but rather clever all the same... I'm not enjoying it as much, though I do admire it, and have a feeling that something spectacular might happen at the end. If any Murdoch fans chance upon here, any recommendations?

Beowulf

2008-02-16T22:37:00.002Z

I taught Beowulf this week. It was so much fun reading it again - apart from reveling in the shiny, heavy language, I kept making all sort of new connections. (New for me, anyway.) I thought it was so interesting the way fratricide is emphasised in the narrative, and how Grendel's descent from Cain (specifically, from Cain's murder of Abel) is played against this. He is a monster - an enemy of God, and of the people of the story, but the people of the story commit the same sin which made him a monster in the first place. One of my students asked if this was another example of the Christian author of the poem distancing the Christian audience from the pagan practices of the past. An interesting thought...

I also asked them to read Tolkien's 'The Monsters and the Critics', but I told them it was optional - a mistake I will not be making again (none of them read it). I enjoyed rereading that, though, too. When I was an undergraduate, I missed out on the Early Middle Ages module, but I made a point of reading Beowulf and that essay. Beowulf didn't do a lot for me the first time I read it, but the essay made me shiver with delight. The way he talks about dragons! (I have a fondness for dragons.) This time I couldn't help noticing how both universalism and nationalism frame his interpretation of the poem. He says it is a poem about man confronting the darkness of impending doom and inevitable death. He says this quite poetically. But - it's not just that. The poem isn't just about universal 'man'. It is about a very specific society, which it goes to great pains to construct. The monsters don't threaten humanity, but the Scandinavians. Hence my theory about Grendel, which I outlined above...

Anyway. The students weren't quite as excited about it as I was, but it is a difficult poem and I think they did pretty well. Next week, the sagas....

The Book of Illusions

2008-01-20T15:48:00.000Z

Paul Auster. Beautiful. Gripping. Convincing. Clever. Haunting. Sad. A hall of mirrors. Read it.

Yeah you might have noticed this blog is losing a little momentum. Writing a PhD isn't really conducive to writing more book reviews in your spare time. For me at least. At the moment. But I'll keep it going, even if it means the posts are brief, for now.

When She Was Good

2008-01-13T15:21:00.001Z

Philip Roth rocks. My favourite is still The Human Stain, which I think is a masterpiece, but this earlier novel (published 1965) made pretty compulsive reading. Also, you sometimes get the feeling with his latest novels that he's writing the same novel again and again, but this is different. There are fewer authorial tricks. The blurb promises: 'In this mesmerising, funny, chilling novel, the setting is a small town in the 1940s Midwest, the subject the heart of a wounded and ferociously moralistic young girl.' Which is pretty much what you get. But what makes it so compelling is that you really sympathise with the main character, and like her, although you can understand why by the end of the novel no one else can stand her.

In other news, the lovie is incommunicable right now, lost in Paul Auster. Mayber I should try him next. I've been stuck two thirds of the way through Umberto Eco's Baudelino for three months now. I'm currently half way through Halldor Laxness's Under the Glacier. Not really sure it's my kind of thing, but it's a pretty short novel, so I'll let you know.

Kristin Lavransdatter III: The Cross

2008-01-13T15:14:00.001Z

Yep, finished it last year. As I was reading it for escapist purposes, I was seriously annoyed when she killed off some of the best characters. In the end, however, it was quite memoriable. And beautiful. If a little sad, in a perhaps-the-next-world-is-better-than-this-one sort of a way.

Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife

2007-11-12T21:11:00.001Z

This is the second in the trilogy, set in medieval Norway. Here's what I thought of the first book. I'm not sure what I make of this one, really. I found the first half very tedious - Kristin moaning about her sins (getting pregnant before she got married), and generally making her husband very unhappy because of it. Things warmed up in the second half when she stopped complaining about her husband and started trying to get him out of jail.

I love the descriptions of Norway - the light and the lakes and the meadows. When I think about the book, it seems glassy and smooth and slightly two dimensional. Blue, and cool. But I looked forward to creeping into bed with it every night. And it changes pace every now and again and becomes heartbreakingly beautiful. I've nearly finished the third one, so I'll give you more of a run-down then. Not one of my favourite books in the world. But I have a feeling it's the sort of book that stays with you - a little bit of Kristin's Norway has a place in my heart.

New Books

2007-10-27T19:53:00.000Z

Due to the Royal Mail postage strike, my books have been dribbling in in intervals. That's okay - it prolongs the pleasure! When I arrived back from Norway, waiting for me were:

Kristin Lavransdatter parts two and three, by Sigrid Undset
Medievalism by Michael Alexander

And although I'm only sixty pages from the end of Kate Grenville's extraordinary Secret River, I'm scared something horrifying is about to happen, and late at night I take refuge in Kristin's medieval Norway. Over the course of the week, I've also received:

Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth Century Poetry, by Chris Jones
Getting Medieval, by Carolyn Dinshaw (got tired of taking this out of the library)
Postmodernism: A Beginner's Guide, by Kevin Hart
The Student's Guide to Writing, by John Peck and Martin Coyle (this is for a series of essay writing workshops I'm leading this term)
Writers' Workshop in a Book, ed. by Alan Cheuse and Lisa Alvarez (I stumbled across this in Borders and couldn't resist - it's musings on the craft of writing from a variety of well-known authors including Amy Tan and Michael Chabon. It's to feed my pipe dream of starting a second novel.)

Oh and some books have arrived for the lovie as well:

The Penguin Book of Norse Myths by Kevin Crossley-Holland (I dipped into this and it looks amazing, and much more fun than ploughing through the poetic Edda)
The Book of Illusions and The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

I also have a new backpack load of books from the library, on top of the library books I brought back from Norway. It's like living in a library in here...

The Solid Mandala

2007-10-14T15:37:00.001Z

It is not outside, it is inside: wholly within.
Meister Eckhart

It was an old and rather poor church, many of the ikons were without settings, but such churches are the best for praying in.
Dostoevsky

The Solid Mandala, Patrick White, 1966. I'd been meaning to read this for quite a while, partly because of the intiguing title, and partly because of its epigraph from Meister Eckhart (always on the look-out for all things medieval). But I have to admit it was a sense of duty more than anything else that kept me plugging away through the first two hundred pages. I don't find Patrick White's novels easy to like. It portrays the everyday life of twin brothers, Waldo and Arthur, in grimy detail. Mucus, excrement, furtive orgasms, tedious suburbia, two old men and their two old dogs. Their codependent relationship of love and hate borders on homosexuality. The first two hundred pages are told in Waldo's voice: the 'clever' twin, awkward and unlucky in love, narcissistic and burdened by his half-wit of a brother, he dwells endlessly on his thwarted literary ambitions. But, just when I thought I couldn't take any more, the narrative shifts into Arthur's voice. And lightens, and comes together, and starts making sense. Becomes beautiful.

Arthur is a holy fool. He is a lot cleverer than Waldo admits, because Waldo's identity is predicated on being the smart one beside Arthur's stupidity. In the first two thirds of the novel we see Waldo constantly taking care of Arthur, but in the last third it is revealed that Arthur is just as preoccupied with taking care of Waldo, perceiving his weaknesses so accurately that he knows to conceal what he knows, what he reads, and the success of his own relationships. He discovers that the concept of the mandala expresses perfectly what he intuitively knows:

"The Mandala is a symbol of totality. It is believed to be the 'dwelling of the god'. Its protective circle is a pattern of order superimposed on - psychic - chaos. Sometimes its geometric form is seen as a vision (either waking or in a dream) or -"
His voice had fallen to the most elaborate hush.
"Or danced." Arthur read.

Arthur is obsessed with marbles, which become the 'solid mandalas' of the title. Over the years, his collection condenses to four special marbles, which represent himself, and the three people he most loves. He considers throwing one away because it has a knot in it, before realizing the the knot, in fact, is the point: '...till from looking at his own hands, soothing, rather than soothed by, the revolving marble, he realized that the knot at the heart of the mandala, at most times so tortuously inwoven, would dissolve, if only temporally, in light' (p. 273). He offers this marble to Waldo, 'half sensing that Waldo would never untie the knot.'

There are repeated references to Tiresius, as well as to The Brothers Karamazov, which acts as an echo of the brothers' fraught relationship, and their searches for transcendence. Their weatherboard house is fronted by a tragic parody of a Classical facade. Finishing the novel, I understood why White deserved the Nobel Prize. It is a heavy novel, but the weight of it is essential. Arthur's voice would not come as such a relief if it had not been proceeded by Waldo's. His revelations would not seem so dearly won. The two are connected, bound together. The epiphanies are expertly enfolded into the structure of the whole, much more convincingly than in my hazy memory of The Tree of Man. I was quite astonished how White managed to make this heavy material blaze with light - like the knot in Arthur's marble. There are also some echoes of The Idiot, and in my opinion, The Solid Mandala is a worthy successor to Dostoevsky, much more so than Coetzee's Master of St Petersburg, which I didn't care for. This novel is quite remarkable. Consider me a convert.

Image: 'The One', Kiolero, flikr.

Seasons and Windows

2007-10-11T16:33:00.000Z

In the book after which this blog is named, there is the story of a girl in a beautiful white room. Her bed is white, the table is white, there is a soft white rug on the floor. Her silky, pale curtains shimmer like moonlight. She is happy. But in the garden outside her window, the winter slowly gives way to spring. Bluebells swarm beneath the oak tree, and the sky blazes above them. Oh, she sighs. If only I could have a blue room. Then I would have all I desire. A sprite, overhearing her, decides to grant her wish. The walls and the cushions and the embroidered couch in her room blush suddenly into myriad shades of blue: sky blue and cobalt and saphire, and her curtains are edged with the deep blue of the evening just before it gives way to black. Oh, she sighs, I am happy, I have all I desire. But outside, the sun shines, and the leaves ripen, and the world changes...

Months later, she sits in a bronze and copper room, gilded with gold. Its warmth and glow had once seemed all she would ever need. But - outside, the snow begins to fall, silently covering the garden. Oh, she sighs, if only I could have a room as white as snow, only then would I be content. The sprite, by now, is fed up. Now, you ungrateful wench, I will grant your wish, she snaps. And the room disappears. The girl shivers in the snow.

If you check this story against the original, I have probably misremembered the details. The beauty of this story was in the details: the descriptions of luxurious fabrics, the colours, the light. So, in honour of this story, I now have all the seasons. I have collected them in Northern Hemisphere trees. They remain a novelty to me, as does the sharpness of the air here, and the tone of the light.

Speaking of Yevtushenko

2007-10-10T07:52:00.000Z

As I was. Over here.

People

No people are uninteresting.

Their fate is like the chronicles
of the planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,

And planet is dissimilar to planet.

And if a man lived in obscurity

making his friends in that obscurity

obscurity is not uninteresting.

To each his world is private,

and in that world one excellent minute.

And in that world one tragic minute.

These are private.

If any man who dies there dies with him

his first snow and kiss and fight.

It goes with him.

They are left books and bridges

and painted canvas and machinery.

Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:

by the rule of the game something has gone.

Not people die but worlds die in them.

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth’s creatures.

Of whom, essentially,what did we know?

Brorther of a brother? Friend of friends?

Lover of lover?

We who knew our fathers

in everything, in nothing.

They perish. They cannot be brought back.

The secret worlds are not regenerated.

And every time again and again

I make my lament against destruction.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

One of my dad's favourites.

Book meme

2007-10-07T11:14:00.000Z

A book meme that I filched from Pea Soup and Superfast Reader. These are apparently the top 106 books that Library Thing users mark as unread.

The books I've read are in bold,
the ones I started but couldn't/didn’t finish are in italics,
what I couldn’t stand is red,
those I've read more than once have an asterisk*,
and those that are green are on my To Be Read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude - this one is red and green - I hated it at the time, but I think I might like it now, so I aim to try again.
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion - yep, every page. Ten years ago. Wouldn't happen these days.
Life of Pi
The name of the rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice *
Jane Eyre *
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov *
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs Dalloway
Great Expectations *
American Gods *
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales *
The Historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys
The once and future king
The grapes of wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & demons
The Inferno *
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the lighthouse - I think I'm ready for Woolf now, must try again...
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s travels - I listened to a children's version of this on audio tape over and over. Does this count?
Les misérables (I got to page 600 (or thereabouts, wasn't even half way through, and realised I couldn't stand any more...)
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The prince
The sound and the fury
Angela’s ashes
The god of small things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame - are you kidding?
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid *
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit *
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White teeth
Treasure Island - see Gulliver's Travels
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

My favourite from this list are: The Brothers Karamazov, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Middlemarch, Mrs Dallaway, War and Peace, Slaughterhouse Five, American Gods, Anansi Boys, Dubliners, The Name of the Rose, The Satanic Verses, 1984. Brilliant, one and all.

Book Soup

2007-10-05T13:40:00.000Z

I read all day until the words blur and refuse to stay in place, like lines of crawling ants. This is what I'm reading:

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (a bit at a time)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Preface to Of Grammatology (also a bit of at a time)
Paul Kane, Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity
Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory
Kevin Hart, The Lines of the Hand; Your Shadow; Peniel (Poems. This is more fun.)

And pretty soon, I aim to start on The Cloud of Unknowing, some more books about Derrida and some stuff by Maurice Blanchot. I stupidly left in Leeds a couple of very important titles: The Trespass of the Sign and Flame Tree, both by Kevin Hart. My housemate posted them to me on Monday, we'll see when they arrive.

My bed-time reading is The Solid Mandala, by Patrick White. I don't like White much, on the whole, but I feel obliged to get to know his work better (he's Australia's only Nobel laureate). I forced myself through Tree of Man aged sixteen, and have never recovered. That said, I read Riders in the Chariot around the same time, over a breathless Easter weekend (appropriately), and just adored it. More recently I read Voss and enjoyed that in a way. So. There's hope yet. Last night I gave up on everything and buried myself in The Absolute Sandman, which I had rather extravagantly bought for the lovie's birthday a few months back. You can't beat fantasy, in the end... And pictures. Pictures are nice.

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living

2007-09-30T17:28:00.000Z

This was fun. Very raunchy, which other reviews of this title seem to ignore. To begin with I thought it was science fiction: the 'better farming train' makes its way through 1930's Australia, laden with scientific experts to teach the farmers how to grow more wheat and their wives how to have more, and fatter, babies. But apparently there really was one. You can read about it in an interview with the author, Carrie Tiffany. There's a quirkiness about the book and a naivety about the narrator which is quite charming. The events of the story are actually quite tragic, but the lightness of the writing ensures that it isn't depressing. It's set in Australia with flashbacks to Yorkshire. Curiously, I read it on a train in Yorkshire. A strange and delightful read.

The Book of Lost Things

2007-09-29T12:19:00.000Z

I bought this book a while ago because it has such a fantastic cover. Looking for something relaxing to read while I was in Leeds recently I picked it up and snugggled in. It was scary. A lot scarier than I expected. It's set against the backdrop of World War II London. It starts off very sadly (and convincingly) as a young boy's mother is dying, and he thinks he can protect her by performing meaningless rituals, like doing everything in even numbers. It doesn't work. After she dies, he loses himself more and more in the fairytales which she too had loved. He gets sucked into their world, where everything is going wrong...

When I was reading it, I thought about why I like fairytales so much. I remember reading an essay by C.S. Lewis (or it could have been Tolkien) defending fairytales from being dismissed as escapism. Are we wrong, he asked, to want to escape this world?

The Book of Lost Things asks the same question. And answers: yes and no. I think the end of this book is less convincing than its beginning, but it is interesting none the less. I used to long desperately for fairytales to be true. Now I know they are true, I don't need them so much. But I like them, I like the lens through which they filter the world. I like the idea of journeys and quests, because if life is a journey, it doesn't matter if you can't see what's waiting round the next corner or over the crest of the hill. You'll find out when you get there.

More on Midnite

2007-09-22T21:28:00.001Z

I just finished it. This is seriously the funniest book I can ever remember reading. I bet the neighbours could hear me laughing through the walls. It's about Midnite's adventures as a bushranger, and then some other (typically Australian) things, but I don't want to give you any more details so as not to spoil the pleasure of reading it for yourself. It's just so funny and so warm-hearted, I've never read anything that's left me feeling so happy.

I have been trying to read this book for years. A good friend of mine in Adelaide, who put me on to Randolph Stow in the first place, told me she'd lend it to me. But just then her son (who was my age and whom she was rather hoping I'd take a shine to, but we were both too shy) returned from teaching English in Japan. Not only that, but he was terribly sick with some fluey thing, and it was the time of the SARS outbreak, so he was whisked off to hospital as his plane landed and put into quarantine. To cheer him up, my friend lent him Midnite instead. Which is all well and good, except that because he'd touched it while he was quarantined it had to be destroyed!

The next encounter I had with Midnite was in Canberra earlier this year. I was trawling through the manuscripts of National Library, looking for stuff to help with my Phd. Going through the boxes of Randolph Stow manuscripts, I found an original copy of Midnite, written on a typewriter, with little notes scribbled all over it. Incredible. I read a few pages, but there were other, more pressing things to look at.

The past couple of months, I've been reading everything by and about Randolph Stow I could get my hands on. But the library didn't appear to have a copy of Midnite. It wasn't shelved with his other books, and when you type the title into the catalogue, it doesn't come up. Haha, but it was hiding there after all! I typed 'Randolph Stow' into the keyword search, and there it was, buried in the 'Stack English' movable shelves in a deep and remote corner of the library. Only it wasn't. I looked for it twice, and it wasn't there - the books stopped way before its call number. I nearly gave up. But third time lucky, and there it was! I don't know if some industrious librarian replaced a whole half-cabinet of books overnight, or if I have selective blindness. Libraries are mysterious places.

But I found it, and I read it, and now I'm smiling my head off. The man is a genius.

Midnite

2007-09-22T07:59:00.001Z

I have a new favourite Randolph Stow novel. Midnite. Written for children. Hilarious. Mitnite is a young bushranger with a gang of five animals, including, most importantly, a Siamese cat. Who speaks with a Siamese accent. And is much cleverer than him.

Once upon a time, in Western Australia a hundred years ago, a young man lived with his father in a cottage in a forest. The young man was called Midnite. At least, that is what I am going to call him, because that is what he called himself, later on, when he was famous.

His father dies, and he is very sad, so Khat tries to cheer him up.

'Let's have dinner,' said Khat, 'and then we will talk about money.'
So Midnite went into the kitchen and cooked the dinner, and they ate it on the verandah, so that Gyp and Major and Red Ned and Dora could listen to the conversation.
'Now,' said Khat, when he had finished his dinner and was enjoying a saucer of tea, 'what are your plans?'
'I have no plans,' said Midnite, looking sad.
'If I were you,' said Khat, 'I should be a bushranger.'
'Would you, really?'
'I should call myself Captain Midnight,' said Khat, 'which is a fine name for a bushranger, but I should spell it M-I-D-N-I-T-E.'
'Why?' asked Midnite.
'Because that is more fierce and romantic,' said Khat. 'There is nothing romantic about good spelling.'

Hear hear!

Summer Reading

2007-09-14T19:47:00.000Z

Now that the summer is ending (mercifully slowly – this weather is lovely!), here's a quick catch up.

Lian Hearn, The Harsh Cry of the Heron

This is the fourth in a series, and they've all been wonderful. Set in a fantasy world reminiscent of medieval Japan, it is evocative and gripping and beautiful, and this book is my favourite yet. Don't want to give too much away, but it's just lovely. And she's an Adelaide writer, hurrah!

Knut Hamsun, Hunger

One of my challenge reads, and more fun than I thought it would be, after the front cover glibly declared that it was one of the most disturbing books in existence. A young Nowegian hovers on the brink of starvation in nineteenth century Oslo, to proud to do much about it. It was disturbing, and the main character was difficult to like (I think this was the point), but I did find myself warming to him towards the end. There's even the odd medieval reference, as he attempts to write a play set in the Middle Ages. It's been compared with Dosteovsky, but is a little one dimensional in comparison.

Randolph Stow, Tourmaline

Read the previous post. What can I say? Bruce Clunies Ross says he has the linguistic equivalent of perfect pitch. I agree.

Randolph Stow, Visitants

Not good plane reading, because the perspective and voice switches every page and a half. Disturbing and compelling, and better on a second reading, when you know what's going on. Set in the Trobriant Islands, it documents a gradual disintegration into madness against a backdrop of cargo cults and reports of alien star-ships.

A. J. Hassall, Strange Country: A Study of Randolph Stow

A thorough summary of everything Stow wrote, but rather bland, and ignores some of the most interesting aspects...

Nick Hornby, How to be Good

This one definitely is good plane reading. Deceptively light hearted, this is an essentially bleak appraisal of married life.

Mormonism for Dummies

I'm not about to convert, but I found this fascinating. Not sure about the regulation underwear, or whether God lives near a distant star, but did like the depiction of Eve as the brave, courageous founder of mortal life.

D.M. Cornish, Monster Blood Tattoo

Another Adelaide writer, who has created a world of monsters and sailing ships where things are not quite as they seem. Great fun. Can't wait for the rest of the series.

And now on with the term! Stay tuned, posts here might become a little more frequent...

Tourmaline

2007-08-16T09:04:00.001Z

I say we have a bitter heritage, but that is not to run it down. Tourmaline is the estate, and if I call it heritage I do not mean that we are free in it. More truly we are tenants; tenants of shanties rented from the wind, tenants of the sunstruck miles. Nevertheless I do not scorn Tourmaline. Even here there is something to be learned; even groping through the red wind, after the blinds of dust have clattered down, we discover the taste of perfunctory acts of brotherhood: warm, acidic, undemanding, fitting a derelict independence. Furthermore, I am not young.
There is no stretch of land more ancient than this. And so it is blunt and red and barren, littered with the fragments of broken mountains, flat, waterless. Spinifex grows here, but sere and yellow, and trees are rare, hardly to be called trees, some kind of myall with leaves starved to needles that fans out from the root and gives no shade.
At times, in the early morning, you would call this a gentle country. The new light softens it, tones flow a little, away from the stark forms. It is at dawn that the sons of Tourmaline feel for their hertage. Grey of dead wood, grey-green of leaves, set off a soil bright and tender, the tint of blood in water. Those are the colours of Tourmaline. There is a fourth, to the far west, the deep blue of hills barely climbing the horizon. But that is the colour of distance, and no part of Tourmaline, belonging more to the sky.
It is not the same country at five in the afternoon. That is the hardest time, when all the heat of the day rises, and every pebble glares, wounding the eyes, shortening the breath; the time when the practice of living is hardest to defend, and nothing seems easier than to cease, to become a stone, hot and still. At five in the afternoon there is one colour only, and that is brick-red, burning. After sunset, the blue dusk, and later the stars. The sky is the garden of Tourmaline.

More Stow. And, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful openings to any novel ever written.

The Suburbs of Hell

2007-08-16T08:21:00.000Z

This poor little blog has been neglected due to holidays and sickness and frantic catching-up on work, but as this novel is work, I thought I could justify five minutes of general musings. Another Randolph Stow, published in the early 80's. It's the last novel he published, in fact. Though I'm sure I'm not the only one hoping he has another one tucked away in his mind, just waiting for an excuse to be written. That's the way he does things. A bit like Mozart, he has the whole thing in his head before he starts. And then he just writes it out in four weeks flat. Pretty impressive if you ask me.

The Suburbs of Hell is a murder mystery set in a coastal town in East Anglia. I read it several years ago and remembered it very fondly, particularly the dialogue and the incredible way he catches accents and turns of phrase. Stow really listens to the way people talk, and he is a master craftsman. But I'll have to say, that although the novel is very impressive, I was a bit disappointed on a second reading. It is more like a short story than a novel, and you have to read it slowly. It is scary, and the characters he creates are wonderfully tangible, but you never discover a motive for the killings. I think I just don't quite get it. Maybe when I've written about it some more I'll change my mind about it. Stow says he intended it as a modern 'Pardoner's Tale', so maybe if I reread Chaucer's story it will give me some clues (it's a very hazy memory at the moment). It's also peppered with quotes from Beowulf about ominous monsters and imminent death. A very strange book. I'm just not quite sure what to make of it.

Girl Green as Elderflower

2007-07-19T10:00:00.000Z

For my entry on this novel, I had planned to cut and paste from the 2500 word conference paper I gave last week. I realised pretty quickly that it wasn't going to work. This realisation brought home just how differently I write for different audiences. A conference paper is different from a thesis chapter, and not only in length, just as a conference paper for a medievalist audience differs from a paper for a postcolonial studies audience, even if I am actually talking about the same thing (in the former, I have to explain why I'm talking about Australia, and in the latter, the Middle Ages). In a blog post I don't have to defend anything. Do I. What I like about blogging about novels, is that I can be as personal and effusive and anecdotal and cursory as I like. It's fun.

I really love Randolph Stow's Girl Green as Elderflower (1980). I love the title – the weight and balance of the words, the way they swing off each other. Stow is a pretty amazing poet, so it's not surprising that he can come up with good titles. I love the structure of the novel, the way the medieval stories are embedded in the modern narrative, and the complex ways in which they reflect each other. And I love Stow's prose, the seemingly effortless way he catches Suffolk voices.

Girl Green as Elderflower tells the story of the convalescence of Crispin Clare, as he recuperates in Suffolk from a traumatic experience – malaria and attempted suicide – in the Trobriant Islands. Stow himself had had a similar experience. As Clare slowly regains his health, he translates and rewrites 12th century Latin stories. These include the story of a fantastic sprite who was abandoned by her mother at birth and brought up by a witch, and longs for freedom, friendship, and her own family. He goes on to tell the story of the green children, as related by both Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh. According to these twelfth century sources, the two green children were discovered in Suffolk or East Anglia, and were taken in by locals. Initially refusing to eat anything, the children eventually feast happily on green beans, before growing accustomed to ordinary food and slowly losing their green colour. The boy eventually dies, but the girl grows up to be wanton and lascivious. When asked where they come from, they reply that they come from the 'land of St Martin', where 'all dwellers and things of that region were tinged with a green colour, and that they perceived no sun, but enjoyed a certain brightness such as happens after sunset.' In Stow's novel, the green girl explains: 'We are people of the land of the antipodes' (p. 127).

Being now out of the sun the children gazed up at the knight, the most imposing man in the room, wide-eyed, and the beauty of their eyes amazed him like some stone never seen before. They were not of one unmixed green, but flecked or lined with different greens, and in each child's eyes there was a different promise; for in the boy's there was, as it were, a misting of blue, while in the girl's was a haze of pale bird-breast brown.
Nor were their skins all of a single colour, but as there is variation with us (whose arms, for example, are darker above than below), so the skins of the green children verged in some places on the fairness of ladies. Noticing this, the knight thought first of the green of leeks, where that green meets white. But his second thought was of green elderbuds, at the point where they are transfigured into bloom (p.
118).

Clare's own alienation and displacement as an antipodean exile are reflected in the lives of the green children. Oh, there is so much to say about this book, and it will all go in my thesis. The medieval stories Clare tells are tragic, but the way they fit together, and refract the characters of his everyday life, is extraordinarily beautiful. Through the stories he tells, the strangeness of the Middle Ages enables Clare to face with courage the strangeness of the modern world.

The Wreath

2007-07-19T09:57:00.001Z

Yet another take on the Middle Ages. Noticing a theme yet? Sigrid Undset won the Noble Prize for her portrayals of the Norwegian Middle Ages in novels such as this one. And it is lovely. It is the first of a trilogy, and I can't wait to read the other two. I forgot to order them, though, so wait I must.

In some ways this is straightforward historical romance fiction. Young girl grows up on remote farm in medieval Norway, falls in love with a bit of a rogue, and accordingly compromises her chastity, which leads to a number of awkward situations. But the beautiful depictions of the places and seasons, the portrayals of the tensions in the society (between Christianity and Paganism, for example), and most of all, the finely drawn, heartfelt but often pained relationships, make this novel something special.

When I think about novels set in or drawing on the Middle Ages, I start by asking why? Why was the Middle Ages deemed necessary for this story? What does this particular representation of the Middle Ages reveal about the desires and assumptions of the author? I guess a fairly obvious question is how accurately is the Middle Ages represented, but this question is not always the most interesting one. In this case, I think Undset did a lot of careful research, and integrated it into the story sparingly but lovingly, though not being an expert on fourteenth-century Norway, I can't say for sure. Using a medieval setting can often serve nationalistic purposes (especially for countries which have medieval pasts). Perhaps there is a bit of this here. But my instinct says its main purpose is different.

I think Undset turned to the Middle Ages because it offered a template for a society with rich kinship systems, formal relationships and obligations, especially for women. It is these constraints, together with the threads of nature and religion, that shape the novel. While Kristin's illicit love affair drives the plot, her relationship with her father and with a wandering monk, and her parents' relationship, are actually the most interesting elements. Expectation, disappointment, affection, desire and loss are brought into painful relief in brief, intimate moments scattered throughout the narrative. Kristin's mother, Rangfrid, prays for her family at night: 'As her body gradually grew stiff with the cold, she set out once more on one of her familiar night journeys, trying to break a path to a peaceful home for her heart.'

Kristin's childhood vision of purity and brilliance proves difficult to sustain, but her first glimpse of a stained glass window remains one of the most beautiful scenes in the novel:

On the grey stone wall above her, Kristin saw strange, flickering specks of light, red as blood and yellow as ale, blue and brown and green. She wanted to look behind her, but the monk whispered, 'Don't turn around.' When they stood together high up on the planks, he gently turned her around, and Kristin saw a sight so glorious that it almost took her breath away.
Directly opposite her, on the south wall of the nave, stood a picture that glowed as if it had been made from nothing but glittering gemstones. The multicoloured specks of light on the wall came from rays emanating from the picture itself; she and the monk were standing in the midst of its radiance. Her hands were red, as if she had dipped them in wine; the monk's face seemed to be completely gilded, and from his dark cowl the colours of the picture were dimly reflected. She gave him a questioning glance, but he merely nodded and smiled.
It was like standing at a great distance and looking into heaven.

News From Nowhere

2007-07-15T09:25:00.000Z

Okay, time to catch up on the books I've been reading while my life has been in chaos. There's always time for reading. In the end, News From Nowhere (1890) by William Morris is really quite enchanting. It's utopian fiction, which I assumed predestined it to be fairly boring. Bad news is more exciting than good news, after all, especially where fiction is concerned. And there are boring passages, and places where it drags. But its vision of a future England as a heightened, perfected, communist style Fourteenth Century is actually very charming. Of course Morris is best known for his designs and soft furnishings, and there is plenty of emphasis in this novel on the value of handcraft and beauty. In this world, there is a surplus of wealth and time, so ordinary items like pipes can be intricately carved and encrusted with jewels, and then given away to whoever wants them. But there are sources of tension and plot-development, after all.

Firstly, there is the strangeness of this wonderful land, and the difficulty the narrator has in fitting in – he tries to pay for things, for example. And then there is the question of how the revolution took place, how England was able to regain its picturesque past. And finally, there is the fear that dogs the narrator that he will not be able to stay there, that the beautiful world will fade away, becoming no more than a dream.

I've been thinking lately about portrayals of the Middle Ages as childlike, and actually this is one of them. The characters of this neo-fourteenth-century utopian England have a childlike simplicity and delight in the natural world which the nineteenth-century narrator finds strange. The children are not locked in schools or any systems of formal education, but are allowed to develop naturally, according to their interests and curiosity. And the narrator is astonished to find a grand eating hall decorated by depictions of scenes from fairytales:

I smiled, and said: 'Well, I scarcely expected to find record of the Seven Swans and the King of the Golden Mountain and Faithful Henry, and such curious pleasant imaginations as Jacob Grimm got together from the childhood of the world, barely lingering even in his time: I should have thought you would have forgotten such childishness by this time.'

The old man smiled, and said nothing; but Dick turned rather red, and broke out:

'What do you mean, guest? I think them very beautiful, I mean not only the pictures, but the stories; and when we were children we used to imagine them going on in every wood-end, by the bight of every stream: every house in the fields was the Fairyland King's house to us...' (p. 130)

Later, the old man describes this new epoch as 'the second childhood of the world' (p. 162). It's worth noting that in Morris's vision, Leeds and Manchester have completely disappeared – no place for dark Satanic mills here!

Rain Poems

2007-07-06T10:50:00.000Z

because rain is on my mind...

Rain Prayer

Rain splashes, blesses
this alien garden this

walled green square these
tumbling flowers and pillars

and vines. It plinks splosh-drink
in the fishpond, wet

grey mist turns paving stones
to glass. I will stand,

let wet anoint me
among heavy leaves, let

weightlessness teach me
to float, passive,

tingling, exposed, loved
by the small cold kisses of air.

First Rain

for Liz WD

All afternoon
rain clamours happily
on the sky-light and the tin –
it wants to get in.
Green-earth rain-smell hurries
through the open door.
The garden trembles,
the ground gasps,
it wants to get in –
that feeling almost aching knowing
something will be resolved,
some cadence closed and opening
in one breath,
some door to everywhere –
it wants to get in.

But since the illness
(that beast who’s eating
your freedom, your muscles,
and half your mind)
all you want
is to walk again.
To sit yourself up,
to think clear thoughts
and speak words that make sense,
to wash the dishes again,
and do all these things even
without needing
to sleep
(like you are now)
when the blurred world
becomes safe and dark
when faltering thoughts
drift
and untangle
(incomprehensible still, but fluid).

The bed is kind and carries you
and the rain
is far away but closer than breathing
when it gets in.

Poetry

2007-06-18T06:49:00.000Z

Traveller asked me about my favourite poets. Well...

Poetry for me is about wonder. I was going to write that poetry for me is about language, but it is about more than this. What I love a poem to do is to prize open a space which had been closed, to turn a moment inside out. To shine with 'Heracletian fire', to borrow a phrase from one of my favourites. In the process, it can be joyful, or whimsical, or sad, or funny, but it needs to have this resonance to it, to make something inside you twist with recognition.

Poets who have made me catch my breath, or laugh out loud, or tremble inside, or smile, with awe and wonder: Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney, e.e. cummings, Wendy Cope, Sharon Oldes, Miroslav Holub, Zbignew Herbert, Carol Ann Duffy. I like some Anglo-Saxon poems too: Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Wonders of Creation. My favourite medieval poet is the Gawain-poet, or, more specifically, the Pearl-poet. No one knows this person's name - they are usually assumed to have written both these poems, but no one can be sure. Gawain and the Green Knight is the more famous, but Pearl is special. I'll write more about it some time. It's contemporary with Chaucer but a lot more difficult to understand, because it's alliterative, and in an obscure dialect. The language is completely amazing, like great heaps of shining jewels.

My Phd is about four Australian poets: Les Murray, Randolph Stow (who writes novels too), Francis Webb and Kevin Hart. I love all of them, that's why I chose to work with them. Other Australian poets I love include Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood. That's it for now. I haven't forgotten about Bookeywookey's poetry challenge - I'll get onto that soon.

Who are your favourite poets?

Book Awards Reading Challenge

2007-06-17T15:59:00.001Z

The idea is to read 12 prize winning books between 1 July 2007 and 30 June 2008. Click on the link above for more info. I'd been meaning to read many of these anyway:

The New Life, by Orhan Pamok (Nobel Prize - Turkey)
Hunger, by Knut Hamsun (Nobel Prize - Norway)
Kristin Lavransdatter I: The Wreath, by Sigrid Undset (Nobel Prize - Norway)
The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass (Nobel Prize - Germany)
Women as Lovers, by Elfriede Jelinek (Nobel Prize - Austria)
Omeros, by Derek Walcott (Nobel Prize - Saint Lucia)
Beloved, by Toni Morrison (Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize - United States)
The Secret River, by Kate Grenville (Commonwealth Writers' Prize)
Midnight's Children, Salmon Rushdie (Booker of Bookers)
The Book Thief, by Marcus Zusak (2007 Book Sense, Children's Lit)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon (Pulitzer Prize)
Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson (Pulitzer Prize)

It may be subject to change as whim takes me. I wondered about including more Nobel Prize winners - but many of them looked very depressing. I thought I'd give Women as Lovers a go as it's set in a remote Austrian village, something I'm quite familiar with. If I like The Wreath I'll probably read the rest of the trilogy.

Prize winning books previously read in 2007

The Hours, by Michael Cunningham (Pulitzer Prize)
Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee (Booker, Nobel Prize)
Randolph Stow novels (these have won a variety of Australian prizes)

Orlando

2007-06-16T09:32:00.000Z

Kandinsky, 'Winter Landscape' (1909)

Orlando, by Virginia Woolf (1928), is about time, desire, and poetry. It is about shifting identities, both personal and national. It is a fairytale with baroque details, a historical novel and a dream. When I read this blurb, how could I resist?

His longing for passion, adventure and fulfillment takes him out of his own time. Chasing a dream through the centuries, he bounds from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to the modern world. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey - a nobleman, traveller, writer? Man or . . . woman?

It didn't disappoint. At the beginning it reminded me a bit of Vathek (eighteenth-century orientalist fantasy), but it had a lighter touch than this (it is Woolf, after all). I love the way Woolf can weave a single sentence over a whole page, and you don't mind. I love the bit where England is hit by a huge frost and the Thames freezes over. The new king turns it into a pleasure park:

Lovers dallied upon divans spread with sables. Frozen roses fell in showers when the Queen and her ladies walked abroad. Coloured balloons hovered motionless in the air. Here and there burnt vast bonfires of cedar and oak, lavishly salted, so that the flames were of green, orange, and purple fire. But however fiercely they burnt, the heat was not enough to melt the ice which, though of singular transparency, was yet of the hardness of steel. So clear was it indeed that there could be seen, congealed at a depth of several feet, here a porpoise, there a flounder. Shoals of eels lay motionless in trance. . .

Isn't that great! Oh, there is a lot going on in this novel, and it builds to a wonderful, surprising, twisting climax, but it is easy to read, like someone telling you a fairy story. And it's very funny too. I'll leave you with this defense of the artistic temperament:

The true length of a person's life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute. For it is a difficult business - this time keeping; nothing more quickly disorders it than contact with any of the arts; and it may have been her love of poetry that was to blame for making Orlando lose her shopping list and start home without the sardines, the bath salts, or the boots.

The Story of an Unknown Church

2007-06-14T07:05:00.000Z

Last night I started reading a short story by William Morris, 'The Story of the Unknown Church'. I didn't get very far into it, because it was time to sleep. But a few sentences on the first page reminded me of one of my favourite places in all the world. The story is told in the voice of the master mason of a church built six hundred years ago, and destroyed two hundred years ago.

No one knows now even where it stood, only in this very autumn-tide, if you knew the place, you would see the heaps made by the earth-covered ruins heaving the yellow corn into glorious waves, so that the place where my church used to be is as beautiful now as when it stood in all its splendour.

The mason goes on to remember the church. He can only remember it clearly in autumn,

. . . yet it was beautiful in spring, too, when brown earth began to grow green: beautiful in summer, when the blue sky looked so much bluer, if you could hem a piece of it in between the new white carving; beautiful in the solemn starry nights, so solemn that it almost reached agony. . .

I too remember a church. The beautiful Bolton Abbey, in the Yorkshire Dales. I love walking around abbey ruins. Reivaulx Abbey and Whitby Abbey are also among my favourites. I love how crumbling stone arches frame the sky, how outlines of windows once decked with stained glass now show the dazzling patterns of cloud and sun. I love the ground, where the monks have walked and slept, and I love how the wind sweeps in. The sky seems an appropriate ceiling, and the shifting weather a worthy heir to the monks' prayers. But I always try to imagine how it would have been - the windows glassed, the arches roofed, the walls painted. There is a melancholy about such open, broken places.

I was thinking these very thoughts as I wandered the ruins of Bolton Abbey, thinking how wonderful it would be to see this place as it was then. And then I turned a corner, and found a door, opened it, and stepped inside.

The nave of Bolton Abbey is still in use. You can attend church services. There is a roof and windows, paintings on the walls. I hadn't known this, and it seemed like an apparition come to life, a fragment of history. The wall paintings aren't old ones, but they are lovely. Twining stems of lillies cover the back wall. This seemed right, too - nature brought inside. The abbey is set in the most wonderful grounds - there is a river with stepping-stones, and thousands of trees. You can walk along the river and then up into the dales - truly a magical place, 'as beautiful now as when it stood in all its splendour'.

Cross-posted at Northern Lights.

Why I read what I read

2007-06-11T14:48:00.000Z

It's a mix, really. But there are three guiding principles: to get to know my academic field (margins as well as centres); to read the sort of books I'd like to write; and finally, for pure pleasure.

The first category is rather broad. It includes postcolonial fiction, especially Australian, anything written in the Middle Ages (5th to 14th centuries, as well as Classical works which influenced these centuries), anything written after the Middle Ages (any time up till now) which refers in some way to the Middle Ages, and of course academic books and articles about these topics. I suppose I should be catching up on the theorists too.

The second category, books I'd like to write, is veering towards young adult fiction of a magical nature. That's sort of what I wrote the first time. I say sort of because I don't think it fits neatly into a genre, which is partly why it took so long to write - 10 years, on and off. I'm currently seeking an agent - a painstaking process. This time I'd like to write something with a neater structure - a structure I have in mind before I begin. Books I've read recently in this category include Lian Hearn (Gillian Rubenstein)'s marvellous The Nightingale Floor trilogy. It's an epic adventure set in a land reminiscent of medieval Japan. The story is gripping, the writing is beautiful, and I just loved them. There's actually a fourth one waiting for me in Leeds - I'll tell you all about it when I've read it.

The third category - pure pleasure - obviously overlaps with the first two. I love beautiful writing. I love a light touch. I love fantasy, of the Gaiman and Pullman kind. Of the novels I've written about so far on this blog, I've enjoyed The Hours the best.

So on my rather hazy to be read list are: 19th and early 20th century Australian literature (I haven't read much of this and feel that I should), Beloved, by Toni Morrison (often is mentioned in postcolonial contexts, and I've a feeling it's a great book), more Walter Scott (I read and loved Ivanhoe earlier this year), and oh, lots more. I want to read some Gail Jones. I want to start re-reading Chaucer, as my recollection of some of The Canterbury Tales is getting rather hazy. I've decided to bite the bullet and buy a second copy of The Riverside Chaucer (big lump of a thing that just will not fit in my bag and so must remain in Adelaide). Any recommendations? Why do you read what you read?

Les Murray

2007-06-05T07:08:00.000Z

Okay, in response to popular demand - the marvelous, magical Les. Maybe writing a bit about him here will spur me on to my worthy task of finishing my chapter. What I like about Les (and you can't help but call him this) is the brilliance of his language, and the way he builds and layers images, charging them with emotion and hope. He is Australia's most internationally acclaimed poet, and I think this has something to do with the huge volume of his output, as well as its quality, and the way he often consciously writes about Australia, especially country Australia, thus appealing to international markets who want to think about Australia in this way. And he's won lots of prizes. Above all this, however, is his poetry's utter brilliance. Not all of it - not all the time. But reading his work, you often come across a poem, a stanza or a phrase which makes you gasp, or flips you inside out, or makes something inside you sing, or just astounds you, and you know - here is no ordinary poet. This is something special.

His early poems are perhaps the most accessible. 'Spring Hail', 'Noonday Axeman', and 'An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow' are often taught in High School and are all incredible. Going on from there, must-reads include 'Equanimity', 'Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands', 'Shower', and 'The Quality of Sprawl' from The People's Otherworld, and the heartbreaking 'The Last Hellos' from Subhuman Redneck Poems. He has also written verse novels, and his recent Fredy Neptune is well worth a read. A special favourite of mine (because I grew up there) is 'Cave Divers Near Mt Gambier', where 'chenille-skinned people' descend into sinkholes:

Here in the first paddocks, where winter comes ashore,
mild duckweed ponds are skylights of a filled kingdom. . .

. . . Crystalline polyps

of their breathing blossom for a while, as they disturb
algal screens, extinct kangaroos, eels of liquorice colour

then, with the portable greening stars they carry under,
these vanish. . .

I love the way he describes the sink-holes as 'skylights of a filled kingdom' - that's just what they're like - these vast underwater caverns with such harmless looking entrances.

But I could go on forever. My chapter is already 16,000 words, and that's just on Les Murray and medievalism. For a concise introduction for my thoughts on this matter, you can look at Bard's Venerable Vernacular, an article based on a conference paper I gave in February, that was (to my great excitement) published in the Australian. My absolute favourite Les Murray poems, however, are in Translations From the Natural World. That's just what they are - voices of animals and plants, speaking. Such as Pigs: 'Us all on sore cement was we.' And 'Migratory':

I am the nest that comes and goes,
I am the egg that isn't now
I am the beach, the food in sand,
the shade with shells and the shade with sticks.

In this collection Murray does really amazing things with language, tense, grammar and perspective. The 'Cockspur Bush' says: 'I am lived. I am died.' Murray records the voices of bats in Bats' Ultrasound:

ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array,
err, yaw, row, wry - aura our orrery,
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.

When I discovered this stanza I nearly died of amazement. And I really love 'Possum's Nocturnal Day', which describes the possum's exciting nocturnal adventures, then ends:

but then, despite foliage,
my cool nickel daytime bleaches into light
and loses me the forest genes' infinite air of sprung holds.
My eyes all hurt branchings
I curl up in my charcoal trunk of night
and dream a welling pictureless encouragment
that tides from far but is in arrival me
and my world, since nothing is apart enough for language.

New Books

2007-06-02T20:26:00.000Z

I just arrived in Norway with a backpack stuffed full of library books and not as many clothes as I had hoped to fit in. Before I got here, I indulged in a bit of on-line book buying. Not all of them managed to fit in the backpack (or even arrived before I left), but here's what I have to look forward to:

Monster Blood Tattoo, by D. M. Cornish (last time I was in Adelaide all my friends were raving about this new Adelaide writer. Unfortunately it's a big heavy hardback so I'll have to wait till I get back to Leeds before I read it.)
News From Nowhere and Other Writings, by William Morris
Hunger, by Knut Hamsun (apparently a Norwegian classic along the lines of Dostoevsky, but more depressing - better make sure I'm in a cosy place before I read it)
Kristin Lavransdatter I: The Wreath, by Sigrid Undset (a Norwegian novel set in the Middle Ages! When I came across a mention to this book on Books Are My Superpower, how could I resist! Unfortunately this one didn't arrived till after I'd left)
The Green Knight, by Iris Murdoch (yep, more medieval references)

At the moment I'd reading Orlando by Virginia Woolf, and writing a thesis chapter on Les Murray, so maybe I'll post a bit about him, too.

Oh, and here's a link to the blogroll game - good fun if you want to meet other book-bloggers!

The Hours

2007-05-31T17:16:00.000Z

The Hours, by Michael Cunningham, is one of those rare, glittery constructions which make you gasp, and sigh, and sets a ribbon of delight twisting inside you. I mean - I loved it. It's built around Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dallaway, so you need to read this first. But when I say built, I don't mean roughly or heavily. It is like a river, and a city made of light, and the quick-pulsing heart of a small bird. It is connected to Mrs D so lightly, so elegantly, so deeply and so gently that it made me think of all these things.

When I read the first couple of pages I had reservations. So, I thought, he's picked up the rhythm and the sentence structure from Mrs D and transplanted it into the 1990's. Big deal. But two more pages in, and I was lost in the beauty of the refractions, and the way he has formed something entirely new from an engagement with the older text. Incredible.

The novel, set on a single day, oscillates between three time-frames: Virginia Woolf's 1920's Richmond, as she begins to write Mrs Dallaway; Laura Brown's stifling life as a housewife in 1940's Los Angeles, as she longs to sneak away and read Mrs Dallaway; and Clarissa's 1990's New York, as she buys flowers and prepares a party for a dying friend. Clarissa's name and life echo Mrs Dallaway, and there are subtle refractions which make you gasp with recognition and surprise, almost like deja vu.

I read Mrs Dallaway last year, as I was tutoring on the Reading Prose module for first year English students at the University of Leeds. It is a beautiful book, a perfect book; I enjoyed every page. I love Mrs Dallaway, I feel like I've met her somewhere. She is ordinary but extraordinary as well. I think my students had trouble coming to terms with this, and saw her as shallow or a victim. I wonder if, for most people, Woolf is more accessible when you are a little older. I tried Towards the Lighthouse when I was 18 and got nowhere with it.

I haven't seen the film of The Hours, but I guess I will at some point. I didn't see it when it first came out, because a few people told me it wasn't very good, though I've since heard otherwise. It's probably a good thing, because I hadn't read Mrs D at that point, and it was lovely to read The Hours without knowing exactly how it was going to work.

Writing a novel always involves making choices, limiting possibilities, taking this path instead of that one. The Hours went back to Mrs Dallaway and teased out some of the threads not followed, the roads not taken. When I finished it, I thought - yes, this is the best way to respond to literature! Not writing essays or theses, but making a new story, making it live again. It made me want to run out and get hold of everything Cunningham has ever written. I'm in Norway now, so that will have to wait. But it won't stop me thinking of rivers, and glittery cities, and the quick-beating hearts of birds.

Disgrace

2007-05-31T13:48:00.000Z

This is a very good book - enjoyable to read, haunting, strange, unsettling, inconclusive but satisfying. This is the third book I have read by J.M. Coetzee and it is definitely my favourite. The other two, Youth and The Master of St Petersburg, seem thin and lopsided in comparison (I was never predisposed to like The Master of St Petersburg, however, as I was a Dostoevsky worshiper when I read it, and it doesn't paint a very flattering portrait of him). In contrast, the characters of Disgrace are human, flawed, warm, embracing contradictions. The novel, set in post-apartheid South Africa, is perfectly balanced between three voices - the disgraced academic, his stubborn and vulnerable daughter, and the silent hurt of wounded, unwanted animals. A peculiar combination, but the voices weave together and create a curious music of degradation, loss and hope, much like the opera that the academic, David Lurie, tries to write about Byron's lamenting mistress. Touching on grandeur, but horribly comic. The sense I am left with is that of creeping very close to the edge of everything - a blank white mist of fog, unbearably sad - and looking at it coolly, calmly, and stroking it.

Not again!

2007-05-24T21:06:00.000Z

Yep, another meme. I've been tagged by Literary Acquisitionist. But this one's simple: turn to page 161 of the book closest to you (no cheating) and copy out the fifth full sentence. Then tag three people. The book closest to me happens to be Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern, by the marvelous Stephanie Trigg. For a less random sample of her writing, check out her wonderful blog.

His primary institutional affiliation was with the Working Men's College in London, founded by J. M. Ludlow and C. E. Maurice in 1854, where he taught English grammar and literature and where he spent much of his time organizing its social program.

You'll never guess who she's talking about here. I've included a picture of The Riverside Chaucer, because, aside from the fact that it's very pretty, Trigg opens her book with a fascinating discussion of this image.

And I'm tagging:

Eva at A Striped Armchair
Superfast at Reading is my Superpower
Dancin' Fool at In the Pink

Naughty Squirrels

2007-05-23T22:09:00.001Z

You probably can't see it, but the woman at the bottom of the page of this fourteenth-century psalter is cradling a squirrel. This may not be as innocent as it initially appears. I've been reading a fascinating book called Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, by Michael Camille (1992). He writes:

When we look at such pages today, we are apt to see them as charming and view the animal 'vignettes', as they are often, erroneously, called, as humorous, even childlike. Nothing could be further from their purpose. . . In the fabliau 'De l'Escuirel', a young girl asks 'What's that?' on seeing the male member for the first time. Told that it is a squirrel, she immediately wants to hold it in her hands. In this naming game desire is encoded in innocent signs that are the girl's undoing (p. 38).

One of Camille's main points is that the often bizarre, offensive and strange images on the edges of medieval manuscripts are not incidental to the text, but often arise from conscious word-play, a turning-upside-down of the text. I do love how in the Middle Ages everything is thrown in together in situations like this. But I won't quote you any more - don't want this to get scholarly! Just wanted to show you what the scholars are getting up to. Medieval obscenities have been a popular topic lately. I recently heard a paper on penises in Norse Sagas (not very pretty, lots of forced castration). And Medieval Obscenities is the title of a recent book edited by one of my old lecturers at York, Nicola McDonald. She found a picture of some very naughty nuns to go on the cover.

The Man who was Thursday

2007-05-22T21:23:00.000Z

This novel by G.K. Chesterton (1908) is a very curious beast! It shifts tone several times, especially towards the end, but it seems to work. It reminds me, quite a lot, of a Jeffrey Smart painting - one of the most extraordinary things about it is the way it portrays light on landscapes and street scenes, mainly London. It's daring, strange, glowing. I really like it. There's a narrative trick in it, which Chesterton uses again and again, but I got taken in by it every time because the writing is so good that you just go along with it. In some ways it's like one of C.S. Lewis's science fiction novels, but with a much tighter structure.

The premise is a policeman trying to fight a terrifying council of anarchists, but the novel is about a lot more than this, exploring the nature of reality and the concept of God in a chaotic, brutal world. It is subtitled 'A Nightmare', and although its straight-forward prose makes you forget this at times, it does switch bizarrely between peaceful illuminated clarity and frightening nightmarish episodes, in a way reminiscent of dreams. Here are some of the passages that stood out for me (there were several on every page, it was hard to choose):

Under the white fog of snow high up in the heaven the whole atmosphere of the city was turned to a very queer kind of green twilight, as of men under the sea.

By this time the afternoon sun was slanting westward, and by its rays Syme could see the sturdy figure of the old innkeeper growing smaller and smaller, but still standing and looking after them quite silently, the sunshine in his silver hair.

... Syme was a type of the poet who seeks always to make the light in special shapes, to split it up into sun and star. The philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite. For him the great moment is not the creation of light, but the creation of the sun and the moon.

And here's something Chesterton wrote about it in 1936, published in an article the day before he died:

It was not intended to describe the real world as it was, or as I thought it was, even when my thoughts were considerably less settled than they are now. It was intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date; with just a gleam of hope in some double meaning of the doubt, which even the pessimists felt in some fitful fashion.

What's curious here is that it's actually more interesting to try to describe how people feel about the world, rather than vainly seek to describe it as it really is. In any case, the way people feel about the world is how the world is for them.

On another note - there must have been conferences about London in literature - I would love to go to one! There are so many books about London, showing it in so many different lights.

Eight Things

2007-05-19T19:30:00.000Z

Eva at A Striped Armchair tagged for the eight things meme! It's been doing the rounds of the book blogs. So, here's my list.

Colourful teacups, socks and cushions make me happy.
Everything stops for Dr. Who.
I can't spell
I learnt to paraglide in Austria when I didn't speak German (although I learnt the words for straight ahead, left, right, and brake very quickly)
Things I miss about Australia: sunshine, fruchocs, Farmers Union Iced Coffee, sandy beaches, my family, rosellas, magpies in the morning, the smell of gum trees
My life in cats: Che Che (the panda cat, long-suffering); Thistledown (fluffy, soppy, blue-grey); Merlin (huge chocolate Burmese, dangerous and beautiful); Mr Cat (inquisitive, ingenious, the gentleman cat)
St Petersburg, Stockholm, Zurich and Berlin are my favourite European cities. And of course York.
Radioactive Man is the best

And here are the people I'm tagging:

Radioactive Man at Radioactive Man
Richard, at Postcards from Richard
Jess, at This Delicious Solitude
Fifi, at Strange Fruit
Jordan, at clash of the bull and the frog
Ilse, at Fraulein Ilse's Blog
Anne, Emily and Charlotte at Ask the Bronte Sisters
Aquisitionist at Literary Aquisitionist

From bookworm to butterfly

2007-05-11T22:44:00.000Z

The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Melanie Mall and the Pie in the Sky. John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat. Hundreds of fairytales. And a good dose of A.A. Milne, especially King John, who longs for 'a big, red India-rubber ball'. From these humble beginnings, we bravely set forth to destinations unknown.

Pippi Long-stocking and The Hobbit - undisputed stars of the primary school years. Until the unsuspecting bookworm is plucked from her cosy hole and dropped in a country town, burrowing for cover in the fat, welcoming, wonderful Lord of the Rings. This proves a good companion for six long years, but there is space for other travelers on the road: Chaim Potok, Susan Cooper, David Malouf. At the end of year 12 she re-reads TLOTR in three days straight, and worries that she loves it more than God.

At University the green leaves of the forest beckon. Leaving Tolkien behind, the intrepid bookworm flirts with Italo Calvino before munching on happily in a much bigger world: Jane Eyre, James Joyce, Eliot - both T.S. and George, Chaucer, Malory, Sir Gawain, Tim Winton, and a heavy, heady dose of Dostoevsky. Bliss.

After four years, bookworm emerges, bewildered, squinting at the light. Finds a job that lets her read at night. Sweeping floors, pushing wheelchairs and wiping bottoms by day, the bookworm gorges sweetly by night: War and Peace, Middlemarch, everything Neil Gaiman ever wrote. And slowly, she hatches the best plan yet.

One long snooze, and the bookworm sprouts wings, big ones. It's off to England, to read the old books in the old languages. And the shiny new butterfly finds more than she'd hoped. Yes - there's Ovid and Virgil, Augustine, Dante, the glittery Pearl, Norse Sagas and Anglo-Saxon poems like heavy gold rings. But there's also Kurt Vonnegut, Milan Kundera, Virginia Woolf, Philip Roth, Umberto Eco and the magical Philip Pullman. Here are fields, broad and bright, their new colours flashing in the sun.

New Books

2007-05-10T21:54:00.000Z

I went to the library today but there were no seats due to exams (lots of 18-21 year olds shuffling papers and surreptitiously checking their mobile phones), so I ended up in the university bookshop instead. Oops. And they had 25% off fiction. So I bought:

Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee
Orlando, by Virginia Woolf
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham
The New Life, by Orhan Pamuk

And then I ran very fast so I didn't buy a couple of novels by Simon Armitage and Brick Lane by Monica Ali. Got to stop somewhere. I'm quite excited about The New Life cos of the medievalist references (to Dante's Vita Nuova) - I've read a paper about it somewhere. The justification was to cheer myself up for feeling a bit down about my PhD. Update - the Randolph Stow fest can slow down a bit cos I still need to keep working on my Les Murray chapter. I'm also part way into The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton, so p'raps I'll get back to that.

The Merry-go-round in the Sea

2007-05-10T09:03:00.001Z

Back to Stow. This one is lovely. I read it a long time ago and had forgotten almost everything about it. It's just so much fun to read - the sounds, the smells, the sorts of things a child would notice. It made me remember a big tree in my Aunt's garden that's covered in these purple berry things, which also used to cover us. Here's a sample:

In every season the boy exalted in his senses, in his body. He exulted in the heavy sweetness of jonquils and in the frail scent of tomato leaves; in the harsh rasp of leaves on his skin as he climbed a figtree, and in the waxy dusty smoothness of the minute datepalm flowers; in the cold sea of early morning, and in the warm sea under the rain. He loved the rough taste of gumleaves and the sweetness in tecoma flowers; the red jewels in pomegranates, and the shells of rainbow beetles in the grey tuart bark (p. 125).

It's also very sad, because there's the second world war going on in the background, a long way away, and the narrator's dear cousin Rick is a prisoner of war. He comes home, but never really gets over it. He doesn't belong any more. Apart from some delightful portrayals of aging aunts and grandmothers, the book is very masculine, and there's a tension in some of the relationships linked with Rick's huge grief. It reminded me of the end of my favourite poem by Stow, 'Ishmael':

- and what have I to leave, but this encumbering
tenderness, like gear forever unclaimed.

Gives me shivers every time. The book's also very funny. Here's something for all you Brits who tease us for being colonial:

Nobody wanted to be a Pommy. Pommies might be gallant in wartime, but they had an unfortunate ancestry. They were descended from all the people who had declined to found America and Canada and South Africa and New Zealand and Australia. They were born non-pioneers (p. 224).

Heh.

Asleep in a book

2007-05-09T22:11:00.000Z

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

2007-05-07T15:14:00.000Z

I interrupt the Randolph Stow fest to bring you a little Milan Kundera. I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being last weekend, and found it very beautiful. The first time I tried to read it, I read the first hundred pages then gave it up in disgust. This was five years ago. The heartless promiscuity, combined with the detached treatment of the characters, and a particularly shocking image of the former, were enough to make me put it down. I won't repeat that image here, it's pretty revolting (though, as I now see, also quite amusing).

I tried again because it's the favourite novel of many people I respect, and also because I have read and enjoyed some of his other novels. This time, I wasn't surprised that so many people love it. I think it is partly the way it combines lightness and playfulness with an awareness of the darker sides of human nature, and its fragility. There is something lovely about its flawed, irresistible love story. The title refers to the fleeting nature of life in this world - its impermanence, its randomness, the way we build meaning into our lives by interpreting coincidence. Kundera asks: which is better, lightness or heaviness?

Set against the backdrop of the 1968 Russian invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia, it focuses on ordinary people trying to go about their lives. It's quite scathing about the Western tendency to make heroes of Czechs. What is beautiful about it is the way it combines philosophical detachment with real gentleness. The characters are constructions to explore and embody ideas - Kundera points this out and doesn't pretend otherwise. But he is gentle with them. He shows how fragile and ridiculous it is to build a life on coincidence, but then he also shows how beautiful it is, and how it is practically impossible to do anything else.

I can't quote you anything from it because Michael's copy (which I read) is in Norway, and my copy (which I abandoned) is in Adelaide, and the usually wonderful Brotherton library here in Leeds inexplicably doesn't have one. Which brings me to an aside: why is it almost impossible to study literature in translation in Australian and English universities?

But back to Kundera. I also recently read and enjoyed Ignorance, which is all about nostalgia for one's language and ones homeland, and Slowness, which isn't quite as successful. These two more recent novels were originally written in French while his earlier works were written in Czech. Three years ago I read Immortality, which I still love (and not just because I read it in the Museum Gardens in York in the sunshine with an icecream, and it had been recommended by my soon-to-be boyfriend, which gave it an urgent and beautiful aura). Immortality, set in Paris, is along the same lines as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but is even more playful and exuberant. It meditates on (among other things) the immortality of gestures. Kundera is something special. I am glad to have discovered him.

The Bystander

2007-05-05T21:17:00.001Z

Randolph Stow, 1957. The Bystander tells the fortunes of the descendants of the characters from A Haunted Land, 45 years on. The land is still haunted, the farms are crumbling, the characters barren. The interesting thing about it is that any one of the characters could be the 'bystander' of the title. As usual for Stow, everything goes spectacularly wrong. One of the main characters is mentally disabled, which is also a theme of recurrent interest for Stow. Reworked versions of the characters turn up in the much more stylized later novel, Girl Green as Elderflower.

Stow himself has dismissed his early works, no longer wanting to be associated with them. I can see why. While the prose is clear, fluid and more than competent, it does not glitter like graphite, as it does in his later works. They are also more conventionally and hazily structured. I'm glad I've read it, and it's interesting to see the same characters and themes reoccurring, but I'm most looking forward to rereading the later books. When I get to Tourmaline, I'm going to quote for you the most beautiful opening paragraph I've ever read.

A Haunted Land

2007-05-04T08:28:00.000Z

I'm afraid this blog is about to begin with a bit of a Randolph Stow fest, as I am beginning a thesis chapter on him and reading, or rereading, everything I can get my hands on. But a Randolph Stow fest is not a bad thing, as I think he is one of Australia's best, and most neglected, writers. His work was introduced to me by the lovely Marianne Mackintosh, and I am very grateful. A Western Australian, Stow made a huge impression on the Australian literary scene as a young prodigy in the 1950s, but his production rate slowed down over the years as he didn't want to publish just for the sake of it. He left Australia long ago and now lives a reclusive life in East Anglia. In the past he has taught at both Adelaide (my old University) and Leeds (my current one).

A Haunted Land (1956) is not as good as his later novels, but as it was published when he was only 21, it is pretty impressive. It is the story of an intense, insular family on a remote farm in Western Australia. It's kind of a cross between Voss and Brideshead Revisited. The Australian landscape is evoked deftly, but serves as a background for the real story of grief, charisma, madness and destruction centred around the father Andrew Maguire. This is an early example of Stow's fascination with magnetic figures who both enchant and damage those around them, which will be explored to a frightening intensity in Tourmaline.

The Little Book Room

2007-05-02T15:11:00.000Z

I read The Little Book Room back in the days when books didn't have authors but were magical objects that somehow crossed from other worlds into this one. It was red, and worn, and smelled of old paper. It was a collection of stories, and the first story was about a special room, lined with books. I wanted that room, I wanted to be there. And then, miraculously, the book became the room. I have not seen this book since I was a child, but some of the stories are still precious to me. One of them was about a beautiful glass Christmas tree. In anther, a king had to go on an adventure to find a bride. His kingdom was bordered by a tall, thick hedge, beyond which was wasteland. His knights would jump over the hedge on their horses, and there was nothing there. But the children, who crawled under the hedge, knew that on the other side there was a magical forest. And one day, the king crawled under the hedge, and his adventures began.

The book was partly about these magnificent stories, and partly about the pleasure of reading them. That's what this is about too. Books encountered and remembered. Not just books but the spaces they exist in. You're welcome to join me, under the hedge.

The Little Book Room

Another Move

My other June reads

The Book Thief

My Antonia

Baudolino

The New Life

The Penguin Book of Norse Myths

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

The Secret River

The Black Prince

The Green Knight

Beowulf

The Book of Illusions

When She Was Good

Kristin Lavransdatter III: The Cross

Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife

New Books

Other Reading

The Solid Mandala

Seasons and Windows

Speaking of Yevtushenko

Book meme

Book Soup

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living

The Book of Lost Things

More on Midnite

Midnite

Summer Reading

Tourmaline

The Suburbs of Hell

Girl Green as Elderflower

The Wreath

News From Nowhere

Rain Poems

Poetry

Book Awards Reading Challenge

Orlando

The Story of an Unknown Church

Why I read what I read

Les Murray

New Books

The Hours

Disgrace

Not again!

Naughty Squirrels

The Man who was Thursday

Eight Things

From bookworm to butterfly

New Books

The Merry-go-round in the Sea

Asleep in a book

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Bystander

A Haunted Land

The Little Book Room