2000s

Tinkers by Paul Harding – #NovNov Day 13

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Another late post today, because I was out this evening – seeing the film Early Summer – but today I read 2009’s Tinkers by Paul Harding, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. I bought it in 2012, possibly because of the enthusiastic quote from Marilynne Robinson on the back. The novel opens:

George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.

Great opening line, isn’t it? From here, we occasionally go back to the hospital bed and the disorienting world of the present – but George is much more at home in the past, by now. And not only his past. As he lies there, memory and invention swirl together as the narrative takes us into his past and into his father’s. George is a watch-mender, and the story feels like taking apart a watch – tinkering with it, and finding out how every small part works.

His own upbringing was in poverty, with an unreliable mother and a father who abandoned the family one day. Before this, the father’s most unpredictable quality was his seizures. In an era before any medication to help these, they were both frequent and alarming – though George only witnessed one once.

One of the unusual things about Tinkers is how it wanders in and out of first and third person. It all seems to stem from George’s memory, but sometimes we are in the first person of Howard’s (his father) narrative, seeing things that George couldn’t possibly have witnessed.

He had spoken no words to himself. No conscious thought precipitated his action, as if spending the whole day contemplating what he was going to do, had already done by the time he fitted words to the actions, which was to ride past the kitchen window that framed his family and leafed them in its gold light, would have diluted his resolve, would have led him to turn himself over to a fate that, had he thought about it, he would have accepted rather than acknowledge its implications. He could not have let himself be witness to the simultaneity of his wife passing him a plate of chicken or a basket of hot bread as she worked out her plans to have him taken away. Howard had assumed that their silence over his fits, over everything, stood for his gratefulness to her and her loyalty to him. He had assumed their silence was one of kindness offered and accepted.

It works because of the almost dreamlike ventures into memory that are the premise of the novella. And I particularly enjoyed when another piece of the puzzle was added, and we see Howard’s relationship with his own father – an other-worldly minister, not realising when his mind starts to depart. I can see why Marilynne Robinson liked the novel; in its structure, it has elements of Gilead and the legacy that can be passed through generations of experience.

The only bits that didn’t work quite so well for me were where it goes too stream of consciousness, and entire pages would be single paragraphs. And there was a collage-y feel at times, with quotes from other places – possibly fabricated, I’m not sure. Some on watchmaking worked well, but I had no idea what was going on with the sections on Borealis, which are sort of numbered entries of poetic experiences. Mystifying.

All in all, another Novellas in November success. I think Harding’s writing suffers a little in comparison to Robinson’s in a similar line, but it’s hardly a far comparison as Robinson is superlatively good at this. I still really liked Tinkers a lot, and would happily re-read it.

Small Wonder: Essays by Barbara Kingsolver

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As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve just read Small Wonder, a collection of essays by Barbara Kingsolver published in 2002, some or all of them gathered from the places they’d been published in the previous few years. It is my first encounter with Kingsolver’s own, non-fictional voice – and yet I somehow felt that I would have recognised it anywhere. It’s exactly the sort of voice you’d expect from the author of her novels – and many of the same themes, of ecology, family, power, and love.

Much of her writing is political – with a small-p, or at least a medium-sized one. The great dividing line in the essays is, of course, 9/11. She is clearly writing in a world still reeling, but she courageously looks beyond the shock and grief – and questions what the response says about the American psyche. What the correct way for the average person to respond is – not dictating how someone should respond emotionally, perhaps, but asking what a proportionate and wise collective response might be. She received death threats for her views (and writes a brilliant chapter on how people have claimed the flag and ‘being American’ for a specific viewpoint – which certainly hasn’t changed). How brave of her to write something like this in 2002:

The American moral high ground can’t possibly be an isolated mountaintop from which we refuse to learn anything at all to protect ourselves from monstrous losses. It is critical here to distinguish between innocence and naïveté: the innocent do not deserve to be violated, but only the naive refuse to think about the origins of the violence. A nation that seems to believe so powerfully in retaliation cannot flatly refuse to look at the world in terms of cause and effect. The rage and fury of this world have not notably lashed out at Canada (the nation that takes best care of its citizens), or Finland (the most literate), or Brazil or Costa Rica (among the most biodiverse). Neither have they tried to strike down our redwood forests or the fields of waving grain. Striving to cut us most deeply, they felled the towers that seemed to claim we buy and sell the world.

If she is measured and thoughtful in her writings on politics, perhaps aware of the incendiary resposnes, Kingsolver allows herself to be fiercer when it comes to ecology. Readers of Prodigal Summer won’t be surprised. It is still measured, but it feels like anger that has been distilled into eloquence. I didn’t note down any of the quotes, but she is incredulous about people’s wilful ignorance about the limited resources we are taking from the earth.

Nature is a key theme in Small Wonder, whether macro or micro. She writes beautifully about a hummingbird constructing her nest. And I also loved this, on the joy of living immersed in nature (sidenote, also my first introduction to the American spelling of artefact):

I have come to depend on these places where I live and work. I’ve grown accustomed to looking up from the page and letting my eyes relax on a landscape upon which no human artifact intrudes. No steel, pavement, or streetlights, no architecture lovely or otherwise, no works of public art or private enterprise – no hominid agenda. I consider myself lucky beyond words to be able to go to work every morning with something like a wilderness at my elbow. In the way of so-called worldly things, I can’t seem to muster a desire for cellular phones or cable TV or to drive anything flashier than a dirt-colored sedan older than the combined ages of my children. My tastes are much more extreme: I want wood-thrush poetry. I want mountains.

This is not the most personal collection of essays (though one certainly gets to know her as a person), but I did also love those that dealt with her life. There are some about her writing career, some about her love of books, and some about her family. My favourite two essays in the collection were back-to-back – ‘Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen’ and ‘Letter to My Mother’. They are simultaneously specific and universal. Her emotional restraint in them somehow makes them feel all the deeper – like when someone is trying to hold back tears.

The structure of her essays does become slightly samey, when read all in a row. She starts from a specific anecdote and widens to the general – not an unusual structure for an essay, of course, but I began to wait for the story about her daughter’s homework, or the conversation she heard in a shop, or reporting a weird story she’d read in a newspaper, to widen out into commentary on a much broader political, social, or environmental topic. And perhaps I preferred her on the detail – on the anecdote, the small moment – than on the rallying cry. The latter is necessary, but it is the former where her gift for precision truly shines. And I think that is my taste for any essay, really. The beautiful, revealing, surprising detail.

It’s interesting to read this collection from a distance of almost two decades. While the issues haven’t changed all that much, popular stances have. Kingsolver’s passionate cries on behalf of the environment are almost mainstream now. Her awareness of global need, and the power and responsibility held by the US, became central discussion topics post-9/11 and never really went away – but it is chilling to read about the Taliban then, and see what’s happening now. And with the eyes of a reader in 2021, Kingsolver’s essays that mention political division seem almost naive. There’s an area that has certainly got worse. I wonder if she has written an essay on Trump and his disciples.

In some ways, reading a collection from 20 years ago can feel more dated than from 100 years ago, because it is in living memory. Her comments on the ubiquity of mobile phones, for instance, read like someone in 1920 complaining of the speed of the infrequent 15-mph cars outside their window. But if she was often a voice in the wilderness, and would still be ignored by a significant section of the flag-wielding, climate-change-denying political spectrum, it does feel like many of her concerns have become much more widely held. The immediacy of these essays has been lost, but the distance also gives perspective to which issues still need to be discussed – which have got better, which worse, and which (like the hummingbird’s nest-building) exist as curiously eternal moments in the midst of the shifting topics of the day.

Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham

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If you click that ‘Cunningham’ tag above, you’ll see how much I love his writing. He is one of my favourite living writers, and I am getting unsettlingly close to having read everything he has published so far – one of the ones I hadn’t raced towards is 2005’s Specimen Days, and the reason is that it takes me very out of my comfort zones.

It’s a novel of three periods – much like Cunningham’s best-known book, The Hours, though in Specimen Days the periods do not interweave. Rather, there are about a hundred pages devoted to each – New York in the nineteenth-century, in a contemporary world still rocked by 9/11, and in a sci-fi future that I don’t remember the exact dates of. In each period are Simon, Catherine, and Lucas (or close variations on those names). They have different relationships in each section and, indeed, only two of them are alive in the first and second sections. It’s an intriguing and inventive premise – but did it work?

In the first period, Lucas is a young teenager starting work at a metalworks – taking over from his brother, Simon, who was killed in an accident with one of the machines. He has to go to earn money for his parents, but also wants to give some of it to Catherine – the woman who was going to marry Simon, and with whom Lucas has an uncertain relationship. Lucas is devoted; Catherine is a little unnerved, affectionate, troubled. It doesn’t help that Lucas can only communicate in Walt Whitman quotes, most of the time.

Walt Whitman is one of the most prominent connections between the sections. He actually appears as a character, briefly, in the first section – but, in each, there is a character who speaks chiefly in quotes from his poetry. In the first it is Lucas; in the second it is a child phoning in warnings about bombings (more on that soon); in the third it’s a robot. I was expecting more links and overlaps between the sections, but Cunningham doesn’t play overly with this conceit – so it’s Whitman’s words that form the threads between the worlds. Which would probably mean more to someone who had read some Whitman, which I have never done… I believe Leaves of Grass is still a text most high schoolers study in America, but Whitman is much less read here in the UK and I suspect I lost some of the significance that was intended.

Anyway, back to the 19th century. Historical fiction is a tricky genre for me, but I loved how Cunningham took us into Lucas’s world – with an accurate range of expression from an uneducated teenager in the midst of shocking grief. His job in the factory is simply putting metal plates into a machine to be stamped, and Cunningham manages to convey the almost dehumanising monotony of this in, paradoxically, a way that is captivating to read.

He began to see that the days at the works were so long, so entirely composed of the one act, performed over and over and over again, that they made of themselves a world within the world, and that those who lived in that world, all the men of the works, lived primarily there and paid brief visits to the other world, where they ate and rested and made ready to return again. The men of the works had relinquished their citizenship; they had immigrated to the works as his parents had immigrated to New York from County Kerry. Their former lives were dreams they had each night, from which they awakened each morning at the works.

Man, Cunningham is good.

My favourite of the three sections, unsurprisingly, was the central, contemporary section. Catherine is now Cat, who works as the receiver of calls to the police that might pose plausible threats. Most of the calls she gets are from mentally unwell people who pose no real threat – who think their TV is spying on them, or that they are psychic, and so forth.

If the caller suggests that somebody is making them do something, then she has to ‘red tag’ the call, and elevate it to a different team – because if somebody else is instructing them, whether that person is real or not, then the threat becomes much more credible. In the call she receives from a young boy, she doesn’t red-tag when he says ‘I wasn’t supposed to call’.

It may or may not have made a difference – but not long afterwards, a politician is murdered when a boy hugs him and detonates a bomb. They spend some time trying to work out a connection, but it may be more unsettling: random attacks. Then Cat begins to get mysterious phonecalls from another boy who claims to be ‘in the family’ with the first caller.

In this period, Simon is Cat’s rich, obnoxious boyfriend. I shan’t spoil who Lucas is, but it’s a great twist. Cunningham is so good at the dynamics among a group of people, and I was totally absorbed in this contemporary world. He doesn’t need high stakes to make a narrative compelling, but they added something a little unusual here – and the final words of this section will stay with me for a long time.

And then the third section… Reader, I tried. I really did. But I simply have a brain block when it comes to a world of robots and invading aliens and whatnot. I never really knew what was going on, who was human and who was programmed or what the aliens were up to, and I ended up skim-reading it. I don’t really have anything to say, except I’m sure the problem was with me rather than Cunningham.

So it was definitely a curate’s egg for me. I will try anything Cunningham writes, but even a prose stylist as beguilingly good as him couldn’t get me past my own prejudices – or, rather, my own stumbling blocks. If you share mine, then I still recommend you read the first two thirds of this novel. And if you don’t share mine, then you’ll doubtless find a lot to love right to the final page.

Cunningham hasn’t published a novel for seven years, so I feel like one MUST be around the corner somewhere. His most recent is the brilliant The Snow Queen, and I would love him to do another like that, using a smaller conceit and keeping things in the real, contemporary world. And hopefully soon?

The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson

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Mary Lawson’s latest novel is on the longlist for the Booker Prize. Seeing her name there finally prompted me to read the novel she was longlisted for in 2006 – and which I bought in 2009: The Other Side of the Bridge.

I first read Lawson with the novel Crow Lake, which I heard about on Margaret’s blog – and I reviewed it back in the first year my blog existed. Somehow it was a long time between drinks, but it’s testimony to keeping books on your shelves even if you haven’t managed to get to them for more than a decade. The Other Side of the Bridge is a wonderful read.

It’s set in rural north Ontario, in a fictional town called Struan. In winter, a few minutes outside is enough to chill the marrow in your bones. A trip to Toronto is possible, but in the two timelines we see here – the mid 1930s, and a generation later in the 50s – the community is pretty self-sufficient. The most important professions are farmer and doctor – and there aren’t a whole lot of other professions.

In the 1930s timeline, Arthur and Jake are farmer’s sons locked in a battle that at least one of them doesn’t understand. Arthur is the older – adept at farming but poor at school, stuck going because of his mother’s ambitions that it will help him have opportunities. The way he is described is often animalistic – slow, broad, heavy. But he is thoughtful and kind, and quietly sensitive – he knows that his father won’t ever do anything courageous, and he knows that his mother loves Jake more than Arthur.

Jake is quick-witted, intelligent – and seemingly cruel. As a child, he loves to get Arthur in trouble with his lies – cajoling him into hitting a boy Jake alleges is bullying him, which turns out not to be true. He fakes danger, calling again and again for Arthur’s help – until Arthur believes Jake is really in danger, and Jake can laugh at him for his gullibility.

It’s this ‘boy who cried wolf’ that leads to the defining moment of their lives together – tied up with the bridge of the title. ‘The other side’ is not simply getting away from Struan – it is the other side of the day where the bridge played its role in a devastating incident. I shan’t spoil.

In the 1950s – alternate chapters dip between the two – the focus is on Ian, the doctor’s son. He is intelligent and pensive. Everybody assumes he will follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor – but as a teenager he gets a weekend job at a farm instead. Arthur is the farmer now, married to Laura and father of three. Two women define Ian’s life: his resentment of the mother who left his family, and his silent adoration of Laura. At night, he goes to watch the house – content just to see Laura walk across the room, and be near the life she is living.

The Other Side of the Bridge is a slow, immersive novel. It reminded me a lot of Barbara Kingsolver, though with perhaps less visual description of the natural world. In Struan, the natural world isn’t considered for its beauty – only its practicalities. But Lawson is just as good as Kingsolver at the depths of human relationships in a small community, and the gradual consequences of actions that might sprawl over decades. Even sudden changes are not cut and dried – Lawson expertly shows how the tendrils of each big moment can creep through the years. Her writing is so subtle and perceptive.

In this community, few people leave and few people come – except in wartime, which comes in the earlier timeline. In the later timeline, Ian is weighing up whether to stay or go. Here’s a long chunk of a section where he’s talking with his girlfriend, Cathy:

“We’re going to miss it, you know,” she said.

“Miss what?”

“All this.” She gestured at the dark wooden booths with their stained red-plastic-cushioned seats, the red Formica tables, the walls festooned with photos of happy fishermen holding up big fish. Paper place mats with more fish swirling about the edges, fishing lines coming out of their mouths. Above the door to the toilets there was a three-foot-long muskie, stuffed and nailed to the wall.

“When we’re older, we’ll look back at this place and realise it was beautiful.”

“Harper’s” Ian said.

“Even Harper’s,” Cathy said earnestly. “We’ll look back and we’ll realise that our childhoods were beautiful, and everything in them was beautiful, right down to…” she looked about her, “right down to the holes in these cushions. We’ll realise that Struan was the most wonderful place in the world to grow up in. We’ll realise that wherever we go, wherever we live for the rest of our lives, it will never be as perfect as here.”

A little worm of irritation rose up in Ian from somewhere about mid-chest. “Maybe we’d better not go,” he said, twisting his mouth in a smile.

[…]

“But we have to go,” Cathy leaned towards him earnestly.

“We don’t have to go. Most of the kids we started school with aren’t going.”

“Yes, but people like us have to go. You know that.”

I love the steady beauty of this novel, and my only criticism is that the pacing gets a little awry towards the end – things more a little too quickly, in both timelines, and it felt a bit like Lawson lost confidence in keeping the narrative going at its gentle pace. It felt like portraits that had been built up of minute brushstrokes being finished off a little impressionistically. Though this wasn’t ideal, it didn’t spoil the reading experience – I still finished wondering at her ability to create such a nuanced world, more truthful than any cosy countryside or any Hardy-esque rural misery. Actually, that is what Lawson does best: truth. The Other Side of the Bridge is such a powerfully constructed world that it feels a little blasphemous to suggest that Struan isn’t really there somewhere, still living the legacy of the actions of men and women half a century or more ago.

The Boarding House by Piotr Paziński

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BoardingHouseIn March, I posted my first of four reviews of books that have won the European Prize for Literature (EUPL) – the amazing Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava, which it one of the best books I’ve read this year. The EUPL is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – the video at the bottom of this post explains a bit more. The prize is judged on the original language rather than the translation, but I don’t read Polish so I read The Boarding House in a translation by Tusia Dabrowska (or MJ Dabrowska, on over covers I’ve seen). The novel was an EUPL winner in 2012, though was originally published in 2009.

In the beginning, there were train tracks. In the greenery, between heaven and earth. With stations, like beads on a string, placed so close together that even before the train managed to accelerate, it had to slow down in preparation for the following stop. Platforms made of concrete, narrow and shaky, equipped with ladders and steep steps, grew straight out of sand, as though built on dunes. The station’s pavilions resembled old-fashioned kiosks: elongated, bent awnings, and azure letters on both ends, which appeared to float on air.

I’ve always enjoyed peering at them, beginning with the first station outside the strict limits of the city, when the crowded urban architecture quickly thins out and the world expands to an uncanny size.

Luckily, the tracks remained as I’d left them. They run straight ahead, in a decisive gesture, to melt with the horizon, from here barely visible, hidden behind nature, or, to the contrary – to disappear in a hidden tunnel hollowed out in the sky and then begin running again on the other side, in a completely different and unknown world.

The opening paragraphs of The Boarding House start with the opening words of the Bible – or, more aptly for this novel, the Torah. The narrator is Jewish, and the train he is taking is out to a distant Polish boarding house, which once doubled as a sanatorium. He has been there before as a child, when he spent his summers with a grandmother. The people who live there now – like his grandmother before them – are survivors of the Shoah, or Holocaust.

There is a dream-like quality to much of the novel. The narrator listens to the stories of those who live in the boarding house, many of whom seem to live half in the past and half in the present. This is echoed in the way the prose will wind back and forth, and you often find yourselves finishing a scene in a different time and place to where you started. The edges of sections are blurred.

The narrator is himself between times too – recalling his childhood, the inherited stories of the Holocaust, the current need that he taken him back to this place. It’s a novel filled with palimpsests – though also humour, and there is the usual mix of cantankerous characters, gossipy characters, pessimists and optimists stuck in a lengthy dialogue, held together in this boarding house in the middle of nowhere.

It’s an interesting novel, and it interestingly reveals a lot about the legacy of the appalling treatment of Jewish people during the 1930s and ’40s. The dreamlike quality of The Boarding House is both an asset and a drawback, depending on what mood you’re in – it’s hard to grasp anything concrete, or feel like you’re on steady ground as a reader at any point.

And I don’t know if Dabrowska’s translation accurately conveys this quality in the original novel, or if there are places where it isn’t quite working as a translation. As I say, I don’t read or speak Polish – but there were many places where the writing jarred a little for me. ‘This didn’t come across very cleverly’, for instance – that use of ‘cleverly’ doesn’t quite make sense. The narrator refers to a ‘freestanding closet’, rather than a wardrobe. I didn’t quite understand this sentence, even on several attempts: ‘The door creaked, so fearing that it might cause even more of a ruckus that would wake up the entire boarding house, I sneaked through the smallest crack possible.’ That’s a handful of minor instances, but there were several on every page. Perhaps it is there in the original, and is intended to disconcert the reader. I don’t know.

It’s a difficult one. I didn’t love this novel, and I never felt on solid ground reading it. But perhaps that is the point?

The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi

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I got sent Helen Oyeyemi’s second novel, The Opposite House, by the publisher in… 2008, the year after it was published. Oops, sorry Bloomsbury. I’ve read four of her other books, and have finally read this one too. Better late than never? And what prompted me to finally read it? It was one of the 20 books I listed for the inaugural BookTube Spin, and its number came up.

My relationship with Oyeyemi’s writing is definitely a bit up and down. I really love Boy, Snow, Bird and often recommend it to people – others of her books I have liked a lot, but some have tipped over the edge of experimentalism into confusion, for me. How will The Opposite House fare?

Maya lives in London, having moved there with her family when she was five. She only dimly remembers her life in Cuba – there is really only one memory: sitting under the table at their farewell party, hearing a woman singing. It is her defining recollection of life in the land of her parents and their Yoruba gods. And speaking of those gods, among them is Yemaya Saramagua, an Orisha, who lives in the somewherehouse. Short sections between chapters show her existing in this mysterious, liminal place which opens out onto two very different worlds:

On the second floor, rooms and rooms and rooms, some so tiny, pale and clean that they are no more than fancies, sugar-cubed afterthoughts stacked behind doorways. Below is a basement pillared with stone. […] The basement’s back wall holds two doors. One door takes Yemaya straight out into London and ragged hum of a city after dark. The other door opens out onto the striped flag and cooking-smell cheer of that tattered jester, Lagos – always, this door leads to a place that is floridly day.

In London, Maya has discovered she is pregnant – though she hasn’t told her boyfriend Aaron, or her family. She is conflicted by the pregnancy but, in typical Oyeyemi style, it is a conflict that seems to swirl between reality and magical realism. There is no searing look at whether or not to have an abortion, but thought processes that look much more at the metaphysical and abstract implications of pregnancy. All of Oyeyemi’s novels seem to exist in a somewherehouse – a world between worlds, where reality, fairy tale, religion, and magical realism co-exist and inform one another. But reality is one of the ingredients. This cocktail doesn’t diminish the impact of real anxieties and burdens:

Slaves had to be Catholic and obedient or they’d be killed, or worse. The Word ‘slave’ is a big deal to Chabella and Papi; neither of them can get out from under it. It is a blackness in Cuba. It is sometimes bittersweet, for such is the song of the morena; it is two fingers place on a wrist when a white Cuban is trying to describe you. Papi tries to systematise it and talk about the destruction of identity and the fragility of personality, but he is scared of the Word. Mami hides inside the Word, finds reverie in it, tries to locate a power that she is owed.

I think quotes like that give a better sense of what reading an Oyeyemi novel is like than any description I can try to give. The Opposite House incorporates interesting and vital questions about, say, race – Maya and her family are black Cubans; Aaron is a white Ghanaian – and about mental health, portrayed through the ‘hysterics’ that live alongside and pursue Maya and her best friend. The prose never settles on conclusions, or even on the sort of imagery that allows the reader to make their own. Instead, everything is filtered through a beautifully written and imagined prose style that is uniquely Oyeyemi’s – so distinct that it is not just a style but a world.

I found the Yemaya elements beautiful and striking and confusing, but was most drawn to the scenes between Maya and Aaron. There is distance and uncertainty in their relationship, but somehow Aaron was, to me, a really lovely and warm character. Oyeyemi is very good at building up nuanced relationships – familial, romantic, or friendly – but I found something particularly special in that between Maya and Aaron, perhaps because he was kind without that kindness being able to solve problems. It was a twist on the sorts of boyfriends you often see in books.

Boy, Snow, Bird remains my favourite of Oyeyemi’s novels, though I have one yet to read – but The Opposite House is up there, a really vivid and intriguing novel that refuses to let you settle as a reader, and makes up its own rules to help penetrate to deeper, if less graspable, truths about relationships and human nature.

Notes From No Man’s Land by Eula Biss

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#ReadIndies naturally made me think of my unread pile of Fitzcarraldo Editions. I’ve yet to buy any of the blue fiction titles, but am amassing the white non-fiction – mostly spurred on by how brilliant This Little Art by Kate Briggs is. I don’t remember why I picked Notes From No Man’s Land – originally published in 2009, and published by Fitzcarraldo in 2017 – but I’m glad I did, because it’s excellent.

Let’s address the elephant in the room first of all: this is a collection of essays about racism by a white woman. At one point she refers to her family as ‘mixed’, but this turns out to be largely about the people her mother and aunt married, not her biological relatives. Well, her mixed-race cousin is her blood relative, of course, and there is an interesting essay on their relationship that I imagine would be very different if the cousin had written it.

Anyway, when I picked up the book I had assumed, from the title, that Eula Biss was herself mixed race – the no-man’s land perhaps being between two communities. That is not the case. Biss lives in various different places throughout the essays in this collection, and sometimes she is in a racial minority and sometimes in a majority, but she is always a white woman looking at an issue that affects other people far more than it affects her. That might mean you wouldn’t want to read Notes From No Man’s Land, and I’d understand that. What I will say is that she doesn’t claim to be anything more than an observer – of current day, of her lifetime, and of history.

The opening essay is a powerful example of the latter. ‘Time and Distance Overcome’ was initially intended to be ‘an essay about telephone poles and telephones’, exploring how people reacted to have poles and wires festoon their neighbourhoods and skies. We take them for granted now, but, as Biss writes:

The idea on which the telephone depended – the idea that every home could be connected by a vast network of wires suspended from poles set an average of one hundred feet apart – seemed far more unlikely than the idea that the human voice could be transmitted through a wire.

The essay starts out looking at this dawn of a new technology. But Biss’s searches for ‘telephone pole’ in newspapers of the early-to-mid 20th century revealed something else: how often they were used for lynchings. With a judder, the essay turns to lynchings instead. Biss doesn’t over-editorialise, but lets the horror of the facts speak for itself. In this essay, she shows something she is very good at throughout Notes From No Man’s Land: resisting the narrative urge to draw everything into a structured conclusion. Whether her essays are mostly facts or mostly subjective, and this collection mixes the two, she doesn’t tie a neat bow.

The first essay is the most objective of the lot. In others, Biss’s own experience is centred – living in so-called dangerous areas of New York, and trying to establish why they have that reputation; moving to Mexico and trying to improve her Spanish; being a teacher in New York during 9/11, and being a university professor at an insignificant university in Iowa. Some of her insights in the latter were among the most interesting things in the book – how clueless most of the students were about racism, but also how university students (en masse) fulfil many of society’s fears about ‘othered’ groups, but somehow without being the target of discrimination and fear.

I loved the way that Biss interwove the personal and the historical in many of these essays – sometimes jarringly, to great effect, and sometimes much more gently. A child custody case flows in and out of Biss’s frustrations working for local media; a Nina Simone song plays during a car journey and melds with thoughts on Irish racial identity; Biss’s experience as a teacher come alongside the idea of education post-slavery. Again, even when these comparisons jolt the reader, or seem poles apart, Biss doesn’t overplay her hand as an essayist. It doesn’t seem an affront to compare ex-slaves’ education with her teaching experience, because she never directly compares them. They are just both there, in the essay, allowing each other room and creating a landscape which the reader can explore.

Chiefly, Biss is a woman driven by curiosity, compassion, and an ability to see how seemingly disparate elements exist within the same universe. Here she is on ‘diverse’:

Walking down Clark Street I pass a poster on an empty storefront inviting entrepreneurs to start businesses in Rogers Park, ‘Chicago’s most diverse neighborhood.’ It takes me some time, standing in front of this poster, to understand why the word ‘diverse’ strikes me as so false in this context, so disingenuous. It is not because this neighborhood is not full of man different kinds of people, but because that word implies some easy version of this difficult reality, some version that is no full of sparks and averted eyes and police cars. But still, I’d like to believe in the promise of that word. Not the sunshineness of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it.

And perhaps that’s what I liked best about this book. It resists any ‘easy version of this difficult reality’. It recognises complexity, and celebrates the un-simple.

The City and The City by China Miéville

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You know those books that are always on the cusp of being read? Like a word on the tip of your tongue, you’ve constantly been ‘about to read it’, even if always remains fourth or fifth or fifteenth in the mental queue. Well, I got The City and The City (2009) by China Miéville for my birthday in 2010, and finally I’ve read it – I originally wanted to read it after reading a review by Sakura, who used to blog at Chasing Bawa.

The concept is what fascinated me. The narrator is Inspector Borlu, who lives in Beszel – those words should have an accent on the u and z respectively; please imagine them there. Beszel is a slightly run-down city somewhere in Eastern Europe – it also occupies the same space as the city Ul Qoma.

This isn’t fantasy, though. Rather, it’s a development of the sort of tension between cities that happened with East and West Berlin – taken to a logical extreme. Certain parts of the ‘glossotopia’ are Ul Qoma and certain parts of Beszel, but there is also a substantial ‘cross-hatched’ region, where the cities co-exist. And it is not an amicable coexistence.

Neighbouring houses might be in different cities. Pedestrians on the same street are citizens of different places. And acknowledging the other city in any way is illegal – and will get you taken away by Breach, a sort of secret police. Citizens of each city train themselves to ‘unsee’ the buildings and people of the other city – recognising, in a glimpse, an architecture or a style of dress that marks somebody as unseeable. Here is Borlu at the checkpoint between the cities:

Pedestrians and vehicles came and went. Cars and vans drove into it near us, to wait at the easternmost point, where passports and papers were checked and motorists were given permission – or sometimes refused it – to leave Beszel. A steady current. More metres, through the inter-checkpoint interstice under the hall’s arc, another wait at the buildings’ western gates, for entry into Ul Qoma. A reversed process in the other lanes.

Then the vehicles with their stamped permissions-to-cross emerged at the opposite end from where they entered, and drove into a foreign city. Often they doubled back, on the cross-hatched streets in the Old Town or the Old Town, to the same space they had minutes earlier occupied, though in a new juridic realm.

If someone needed to go to a house physically next door to their own but in the neighbouring city, it was in a different road in an unfriendly power. That is what foreigners rarely understand. A Besz dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach.

But a book can’t just be its setting, of course. The story is about a horrific murder, of a Besz woman who had been an academic. Her particular area of interest was controversial: a rumoured third city, hidden between the other two and not known by either… Her parents come to the city/cities to try to find their daughter’s murderer, and naturally do not understand the divisions they must respect.

Police procedurals are not usually my cup of tea, and I did have to skim over some of the more graphic passages, but there aren’t many of those. Borlu is a good protagonist for this set up – obeying the rules of the city and its ‘hidden’ counterpart, while mentally thinking them absurd. He is not quite Winston Smith from Nineteen Eighty-Four, and he has no dawning revelation or rebellion against a corrupt and bizarre system. Instead, he has to work within the confines of this curious world, determined to find the killer. The quest for justice gets increasingly dangerous as fraught secrets threaten to become discovered…

The City and the City isn’t a novel I’d look twice at if it were just a modern crime novel, and the plot didn’t overwhelm me. But what kept me captivated was that brilliant concept. Somehow, Miéville kept it original and enthralling. I did wonder if it would be the same idea repeated over and over, burning out after a flare of novelty. but it’s not. Dealing with the nuances of simultaneous cities complicates the plot, but I could honestly have read Miéville’s descriptions of them and their inhabitants as much as he cared to write. A brilliant idea is fully realised.

Part of me wishes this idea was used for something other than a crime novel – but the two are really inseparable in the way the novel develops. Not my usual fare, but recommended for the extraordinary and sustained cleverness of the concept.

Isolarion by James Attlee

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I joined my village book club at exactly the wrong time. I did make it for their annual meal (which was a slightly odd way to meet those I’d not previously met) but the next meeting came after the pandemic hit and we decided not to go ahead. A few days later, we were in lockdown. I still haven’t written about The Citadel by AJ Cronin that we read for that, but I loved it.

This was before libraries shut, so we were able to get our next book: Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey by James Attlee, published in 2007. As you find out in an epigraph – isolarion is ‘the term for 15th-century maps that describe specific areas in detail, but that do not provide a clarifying overview of how these places are related to each other’. It’s a pretty self-indulgent title, since nobody will know what it means without opening it, but authors often seem to lose their heads when it comes to a title. The ‘specific area in detail’ in question is Cowley Road, Oxford. It’s a long road that goes straight through East Oxford – the less affluent area of Oxford. (It’s an intriguing phenomenon that you will hear people talk about North Oxford and East Oxford, but never about South or West.)

From the events mentioned, Attlee was researching this around 2002-2004. I moved to Oxford in 2004 – to a big, ugly student accommodation block next to the Plain Roundabout, which divides East Oxford from Central Oxford. I could see Cowley Road from the kitchen window. I lived in Oxford for 15 years, and before I finally managed to move out to a little village, I lived in East Oxford again for a few years. I never lived on Cowley Road itself – this country boy could not have coped with living on a busy road – but I lived around it off and on for quite a while. So I definitely had a personal interest in seeing what Attlee would make of it – I don’t know if it would have the same appeal for people who’ve never been there. Who knows.

The beginning of this book starts a trend that was also my favourite element of Isolarion – going into the different shops, pubs, restaurants etc of the street, and learning about them from their owners. Learning what it was like to have a business there, and how the proprietors ended up there. Because East Oxford is easily the most multicultural part of the city, and that’s reflected in the range of shops there: Brazilian art gallery, Chinese medicine, Polish food, Lebanese food, Indian food… there are a lot of food shops there. My favourite to walk past, though I never went in, was a robemakers – because the mannequins in the window wore clerical robes that reminded me of life in a vicarage. Some of the places Attlee mentioned had disappeared before I moved a little while later – some are still in situ, though you’ll also find Sainsbury’s, Costa, and other signs of gentrification there now.

All of this was wonderful – building up the sense of recent history and community, talking to people who’ve been there all of their lives. It certainly isn’t romanticised – he also talks about the churchyard where people get drunk, the levels of homelessness, the mentally unwell people who pace the street (I recognised the people he spoke about). He talks about the porn shop – that, no, I have never been in. It’s called ‘Private Shop’ – when Attlee wrote about it, and when I moved to the area, it was a blue shop with a discreet sign. Now it’s still called ‘Private Shop’ but the ‘A’ is silhouette of a naked woman… some discretion has been lost.

Alongside this, Attlee documents his attempts to guide the local planning committee about how best to celebrate the area – he is very anti having a gateway arch at the beginning of the street. It was a little off-putting how certain he was that he was right and other locals were wrong, but it was an enjoyably immersive sense of living in the community.

So, there were the makings of a book I really loved. I could even forgive his casual dismissing of students as being part of East Oxford life, though I’d point out that they (we) spent a lot more time there each week than people like Attlee, who commute to London. But he rather lost me when he got abstract.

Increasingly, Isolarion turns to philosophical tangents. He gives overviews of various religions, and has some platitudes to share about them. The concrete gives way to his musings about them, and I didn’t find his musings particularly exciting. He quotes Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy a bizarre amount that an editor should have cut down on – it reminded me of another book about Oxford that kept going on about Isaiah Berlin. Stick to the topic on the table, folks, and don’t let your personal obsessions take over!

So, if this was edited down to the concrete – and if Attlee had interviewed more people – it would have been a truly wonderful book. As it was, I still loved reading it – paradoxically, I enjoyed it more than the sum of its parts. But I do wish he’d been stricter with himself about what made Isolarion great and what was interesting just to him.

In The Dark Room by Brian Dillon – #FitzcarraldoFortnight

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When Karen and Lizzy announced that they’d be doing a Fitzcarraldo Fortnight, I thought it would be a great opportunity to read some of the Fitzcarraldo Editions I’ve been bulk buying since I read the brilliant The Little Art by Kate Briggs. And I decided to start with one that’s been on my shelf for a year or so – In the Dark Room by Brian Dillon, originally published in 2005 and published as a Fitzcarraldo Edition thirteen years later.

The book is about memory and about grief. Dillon is looking back on the death of his parents – his mother, from a long and horrible illness that affected every part of her body, slowly killing her; his father, from a sudden heart attack. And he starts in the house that he is packing up, a few years after his father has died and after disputes with his brothers. The starting point is the memory that is held in objects, in houses, in the things that surround us – and the mixed blessing this can be for a family that has always had an anxious undercurrent, with things unsaid and other things too hastily said.

The first section is on houses, and the book opens as though we were being directed to the house. It’s impossible to write about houses and memory without quoting Gaston Bachelard, and perhaps without feeling that Bachelard already did it all perfectly in The Poetics of Space – but Bachelard wasn’t anywhere near as personal as Dillon. His writing is raw and doesn’t shy away from difficult emotions. It is also filled with brilliant, pithy moments like this:

A house changes after somebody has died: there is suddenly too much space.

In the Dark Room is constantly on the fine line between beautiful, observational style and being overwritten. I’ll admit: every time I picked it up, the sentences seemed over-wrought, always using the longest words where shorter ones would have done the same…

I have gradually surrounded myself with objects which trace the most random pathways into the past I am now trying to map. I feel myself dispersed, fragmented among these relics, quite unable to fit them into a logical sequence. I can dimly imagine such a story; a whole narrative, properly autobiographical, a propulsion towards the sort of self-knowledge that can conceive of itself as some kind of culmination.

Here’s the thing, though. After a paragraph or two, I always found that I had adjusted my mind accordingly. I lifted it to his register. And, perhaps because it is so consistent, it very quickly didn’t jar at all. My colleague John came up with the perfect analogy – it’s like swimming in the sea, that the cold only hurts for the first few minutes.

The title of the book is, of course, a reference to the place where photographs are developed. And this isn’t just a metaphor for the way in which memories gradually gain or lose clarity – there is a lot in the book about the few photographs that Dillon has of his parents. He cannot relate to the families who have albums full of them – he has a mere handful from their lives, and uses these to describe their lives, their relationship, their milestones. He makes the best of his paltry research materials, using their very insufficiency as inspiration.

I say ‘he cannot relate’ to them – there are quite a few times Dillon seems almost cartoonishly unable to relate to other people’s experiences. One that stuck out bizarrely to me is his mother’s Bible – she has highlighted a passage from 2 Corinthians that is a beautiful, wonderful passage about God’s grace and His ability to work through imperfect humans, and Dillon can’t comprehend that it could bring her joy. He is unable to see past his own prejudices. Similarly, we know that he has a fraught relationship with his brothers – but we never really learn why, or what they might think, or what led to it. They are his parents’ children too.

On the other hand, he is mesmerically good at writing about illness. The slow revelation of the illness his mother had, and the way in which he enables the reader to understand the frustration, agony, hopelessness that she must have felt, is done brilliant,y – and illness is notoriously difficult to convey, let alone at one remove.

So, In the Dark Room is perhaps a book of paradoxes. A deeply personal book that retains unexpected hiding places; an insightful book that can be oddly closed-minded; a beautiful book that takes time to adjust to. Overall – yes – a triumph that is as flawed as any individual, and both as patchy and as affecting as memory.