Peter/Dark Puss sent me a link to a potential Sunday Song this week, and I really enjoyed it – without further ado, here is Whale Song by Lemolo.
Click here for previous Sunday Songs.
Month: May 2011
Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany
It seems an age since I did a Weekend Miscellany, doesn’t it? But it’s back – and I’ll be spending my Saturday in London playing bookish board games with blogging folk! I’m not exactly sure who’ll be there, I think it might be a select few of us, but of course I’ll report back in due course – and if it’s a success, perhaps we’ll get some more people involved next time. My gift to you is, instead, a book, a link, and a blog post…
1.) The blog post – over the past three or four weeks I’ve seen so many blog posts that I wanted to draw your attention to, and vowed that they would be the one I’d choose. I thought I’d dedicate a whole post to saying how wonderful these posts are. And naturally I’ve forgotten nearly all of them – but I *do* remember one. Over a month ago, Hayley wrote a fab post entitled ‘A sweeping family saga set against the background of a dystopian future…‘ Basically, it’s about blurbs and recommendations which put you off books… I adore this sort of discussion; go over and add your own thoughts. I’ll kick off: ‘It’s Ireland in 1880…’
Oh, and I must say thanks to everyone who participated in my One Book, Two Book meme – I loved seeing them pop up everywhere, and got quite peculiarly excited about seeing something I started spread across blogs – as well as fill my head with recommendations.
2.) The link – is to this idea about posting photos of your bookshelves to Flickr, and telling the world a bit about them – as well as gazing at other people’s bookshelves, of course. The article emailed to me by my friends Lucy and Debs – thanks guy!
3.) The book – of all the review books which have arrived at my door in the last month, requested or unsolicited, the one I’m most excited about is Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi, which came courtesy of Picador. I loved The Icarus Girl; I was baffled by White is for Witching; I still haven’t read The Opposite House. But I think Oyeyemi is a rare talent nonetheless, and now she’s turned her attention to a 1938 novelist whose imaginary muse turns up… well, I’m sold. It also reminds me that I have Barbara Comyns’ novel, also called Mr. Fox, waiting to be read.
Possibly Persephone?
Another quick post, as I seem to be constantly too sleepy to write proper reviews – the little space on the bookshelves above my bed for books waiting to be reviewed is getting pretty chock-a-block.
I’m off to an event at Persephone Books next Wednesday, called Possibly Persephone?, where people can suggest books which they think would be good in the series. I’ve chosen the book I’m going to recommend, but I’ll keep it secret here until after the event. The books which I think would fit most perfectly into Persephone’s canon are Helen Thomas’ (auto)biographies As It Was and World Without End – it’s like they were written to be Persephone Books, but they’ve already been given the Persephone shake of the head, for whatever reason. So, I’ll try my luck with another one! I don’t know if any of the previous Possibly Persephone? events have resulted in published titles, but it should be fun nonetheless.
So, of course, I’m turning this over to you – which neglected book do you think would make the next great Persephone title? Thinking caps on…
Reading up my Greens
I was in a bookshop a little while ago (I know – shocker, right?) and came across a bunch of Henry Green novels. I bought an old Penguin edition of Loving a while ago, but, for some reason, it wasn’t calling out to me. I love old Penguins sometimes, but they’re so plain that if I don’t know much about an author beforehand, they probably won’t tempt me.
And these were rather pretty editions – lovely American paperbacks, which have a much nicer feel to them than modern British paperbacks. [EDIT: I am selling my country short! John Self points out in the comments that these editions are actually from The Harvill Press in the UK]
I stood in the shop for quite a few minutes, reading and re-reading the blurbs on the back of the five Henry Green novels they had in stock, trying to decide which was the most appealing. I put one after the other back on the shelf; picked them up again; put them back…
Well. As you can see – in the end, I bought the lot. I just couldn’t decide. Doting, Back, Party Going, Concluding, and Blindness are now on my bedroom floor, waiting to be added to LibraryThing.
Have you read any of them, and which should be my first Henry Green novel? (Please say one of these five… I don’t want to buy any more until I’ve read at least three of these!) Thoughts?
The laptop returns, and this is what happens…
I am back in the land of the living! Or back in the land of the blogging. I got rather carried away with it all… if you want to read my thoughts on Reading in Phases, then scroll down past the ramble…
Somehow being without a laptop for any length of time feels more or less the same as being stranded on a desert island. People are always ‘stranded’ on desert islands, aren’t they? I think I’m going to be sequestered on one, if that ever turns out to be my path in life. By the by, I would last something under four hours in any sort of situation which required Great Survival Techniques. Case in point (and a neat circle to this paragraph): the Great Laptop Withdrawal.
My screen broke. Not sure how. I probably stood on it in the night, or something, but I woke up on Thursday morning to find that it was all sulky and broken, so trotted off to a computer fixy man. It’s lingo like that which makes their eyes light up, and start suggesting I have the filange looked at. (Give yourself ten points if you recognised the Friends reference). Except, the eyes of the man in the first repair shop would only light up if he were set on fire. He was astonishingly unfriendly. I’m one of those guys who will always choose cheeriness over competence in a customer care situation. Both is nice, but if I have to pick one, I’d definitely come away happier from someone who hadn’t a clue what they were doing, but smiled a lot.
So, I went off to another laptop repair place. The man there was much friendlier. Turns out it took longer and cost more than Unfriendly Company would have done, but… this is the price a pay for a smile. To cut a long story short, my laptop is back.
And I have managed to get through four computerless days. The main deficencies I noticed were (a) not being able to blog, (b) not being able to finish writing my chapter by my deadline, (c) not being able to check silly little facts which normally I’d just Google, (d) not being able to watch DVDs if other people were using the living room, (e) not being able to watch DVDs whilst I baked, (f) not being able to Skype my friend Lorna in Paris. That’s probably about it.
On the plus side – I read more, slept more, procrastinated less, and generally made a better use of my time. I finished Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude (might have to delay my review, though, as I have lent it to Harriet), read most of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and other stories, fell further in love with The Element of Lavishness: the letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and left piles of books all over my floor, waiting to be added to LibraryThing.
I’m not sure you required such a thorough update, did you? Clearly being away from blogging has left me a little unhinged. (Incidentally, appropos of nothing, I’ve always thought it would be fun if a song rhymed ‘lachrymose’ and ‘bellicose’. But I don’t think it’s worth my while going into the singer-songwriter business just to make this happen.)
Onto the second, more bookish, section of The Blog Post That Will Make You Wish Simon’s Laptop Had Never Been Fixed. Especially if it draws confessions out of you that you’d rather keep undrawn. I’m going to give it a little subheading, for those who’ve scrolled down to find it…
Reading in Phases
I used to be a very obsessive reader. I’m still obsessed with reading, of course, but I used to read everything in one series, or by one author, and fixate on that – until the next one came along. I now read much more widely, which can be quite frustrating sometimes as I might find an author I love (say, William Maxwell) and discover two or three years later that I’ve still only read one thing by him. I miss the opportunity of bouts of reading one author. Being ‘well-rounded’ and having ‘broad reading interests’ sounds good, but I’m pretty certain it has its downsides. Not that I do have especially broad reading interests, since about 85% of the books I read were originally written in English. But you understand my meaning… or you will, when you see how my reading life went until I was about 18.
learning-to-read until could-read-proper-books: Mr. Men
age 5-9: Enid Blyton
age 9: Goosebumps
age 10-11: Point Horror
age 11-12: Sweet Valley High
age 12-14: Agatha Christie
age 15: (meandered a bit)
age 16-17: A.A. Milne & Richmal Crompton
I simplify a bit. But generally those years were focused upon those authors, and it was only when I was 17 or 18 that I really started to read a couple of books by an author here, one by another author there, etc. etc.
But the reason I bring this up is because Verity lent me the new Sweet Valley Confidential: 10 Years On, because I was intrigued to see how it lived it up to my memories, but not quite enough to buy it. And I have been surprised, amused, and delighted by how many other bloggers remember Elizabeth, Jessica et al with affection.
Well… I got to p.40. It was awful. Utter drivel. I suspect I might feel the same if I went back to the original series now, and it just goes to show how tastes change. I’m always a bit surprised by well-read people who like to kick back with Mills & Boon or similar – I’m all for relaxing reading and comfort reading, but I don’t find reading bad books relaxing. I just find it annoying. Give me Diary of a Provincial Lady any day – comfort reading that is still brilliantly written. (On the other hand, I love relaxing with bad films – I love good films too, but bad ones are great sometimes.)
Did you read in phases? I suspect every child and teenager goes through that stage, but perhaps it isn’t simply a stage – there is something to be said for immersion in a single author or series, and perhaps some of you still do this now? I’m very tempted to set aside a few weeks just to read, say, William Maxwell or Milan Kundera or Muriel Spark or Barbara Trapido or EM Delafield – any of the many authors I’ve been stockpiling on my shelves. But I probably won’t. Book group titles always seem to be obstacles to those sort of spontaneous reading projects.
This post will have to end sooner or later, won’t it? And I suspect it should be sooner. Sorry again that it’s been a huge messy ramble, and shows all the signs of having missed my daily (more measured) blogging. Promise I’ll be more composed and contained tomorrow. In fact, I have a post planned, and it will almost entirely consist of a photograph.
Somehow I’m still typing…
…but I will stop…
ever so…
ever so…
soon.
Unplanned absence…
I shan’t be blogging for a few days, it looks like – my computer screen broke, and went in to be fixed on Thursday. But now they’re saying it could be Wednesday before I get it back…
Doh! Hope they do it soon. You might be forgiving, but my thesis chapter isn’t… still, I seem to faff a lot less without my laptop, and get more reading done in bed. Currently loving Shirley Jackson’s short stories, fyi.
See you soon…
Fancy joining in?
It’s time for another readalong! I thought I’d give you some advance notice to see if you want to join Lizzy Siddal and me as we read The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton – I spotted that she had recently got it, and I’ve been meaning to read it for a month or two: it seemed a good idea to read it together. We plan to post our thoughts sometime in the first week of June, or thereabouts – but I am already about a third of the way through it, and it is *brilliant*.
Putting my most persuasive face on, I’ll just say that it’s a 1940s novel about Miss Roach, bombed out of her London house and forced to live in an unpleasant boarding house in Thames Lockdon. The prose is exquisite, and Hamilton’s precision is incredible. Somehow it is both bleak and incredibly funny. Here’s an excerpt to draw you in….
As she let herself in by the front door she could in the same way see the Rosamund Tea Rooms – the somewhat narrow, three-storied, red-brick house, wedged in between a half-hearted toy-shop on one side, and an antique-shop on the other. She saw its bow-window on the ground floor, jutting out obtrusively on to the pavement; and above this, beneath the first-floor windows, the oblong black wooden board with faded gilt letters running its length – “The Rosamund Tea Rooms”. But now, since the war, it was the Rosamund Tea Rooms no more – merely, if anything, “Mrs. Payne’s”. Mrs. Payne would have taken the sign down had not the golden letters been far too blistered and faded for anyone in his right mind to imagine that if he entered he would be likely to get tea. All the same, a few stray people in summer, probably driven slightly mad by the heat, did still enter with that idea in mind, and quietly had their error made clear to them.
I love it. I think it was the word ‘half-hearted’ that made me realise I’d love Hamilton – so few authors would have chosen that word, there, and it conjures up such an image.
Right! If that has spurred you on, grab a copy and get readin’ any time between now and June. No strict time span or anything – but I think this could definitely be a gem.
Echo
One of the novellas I read during Novella Reading Weekend was Echo (1931) by Violet Trefusis (translated from French by Sian Miles) and I thought it was rather brilliant. If I hadn’t read Paul Gallico’s exceptionally good Love of Seven Dolls at the same time, I’d probably have dashed off an enthused review of Echo right away. As it is, prepare yourself for some enthusiasm now. (I should add, I’ve since read Broderie Anglaise – I’ll probably write a blog post on it at some point, but I was severely disappointed – it was nowhere near as good as Echo.)
I had a little stack of unread Violet Trefusis novellas (they do all seem to be short – Echo is 109pp.) on my shelf, mostly because I recognised her name from Virginia Woolf’s diaries and various Bloomsbury books. I hadn’t quite worked out where she fitted into everything (turns out she had a youthful affair with Vita Sackville-West, as you do) but the combined allure of Bloomsbury and brevity was enough for her to find her way to my shelves. And, eventually, to my hands – I’m very glad she did, because Echo is very funny, as well as well written and occasionally quite moving. Oh, and it has twins in it. That’s what sealed the deal.
As people seem to in novels of the period, the central characters live in a Scottish castle. To give you an image of its state, this describes the bedrooms: ‘They were all equally high-ceilinged, equally pale, equally damp, and entirely devoid of comfort or charm.’ The castle houses Lady Balquidder and her twin niece and nephew, Jean and Malcolm – Lady Balquidder is proper and restrained, always behaving exactly as polite society expects of her, and receiving her due from society in return. Here she is:
Her plump hands were covered with freckles which matched the colour of her hair, still auburn, despite her sixty-five years. From time to time, the ale-coloured eyes, beneath their reddened lids, darted a glance at the door. Her whole person flickered like a small but constant flame.
Jean and Malcolm are not built in the same mould as their aunt. They are hardy, rough, and unmannered youths – in their early 20s – whose behaviour is closer to savages than to Lady B’s. That is to say, they greatly prefer nature to the confines of rooms (‘each of the twins had a passionate love of their wild homeland and were constantly entranced by its beauty’), and possess no frailties nor qualms which generally afflict those of their supposed class. Jean, especially, is proud of not being unduly feminine – and is devoted to her twin brother.
Into the mix of this maelstrom comes another of Lady Balquidder’s nieces, the twins’ cousin, Sauge, from Paris.
“Yes,” agreed Jean, “I can’t wait to see her teetering about the moors in Louis Quinze heels. She’ll want to have snails every mealtime – when she’s not eating frogs, that is. She’ll have a little corncrakey voice, and she’ll keep saying ‘Ah mon Dieu!’ all the time. And, of course, she’ll be fat and dumpy, like her mother; you know, there’s a photo of her on Aunt Agnes’ desk.”
“Well we can certainly make her life a misery,” proclaimed Malcolm with relish.
Needless to say, Sauge is not in the least like this. Trefusis dashes us away from Scotland to Paris, and we get to glimpse Sauge first-hand:
Her searching curiosity was by now proverbial and she was strong and capable enough to act as a prop to someone who really interested her, as a trellis to the young tendrils of a plant slow to develop.
But whenever the eternally grateful ‘subject’ showed signs of wanting to stabilize a relationship regarded always by Sauge as temporary, she would quietly slip away, fearful lest a human heart bring her down from the Olympian heights of her disinterestedness.
The arrival of Sauge triggers off all manner of change at the castle, of course. Initially the twins treat her with the rudeness they intend – but Sauge’s unusual, beguiling nature begins to work its effect over the family. This is no Cinderella tale, or even a novel with the enchantment of The Enchanted April – Sauge brings tragedy alongside comedy; and I should reiterate, Echo remains very amusing throughout – Trefusis’ turn of phrase is a delight. But it is not unmitigated…
Through no fault of her own, Sauge is the catalyst for a change in Jean and Malcolm’s interaction with one another, as both become, in their clumsy ways, besotted with their cousin. Behind Jean’s refusal to be thought feminine lies a painful naivety; behind Malcolm’s bravado lies inexperience and immaturity. Running beneath the amusing encounter of the civilised and uncivilised is a much more dramatic, tautly told narrative of a crisis point in a relationship – albeit one between siblings. The early 20s can be an incredibly difficult time to be a twin, and Trefusis paints so perfectly the unspoken struggle that must take place when one is ready to loosen the close bond before the other. Trefusis moves from comic to farce to moving with brio – and all in just over a hundred pages.
Echo starts like a Saki short story, all dark mischief and childish menace, but develops and maintains the fablesque tragedy of the Brothers Grimm, alongside flashes of the vibrant, vulnerable 1920s heroine. It’s a heady, brilliant mixture – and, of course, a further addition to the pantheon of twin-lit.
Books to get Stuck into:
The Juniper Tree – Barbara Comyns: the same weaving of fable and pathos appears in this lesser-read Comyns novel
‘The End of the Party’ – Graham Greene: I haven’t written about this twin-based short story, but it is a perfect little accompanient, and can be read online if you click the link.
The beginning of a series…?
Vintage Classics Day
Do keep popping back and checking out the comments on my One Book, Two Book post, since loads of lovely people have been joining in and popping links in there. Thanks everyone! Not too late to do your own, of course.
On Saturday I was in London for Vintage Classics Day, helping celebrate 21 years of the publisher Vintage. Check out this webpage for a clever mosaic, where you can click on the composite books. They very kindly gave me a complementary ticket to attend a day of talks and things – and it was lovely to see Claire, Sakura, Kim, Jackie, and Lynne who were also attending (Jackie’s link will take you to a great write-up of the day.)
There were a number of sessions of the great and the good discussing classic fiction. The first was about favourite villains, but I think that’s a discussion I’m going to put on hold for another blog post, as I have Strident Views About It.
Up next was a conversation with Rose Tremain. Shamefully I have read zilch by her, but she seemed an interesting and friendly woman – I especially liked what she said about the value of siblings (the inspiration for her latest novel, Trespass) as amongst the few people who have known you all your life. I’m only 25 and, outside my family, I only have one good friend whom I’ve known for more than a decade (Hi Sarah!) so I definitely appreciate Tremain bringing this up. Any suggestions for Tremain novels I should read?
Another talk was inspired by the ‘Orange Inheritance’ thingummy – previous winners of the prize chose books they’d pass on to future generations. I’m a bit disappointed by the selection, which only has one book that I hadn’t heard of (I want them to unearth gems, please, not give us another edition of Thomas Hardy!) But it did lead to a particularly interesting discussion, with Mark Haddon cheering on Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Lionel Shriver championing Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. It’s always lovely to hear about books that I’ve read and loved, as usually I haven’t read the books being discussed.
My favourite section was celebrityless – a behind-the-scenes chat with Jean, the librarian of Random House’s archive library (I found the new job I want, then, although it did amuse me that they qualify anything worth over £100 as ‘valuable’. In the Bodleian it would have to be worth at least fifty times that.)
And finally Sebastian Faulks spoke about his recent TV series Faulks on Fiction. He says he’s yet to find anyone who saw all four episodes – I confess I only saw the first, but would be interested in watching the rest or reading his book. He was warm and funny, and really seemed to enjoy the session. Like Tremain, he’s an author I’ve never read – except for his witty collection of pastiches, called Pistache.
All in all, it was a really fun day – thanks for inviting me, Vintage! My favourite moment might have been Rose Tremain gossiping a little about A.S. Byatt, or Lionel Shriver telling an audience member (who said she was disappointed by the ending to that Kevin book) that she was enraged. It’s a good job I didn’t mention that I thought Kevin was written appallingly – how odd that someone who appreciates William Maxwell’s expertly subtle writing can overwrite so much! But mostly it was a joy, as it is always a joy, to be in a room filled with people who love books as passionately as I do.
PLUS, this was my first trip to Foyle’s. I didn’t buy anything, because I prefer secondhand books to new ones (bought eight secondhand books on Charing Cross Road…) but I must say it is an impressive selection and a lovely place to hang out. I’ll be back…