Alberto Manguel on…shelving issues

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Still Life (The Grey Fan) – Francis Cadell

“Yet one fearful characteristic of the physical world tempers any optimism that a reader may feel in any ordered library: the constraints of space.  It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement.  In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.  Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.  This is the paradox presented by every general library: that if, to a lesser or greater extent, it intends to accumulate and preserve as comprehensive as possible a record of the world, then ultimately its task must be redundant, since it can only be satisfied when the library’s borders coincide with those of the world itself.”

— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, p.66

Happy Easter!

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He is risen indeed, hallelujah!

Have a lovely Easter, wherever you are – and, those of you who can, could you spare a prayer for Our Vicar’s Wife? (For those who are new to Stuck-in-a-Book, that’s my Mum.)  She’s ill at the moment – not life-threatening or anything, but still, health would be much appreciated all round :)

Little Poems About Authors

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I spent this evening at the Penguin Bloggers’ Night, which I’ll write about properly next week – lovely to see the old guard (as Kim described us on Twitter!) and to meet some new faces – and, of course, to hear the authors read extracts from their forthcoming books.  More on’t that soon.

The writers mural at Barter Books, Alnwick

What I’m writing today, instead, is somewhat fanciful… on the train home, I started to craft little poems about authors.  Some sincere, but mostly frivolous.  I thought you might enjoy reading them – and that, hopefully, they’ll inspire you to follow suit (either in the comments here, or on your own blogs.)  Here are the four I made up on the train journey!  Do have a go; it’s fun, and makes you feel a bit like you might be Dorothy Parker’s new best friend.

George Eliot; or, Asking for Eliot in a Bookshop
Who’d have guessed, dear Mary Anne,
Your efforts to be thought a man
Would lead, in the next century,
To: “Sorry, sir, T.S. or G.?”

Virginia Woolf
The Angels of the House you slew,
And buried in decorous graves,
Leaving (with arched eyebrow) you:
The common reader who made waves.

Philip Larkin’s Legacy
Oh Larkin, yes, you swore; that’s fine.
But no-one knows the second line.

What’s troublin’ ya?
I am glum; something’s marred me.
Life is hard; I am Hardy.

Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson

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I don’t read many living authors, certainly not as a percentage of my overall reading, but I think there is only one whom I consider to be a ‘great’ – and that is Marilynne Robinson.  This opinion was formed on the basis of her novel Gilead, and has been strengthened by reading her first novel, Housekeeping (1980).  I don’t think it is as good as Gilead, but it is still a strikingly beautiful example of how astonishingly an author can use prose.  The opening lines are surprisingly stark, given the writing that follows:

My name is Ruth.  I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Forster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.
This opening, hovering between comedy and tragedy without any indication which side the balance might fall, is an indication of the absence of men in Housekeeping.  Indeed, the only man who has stuck around makes a dramatic exit in the first pages of the novel – in a manner which reminded me of the opening to Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, although Robinson’s came first.  The man is Ruth’s grandfather; the exit is on a train in the town where they live; the train derails from a bridge, and sinks through the ice to the depths of an enormous lake, drowning everyone on board and hiding their bodies from rescue.

Even this dramatic event, which reverberates slowly through the whole novel – (The derailment, though too bizarre in itself to have either significance or consequence, was nevertheless the most striking event in the town’s history, and as such was prized.  Those who were in any way associated with it were somewhat revered.) – is depicted almost quietly.  There were no proper witnesses, and Robinson does not take on the mantle of omniscience – instead, this tragic and would-be grandiose event is presented through veils of supposition and uncertainty.  I don’t think Robinson could be over-the-top if she tried.  See how calmly she depicts the aftermath, when describing the widow with her daughters (later to be Ruth’s mother and aunts):

She had always known a thousand ways to circle them all around with what must have seemed like grace.  She knew a thousand songs.  Her bread was tender and her jelly was tart, and on rainy days she made cookies and applesauce.  In the summer she kept roses in a vase on the piano, huge, pungent roses, and when the blooms ripened and the petals fell, she putt hem in a tall Chinese jar, with cloves and thyme and sticks of cinnamon.  Her children slept on starched sheets under layers of quilts, and in the morning her curtains filled with light the way sails fill with wind.  Of course they pressed her and touched her as if she had just returned after an absence.  Not because they were afraid she would vanish as their father had done, but because his sudden vanishing had made them aware of her.
Occasionally there are moments of plot in Housekeeping, and they can be quite significant moments, but nobody could call this a plot-driven novel.  No, it is certainly character-driven – and the central character is Ruth.  Robinson doesn’t capture her voice in quite the mesmeric way she captures John Ames’s in Gilead – but that is a feat I consider unmatched by any recent novelist, so she shouldn’t be judged too harshly on that.  We see the bleak, plain experience of young life through Ruth’s eyes – as her sister Lucille grows apart from her, as she looks back on their mother’s abandonment of them, as she tries to understand her increasingly eccentric aunt.  But mostly as she watches the world pass, and attempts to find her place in it.  There are certainly humorous elements to her observations, but perhaps the dominant note is poignancy: ‘That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different.’

I am usually left unaffected by depictions of place and landscape in literature (it’s probably the reason that I loathed Return of the Native, for instance) but even I found Robinson’s depiction of Fingerbone – the atmospherically named small town – entirely consuming and impressive.  Whoever designed the cover for this edition did an exceptional job.  Maybe it’s cold, vast places which affect me, since I felt the same about Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves.

Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.
At book group, someone mentioned that Housekeeping couldn’t have been set in the UK – we just don’t have that sort of isolated vastness anywhere.  Having the enormous lake, holding unfindable bodies and untraceable secrets, and the equally enormous railway bridge running over it – it is such a clever way to create a dramatic, memorable landscape, and define the town in an unsettling manner.  A trainline should signify connection and communication, but here it just seems to connote distance and almost terrifying grandeur. And the bridge comes back into play at the end of the novel, encircling the narrative with the same all-encompassing dominance that the bridge and lake have over Fingerbone.

I’ve not mentioned much of the plot, because (as I said) it is pretty immaterial to the chief pleasure of reading Housekeeping.  The novel is really like a very long poem.  It meanders, in the best possible way; it is impossible to speed-read, or at least it would be an exercise in wasted time to do so.  Instead, one ought to wallow and wander through Robinson’s prose.  Traditional storytelling has no place in Housekeeping – instead, a patchwork of moments is sewn together, creating a fabric which is unusual but beautifully captivating.

Maguel on… the printed page

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Last July I mentioned that I was starting an ongoing series on excerpts from Alberto Manguel’s The Library At Night. Well, better late than never, here is the second instalment!  And it’s a cheeky riposte to the rise of e-readers, which have (to my mind, rather inexplicably) exploded in popularity since this book was published in 2006.

Restaurant Car (c.1935) by Leonard Campbell Taylor

“Even the newer electronic technologies cannot approach the experience of handling an original publication.  As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the page, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader’s hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words.  (Columbia University’s librarian Patricia Battin, a fierce advocate for the microfilming of books, disagreed with this notion.  “The value,” she wrote, “in intellectual terms, of the proximity of the book to the user has never been satisfactorily established.”  There speaks a dolt, someone utterly insensitive, in intellectual or any other terms, to the experience of reading.”*

— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night, pp.74f

*[I would point out that, reading Patricia Battin’s Wikipedia page, she is far from a dolt – and has even done a lot for the preservation of physical books, but I still agree with Manguel that what she says here is, to my mind, unsatisfactory.]

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Hopefully I’m going to see some crocodiles this weekend… I’ll keep you posted, either on here or, more likely, on Twitter – where I’m @stuck_inabook, donchaknow.  I’m afraid I’m just as likely to talk about Neighbours or cats as I am books, but…

1.) The books – you know me, I love reprints – so it’s always exciting to unwrap an unsolicited publisher package and discover that it’s got reprints.  Even better, they’re by an author I like, and they’re books I don’t own – soon I’ll be trying The Boat and A Perfect Woman by L.P. Hartley (best known for the very good The Go-Between), courtesy of John Murray.  Click on the images for more info.

2.) The links – time for an update about OxfordWords blog posts, sneakily put in the ‘links’ section!  I’ve been calling in favours from the blogosphere, and a couple of posts appeared over the past weeks from names you’ll recognise… here are some of my favourite recent articles:

Harriet wrote about Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Rachel wrote about Vita Sackville-West
Andrew Motion wrote about poetry and memory
My lovely boss Malie wrote about My Fair Lady
I wrote about pronunciations of ‘scone‘.
Our ‘baby names generator‘ proved very popular!

3.) The blog post – do check out Karyn’s posts about her travels – especially if piles of Penguins get you all tingly.

Going Underground

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Look what arrived in the post the other day!

That was a very pleasant surprise – Penguin kindly sent me the Penguin Lines collection – a series of stories celebrating 150 years of the London Underground, each (as you see) the colour of a tube line.  The British Transport Museum, incidentally, offers milkshakes in every colour of the tube map – which sounds like a lovely idea until you realise that one of them will have to be grey.

It’s no secret here that I don’t much like London, and I certainly don’t any fondness for the Underground – but I *do* have a huge fondness for any Penguin series, and have their Great Loves and English Journeys boxsets.  My collecting instinct and love of sets, not to mention my love of colour, makes me already fall in love with this set, even though I’ve only actually heard of one of these authors (John Lanchester).

All the book and author info is here – perhaps you can advise me where to start?

Old and young writers

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photo source

After reading The Easter Party by Vita Sackville-West (see previous post), which included a little section where Lady Quarles propounds her thoughts on philosophy and theology – a little overdramatic, and seemingly Vita’s own views put into a character who, for a page or two, became a puppet – it got me thinking.

It is a truism that the very young proclaim their beliefs most assertively, and that the old have been humbled by their experience of life into an unprovocative wisdom.  That isn’t my experience of reading novels.  Yes, young writers often throw forth their theories with earnest abandon- but also, it seems to me, with a sly awareness of their own audacity.  Novelists at the end of their careers (and, at 61, Vita Sackville-West was not exactly old when writing The Easter Party, but she was nearer old than young) seem to dismiss all other theories as the babblings of youth, and put forward their own (however subjective) theories as some sort of obvious truth.

Does this tally with your reading?  Any thoughts?

The Easter Party – Vita Sackville-West

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Hayley has a good track record of giving me books that she hasn’t hugely enjoyed, which I end up loving. First off was Marghanita Laski’s Love on the Supertax (which remains my favourite of her novels, although I’ve only read three); now is Vita Sackville-West’s The Easter Party (1953). I couldn’t get a good photograph in the light, so I played around with the image instead.

It certainly isn’t an unflawed novel.  It is melodramatic and improbable.  But, with the odd reservation or two, I loved it.

The Easter party in question is a gathering at Anstey, the beautiful country home of Walter and Rose Mortibois.  In the party is Rose’s dowdy, contented sister Lucy, with her husband Dick and 22 year old son Robin; eccentric, flirtatious Lady Quarles, and Walter’s witty, intelligent brother Gilbert.  It is a curious group of people, all a little wary of the situation, each with their own private or public anxieties.  Which sounds a very trite way to describe the scenario – and, truth be told, Vita Sackville-West doesn’t wander too far from the trite, at times.

This is especially true in the comparison of Rose and Lucy.  Rose is in a loveless marriage – or, rather, an unloved partner in a marriage, for she devotedly loves Walter.  He, however, never made any bones about what he was offering her.  He prefixes his proposal with “I will not pretend to be in love with you,” which is, of course, what every little girl dreams of happening.  By contrast, Lucy and Dick have a delightful marriage.  It is very rare to come across a lovely, loving couple in fiction, and Vita S-W has to be congratulated for creating a pair who, in middle-age, still call each other ‘Pudding’, and are adorable rather than nauseating.

So, yes, we have the rich, unhappy woman and her poor, happy woman.  (By ‘poor’ I mean, naturally, ‘only has one bathroom’ – they’re not on the streets.)  It’s not the most original set-up, and I did wonder whether Vita was writing this in a rush – it was her penultimate novel, and I already knew that I hadn’t been much of a fan of her final one.  But this turns out to be more than a collection of amusing, exaggerated characters and well-worn, inevitable moral lessons.  Vita Sackville-West weaves something rather wonderful from this material.  For starters, it is amusing – here is Gilbert’s faux-horror at the idea of meeting Lady Quarles:

Are you trying to tell me that Lady Quarles is cosy?  If so, I don’t believe it.  Nothing that I have ever heard of her indicates anything of the sort.  It is true that my cognizance of her is limited to the piles of illustrated papers, all out of date, which I contemplate only when I visit, in a state of the greatest apprehension, my dentist or my doctor.  I am perhaps then not in the best of moods to appreciate the charm of irresistible, lovable ladies propped on a shooting-stick in tweeds or entering a theatre by flashlight in an ermine cloak, but on the whole I think I had better not risk transferring my acquaintance with Lady Quarles from the printed page to the flesh.  I might be disillusioned.
She is a wonderful character when she arrives – garrulous, excitable, somehow loved by all despite being an almighty nuisance.  I found her a little less tolerable when she started bearing her soul – because she started declaiming things in a very third-act-Ibsen way.  Thinking of The Easter Party in dramatic terms was very helpful for these segments…

It is, however, with the host and hostess that The Easter Party gets more interesting and original – and stand above similar novels.  I don’t know about you, but I find passion between humans in novels rather dull to read about – it’s so apt, if not done perfectly, to smack of the third-rate melodrama.  Perhaps it’s my diet of soap operas which has made me so intolerant of these unconvincing sounding conversations.  But what I will run towards, eagerly, are novels where a human is has a passionate love for something non-human.  I was going to say inanimate, but that’s not true for the central passions in The Easter Party.

For Rose, it is (besides her cold husband) Anstey and its gardens.  In Vita Sackville-West’s exceptionally brilliant novella The Heir, a man develops a loving obsession with the house he inherited.  Thirty years later, Vita Sackville-West is still exploring the relationship between person and property.  She, of course, had this deep bond with her family home Knole (and was justifiably pained and outraged that the laws of primogeniture meant her gender precluded her inheriting it.)  This affection, along with her expertise as a gardener, enables her to write beautifully and movingly about Anstey and its grounds:

The beauty of the renowned Anstey gardens!  Rose stood amazed.  Svend [the dog] brought one of his little sticks and dropped it at her feet and stood looking up, waiting for her to throw it, but she could take no notice.  She was gazing across the lake, with the great amphitheatre of trees piling up behind it, and the classical temples standing at intervals along its shores.  It was one of the most famous landscape gardens in England, laid out in the eighteenth century, far too big for the house it belonged to.  The house, however, was not visible from here, and, but for the temples, the garden might not have been a thing of artifice at all, but part of the natural scenery of woods and water, stretching away indefinitely into the countryside, untended by the hand of man.  Already the legions of wild daffodils were yellowing the grassy slopes, and a flight of duck rose from the lake which they frequented of their own accord.  The air was soft with the first warmth of spring, which is so different from the last warmth of autumn; the difference between the beginning and the end, between arrival and departure.
But this is familiar Vita territory; I was not surprised to encounter it.  A more unexpected, and unexpectedly moving, passion was the relationship Walter has with his Alsatian Svend.  (And in case you’re worrying, based on my previous reading of Lady into Fox and His Monkey Wife, fear not – their relationship is entirely unsuspect.)  Walter, who cannot express affection for any human, including his wife, is devoted to his dog.  The scenes describing their companionship and mutual trust could have felt like a mawkishly over-sentimental Marley and Me intrusion, but are done so cleverly and touchingly, that I doubt anybody could censor them.  And that’s coming from a cat person.  Svend even becomes an important plot pivot…

There are enough lingering secrets and unlikely speeches to make The Easter Party feel like a throwback to theatrical melodrama, but Vita Sackville-West combines these with gorgeous description, genuine pathos, and a web of delicate writing which bewitches the reader.  It’s a heady mixture, and one I doubt many authors could pull off – but I loved it.  Vita Sackville-West will never be in the same stable as Virginia Woolf, the author with whom she is still most often mentioned.  She wasn’t trying to be.  She was a talented writer, crafting something unusual – somehow both willfully derivative and original, and (for me, at least) an absorbing, delightful, occasionally tragic, read.  Thank you, Hayley!

A lovely Penguiny find

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Despite having a whole weekend doing basically nothing, I have still failed to put together a review – or even read very much, actually – so instead I shall show off a recent find!  I don’t think it’s especially rare or anything, but I think it’s a fantastic example of Penguin cover design in its heyday.  And it cost 30p.  I didn’t know there were still places where you could get books for 30p! Turns out the charity shops of Headington are rather cheaper than the charity shops of Oxford.