2000s

Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar

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I wanted to write about Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar (translated by Jerry Pinto) before the end of Novellas in November – hosted by Rebecca and Cathy. It’s only as I sit down to review it that I discover my edition is 228 pages, and thus rather over the suggested novella page limit – but it has big margins and a massive font, and I did some quick sums that suggest it’s under 50,000 words. So… maybe I can count it? I can easily see Cobalt Blue being printed as a 150pp book in a more usual font size.

Enough justification – let’s chat about Cobalt Blue (2006). I came across it because I watched the 2022 film – directed by the multi-talented author. Curiously, the film was in Hindi but the book was written in Marathi. I love watching Indian cinema, and really appreciated Cobalt Blue, which is shot beautifully and sensuously, with a gentle, philosophical feel to it. I was interested to see how the book would compare.

The gist of the plot is that the Joshi family rent out one of their buildings to a mysterious visitor. He is friendly, artistic, ready to be welcomed – and calmly secretive about every detail of his past. I think I’m right in saying that we don’t even learn his name. But we do learn early on that both the son and daughter of the house fall in love with him.

The first half of the book is from the perspective of the son, Tanay – addressed to ‘you’, the visitor.. He’s in his early 20s, and his sexuality seems to be both unspoken and unquestioned. He is not tormented by it, but nor is he open with his parents – instead, it seems like he has entered into an almost dreamlike romance with the anonymous paying guest. Though we know from the opening line that the guest leaves Tanay, Kundalkar still suffuses this half of the novella with a feeling of fairy tale. It is not the reflections of someone embittered. It’s a reverie on a lost relationship. Tanay has a beautiful innocence, observing the world around him and himself with a curiosity that feels poetic, if a little detached.

It’s recently come to my attention that when I’m listening to someone, I cock my head. On the phone I hold the receiver between my head and my shoulder as Anuja does, playing a rhythm on the table in front of me. When I watch a film, I run my fist over my face, as Shrikrishna used to. When I shave, I bring my face close to the mirror, as Baba does. When the milk boils over, I walk to the gas range calmly, turn it off and wipe the counter down, without a word— as Aai does.

How did I acquire those habits? Perhaps that’s what happens during the forging of a relationship: if nothing else, you adopt some of the other person’s habits. It makes you feel those small adaptations, those adoptions, make him one of you.

Have you picked up some habits from me? Do you draw circles with a finger on your thali when you’ve finished eating? Do you, every once in a while, squeeze shaving cream on to your toothbrush? Do you sleep with a knee drawn up to you, the bedclothes kicked away? Do you fold the newspaper neatly and put it where you found it, when you’re done?

Yesterday, when a cobalt blue smudge of the wall ended up on my hand, I wiped it on my trousers without thinking.

Anuja, his sister, is less passive and less contented. In the second half of the novella, we see things from her side – how she and the guest leave the home together. This is scandalous in her society, of course, and is the act of someone determined and reckless. She writes in the first person, and the guest feels more like a catalyst than an end point. Kundalkar’s writing is still lovely, but if the first half is a dream then the second half is more firmly wedded to reality.

Throughout it all, we only get hazy impressions of the guest. He reveals things in the family, but keeps himself hard to pin down. There is no big reveal where we learn his motivations – why he romanced both siblings, or which one he might prefer. Cobalt Blue isn’t about him: it’s about innocence and experience, family and loyalty, hope and the reverse.

Having seen the film first, I did have it in mind – and the film is much more linear, perhaps unsurprisingly. The novella is more abstract and jumps around a lot. I really enjoyed the experience of reading it – and I’ll give the final word to the very able translator, Jerry Pinto, who writes a short afterword:

As readers we expect narratives to fall into seemly timelines. But neither Tanay nor Anuja respect the sequential. Smitten, broken, rebuilt, they tell their stories as memories spill over, as thoughts surface. They move from the present to the past and back to the present without so much as an asterisk to help you adjust. Tanay says things again and again, as if he wants to reassure himself, as if repetition will fix what has happened in his memory. Once you get used to this, you realise that this is how we grieve, how we remember, in the present tense and in the past, all at once, because the imagined future must now be abandoned.

Amaryllis Night and Day by Russell Hoban #ABookADayInMay No.21

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In case anybody is counting – yes, I did read No.20 in A Book A Day in May and didn’t blog about it. The book I read is Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, and it’s one of the books in the next episode of Tea or Books?, so I thought I’d wait until then to reveal my thoughts.

And onto today’s book. When I saw Annabel reviewing Russell Hoban’s Kleinzeit the other day, it reminded me that I have a couple of his books to read and they’re quite short. Previously I’ve only read Turtle Diary, which I think is his most famous novel, and… well, Amaryllis Night and Day (2001) is very different.

Peter is an artist who first encounters Amaryllis at a distance in a dream. She is getting on a bus – the bus stop, mysteriously, says BALSAMIC and the bus says FINSEY-OBAY, a place he has never heard of. And the bus is made of bamboo and rice paper in yellows, oranges, and pinks, a bit like a Japanese lantern.

He is beguiled by her (and, yes, it’s the first of Russell Hoban being very Male Author Writing About Women’s Bodies, which did get a bit tiresome). But he has seemingly unrelated dreams and cannot recapture the strange scene – and then, at an exhibition, he meets Amaryllis in person.

When I turned again I saw my reflection, as before, in the glass of the case and fragmentarily repeated in the Klein bottles. Then another face appeared beside mine. I spun around and there she was, dressed the same as in the dream, watching me thoughtfully. She was better-looking than I remembered and not really all that thin. Her dream self might have been painted by Edvard Munch on one of his less cheerful days but the real woman was quite different. Her hair was darker than in the dream; she was still pale but her paleness was that of the Pre-Raphaelite nymphs done by John William Waterhouse; like them she had an exquisite figure, delicately chiselled features, big innocent eyes, and a look of sadness and regret, as if she knew she’d be big trouble but was sorry about it. Astonishing, really, how she was so recognisably herself and yet so unlike her dream self.

I like how Peter, as an artist, sees the world through art references – and not in too forced a way. The Klein bottle, incidentally, is some sort of riff on a mobius strip in which a bottle is eternal surface, or something. I have to admit that I glazed over a little on those bits, complete with diagrams, but other readers will enjoy them.

Peter and Amaryllis have a drink and they want to see each other again – but in the dreamscape. He doesn’t know where she lives or even her last name, so has to rely on this hoped reunion. And… yes, they meet there again.

As their lives continue in dreams (which they call ‘glims’, because saying the word ‘dream’ will force them to awake) and in reality, they take part in a curious experiment. Amaryllis is keen that Peter gets on the bus with her, in the dream, though neither of them seem to know exactly why. And Peter is keen to love Amaryllis forever? I wasn’t sure how the insta-love played into the structure, but Amaryllis is clearly captivating.

The novel continues, with dream and reality becoming more and more aligned. Incidents that happen in dream seem to come true; experiences aren’t clearly dream or reality. The prose remains quite spare and straightforward, which I think is wise. We know where we are within the sentences, even if not within the scenes.

At that time of day I always have the feeling that if you gave reality a good kick the scenery would shake.

I did like Amaryllis Night and Day, though nowhere near as much as I enjoyed Turtle Diary. I think that’s partly because I didn’t much care about either Peter or Amaryllis. Rather, the way Hoban constructed realities was interesting – not necessarily what happened within them. And I did find his erotic gaze a little tedious. He was in his mid-70s when he wrote it, and there’s something a little boring and sad, to me, about old men writing droolingly about 20-something women’s bodies.

So, an interesting experiment that I think deserved more worthy content. But keeping up with my May challenge featuring very different books most days!

Making Love by Jean-Philippe Toussaint #ABookADayInMay No.15

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I bought Making Love (2002) by the Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint back in 2014, in an edition translated by Linda Coverdale – unusually, and pleasingly, her name even makes the cover. It’s a slim novella at only 114 pages, and I found it beguilingly beautiful… with some reservations. I’ve just learned, from the author’s Wikipedia page, that it’s the first in the ‘cycle of Marie’, of which there are four books so far.

Marie is one of the two main characters in Making Love, the other being our narrator – another unnamed narrator, which has cropped up a few times in May. It is set over the course of a few days in Japan, in Tokyo and Kyoto, and we are told from the outset that this trip is the end of their relationship. It hasn’t been planned as a final trip to say farewell to their love – and it is something the narrator slowly realises, with the sense of something inevitable.

That point comes at the end of this paragraph, though the reason I wanted to quote it is as example of Toussaint’s beautiful, beautiful writing. So much of Making Love is suffused with this sort of gorgeous, strangely elegiac writing. Whether the weather, the glowing lights of Tokyo, or simply the sight of a hotel room, Toussaint (and Coverdale) write prose like poetry – but very readable poetry, that doesn’t obstruct the sense:

From where we sat in the restaurant, the wooden window frame presented only a fragmented and incoherent street scene, giving onto a shadowy building with mysterious electric wires and a column of light made up of seven or eight superimposed illuminated signs rising vertically along the façade to announce the presence of bars on every floor. I watched the snow falling silently in the street, light and impalpable, clinging to neon signs, the contours of paper lanterns, car roofs, and the glass eyelets anchoring the wires of telephone poles. When the flakes crossed the bright zone of a street lamp, they whirled an instant in the light like a cloud of powdered sugar puffed aloft by an invisible divine breath, and that snow seemed to me an image of the passage of time, and then, in the immense helplessness I felt at being unable to keep time from passing, I had the presentiment that the end of the night would mean the end of our love.

Those reservations I mentioned earlier? I think the only thing holding me back from relishing every page of Making Love is clued in the title – there is a seamy side to the novella. Along the way, even as they approach the end of the relationship, the couple make love on several occasions – and I don’t object to that being in the novella. But the words and sentences used to describe those moments lose all gentleness. They tone becomes quite sordid and, dare I say, anatomical. It is at odds with the feel of the rest of the prose, in a way that doesn’t feel effective so much as inelegant.

I was more intrigued by the suspenseful subplot of Making Love – the little vial of acid that the narrator has packed with him on this trip, keeping it hidden in his washbag. He returns to it often throughout, whether in action or thought, and the reader can’t help thinking of it as a Chekhov’s gun – why has he brought it, and what will happen with it, if anything? Interestingly, this additional element to the story doesn’t feel at all jarring, even though it could have done. This part Toussaint managed to incorporate elegantly.

So, I was impressed enough by the writing that I will probably seek out more by Toussaint – and if the Marie cycle is chronological, it will be interesting to see what happens after the end of this relationship.

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich #ABookADayInMay No.10

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I haven’t read any of Louise Erdrich’s novels, which I know are well-regarded, but that didn’t stop me being very interested in Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003), which Daunt Books have now republished and sent me as a review copy.

It’s a memoir-travelogue-history in which Erdrich takes her 18-month-old daughter to Ojibwe Country – the area in southern Ontario where her ancestors have lived for years, and where the father of her daughter lives (a man she calls Tobasonakwutiban). It’s never easy to arrange to meet up with him, but somehow they manage.

And it’s like entering another world – one more connected with the past, with the surrounding islands, lakes, and land, and with their identity. Perhaps it is the precariousness of that identity that makes it so vivid – it is an identity that had been routinely attacked by schools that sought to remove anything distinctive from this people, to quash out their language and force them to assimilate.

In the book, Erdrich has been running a bookshop in Minneapolis. It is a world away from Ojibwe Country, but she has some connection – she is Turtle Mountain Ojibwe (as well as half-German) and her grandfather had been a tribal chairman for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. If there is a clash of cultures when Erdrich comes to visit Ojibwe Country, it is not the clash of an outsider coming to the place – the clash is within her. Here’s her reflection on the system of deities, and propitiating them with tobacco:

There was a time when I wondered – do I really believe all of this. I’m half German. Rational! Does this make any sense? After a while, such questions stopped mattering. Believing or not believing, it was all the same. I found myself compelled to behave toward the world as it if contained sentient spiritual beings. The question of whether or not they actually existed became irrelevant. After I’d stopped thinking about it for a while, the ritual of offering tobacco became comforting and then necessary. Whenever I offered tobacco I was for that moment fully there, fully thinking, willing to address the mystery.

There are also elements that are unconnected with her tribal connections or her visit – the fact that, at 48, she is quite old to have a toddler. The girl’s father is in his mid-60s. Erdrich has three teenage daughters too. It’s an unusual life to lead, and Erdrich examines the situation and her reflections on it with the same respect and intelligence that she turns to Ojibwe Country and its customs and history.

My favourite bits of the book, unsurprisingly, were those that dealt with language. In the 2014 afterword Erdrich reveals that one of her teenage daughters (now adult) has invested many hours to a whole-hearted learning of Ojibwe, which is apparently in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the hardest language to learn. I am very much not a polyglot, but I enjoy reading about language learning:

Two-thirds of the words are verbs, and for each verb, there are countless forms. This sounds impossible, until you realize that the verb forms not only have to do with the relationships among the people conducting the action, but the precise way the action is conducted and even under what physical conditions. The blizzard of verb forms makes it an adaptive and powerfully precise language. There are lots of verbs for exactly how people shift position. Miinoshin describes how someone turns this way and that until ready to make a determined move, iskwishin how a person behaves when tired of one position and looking for one more comfortable. The best speakers are the most inventive, and come up with new words all of the time. Mookegidaazao describes the way a baby looks when outrage is building and coming to the surface where it will result in a thunderous squawl. There is a verb for the way a raven opens and shuts its claws in the cold and a verb for what would happen if a man fell of a motorcycle with a pipe in his mouth and drove the stem of it through the back of his head. There can be verb for anything.

I found the historical sections a little less interesting, even though the explain the 11,000 books that were brought to the island, many of which are still housed in a custom-designed library island. It is the fresh immediacy of Erdrich’s experiences and responses that most captivated me.

Books and Islands of Ojibwe Country is an unusual little book. I like its brevity. This is not an exhaustive examination of the region – rather, it is a short and compelling snapshot of one woman’s reconnection with a shared past. And, because of her small daughter, also the forging of an understanding of a shared future.

Cold Water by Gwendoline Riley #ABookADayInMay No.9

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Last year everyone seemed to be reading My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley. I couldn’t decide if it was likely to be my cup of tea or not, but I decided to take a chance on Cold Water (2002) when I stumbled across it in a bookshop in Cheltenham. It’s Riley’s debut novel, published when she was only 23.

It’s about a young woman called Carmel McKisco who works in a run-down bar in Manchester. She has recently broken up from a cheerful man called Tony, and she has vague plans of moving to Cornwall for a fresh start. She and a friend also make a plan to track down a musician they used to obsess about, after his bandmate turns up in the bar.

It’s hard to find much to say about Cold Water, if I’m honest. It meanders through different scenes and people, telling you about some of the locals, or what it’s like to walk the nearby streets. The Guardian review called it ‘a series of well-wrought sketches’, and that’s a good description. They are interesting, well-written vignettes that felt consistently like building up a world in which something could happen… but nothing really does. I think a certain sort of reader will love it. I’ve realised that I don’t need a lot of plot in a novel, but I do need some sort of momentum. And I suppose the absence of momentum is sort of the point of Cold Water, so it didn’t make a huge impression on me.

Here, anyway, is a bit I did like – to give you a sense of her writing:

Margi first started having nights out in Manchester when she was fifteen. At the Hacienda they called her ‘the garage flower’ and would let her in for free. Not unpredictably, she fast acquired a much older boyfriend. Mark Dalton. He was thirty-six. He liked people to see them out together at clubs so everyone would wonder what a pretty young thing like her was doing with him. And Margi liked the idea of this too. She liked him to look old, crumpled and unshaven. They went out together and had drunken, jealous rows. They caused scenes. She started staying at his place in Chorlton most nights, and she says every morning they’d take their caff breakfast, beans on toast in a polystyrene tray and cups of thick tea, into Southern Cemetery, sitting together on the wet grass and talking lofty nonsense. I’m sure it wasn’t every morning, but what the hell. And it was this Mark, so she says, taught her the importance of always making a good entrance and a better exit. “The entrance is important,” he’d say, “but the exit is crucial.” When he finished with her, unceremoniously, she returned to his flat and left an orchid on his doormat, with a note instructing him to think of her while he watched it wither and die. “Well, I was seventeen, I was a romantic…” she shrugs.

Was this a good exit from Margi? Maybe it was. Where was she? My heart thrummed in my stomach all afternoon. I felt uneasy and a little ashamed that I was thinking about it so much. I knocked on the door of her flat that evening on my way into work but there was no reply.

I don’t know how this sort of style and structure compares to My Phantoms or Riley’s other work – but she is good enough a writer here that I would try her again in a different mode.

The Portrait by Willem Jan Otten #ABookADayInMay No.3

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I bought The Portrait (2005) by Willem Jan Otten because of that beautiful cover, which is blending in well with my throw. I also fancied reading something translated from Dutch – in this instance, by David Colmer. And it’s a strange, rather good little book.

I’m coming to a tragic end; that seems almost certain now. The sliding doors are open. I can hear fire raging; it crackles. The wind is blowing directly from the north and into the studio. Sparks shoot towards me, turn to ash, and drift in like flakes of snow. I am on the easel and can only expect the worst.

That’s the opening paragraph. By the end of it we realise who are narrator is – it is the portrait of the title. It’ll take a while before we discover who the portrait is of…

First, the narrator thinks back to a time they can’t really recall – just part of a long roll of canvas, buried somewhere in the middle. Life really begins when an artist comes to the shop and buys a stretch of material to turn into a specific canvas.

If I had the gift of speech, I would now describe what it feels like to finally be a canvas, a canvas with dimensions, a piece of linen that has been measured out, cut with the most razorish Stanley knife and irrevocably stretched tight around a sturdy frame with six-centimetre stretchers no less than three-point-six thick, with wedges and a cross at the back.

A kite that is being flown for the first time might feel more majestic, a kettledrum about to start its premiere performance of Beethoven’s Fifth might feel mightier, a newly raised mainsail filling with wind while its ship heels beneath it might feel more ecstatic – but we, the unpainted, silent and as white as chalk, enter a world that promises us more than kite, drum, or sail. Who could be more on edge with curiosity? More willing? More receptive?

The artist is Felix Vincent, usually referred to as Creator by the narrator. At first he clearly doesn’t know what to do with the canvas, and it (he?) lies against the wall. It is larger and better quality than most of the other canvases in the room, and can’t be thrown away on just any commission. Vincent is a portrait painter of growing renown, though still has to fulfil commissions from people who are willing to pay him. From the narrator’s admittedly inexperienced point of view, Vincent seems to be waiting for something more special, personal for this canvas. He is waiting for his masterpiece.

And the opportunity finally comes when Valery Specht comes to the studio.

Your work is fascinating, Specht continued. You have a rare skill. You can bring someone to life.

(Yes, the novella doesn’t have speech marks – it just about worked, partly because there is very little dialogue and partly because it is, after all, from the point of view of a painting.) Specht, it turns out, wants Vincent to paint Specht’s son. And his son is dead.

I shan’t spoil more about the plot, but it’s impressive how many surprises and turns Willem Jan Otten can get into 185 pages. And I found it quite beautiful and intriguing, though one of the most memorable moments feels a bit at odds with the tone of the rest of The Portrait.

And that narrator? Once you get past the curiosity, it works well. It’s really a fly-on-the-wall point of view, I suppose, with a few novelties – like describing the feeling of a fine paintbrush across one’s surface. I also enjoyed that it can ‘see’ everyone else but not itself. It’s best not to demand too much logic from the choice (why does the portrait understand the news on the radio without context but has never seen a ‘thumbs up’ before?) but just to enjoy the strange depth of reality created by having a painting narrate a book about a painting.

And novella length is perfect for this sort of conceit, so the novelty doesn’t outstay its welcome. I really enjoyed the simple beauty of Otten’s writing (in Colmer’s translation) and spreading out the horizons of my European reading a little more.

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor

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The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor

When I saw that Kim and Cathy announced that they were running a year of reading William Trevor, I was keen to join in. While I hadn’t read any of his books, he had long been on my peripheries – I thought of him as a short story writer, but turns out he was quite prolific at the novel too. Throughout 2023, Kim and Cathy will be covering many of his books (you can see the schedule at either of those links above), but I think they’re happy for anybody to join in with any Trevor at any point. So I went for the only one I had on my shelves at the time (though I have subsequently bought The Boarding House) – and that is The Story of Lucy Gault from 2002. Here is the opening paragraph:

Captain Everard Gault wounded the boy in the right shoulder on the night of June the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-one. Aiming above the trespassers’ heads in the darkness, he fired the single shot from an upstairs window and then watched the three figures scuttling off, the wounded one assisted by his companions.

We are in Ireland in (as that quote says) 1921, one of the peaks in the long history of antagonism between the Irish and English – and anybody who sympathises with either side. Captain Gault lives with his wife and eight-year-old daughter Lucy in a large house surrounded by beautiful woods and sea. Lucy loves the countryside and the sea, often sneaking out to the sea against her parents’ knowledge and command. Against this backdrop of natural idyll is a tense current of violence. It is Captain Gault wielding a gun in that opening paragraph – but the men who are trespassing on his land had already poisoned his dogs, and intended to burn down the house.

Not wanting to cause any further ill feeling, though, Captain Gault goes to apologise to the young man and his parents. As he explains, the warning shot wasn’t meant to hit home. But they refuse to accept his apology, and the situation has become unmanageable. Knowing that he and his family could be murdered any day or any night, Captain Gault makes the decision to leave the country.

On the day they are meant to leave, though, Lucy is nowhere to be found. And then her clothes are discovered on the shoreline.

Desperate in grief, her parents make the difficult decision to leave the house and all the memories of her – escaping to safety, but broken.

Here and in the house, all memory was regret, all thought empty of consolation. There hadn’t been time to have the initials inscribed on the blue suitcase, yet how could there not have been time since time so endlessly stretched now, since the days that came, with their long, slow nights, carried them with a century’s weight?

“Oh, my darling!” Captain Gault murmured, watching yet another dawn. “Oh, my darling, forgive me.”

Stop reading if you don’t want spoilers, though this does happen quite early in the novel. There is twist that is both glorious and tragic. Lucy is not drowned: she had been hiding in the woods, hoping that they would have to stay in their home if she went missing. She is soon found, dehydrated and injured from a fall but otherwise ok, but there is no way to get in touch with her parents. They are travelling in Europe, away from all contact. And so she continues to live in her Irish home – while they, still believing her dead, start a new life for themselves far away.

We skip forward in time and see Lucy as a young adult, but I shan’t spoil anything else that happens in the novel. There is a melancholy to the whole thing, and something that feels peculiarly Irish in the tone, though that is difficult to pinpoint.

Am I a Trevor convert, then? Well, I’m sorry to say that I’m not sure. I found individual sentences and paragraphs beautiful – the one I quoted above is mesmerising – but there was something about the whole that left me a little ambivalent. I certainly didn’t dislike The Story of Lucy Gault, but I felt a bit underwhelmed by the experience.

Perhaps this is my well-documented lack of affinity with historical fiction – I have found novels written during the Troubles much more vivid than those written about it much later – or perhaps I just haven’t quite clicked with Trevor for one of those undefinable reasons that can oddly distance us from a novelist that we should like, in theory. I’m certainly not giving up on him and I look forward to trying The Boarding House, but I have to admit to being left a bit cold by Lucy and her sad life.

Novella a Day in May: Days 28 and 29

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Day 28: Sleepless Nights (1979) by Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick is one of those authors who has been published both as Virago Modern Classic and a NYRB Classic, and there can few greater accolades (other than being a British Library Women Writers author, am I right??) I bought Sleepless Nights back in 2009, and have a couple other books by Hardwick on my shelf, but have yet to read any.

In this novella, a woman looks back on her life – a jumble of recollections and reflections.

It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading now. Every morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread with its pink and blue and gray squares and diamonds. How nice it is – this production of a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home. The niceness and the squalor and sorrow in an apathetic battle – that is what I see. More beautiful is the table with the telephone, the books and magazines, the Times at the door, the birdsong of rough, grinding trucks in the street.

That is the opening paragraph, and gives an indication of Hardwick’s striking, rather brilliant prose. And I don’t have a lot to say about Sleepless Nights, because my experience of it was finding her writing absolutely sumptuous and wonderful, and seldom having any idea what was going on. Names would recur, but I was unable to attach much by way of character to them. There is a lovely few pages on Billie Holiday, who is the only name I can remember, a day after reading the novella.

But, nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it. Because each sentence is a little masterpiece. It was like relishing a series of beautiful brushstrokes, but seeing them as abstract mini-artworks, rather than cohering into a single portrait. I daresay that is partly that ‘transformed and even distorted memory’, but mainly because of me. I find I am less and less able to put together a novel told in this abstract way, where beauty is prioritised over clarity. But, as I say, that didn’t stop me enjoying and admiring it. Just probably not quite the way that was intended.

To finish on Hardwick, here’s another quote I noted down:

“Shame is inventive,” Nietzsche said. And that is scarcely the half of it. From shame I have paid attention to clothes, shoes, rings, watches, accents, teeth, points of deportment, turns of speech. The men on the train are wearing clothes which, made for no season, are therefore always unseasonable and contradictory. They are harsh and flimsy, loud and yet lightweight, fashioned with the inappropriateness that is the ruling idea of the year-round. pastels blue as the sea and green as the land; jackets lined with paisley and plaid; seams outlined with wide stitches of another color; revers and pockets outsize; predominance of chilly blue and two-tones; nylon and Dacron in the as-smooth-as-glass finish of the permanently pressed.

Day 29: The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman (2005) by Denis Thériault

What a perfect little novella The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman is. Translated from French by Liedewy Hawke, Thériault’s book is a perfect use of the form – using the slim space to somehow make something with a beauty that depends on delicacy and brevity.

Bilodo is a postman in his late-20s, and perfectly happy. ‘He wouldn’t have wanted to swap places with anyone in the world. Except perhaps with another postman.’ He doesn’t have a girlfriend and doesn’t have many close friends. When he is not delivering letters up and down the many, many steps of the tall buildings on rue des Hêtres, he mostly spends his time in his small apartment, playing videogames and ignoring the attempts of a colleague to find him a girl.

But he does have one illicit pastime:

Among the thousands of soulless pieces of paper he delivered on his rounds, he occasionally came across a personal letter – a less and less common items in this era of email, and all the more fascinating for being so rare. When that happened, Bilodo felt as excited as a prospector spotting a gold nugget in his pan. He did not deliver that letter. Not right away. He took it home and steamed it open. That’s what kept him so busy at night in the privacy of his apartment.

And, one day, one of the envelopes he steams open only includes this:

Under clear water
the newborn baby
swims like a playful otter

He discovers that a woman in Guadalupe, Ségolène, is exchanging haikus with a man on Bilodo’s postal route, Grandpré. Of course, Bilodo can only read Ségolène’s side of the exchange – but he grows obsessed with her, with the haiku form, with this curious relationship that expresses itself solely, and slowly, through the exchange of written verse.

I don’t want to spoil more of the novella, which only comes in at 108 pages, but Bilodo gets much more involved in the correspondence. And the end of The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman is unexpected, brilliant, and curiously beautiful. I gasped, and yet it is the sort of denouement that confirms the beauty of what has gone before.

This is the second novella I’ve read this May about someone discovering a stranger’s personality through their verse, and I think does it more subtly. I’m so impressed by Hawke’s ability to translate the Haikus in a way that, I assume, keeps both their original meaning and the feel. Because the feel is the most important part. And the feel of the whole novella is lovely – precise, delicate, poignant.

Three To See The King by Magnus Mills – #NovNov Day 24

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I live in a house built entirely from tin, with four tin walls, a roof of tin, a chimney and door. Entirely from tin.

My house has no windows because there’s nothing to see. Oh, there are shutters that can be used to let the light in when required, but they remain closed against the weather for most of the time. It stands in a wild place, my house, high up on the plain. At night it creaks and groans as the wind batters it for hour after hour, in search of a gap to get inside. Even the door has to be bolted top and bottom to stop it from being blown open. I used to worry in case one day I might lose the roof, but so far that hasn’t happened and now I’m certain the structure is quite sound. The man who built it made sure of that. I found the house empty a few years ago, and adopted it for my own use. At first sight I knew it had everything I could need: somewhere to eat and drink and sleep without disturbance, protected from the elements by a layer of corrugated metal and nothing more. A very modest dwelling I must say, but it looked clean and tidy so I moved in. For a long while I was quite content here, and remained convinced I would find no better place to be. Then one day a woman arrived at my door and said, ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding.’

This is the opening to Magnus Mills’s strange, brilliant Three To See The King from 2001. It’s the sixth of his books I’ve read, though the third to be published, and there are certainly hallmarks that I recognise. A short narrative, told in a sparse way from a first-person narrator who doesn’t entirely know what’s happening to him. And the reader certainly doesn’t know either.

The anonymous ‘I’ lives in this tin house in a seemingly endless desert. He has a neighbour, Simon Painter, about three miles away – and knows another couple of men living in two other tin houses a bit further off. This is his entire community, though it can hardly be called that because he lives in contented isolation. We never learn how we gets his supplies, or how he ended up there, or why there are a handful of tin hits in a sandy wasteland. As other reviewers have noted, it is a bit Beckettian – though the tone feels less bleak and more like amiable confusion.

The woman who turns up and says ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding’ is Mary Petrie, a ‘friend of a friend’, who rather imposes upon the narrator. He can’t turn her away – and she ends up moving in. But she is quickly dissatisfied with the way he does things. She is an enigma, and becomes one that he doesn’t wish to leave.

Things start to change when the three other men in his makeshift community become interested in a man they meet who lives a little further off – Michael Hawkins. The narrator hasn’t met him, but Michael Hawkins clearly has charisma and personality. This newcomer – or is he? – begins to shift the dynamics of this peculiar environment. And then other people to start to appear.

Mills is a brilliantly careful writer, and his greatest talent is the way he can pervade a novel[la] with atmosphere – without ever revealing how it’s done. Three To See The King is unsettling almost from the beginning. What makes it all the more unsettling is that it isn’t at all clear WHY it’s unsettling. It seems to be a simple story of harmless people doing numbingly ordinary things. And yet the reader feels constantly anxious, as though there is something around the corner; some horror that has perhaps been in full sight the whole time.

Many of Mills’ novels have the cadence of a parable or fable, even if it isn’t clear what the hidden depth is. While this novella certainly has things to say about communities, power, and even cults, there is no ‘a-ha!’ moment where the puzzle falls into place and a central meaning is unveiled. The title puts you in mind of the Magi visiting Jesus, of course, as does the cover design of my edition – but that might just be another red herring. I feel rather unnerved, after finishing Three To See The King. But in a good way. I have spent time in the presence of a master.

Ignorance by Milan Kundera – #NovNov Day 21

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For those keeping track, I didn’t blog yesterday but I DID finish a book. I didn’t write about it because it’s a future British Library Women Writers title and I’m not sure I’m meant to mention it here yet.

ANYWAY onto Day 21, and what I think is my seventh Kundera novel(la) – Ignorance, published in French in 2002 and translated by Linda Asher. I love Kundera’s writing and unique approach to the novel, especially when I’m in the right frame of mind to embrace his zig-zaggy, philosophical, quirky style.

The book opens with Irena speaking to her friend Sylvie. Irena’s long-term relationship with Gustaf (albeit as his mistress) has just ended, and she is being quizzed on why she is staying France. Sylvie moved from Prague years earlier, and now considers Paris her home – wiping out her Czech past, in many ways. This is the jumping off point for Kundera to think about the concept of nostalgia – how it is phrased in different languages, how we both remember and forget our pasts, what the idea of returning does to a person. Sylvie has a recurring dream that she is living again in Prague – but the dream is haunting, claustrophobic, and unwelcome.

These dream-nightmares seemed to her all the more mysterious in that she was afflicted simultaneously with an uncontrollable nostalgia and another, completely opposite, experience: landscapes from her country kept appearing to her by day. No, this was not daydreaming, lengthy and conscious, willed; it was something else entirely: visions of landscapes would blink on in her head unexpectedly, abruptly, swiftly, and go out instantly. She would be talking to her boss and all at once, like a flash of lightning, she’d see a path through a field. She would be jostled on the Metro and suddenly, a narrow lane in some leafy Prague neighborhood would rise
up before her for a split second. All day long these fleeting images would visit her to assuage the longing for her lost Bohemia.

The same moviemaker of the subconscious who, by day, was sending her bits of the home landscape as images of happiness, by night would set up terrifying returns to that same land. The day was lit with the beauty of the land forsaken, the night by the horror of returning to it. The day would show her the paradise she had lost; the night, the hell she had fled.

Ultimately, Sylvie does make a visit back to Prague. Along the way, the narrative passes like a baton among different people in the book – to Gustaf (which takes us to the past of their relationship), and particularly to Josef. Josef is a man from Sylvie’s past, whom she bumps into in Prague airport. Like her, he has been living abroad – in Denmark. He hasn’t been back for more than a decade, and both of them are being reintroduced to families, friends and places that seem both unchanged and, simultaneously, to have weathered an enormous amount of change. More or less everything I know about the Czech Republic’s history (under its various names) comes from other Kundera novels I’ve read – and it is woven in here too, with all the turmoil the country faced over the 20th century. And particularly the impact of Communism on its émigrés Sylvie and Josef.

Like most of Kundera’s novels, the plot is a simple thread through the centre of the book – but what makes the book so wonderful are the tangents, the reflections, the aleatory connections between fictional characters and moments in time. The two main elements that Kundera returns to are The Odyssey and the German composer Arnold Schoenberg. Sure, why not! My first Kundera novel was Immortality, which includes Goethe, Hemingway, Marx, Napoleon, Beethoven etc, so I was well prepared. Not as characters, you understand, but as sidenotes by the narrator – telling a story that only meets tangentially with the main plot, but those meetings illuminate the story and make it so much more.

Here, for instance, is a moment about The Odyssey that – without Kundera drawing the comparison overtly – tells us much more about Sylvie:

During the twenty years of Odysseus’ absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing.

We can comprehend this curious contradiction if we realize that for memory to function well, it needs constant practice: if recollections are not evoked again and again, in conversations with friends, they go. Emigres gathered together in compatriot colonies keep retelling to the point of nausea the same stories, which thereby become unforgettable. But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Irena or Odysseus, are inevitably stricken with amnesia. The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. The more Odysseus languished, the more he forgot. For nostalgia does not heighten memory’s activity, it does not awaken recollections; it suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else.

My Novellas in November project is going so well. I keep writing very positive reviews, and they are genuinely effusive – so far, it has brought many brilliant books off my shelves. This is right up there with the best Kundera books I’ve read, and that makes it one of the best books I’ve read this year.