Would you believe that there’s still one of my reviews from Issue 1 of Shiny New Books that I haven’t shared with you? It’s of David Sedaris’ Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls – a terrible title but a good book of funny and moving essays. With some misfires along the way. Intrigued? Read the whole review over at Shiny New Books…
One of the nice things about doing Shiny New Books is that I feel I have more of a grasp on what’s happening in publishing at the moment – as you doubtless know by now, modern novels are seldom my go-to. Having said that, there is a tiny handful of living authors whose careers I follow and whose books I await – and one of those is Helen Oyeyemi (even with a couple of her books unread on my shelf). Well – and you’ve guessed this by now – I reviewed her latest, Boy, Snow, Bird, for Shiny New Books, and flipping good it was too. You can read my review here, and (exciting!) the Q&A I did with Helen Oyeyemi too.
I was lucky enough to be sent a copy of Eva Rice’s The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp (2013), alongside which was included a lovely note from the author herself, hoping I’d enjoy it. Well, I did – it is everything that is splendid and lovely and jolly and fun, even while taking you on a trek through the emotions.
My full thoughts are over on Vulpes Libris today, but quickly – if you’ve ever hoped that Nancy Mitford were alive and well and writing 21st-century novels, then this is as close as you’re going to get.
These two books (Midsummer Night in the Workhouse and other stories by Diana Athill and Black Sheep by Susan Hill) have very little in common, other than that (a) the authors have ‘hill’ in their name, and (b) they are the final two books for my Reading Presently project and this is the last day of the year. So I shall consider them in turn, and only if I’m very lucky will I find anything to link them…
Mum gave me Midsummer Night in the Workhouse as a cheer-up present a few months ago, and a Persephone book is (of course) always very, very welcome. One of my very favourite reads in 2013 was Diana Athill’s memoir about being an editor, Stet (indeed, I claimed in Kim’s Book Bloggers Advent Calendar that it was my favourite, but while compiling my list I remembered another which beat it – full top ten to be unveiled in January, donchaknow) so I thought it was about time that I read some of her fiction. Turns out there isn’t that much of it, and she speaks quite disparagingly of the whole process in Somewhere Towards The End (which I’m reading at the moment; spoiler alert, it doesn’t compare to Stet in my mind).
As my usual disclaimer, whenever I write about short stories – they’re very difficult to write about. But they do seem the perfect medium for the expert editor, depending – as they do, more than any other fiction – upon precision and economy. And I thought (says he, being very brief) that Athill was very good at it. My favourite was probably ‘The Return’, about a couple of young women who are taken to an island by local ‘tour guide’ sailors – it was just so brilliantly structured, managing to be tense, witty, and wry at the same time. But the last line of ‘Desdemona’ was exceptionally good (and you know how I like my last lines to stories…)
My only complaint with the collection is that they are a bit too samey occasionally – which might be explained by the new preface, where Athill explains that she mostly wrote from her own experience. And her own experience seemed to be observing a fair amount of unsatisfactory marriages, and having a rather casual attitude towards marital fidelity (more on that when I get around to writing about Somewhere Towards The End.)
Her character and voice seem better established in her non-fiction, but this collection is certainly very good – and Persephone should be celebrated for collecting and publishing something which had been largely ignored in Athill’s career. Hurrah for Persephone!
Colin (yes, he blogs too, and apparently will be doing so more regularly in 2014) gave me Susan Hill’s latest novella, Black Sheep (which was on my Amazon wishlist) for Christmas, and I read it on Boxing Day while laid up with that cold. I’m always so grateful that I gave Susan Hill’s writing a second go, after being underwhelmed by the children’s book I read first – and I have a special soft spot for the novellas which have been coming out over the past few years.
Those of you who follow Hill on Twitter, or remember her erstwhile blog, will know that she seems to finish a book in the time it takes most of us to boil a kettle. Well, more power to her, say I – and I’ve been impressed by The Beacon and A Kind Man. I hadn’t realised that I read those in 2009 and 2011 – well, time flies, and perhaps Hill does pause for breath between books. Black Sheep is not only being marketed in a similar way, with equally lovely colours/image/format, but does – whether Hill has done this deliberately or not – belong in the same stable. The three novellas have definite differences, and possibly started from very different inspirations, but they also share a great deal – all three concern remote, almost isolated communities, the complicated lives of simple folk, and (it must be conceded) a fair dose of misery. Or perhaps just a dose of hardship, because the three novels all seem to come near to gratuitous misery, and then duck away.
Black Sheep takes place in a mining community in the past… I’m not sure how far in the past, or if we’re told, but definitely an era when people rarely left their village and almost no outside-communication took place. The village (called ‘Mount of Zeal’) is divided into the pit, Lower Terrace, Middle Terrace, and Upper Terrace (known as Paradise). We follow the fortunes of one overcrowded family home as the children grow up. Who to marry, whether or not to get a job in the mine, how to cope with illness and grief – these are the overriding concerns of the different children and their parents – but these topics are less important than the way in which Hill writes about them, and the community they live in.
It is such a brilliant depiction of a village. Setting the community on the side of this hill, leading from Paradise to the hell of the mine, may seem like a heavy-handed metaphor – but more significant is the claustrophobia of the village from any vantage, whether in the pit or in the fanciest inspector’s house. We follow perhaps the most important character, the youngest boy Ted, when he emerges from the village into the sheep-filled fields above – a journey seldom made by anybody, for some reason – and there is a palpable sense of narrative and readerly relief. Even while giving us characters we care about, Hill makes the whole atmosphere suffocating and, yes, claustrophobic.
Of these three novellas, I still think The Beacon is the best – but the setting of Black Sheep is probably the most accomplished. It lacks quite the brilliance of structure which Hill demonstrates elsewhere, and comes nearest to a Hardyesque piling on of unlikely misery, but that can’t really dent the confident narrative achievement readers have come to expect from Hill. As a follow-on read from Ten Days of Christmas, it was a bit of a shock – but, if you’re feeling emotionally brave, this triumvirate of novellas is definitely worth seeking out.
And there you have it. No noticeable link between the two – but my Reading Presently challenge is finished! I realise it isn’t as interesting for vicarious readers as A Century of Books, because (presumably) it makes no difference to you whether a reviewed book was a gift or a purchase, but I’ve enjoyed seeing what people have recommended over the years. At the very least, it has assuaged a fair amount of latent guilt! I still have at least 30 books people have given me, and I’ll be prioritising a few for ACOB 2014, but I’ll also enjoy indulging my own whims to a greater extent.
Appropriately enough, five of my Top Ten Books were gifts, and five were not – considering this year I read 50 books that were gifts and just over 50 that were not (finishing, because of DPhil, headaches, and new job, rather fewer books than usual). All will be revealed soon, as promised…
I think I’ve mentioned the blog Hyperbole and a Half a few times over the years, and it is certainly very popular – it gets millions of views, even though it has slowed down a great deal over the past couple of years, as its author (Allie Brosh) has dealt with depression. (She has written movingly and rather brilliantly about depression here.) But generally it is an extremely light-hearted and irreverent blog, detailing Allie’s life through naive MS Paint pictures and snarky, self-deprecating humour. I love it.
And its success means that Brosh was asked to write a book – which my brother Colin kindly gave me for my birthday. It’s about half new content and half things which have appeared on her blog before (including my favourite, the story about trying to train her very stupid dog.)
Brosh’s drawings are deliberately made to look amateur, but I think she must actually be quite talented at drawing – it’s the sort of amateur which needs a professional.
I prefer her stories when they are stories – quite a few are more general reflections on her personality, or things of that ilk. My favourites are those which do just narrate something which happened – getting lost in the woods as a child, wanting to go to a party despite being recovering from a general anaesthetic, moving house with two anxious dogs – because these reveal as much about her personality without losing a narrative momentum.
It’s not very similar to all the other books I review on Stuck-in-a-Book – it’s not even similar to the odd graphic novel I occasionally read – but it is very funny, occasionally incredibly insightful (when she chooses to be in that mood), and a brilliant dip-in-and-out-of book.
It’s been a good year for finishing books about books. There was the wonderful Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet, which is one of my books of the year and which I read over the course of a couple of days – there was Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night, and there was his A Reader on Reading. The Manguels I dipped in and out of contentedly for years – my lovely friend Lorna bought me A Reader on Reading back in 2010 – and it was with a happy sigh that I finally closed its pages a month or so ago.
It’s the sort of book that one inevitably reads with a pencil in hand, wanting to make little notes of agreement in the margins – or at least jot down page numbers to read again later. Manguel’s work is a touch more high-flown than bookish books I adore (like Jacques Bonnet’s, or Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing) but even when he is discoursing on Argentinian highbrows I’ve never read of, I can’t help loving him – because, at heart, he is simply a passionate reader.
I believe that we are, at the core, reading animals and that the art of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species.
I had to give up making notes quite early on, because I knew that I’d essentially want to write down every page. There are literary truths known only to the ardent reader on almost every page. My head nodded in happy agreement so often that I’ve probably got whiplash (NB, I probably haven’t). Check out these two:
Like so many other readers, I have always felt that the edition in which I read a book for the first time remains, for the rest of my life, the original one.
(That’s how I feel about I Capture the Castle and the curious 1970s edition I read.)
The experience may come first and, many years later, the reader will find the name to call it in the pages of King Lear. Or it may come at the end, and a glimmer of memory will throw up a page we had thought forgotten in a battered copy of Treasure Island.
Of course, having read it over so long a period, I can’t remember all that much apart from the things I jotted down… I know that I ended up skimming some of the stuff on Borges, and was surprised by how interesting I found a political section towards the end. When he wrote about individual authors and books, I tended only to be riveted when I knew the books myself (and I love that he uses Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for the source of every chapter’s epigraph) but I was most delighted when he wrote about reading or writing in general.
I realised that if reading is a contented, sensuous occupation whose intensity and rhythm are agreed upon between the reader and the chosen book, writing instead is a strict, plodding, physically demanding task in which the pleasures of inspiration are all well and good, but are only what hunger and taste are to a cook: a starting point and a measuring rod, not the main occupation. Long hours, stiff joints, sore feet, cramped hands, the heat or cold of the workplace, the anguish of missing ingredients and the humiliation owing to the lack of knowhow, onions that make you cry, and sharp knives that slice your fingers are what is in store for anyone who wants to prepare a good meal or write a good book.
Yes, this post is fast becoming simply a list of quotations, rather than a review, but I think that’s the best way to entice you to read Manguel. (Plus, I’ve just come off the stage for the village’s Christmas show, and this is the best you can get out of me…!) And with that in mind, I’ll end with the longest quotation yet – about anonymous authors.
The history of writing, of which the history of reading is its first and last chapter, has among its many fantastical creations one that seems to me peculiar among all: that of the authorless text for which an author must be invented. Anonymity has its attraction, and Anonymous is one of the major figures of every one of our literatures. But sometimes, perhaps when the depth and reverberations of a text seem almost too universal to belong on an individual reader’s bookshelf, we have tried to imagine for that text a poet of flesh and blood, capable of being Everyman. It is as if, in recognizing in a work the expression in words of a private, wordless experience hidden deep within us, we wished to satisfy ourselves in the belief that this too was the creation of human hands and a human mind, that a man or woman like us was once able to tell for us that which we, younger siblings, merely glimpse or intuit. In order to achieve this, the critical sciences come to our aid and do their detective work to rescue from discretion the nebulous author behind the Epic of Gilgamesh or La Vie devant soi, but their laborus are merely confirmation. In the minds of their readers, the secret authors have already acquired a congenial familiarity, an almost physical presence, lacking nothing except a name.
Thankfully Manguel isn’t anonymous, so I can go out and buy other books by him – and the hardback editions of his essays are simply beautiful. Despite being a die-hard fiction lover, I think my dream books are non-fiction literary essays – which are essentially what blogs are, of course. My little shelf of books-about-books may not be as extensive or as personal as the wide (and widening) blogosphere, but it holds almost as special place in my heart, and I long to find well-crafted examples to add to it.
As you see from this post’s title, I didn’t read Faulks on Fiction (2011) in the traditional sense, but rather I listened to it on audiobook. This was something of a novel (ho ho) experience for me, as I haven’t listened to an audiobook all the way through for more than a decade, perhaps nearer 20 years. Indeed, for me – when I had trouble sleeping as an undergraduate – audiobooks were basically lullabies. I’d stick Diary of a Provincial Lady, or Felicity’s Kendal’s White Cargo, or the letters of Joyce Grenfell and Virginia Graham in the cassette player, and go to sleep to the sound of their voices. Those were the only cassettes I owned, so I got very familiar with first ten minutes of each side…
But I asked for the CD (how times have changed) of Faulks on Fiction for Christmas a couple of years ago, and my parents kindly gave it to me. I listened to it gradually, mostly last winter on my iPod, because I had daily walks into town of 45 minutes each way (and couldn’t afford to get the bus all the time). Then I got the job at OUP, could afford to take the bus, and somehow left the final CD of ten until last week…
I haven’t even properly mentioned the author yet, although you’ll have worked it out. Sebastian Faulks (known for his novels, particularly Birdsong, none of which I have read) presented a TV series looking at selected novels in the history of British literature, and this was the tie-in book. I only actually watched one of the episodes – on heroes – and didn’t bother with the rest, because it all seemed a bit dumbed down. Someone told me that the book was better (well, duh) and they weren’t wrong.
Faulks addresses various ‘categories’ – heroes, villains, lovers, and snobs – and tracks each through the history of literature. So he’ll start with a Defoe or a Swift, moving on through Austens, Eliots, Brontes, via Woolf, Lawrence et al, and finally an Amis or an Ali. It is of course a subjective overview of literature, and the four categories we suggests could only ever be a necessary structuring device (arguably all four appear in most of the novels Faulks chooses), but I liked the idea of picking out these motifs. With only one or two examples per century for each category, it could hardly be considered comprehensive, and I baulked a bit when Faulks attempted to draw wider conclusions from his chosen examples – but no matter, I suppose it is what is expected of anything with so broad a title.
There is always that main problem with books which summarise books: that you’ve either read the book being summarised or you haven’t. If you have, you don’t need to be given the outline of the plot (although I found it did often help my faulty memory), and if you haven’t, you don’t want spoilers. I appreciated the run-through on books I never intend to read, but did end up fast-forwarding through sections on tbr pile candidates. Having said that, I listened to his thoughts on The End of the Affair by Graham Greene before I read it, and had still fortunately forgotten everything he said.
In either case, my favourite moments were when Faulks was talking about the books, rather than giving summaries. I didn’t always agree with him – see my post on Faulks and Pride and Prejudice – but I’m a sucker for intelligent, accessible discussion of great liteature. His groupings are intriguing and his discussion is warm, witty, and well thought-through. Of course, it’s been so long since I listened to most of it that I can’t really recall what he said, but the CD I listened to last covered Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller, and I enjoyed hearing what he had to say about the creation of Barbara, and how the novel differed from the film.
As for how the format affected my listening… Well, I found it impossible to separate the speaker from Faulks, even though they were definitely different people (the narrator, incidentally, is James Wilby). I could definitely have done without his attempts at accents – I can understand the eager actor relishing the opportunity to wander from Russia to Yorkshire and back again, but it was rather distracting. But, aside from that, I quite enjoyed listening to an audiobook. There were times when skipping would have been easier than fast-forwarding, or skimming backwards easier than rewinding, but Wilby has an engaging voice and it was the perfect entertainment for walking to and from town, as it could be listened to in discrete bursts without much being lost.
When I’m not reading book blogs (or, y’know, engagingly actively with the outside world, whatever that is), you’ll probably find me watching vloggers on YouTube. I don’t watch any of the book vloggers any more, as they rarely talked about any books I’d be interested in (other than the one I’m going to write about today), but I do watch a lot of funny people, generally just talking about things that have happened to them, or opinions they hold. One of these channels is called the vlogbrothers, where brothers John and Hank Green each make weekly videos addressing each other, but also addressing all their audience (whom – which? – they call ‘nerdfighers’, which is a little too high schooly for my liking, but I’ll let it pass).
Anyway, John Green is not only a YouTube star, but a bestselling author. He’s written a few books, but it is his most recent, The Fault in Our Stars (2012), which caught my attention, and which my friend, ex-housemate, and self-proclaimed nerdfighter Liz lent to me.
Now, The Fault in Our Stars is teenage fiction. I’m afraid I hate the term ‘YA’ (‘young adult’) because it is always used to refer to teenagers who are not young adults. I am a young adult, being about a decade into adulthood. The demographic of most fiction encompasses my age group. Teenage fiction is for younger-than-adults, or old-children, but not for young adults. Vent over. Anyway, I haven’t really read any teenage fiction since I was a teenager, and I didn’t really read much of it after I was about 14. I know a lot of grown-up readers (including bloggers) engage with it a great deal, and that’s fine with me, albeit a little confusing. (People often say something along the lines that it “deals with issues that adult novels wouldn’t cover”, which simply isn’t true, since adult novels cover pretty much everything between them.)
I could turn this post over to a discussion for and against teenage fiction (and feel free to chime in on that, should you so wish) but instead I want to talk about The Fault in Our Stars specifically. It was immediately obvious to me that it was teenage fiction, and I’m not sure why – partly, of course, because the protagonist Hazel (a girl with terminal cancer) is a teenager, but also the style. Its simplicity, maybe? Pass. A few pages in, and I could cope with that, though, and didn’t remain at my initial psychological distance from the book. Indeed, I embraced it, and was swept along.
Hazel is 16 and she is dying of cancer – more precisely, she has Stage 4 thyroid cancer with metastasis forming in her lungs. Green had spent some time working as a student chaplain in a children’s hospital, years before he wrote this novel, and you can tell that he is familiar not only with the goings-on of support groups and medical procedures, but the dynamic of teenagers living with cancer. Somehow it is not an outsiders’ book – although Green has not had cancer, and I have not had cancer, I didn’t feel like their was a barrier between Hazel’s experience and my understanding of it.
Green presents a girl who is sarcastic, witty, secretly a bit sappy, and rocketing along a path of self-discovery, finding her place in the world – she is like every teenage girl in the West, then. Except she has cancer. It is an intelligent portrait because, although cancer is (obviously) the overriding focus of her life and those of her family, it doesn’t seem to be the starting point of Green’s creation of the character – instead, it is something that happened to a character he created, even if it happened before the novel began.
The main thrust of the plot, indeed, is more typical of teenagers’ novels – and adults’ novels – that is, love. Hazel meets Augustus (Gus) Waters, a heartthrob teenage ex-basketball player – who is in remission from osteosarcoma (to which he lost a leg). He is suave, funny, handsome, muscular, sweet etc. etc. I.e. he’s not as realistic as Hazel, in my book; he reminded me a bit of Todd from Sweet Valley High, if that oh-so-literary reference means anything to you. Their relationship is cotton-candy sweet, of the variety which comes with passionate kisses being applauded in public. Yes, that ‘public’ is Anne Frank’s house, but it works in context… just.
A more nuanced subplot is the shared love Hazel and Gus have for a novel called An Imperial Affliction by Peter von Houten (which doesn’t exist in real life, but Green’s novel seems to have spawned dozens of fake cover art attempts – just Google Image Search it.) Of course, the author is not all he seems… but it’s a nice, interesting story – and goodness knows I’m a sucker for a character who loves books and reading, in any novel.
Ultimately, this is a book aimed at teenagers, and I believe they are the readers who will most benefit from it. Hopefully it will inspire a love of reading in people who watch the vlogbrothers channel and, acting in the same way as Point Horror and Sweet Valley High for me, lead them eventually onto adult novels and older literature. But it is not simply a gateway to later reading; for its intended age group, and for anybody being indulgent for an evening, it’s a fantastic and well-crafted novel.
Believe it or not, I’m reading a proof copy here… oops. I started The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey more or less as soon as the proof copy arrived from Headline, back in 1884 or whenever it was that it was sent (erm, 2011?) but wasn’t in the right head space to be reading it, and popped it back on the shelf, knowing I’d go back to it.
Well, with a repeat of A Century of Books lined up for 2014, I’m enjoying delving into 21st-century literature in my post-thesis binge. Indeed, I finished reading this shortly after I submitted my thesis, and before I flew to America, so it’s taken a little while to review. And it’s every bit as good as everyone was saying it was, back when it first came out.
It’s your standard fantastic creation story… a lonely woman who longs for a child accidentally creates one, and then begins to lose control over her creation. The story is remarkably similar to Edith Olivier’s The Love-Child – and even more similar, overtly so, to the Russian fairytale ‘The Snow Maiden’. With my interest in novels of this ilk, it’s as though it were written for me. But, as with any updating of fairytale, what is important is the way in which the tale is told. Ivey does it beautifully.
Mabel and Jack have moved to the middle of snowy nowhere in Alaska, 1920, and live quietly, working hard to keep their farm going. Both characters are quite shy and keep their emotions to themselves, but it’s clear at the same time that these silent emotions run deep – so deep that any hint of them is unbearably painful. And yet, shy as they are, they somehow make friends with their jolly neighbours Esther and George.
“I suppose I’m the black sheep. No one else in my family would think of living on a farm, or moving to Alaska. My father was a literature professor at the University of Pennsylvania.”
“And you left all that to come here? What in God’s name were you thinking?” Esther shoved Mabel playfully on the arm. “He talked you into it, didn’t he? That’s how it often is. These men drag their poor women along, taking them to the Far North for adventure, when all they want is a hot bath and a housekeeper.”
“No. No. It’s not like that.” All eyes were on her, even Jack’s. She hesitated, but then went on. “I wanted to come here. Jack did, too, but when we did, it was at my urging. I don’t know why, precisely. I believe we were in need of a change. We needed to do things for ourselves. Does that make any sense? To break your own ground and know it’s yours free and clear. Nothing taken for granted. Alaska seemed like the place for a fresh start.”
Esther grinned. “You didn’t fare too badly with this one, did you, Jack? Don’t let word get out. There aren’t many like her.”
Though she didn’t look up, Mabel knew Jack was watching her and that her cheeks were flushed. She so rarely spoke so much in mixed company. Maybe she had said too much.
These sections actually reminded me a bit of Betty Macdonald’s The Egg and I, although that is a comedy; the same hardships and marital tensions come about because of giving everything to a working farm.
It swiftly becomes clear that the thing missing the in the lives of Mabel and Jack is not simply money or an assistant, but a child – and, of course, one materialises. A child made out of snow turns – it seems – into a real child, called Faina. She is quiet and undemonstrative; Ivey cleverly changes the way dialogue is spoken in any scene in which Faina appears, so that it isn’t announced by speech marks but blended into the narrative. In the same way, Faina seems to blend into the natural world, never quite leaving it to be their child, always disappearing into the snow. She willingly wears the beautiful coat Mabel makes, but she is still wild – like Clarissa in The Love-Child, she cannot really be contained.
And then there is the question, unearthed by Jack, as to who Faina really is. Is she a miracle, crafted from snow? Or is she all too human, abandoned and homeless on the snowy mountainside? Well, obviously I’m not going to tell you. Nor am I going to tell you about the other complication that arrives, which again mirrors the plot of The Love-Child (and which, I realise, probably means that Edith Olivier probably read ‘The Snow Maiden’.)
Eowyn Ivey has met with a lot of success with this novel, and deservedly so. The Snow Child is written with a beautiful simplicity – or a simple beauty, if you like – with emotions always playing out near the surface; there isn’t much introspection, or a web or words trying to weave a complex portrait of an emotional state, but rather Mabel and Jack’s urgent feelings are clear to the reader (even while they are hidden from others.) What I mean to say is, sometimes the deepest and most complicated situations require only simple words; sometimes the simplest words can convey the deepest sorrow and be more moving than any over-wrought passage. I know I’m not alone in being very affected by The Snow Child – my friend from OUP admitted that it made him cry, and I’ve got to say I liked him even more after that confession – and it is a novel which requires some sort of emotional stability in its reader, or it would be too heartbreaking from the outset. But, oh, it’s worth it.
As I wrote earlier, this novel could have been crafted for me and my interests – and it got a mention in my thesis – and I was surprised, but pleased, to see how widely it was admired and loved. Rightly so. Eowyn Ivey is a significant new talent, and I look forward to seeing what comes next from her.
A quick post letting you know that I’ve been blogging over at Vulpes Libris again (I’ll keep alerting you to my posts there, as they will often be of a similar variety to my posts here) – this time a review of the fantastic Mr. Tibbits’s Catholic School by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, published by the ever-wonderful Slightly Foxed.