a gallimaufry

The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern

Sometimes I reach the end of a book and really don’t know what to make of it. The Starless Sea has been one of those books.

(Study of an owl, pen and ink, French school, late seventeenth century; found here)

Never having read Morgenstern’s bestselling first novel, The Night Circus, I had no particular expectations of The Starless Sea other than stronger wrists as it is a 500-page tome. However, the promise of a quest inspired by a strange book, a dangerous secret club and a ‘subterranean labyrinth filled with stories’ tempted me to borrow it from the English-language section of my local library. Wouldn’t you?

The principal narrative in the novel follows Zachary Ezra Rawlins, a graduate student writing a thesis on video games who is also a devoted reader, and his discovery of a mis-shelved old book with no publication information. When he starts reading it, he discovers an incident from his own childhood has been printed in it. How could that be possible? The book is decorated with symbols of a sword, a key and a bee, and soon he has left the university campus for New York and a masked ball and adventures. His story is interspersed with stories from the book itself, from other books, from a diary; despite this increasingly complex layered structure it is not difficult to follow what is going on.

For what is remarkable about this novel is its lack of tension and its promotion of symbolism. I know – how can a book including a dangerous secret club lack tension? It does. The club swiftly becomes irrelevant, its leader powerless. The quest plot mainly involves Zachary wondering what the quest is. I too wondered what was going on a lot of the time. The key to the book lies in the juxtaposition of the stories and the repeated use of the symbols, and to be quite honest by the end I was mentally exhausted from the sheer size of the narrative and wanted more help from the author in deciding what was going on. Lazy reader.

There’s a scene early in the book in which a class discusses gaming as part of an Innovations in Storytelling course. They talk about how video games balance the framework of their programmed story (pre-destination, if you will) with giving the gamer the freedom to make their own choices (or exercise some free will. There are options and different possible endings, but all have been foreseen. Now, if only I had ever played a video game I think I would understand this novel a great deal better, because I think that Morgenstern is using video-game conventions to structure her novel, and Zachary – a character who exhibits very little personality and could easily stand as an archetypal reader – is our – the reader-gamer’s – avatar in the story. Morgenstern’s refusal to offer easy explanations of her book’s meaning is part of the idea that we, the reader-gamers, must decide for ourselves. This is made more explicit in the recurring stories about Time and Fate, as well as the ending, which I shall nobly resist giving away.

Another element Morgenstern takes from gaming, though it is common to a lot of fiction too, is immersiveness. I didn’t read The Starless Sea exactly to find out what would happen next, I read it for the pure pleasure of being in the worlds that Morgenstern created. Painted doors which open, precocious cats, strange visitors at a wayside inn, jealous stars. Imagine a library filled with all the books ever and never published, a sea of honey deep in the earth which is actually a sea of stories, a forest of cherry trees blossoming at night, an Owl King. Some of Morgenstern’s ideas have literary antecedents, some seem purely her own invention, all are woven together to form a book-lover’s paradise. Every time I opened The Starless Sea, I wondered what marvel I would read next.

(Still Life with a Snake, Elias Van den Broeck; Belgium, seventeenth century; from here)

For some readers, the lack of tension or character development or explication may be off-putting; for me, some of the gnomic utterances grated, and Morgenstern did not always successfully navigate the line when it came to tweeness. (And the UK cover is hideous!) However, despite all this, how could I not enjoy this beautiful expression of love for stories? I shall definitely be re-reading it as there is a great deal that I missed. (Alas for now I must return it to the library.)

(Images of blocked book covers from here.)

Meanwhile, in ‘not-buying-any-new-books-resolution’ news, I have bought:

• Of Cats and Elfin, by Sylvia Townsend Warner (well, I do have to read it for STW reading week, so that doesn’t really count)
• Glass Town, by Isabel Greenberg (really I bought it for my daughter) (when she’s older) (but I’ll read it in the mean time, silly not to)

and I have pre-ordered:

• Medusa’s Daughters, edited by Theodora Goss (which has led me to covet Handheld Press’s Women’s Weird)
  The Tower of Babel, by Christelle Dabois (it’s the third in the series and I wouldn’t want to forget to read it the very moment it’s available)
• The Pure Heart, by Trudi Tweedie.

So that resolution has proved strong.

But in other news, while excavating a corner of the study I found my copy of Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, which I thought I had rashly given, unread, to a charity shop. It turns out that tidying up occasionally has its uses.

that mutton-eating, public-hanging junkie Chas Dickens

I know that practically everyone on the internet has already read this quotation, but every time I see it I start laughing…

Writing a novel – actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs – is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV’s so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it’s damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit.

Steve Hely, from How I Became a Famous Writer

merry Christmas!

Whatever your plans for the holidays may be, I hope that they are filled with joy!

(Picture by Edward Gorey)

Safe Passage Christmas Auction & Prize Draw

Thousands of children, fleeing war and persecution, are sleeping in cold and unsanitary conditions across Europe this winter, an utter scandal when you consider how wealthy European countries are. In Calais, some children were sleeping in the snow earlier this week; one had contracted hypothermia.

From an email by Margot Bernard, member of the Safe Passage French Field Team:

One girl I met last week slept rough in Northern France for nine months this year. When I asked her about why she had not moved in to sheltered accommodation before she said ‘I did not know there is a legal way to safety’. Many refugees think the only way to sanctuary is in the hands of abusive traffickers or jumping on the back of a lorry. That’s where Safe Passage steps in. We provide legal support and information so children can travel through safe and legal routes.

Safe Passage is a charity which seeks to reunite refugee children with family in the UK legally. They are also trying to identify 250 children to bring to the UK under the Dubs Scheme. It has taken 14 months for the first child to be brought from Greece to Britain under this scheme, but at last tthe first child has just arrived and three more vulnerable children are on their way from the camps.

To support their work with these most vulngerable of children, Safe Passage are holding a charity auction, which is open until Wednesday 20 December.

If you are interested in taking tea with Jude Law, winning VIP tickets to the recording of Have I Got News for You or owning a picture by Gruffalo artist Axel Scheffler, you can read about the auction and bid here.

If you’d like to donate in the usual way, you can do that here.

 

a November gallimaufry

(US figurative expressionist painter Renée Radell, The Tide, 1966)

It’s been a long time since I last did a gallimaufry of links... I don’t seem to have as much time, or perhaps inclination, to wander around the internets as before. But here are some things I found interesting, and you might too.

After a group of students wrote to Cambridge University asking for a more diverse English literature syllabus (and more power to their elbow!), the Guardian published writers’ ideas for how this might be achieved. I’m particularly keen to lay my hands on a copy of Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s novel Pather Panchali. Amit Chaudhuri writes of it:

[It was] published in 1928, two years after Mrs Dalloway, and [was] as much a departure in narrative technique as Woolf’s novel. It’s a portrait of village life in Bengal, but is as distant from the dutiful social realism such a project would normally entail as Mrs Dalloway is from a 19th-century-style study of upper-class society. Pather Panchali is an experiment in exploring how narrative might follow the momentary transitions of our consciousness of the world.

(French hair designer Tresse Agoche weaves locks of hair into complex sculptures; from Highness, photographed by delphine diaw diallo)

Friday is always a joyful day in Gallimaufry Towers because it is my day off. And now I can start my happy day with a poem, emailed by Picador. The selection has included poetry that is recent and old, famous and less well-known, and has introduced me to new writers.  In the last few weeks I’ve read work by Gillian Clarke, Jackie Kay, William Shakespeare, Lady Catherine Dyer (no I’d never heard of her either) and Robert Frost. If you’d like to wake up to a poem every Friday morning, then you can subscribe here.

And if you’re keen to discover new things, WomensArt1 on Twitter posts artwork by women – photographs, paintings, sculpture, craft – the range is amazing. And in particular, look at this!

(Rock carvings, Stone and People (1993) by Greenlandic artist Aka Høegh)

Another new thing (to me, anyway): I am not very music-minded and had never heard of Laura Cannell before a friend kindly gave me Simultaneous Flight Movement, and now I can’t stop playing it, it’s completely addictive. It was recorded in Southwold Lighthouse and every time I listen to it I’m transported to the Suffolk coast, it is wide skies and lonely marshes turned into music. You can listen to it here.

Finally, I hate to think about Christmas before December but when I saw Polly Whistle’s beautiful angels I couldn’t resist buying a couple from her Etsy shop. They are exquisite. Look!

(Angels by Polly Whistle, anxious to fly on to my Christmas tree as soon as possible)

Artwork and captions in this post are all taken from WomensArt1 on Twitter except for the last photograph.

glad day

(William Blake, image of Albion from the A Large Book of Designs, found here)

Over the past year it’s been hard not to feel that Anglophone electorates have been making outlandish poor decisions. But today’s British general election results, with a hung parliament, have cheered me up no end. I do believe this is a good result, tempering the hard right, and forcing parties to collaborate. Of course I could be completely wrong! But right now I am so happy! Well done, British people! Well done, young people! Well done, Jeremy Corbyn!

(Though I am sorry about Nick Clegg.)

phyllis & elizabeth

I have recently been sent two pieces of news of a bookish nature, and it seemed churlish of me not to share them.

(Phyllis Shand Allfrey, from the missing slate)

A while ago now, I wrote about The Orchid House by Jean Rhys’s compatriot and friend Phyllis Shand Allfrey.  This week Polly Pattullo, who is the publisher at Papillote Press, wrote to tell me that they have re-issued The Orchid House, and published a collection of her short stories It Falls into Place and a collection of her poetry. Now there is no excuse not to read her! Papillote Press specialises in the work of Dominican writers and their list is intriguing.

Fans of Elizabeth Goudge may not yet be aware that the Elizabeth Goudge Society website has been overhauled and updated. It looks great!

(Elizabeth Goudge, photograph by Bassano Ltd, 1934; London, National Portrait Gallery)

Now I am off to enjoy the weekend with a glass of wine and Variable Cloud (Carmen Martín Gaite, translated by Margaret Jull Costa). This is a novel which had lain about unread and unloved for twenty years and was almost taken to the charity bookshop when I had a small clear-out in August. But its time had come! And it is excellent.

brexit and brontë

(Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before
I swore – but was I sober when I swore?
And then and then came Spring, and Rose-in-hand
My thread-bare Penitence apieces tore.

Illustration by Niroot Puttapipat of Quatrain 70 of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, trans. Edward Fitzgerald;
London, Folio Society, 2009; found here at the artist’s blog)

It’s been a little while since the last gallimaufry of links and, since I’m not feeling like writing (periodically, all the hate, violence, greed and intolerance in the world make me despair as I’m sure they do you and this is one of those times), here are a few posts you may find interesting.

For those of us despairing at the sheer depressing idiocy and duplicity that has characterised the Brexit debate on both sides, yesterday’s frolics on the Thames provided some light relief even as it reinforced doubts about the nation’s sanity:

One day, years from now, when I’m sitting in my armchair by the fire, my son will come up to me and ask, ‘Daddy... what did you do during the EU referendum?’

And I’ll put down my newspaper, remove the pipe from my mouth, and I’ll say, ‘Well, son. I went on a boozed-up boat trip down the Thames with Nigel Farage while men from Ukip shouted ‘Get a job!’ at Bob Geldof as he flicked V-signs at them from a pleasure cruiser and Scottish fishermen squirted water at rival campaigners in a dinghy and Members of Parliament gazed from the Commons in disbelief and 100 people on a bridge sang Rule Britannia.’

(Michael Deacon in the Telegraph; there’s a paywall so if you can’t access it, do read his tweets about it instead, they are hilarious)

If you are concerned about refugees, do consider signing the UNHCR’s petition urging governments to protect them and ensure their rights. (via Neil Gaiman)

It’s not often there’s good news about the environment, but here’s a nice story about Văcărești, an abandoned plot of urban wasteland in the heart of Bucharest which has been reclaimed by nature.

Spanish Lit Month 2016 is around the corner in July. As I am reliably unreliable when it comes to any sort of readalong (cough, Little, Big) I am planning to read Julián Ayesta’s Helena, or The Sea in Summer because I believe that even I can manage 124 pages in 31 days. (Although I’m not quite confident enough to add my name to the list.) Richard is also co-hosting a readalong of The Man Without Qualities; I would love to join in as I’ve meant to read this for ages but see above, unreliable. I have a collection of Musil’s short stories so might indulge in a Sympathy Read.

And 165 years after dining with Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë has been cleared of a ‘dress gaffe’ (though not of contributing to a ‘gloomy and silent evening’.

(The dress Charlotte didn’t wear, from here)

some things I didn't know about e-books, and which you might not know either

(Library, diorama made and photographed by Lori Nix, 2007, from her series ‘The City’; from her website)

While I do not own an e-reader and don’t see myself purchasing one in the near future, I am not an adherent to the ‘Apocalypse rides on the coat-tails of e-books’ school of philosophy any more than I believe that anyone who persists in buying paperbacks is naught but a puppet to the dark forces of ‘legacy’ publishing and a Luddite impeding the free flow of great literature. I am bored with all the heated quarrels pitting paper against electronics and the wild predictions, and I have given up reading most articles with anything about e-books in the title. However, I have recently come across two pieces I found interesting on this very subject.

One, from the BBC, describes a reading revolution which is occurring in Africa. Hitherto, poor infrastructure has made distribution of books very difficult (and that is just one of the many headaches publishers in Africa have faced). In many areas away from larger towns and cities, readers and also aspiring writers have been left stranded, unable to access books. But in the wake of the astounding adoption of mobile phones across the whole continent over the past decade, smartphones are becoming increasingly popular. With them has opened up the possibility of downloading and reading books – any books! Books written in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Britain, France, the US; books translated from the Chinese, Latvian and Finnish. Books full of stories, ideas, challenges. Until global poverty has been properly addressed, millions of Africans will not have the means to afford a smartphone nor the access to electricity with which to charge it, but for many of the better-off this is hugely exciting and full of implications for the future.

The other article, in the Guardian, concerned some research which suggested that readers of a text on Kindles recalled less of the plot than readers of the same text on paper. The research only involved 50 readers, and of the Kindle readers only two were ‘experienced’ Kindle readers, so I think it needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt, but in conjunction with another small study of Norwegian students, also referenced in the article, it starts to raise questions about the limitations of electronic devices for certain sorts of reading. What do you think? Have any of you had experiences which fit with this? I used to copy-edit and proofread and I must say I didn’t work as well on-screen as on paper – but then I assumed that was because I was a dullard. Maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t...

(Some new friends)

a Very Inspiring Blogger award

A little belatedly I’ve discovered that litlove and Harriet have both very kindly awarded me a Very Inspiring Blogger award. Thank you so much! I am really pleased, and touched, and surprised too. Sadly, I can’t nominate them back: both of them have been very inspirational for me.

These are the rules for the Very Inspiring Blogger awards:

• Thank and link to the person who nominated you.
• List the rules and display the award.
• Share seven facts about yourself.
• Nominate fifteen other amazing blogs and comment on their posts to let them know they have been.
• Optional: display the award logo on your blog and follow the blogger who nominated you.

Nominating fifteen weblogs was impossible. There are so many inspiring ones to choose from and I should hate any blogger not listed here to suppose that I don’t find his or hers also inspiring (this anxiety about missing someone out and upsetting them is behind my decision not to have a blogroll here, although I’m not always sure it’s a good decision). To try and limit the insane length of my list, I decided not to include anyone whom I believe has already received the award – so no Stefanie, Tom, Hayley, Kaggsy, Annabel, Simon, Dolce Bellezza, Alex,  Jenny, Mary, Vicky, Ana, Danielle, Caroline or Richard. Some people might be surprised to find themselves here since I have never commented on their weblogs, I naturally incline towards lurkerdom, but they are inspiring nonetheless.

And here are nine marvellous and intriguing blogs in no particular order, and if you feel that your weblog should be here too, then you are right, it should be, and I’m very sorry it isn’t.

1. Pieces – Not only has Michelle introduced me to many, many new writers (as so many of you do) but she demonstrates the virtues of slow reading and close reading. She writes as if she’s really marinated in a text; she pays attention at sentence level and remarks on details and textures which can so easily be missed in a single post about a book.
2. Still Life with Books – Violet was a blogger I discovered through the Angela Carter Reading Week. She has an amazing ability to get right to the heart of a book and I aspire to writing the sort of thoughtful and well-structured reviews she seems to dash off effortlessly.
3. Miss Pickering – How can anyone failed to be inspired by the lush flowers and dry wit of Miss Pickering? She brightens up the greyest of Belgian days.
4. Jackie Morris Artist – Jackie Morris is an artist, illustrator and writer and I find her posts about how she works endlessly absorbing and beautiful too.
5. Obooki’s Obloquy – I think of Obooki as the Starship Enterprise of book bloggers, boldly going to some of literature’s furthest and least-trod reaches. Although, truth be told, I’d be scared to bump into him on a dark night...
6. The Age of Uncertainty – Steerforth is a second-hand bookseller, discoverer of oddities and explorer of the world, well  I can’t explain the immense charm and addictiveness of his weblog, it is just lovely, go and read it.
7. Into the Hermitage – It’s not just Rima Staines’ art which draws me here time and time again although I love to look at it; what really fascinates me is the life she has created and chronicles. She depicts all the magic and wonder in the world around her, and it encourages me to seek the same around me.
8. Kiss a Cloud – Claire! Start posting again! We miss you!
9. Discarding Images – A day begun with a dash of mediaeval insanity can only be a good day.

And now seven facts about myself. Friends, there are many facts but most of them are stupendously dull. No birthmarks shaped like Jesus, hidden musical talents or detachable limbs. So this has been tricky.

1. When I was a child, I wanted to be a witch when I grew up; some might say that I have achieved that ambition but my whole adult life has been lived with the faint disappointment that turning people into toads and flying around on broomsticks isn’t actually a valid career option.
2. My mother taught me to read when I was four and instilled in me a slavish addiction to fiction and poetry.
3. I have lived in Ipswich, Florence, Cambridge, London, Makurdi (Nigeria), Dover and Geel (Belgium). I am still in Geel.
4. One morning I encountered a rat looking up out of the loo at me. That was an odd moment.
5. I cannot help believing that everything is alive really. I mean, I know that a pot or a chair or even a book doesn’t really have feelings, but yet... It makes throwing things away really difficult because how will they cope with the rejection?
6. I can load, clean and fire a rifle. My aim is quite good.
7. Cows terrify me.

I am off on a surprise camping trip to the Ardennes tomorrow morning, but will be back later this week. If I haven’t disappeared into a big pit of mud and Pot Noodles and wailing.