a gallimaufry

The Angelic Avengers, by Pierre Andrézel/Isak Dinesen

(Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen at her desk at home in Rungstedlund, 1955; from the archives of her Danish publisher, Gyldendal; found here)

Recently I read a biography of Isak Dinesen by Judith Thurman (and very good it was too). Thurman naturally enough discusses Dinesen’s work and the circumstances which gave rise to it, and of course discussed the only novel she published, The Angelic Avengers. This was written during the war while Denmark was under the ‘protection’ of the Nazis; Dinesen just made it up as she went along for ‘a little fun’, in contrast to her manner of composing her tales, which involved much more polishing, and published it in Denmark in 1944 under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel. (I don’t know if there’s any significance to Andrézel, it makes me think of donkeys! Because of the French âne and Dutch ezel.) The press quickly discovered the author’s true identity, although Dinesen steadfastly refused to admit she had written it, and it was judged by the standard of her tales and savaged. Perhaps because this experience was so upsetting, perhaps because she herself felt that the book was substandard, Dinesen only publicly acknowledged The Angelic Avengers as a work of hers in an interview with the Paris Review in 1956 (the English translation, which she made herself, was published in 1946 and 1947 when she was desperate for money; another possible reason for her to distance herself from it).

Intrigued by this, I ordered a copy at once! I must say that I think the savaging was completely unjustified, although yes yes, her tales are greater works of art. Perhaps it is to Dinesen what Orlando is to Virginia Woolf. It’s fun, a playful gothic tale of damsels in distress that’s perfectly suited to these chill dark days. It is set in Victorian England and is indeed quite silly, but there is more to it than pure melodramatic escapism and it is all written in Dinesen’s delightful, elegant prose.

[Zosine] once more turned towards the others. ‘No one, no one on earth,’ she passionately exclaimed, ‘can realize what I have gone through, what I have experienced during these days and nights! It is a terrible thing to be deceiving all the people round you! But at the same time it has in it a kind of fascination. It is an affair to exert all one’s faculties. It is a fatal game; it is wicked, I believe! But still it is a game, one feels as if one might go on for ever! But now I am more tired than I had thought it possible to be! It is when danger is over that one sits down to die. I am happy, but my strength has gone, and I am changed! I believe I have grown old!’

Orphaned Lucan Bellenden, daughter of a scientist, is forced to flee her position as a governess by the unwelcome proposition of her employer. She seeks refuge with her schoolfriend, the wealthy Zosine. However, Zosine’s fortunes are about to change drastically, and the two girls try to find work via a London agency, through which they are selected by the philanthropic, kind Reverend Pennhallow and his wife to be their companions in place of their lost daughter and receive a proper education. But all may not be as it seems – dah dah daaaaah! (For once I’ll try not to spoil the plot.)

The oppression of women is a core theme in The Angelic Avengers.The two girls must support each other and save themselves from the dreadful fate which awaits them. The masculine world is portrayed as threatening and exploitative. A male employer may propose that his children’s governess become his mistress, and her only recourse is flight (Dinesen admired Jane Eyre and there are many references to it in The Angelic Avengers: here the Mr Rochester figure is abusive). Without a male protector, young women are vulnerable; poorly educated but not working class, their avenues of employment are few and mainly labelled ‘governess’. Men devise, run and are the consumers in the (female) white slave trade. Of course the girls end up happily married at the end (I don’t think that’s a spoiler!) to nice young aristocrats whose inherited fortunes seemingly are not founded on the pain of other human beings, but in a nice twist on the traditional fairy tale of the hero who wins a princess at the conclusion of his adventures, these young men are very much rewards for the heroines’ bravery and spiritual strength rather than active helpers or interesting characters.

For when the girls face a terrible evil, the young men are no help at all, nor is the rich papa. The only support Lucan and Zosine receive comes from another woman, an apparently mad black former nanny, even more dispossessed than they, yet courageous and loving. The central moral question the book poses through their plight is: how does one respond to evil, particularly when one is powerless? Zosine and Lucan each find slightly different answers to that question. Revenge, as it turns out, causes moral sickness in the administrator. The book argues that the destruction of evil requires forgiveness and compassion. This cannot have been an easy message to write or to read in ‘protected’ and post-war Denmark.

This is a melodrama, and thus there are a lot of extremes and far-fetched elements, some of which involve playing  with literary conventions and expectations of the gothic. In another echo of Jane Eyre, the fortune of Zosine’s beloved papa has been built up in the West Indies – on slave labour. Through Olympia, the nanny, Dinesen shows this distressing basis to European wealth: yes, Dinesen’s language isn’t what we would use today, and Olympia herself doesn’t question an order in which she is expected to serve, but her story of the horrible white man feeding on slave flesh is a vivid metaphor for the exploitation of the black West Indians by the whites. Whites preying on blacks, men preying on women: the nineteenth century is an ugly time.

Despite all this, The Angelic Avengers never takes itself too seriously. Something Zosine says to Lucan has been picked out as an epigraph for the novel, and it’s very fitting:

You serious people must not be too hard on human beings for what they choose to amuse themselves with, when they are shut up in a prison, and are not even allowed to say that they areJane Eyre prisoners: if I do not soon get a little bit of fun, I shall die!

Oh, and I’ve just discovered that it was made into a film in the US in 1948!

(Images are of the British and Danish covers of the first editions of The Angelic Avengers.)

A Heart So White, by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Not having been at the computer much these past few weeks, I have failed to take advantage of the full glory of Spanish Lit Month and all the wonderful posts thereon around the internet. (It is hosted by Richard and Stu, who have kept a list of participants.) And despite starting A Heart So White in good time I am, as is my wont, squeaking my post in on the very last day of SLM. This intricate and subtle novel is not one to rush, and Javier Marías has now become my new favourite author.

That’s the unfortunate thing about what happens to us and remains unrecorded, or worse still, unknown or unseen or unheard, for later, there’s no way it can be recovered. The day we didn’t spend together we will never have spent together, what someone was going to say to us over the phone when they called and we didn’t answer will never be said, at least not exactly the same thing said in exactly the same spirit; and everything will be slightly different or even completely different because of that lack of courage which dissuades us from talking to you. But even if we were together that day or at home when that person phoned [...], even then, none of that will ever be repeated and consequently a time will come when having been together will be the same as not having been together, and having picked up the phone the same as not having done so [...] Sometimes I have the feeling that nothing that happens happens, because nothing happens without interruption, nothing lasts or endures or is ceaselessly remembered [...] What takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us is identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate those identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be told.

Upon her return from her honeymoon Teresa Aguilera attends a dinner party at her parents’ house; leaving the table, she goes to the bathroom, takes out her father’s gun and shoots herself. Forty years later and Juan and Luisa are honeymooning in Cuba; Luisa is ill in bed and Juan, standing on the hotel balcony, is mistaken by a woman for her lover, who is in the next room. Juan is the son of Teresa’s widower, Ranz, who remarried. Ranz’s new wife: Teresa’s sister (also now dead). But nobody has ever really spoken of this to Juan nor has he thought to learn more until Ranz utters two words at Juan’s wedding reception – ‘Now what?’

On one level this is a puzzle: why did Teresa commit suicide? Read attentively, and you will probably be able to guess the secret (I write ‘probably’ because I didn’t really, but when one reaches the end and looks back it seems so obvious.) The novel is Juan’s account of the first few months of his marriage. The scene in which he relates (much of) the truth of Teresa’s death is peppered with parenthetical quotes from the rest of the novel, echoes of earlier events and analyses and thoughts. (It is so difficult to write about this without spoiling the plot, because that scene of revelation is so crucial to the understanding of it all.) Yet while this revelation forms the climax of the novel, it is far from its driving force and indeed disappears from view quite often. Juan’s sentences are long and ruminative, he goes spiralling away from the narrative to consider whether there’s a difference between acting and knowing about an act, how secrets begin and grow, why interpreters hate translators and simultaneous translators hate consecutive translators.

The novel is highly patterned, returning again and again to triangular relationships, a person standing outside a room in which there is a couple, a foreign man seeking extra-marital sex, recording versus remembering, a woman humming a song to herself... It is as if Juan is trying things out from different angles. He is uneasy about being married, his relationship with his father is uncomfortable. Thus the patterns relate to him and his circumstances as much as they provide ‘clues’ as to what happened to Teresa. His text as a whole is tinged with anxiety and menace. Juan is highly conscious of women’s vulnerability to men, specifically their lovers. His story begins and ends with imagined acts of violence on women’s bodies, the first of which, Teresa’s suicide, has occurred but of course was not witnessed by Juan; the second is purely imaginary but suggestive and disturbing. References to Bluebeard, Macbeth and a sinister little song about a bride whose groom turns into a giant serpent and devours her on their wedding night maintain the disquiet. Actually the whole text is serpentine, winding around and around the central question, refusing to accept what is already known.

One of the repeated motifs is of finding there’s no milk in the fridge and needing to buy some more. Each time I encountered it, I wondered about it. Of course, just before the dénouement, Juan observes there is no milk in the fridge and he should buy some more. And I wondered... Did these highly patterned events chronicled in the novel actually occur at all? Or did Juan discover the family secret and then, in trying to write his account, disperse all its elements – including the unimportant ones, like the milk – in stories which reflect truths about his recent and current emotional states and truths about his father?

For Juan is caught between wanting to know and not wanting to know; feeling the past is important and feeling it’s irrelevant. He insists on the unreliability of memory, the impossibility of communicating anything accurately, the lies people tell and their failure to comprehend their own motives anyway. He even points out that he can’t possibly be remembering with much accuracy the conversations he records in his book. He and Luisa are translators, Ranz is an art expert and dealer, their friend Custardoy paints copies and forges Old Masters. All of these characters are in the business of transmitting the messages – be they words or images – of others. None of them can make the transmission without in some way interpolating something of themselves and altering the nuances of the message. So in the end, this novel is, like each of the stories within it, only a partial and distorted truth based on untrustworthy evidence . (But a very satisfying, enjoyable and beautifully written partial and distorted truth!)

(Photograph of Javier Marías from 3:AM Magazine, August 2012, here)

The Tragedy of Fidel Castro: A Novel, by João Cerqueira, translated by Karen Bennett and Chris Mingay

God went on with his musings. ‘I also wanted to have a father and mother.’
‘You have billions of children.’ [replied Christ]
‘I sometimes wonder if their real father wasn’t someone else.’
‘It’s the adoptive father that counts.’
‘But, if I created them in my own image, then why do they behave as they do?’
‘You’re in no position to complain. Before I was born, you were terribly mischievous. And in any case, you gave them freedom of choice, free will.’
‘That doesn’t seem to have been a very good idea.’
‘That’s the problem. Only thinking beings can conceive transcendental existence. Can you imagine a turkey in a mystic ecstasy, contemplating his magnificent baroque sculptures?’
God frowned. He’d never been very keen on sacred art.

A few months ago the author of The Tragedy of Fidel Castro contacted me and asked if I would review his novel. Initially I was not terribly keen, partly because not many people read a gallimaufry so I didn’t believe it was worth his while sending me a review copy and partly because it sounded like something outside my comfort zone. But he didn’t seem disconcerted by the small number of readers, and I told myself that it is good to broaden your horizons, and so...

The novel pitches us into a time of heightened tension between JFK and Fidel Castro. JFK visits a captured Cuban spy to try and enter the mind of a communist, and ends up releasing him. Fidel Castro, meanwhile, regularly disguises himself and haunts the streets and bars of the city to learn the thoughts of his own people. Fátima (the place, personified, at least I believe so) telephones God to warn that war is imminent unless there is divine intervention. What will happen?

Too much, in my opinion. And also, not enough. This novel is properly crazy. I can only conclude I am the wrong reader for it, although I can’t decide whether this is due to my unfamiliarity with Portuguese literature (it seemed so overwritten) or my uninterest in the premise. I could not engage with any of the characters. This might not matter, but my entire reading experience was one of floundering – if I couldn’t engage with the characters, or the style, or the plot – because it was hard to discern one amid all the pyrotechnics – what could I grasp at? It was unlike any novel I’ve ever read before.

The preface insists, ‘This book takes place in an imaginary time and space. All characters and organizations mentioned are entirely fictional’, but the novel is stuffed with characters who have the names and attributes of real people and with repeated discussions of capitalism, communism and the Cold War. It seems to both strive for and reject political satire. It includes magical realist elements but much of the rest of the action is entirely unrealistic and fantastical, so the magical realism has no purchase. While much of it is supposed to be funny, I found the comedy laboured. In one scene, the released spy, Varadero, encounters Castro, disguised as a woman, in a night club and is overcome by lust for him. Cerqueira might have been making a point here about the nature of political power were he not also trying to distance himself from satire. He was definitely trying for comedy, and it just was not to my taste. Violence as a metaphor was used so frequently that it became tired. Every time someone looked at something, it was ‘as if’ they were machine-gunning it. Often, I wondered where we were going or what the point was. There were scenes that felt redundant – for instance, why the passage in which Ogam is called up? I couldn’t see what that added to our understanding of character, plot or atmosphere.

(Photograph of Fidel Castro, found here)

I found the writing to be over-egged. Here’s a paragraph picked at random from towards the end of the novel, just after Castro’s (Cuban) troops invade JKF’s land:

Sitting on a blue velvet sofa in one of his clandestine residences, dressed in little more than a pair of white shorts, Fidel Castro held the letter from Marcos in one hand, studying it, supporting his forehead with the other. Stripped of attire because of the tropical heat, he looked more like a retired athlete. Signs of exceptional physical prowess could still be deciphered to those predisposed to this archaeological task, finding in these ruins the remains of former grandeur. Thus, like a majestic temple that once held gods and astounded mortals but now only boasted a few columns, Fidel presented the attributes of every great monument: He had inspired countless books, documentaries, and films. The masses knew him, and his place was guaranteed in history.

To me this extended metaphor tells nothing new but just wanders away from the plot. It consumes a lot of energy but doesn’t advance our understanding, so that much of the book, which is written like this, feels exuberant yet simultaneously static. However, smothered inside the overwriting was, I felt, something original and clever about mythmaking and power trying to climb out. Although much of the comedy didn’t appeal to me, I did find the exchanges between God and Christ amusing, and there’s a nice moment after the invasion when the (Cuban) revolutionaries are astonished to find that the (US) workers are less than enthusiastic to be liberated from their oppressive overlords. And Cerqueira can be perceptive and insightful. I can’t help feeling that I just didn’t understand what he was trying to do.

(Photograph of João Cerqueira, from his website)

This was the first time I had ever agreed to review a book here in a gallimaufry, usually I write about books I have bought. I have reviewed for Shiny New Books, but that feels slightly different: a gallimaufry is entirely my hobby and usually I only write about what I want to write about. I don’t choose to write about books I haven’t enjoyed or didn’t find interesting, because I’m not a professional reviewer under any sort of obligation. I thoroughly hated this experience because I wanted so much to appreciate and enjoy The Tragedy of Fidel Castro and write enthusiastically about it, and I could not. Moral of story: if you only want to write positive reviews, only accept review copies you are confident of liking and save experimenting for your own purse.

The Tragedy of Fidel Castro is a USA Best Book Awards Winner, it has won several other awards and has positive reviews elsewhere on the internet so, as I warned you, I am the wrong reader. Has anyone else read it? What did you think?

reading challenges for the summer

Via Dolce Bellezza, I’ve just discovered that 8–15th June has been declared Angela Carter Week by Caroline and Delia. Since I’ve just spectacularly failed at my Anthony Powell challenge, I thought I’d sign up. I’ve had a copy of Several Perceptions festering away on my shelves for several years, and I want to reread The Bloody Chamber. Even I should be able to read and post about a short story at least.

Another reading challenge on the horizon is Spanish Lit Month 2014 hosted by Richard and Stu. I managed not to fail at this in 2012 (by the skin of my teeth) so I thought I’d try not failing at it again. A dear friend gave me a copy of Javier Marías’ A Heart So White which I have ungratefully not read yet, and there are several stories in Borges’ Ficciones which are also awaiting the Parry eye. I might read both books! 

Despite my previous form, I am cheerily optimistic about these two challenges. Both involve books I have been meaning to read for a while anyway, and both – crucially for me – are short. I think my weakness is long challenges which become burdensome. What about you – do you join reading challenges, as a way of encouraging you to read new things or dust down something from your shelves, or do you avoid them?

(Photograph of Angela Carter, Alamy, from here; photograph of Javier Marías by Eamonn McCabe, from here; photograph of Jose Luis Borges and friend from an interesting essay here)

shiny new shiny new books

Have you read about Shiny New Books yet? It's the new 'quarterly online magazine focusing exclusively on new and forthcoming publications that will help you decide what to read next and why', set up by four bloggers whom you might already know: Victoria, Harriet, Annabel and Simon. There are reviews of fiction, non-fiction and reprints – although they're recommendations rather than reviews, which sets Shiny New Books slightly apart from most other book magazines. But that is not all! There are also competitions, and in the BookBuzz section you'll find interviews with and posts by authors about their latest books and the writing processes behind them. In this issue there are interviews with Helen Oyeyemi, Jill Dawson and Sebastian Barry, to name just three, an article on translating Tove Jansson's biography and the editors of Slightly Foxed talking about what goes on behind the scenes of that lovely magazine.

Are you still here? Do go and check it out – it looks great! But I would say that, wouldn't I, because I have contributed a review. It's of Nanni Balestrini's novel Tristano and here's a snippet:

To give the reader the greatest creative freedom, Balestrini denies us a continuous narrative. The text circles round certain images, scenes and phrases, whirls away from them, rejoins them later. Some sentences connect to make a snippet of story, others are fragments isolated from each other. There’s a mixture of dialogue, domestic detail, scientific or technical information. Journeys which are usually interrupted, books which are endlessly being unpacked. Balestrini has also eliminated all punctuation bar full stops, apostrophes and hyphens, so that the reader decides on the emphasis, the tone of a sentence. The characters and place names are all indicated by the letter C. This sometimes leads to ambiguity: who crossed the room? who just spoke? The lines between the characters thus can become blurred. The narrative voice flickers between first, second and third person, perhaps to show characters, author and reader as complicit in creating the story and part of that story, as inseparable from each other.

If that hasn't put you off, you are a real die-hard and you can read the rest of the review here and find the publishers, Verso, here. I have to say, it's a novel that makes you work very hard to read it and writing about it was difficult too, but I thought it totally worth the effort. The book, I mean; I do seem to have wittered on rather in the review.

The Romance of Tristan, by Béroul, translated by Alan S. Fedrick

(Image used on the current Penguin Classics edition of The Romance of Tristan; found here)

In the introduction to his translation of Béroul’s Romance of Tristan, Alan S. Fedrick warns us:

[…]Beroul’s poem contains much that will startle and baffle a present-day reader who judges it by the modern aesthetic criteria of fictional narratives. There is no doubt that Beroul’s poem is sadly defective by modern standards; for it is far from easy to imagine that a piece of narrative fiction can exist as a serious work of art while dispensing with elements as fundamental as a coherent plot, an ordered flow of events with a clearly discernible causal nexus, and convincing characterisation.

If that is a little offputting, postmodernism has interposed itself between the contemporary reader and Fedrick, whose words were published in 1970. I don’t think that we now apply those aesthetic criteria to all fiction, and in fact this passage seems more dated than Béroul’s poem, written down in c. 1170–90. It is true that the poem is studded with contradictions – for instance, several enemies are killed off more than once, gleefully – so that it can occasionally feel as if you’re reading several palimpsests laid one over the other rather than a single poem. These may be accounted for by the oral origins of the poem, the inattention of the scribe who copied it down into the only surviving manuscript of it or its author being not one but at least two poets; they may also be deliberate aesthetic choices. In any case, the poem is held together by its central concern, the love affair of Tristan and Yseut.

‘Sir, I love Yseut so much. Because of her I cannot sleep nor even doze. My decision is soon taken: I would rather be a beggar with her and live on herbs and acorns than possess the kingdom of the rich King Otran. I beg you not to ask me to leave her, for I cannot do so.’

Still, while this version of Tristan and Yseut may be the earliest written one still in existence, any reader expecting a wonderful romance of noble, star-crossed lovers will be surprised. The narrator of the poem is cheerily partisan, vituperating the lovers’ enemies (‘Whoever would think of such a low trick?’; ‘May God curse them!’) and exclaiming excitedly at moments of high tension (‘God, what folly! He was too rash’). What is odd is that Tristan and Yseut do not seem to justify such support. They suffer no qualms of conscience over their illicit relationship and deceive with both outright lies and, more usually, with ambiguous oaths. Tristan, who even before meeting Yseut has amassed a lot of experience in disguise and deception, repeatedly avows that he will prove his innocence in trial by combat, well aware that he is such a great warrior that nobody will dare challenge him. This is not the spirit of trial by combat, during which God is supposed to support the virtuous, not the strong. Tristan’s reasoning seems to be he is strong so therefore must be virtuous and supported by God, and he’s certainly right that nobody will risk fighting him. He is really little more than a bully, and not averse to murdering unarmed opponents either. And Yseut? Having persuaded her maid, Brangain, to take her place on her wedding night, Yseut tries to have Brangain murdered to safeguard her secret. She also swears on the holiest relics in Cornwall that ‘no man ever came between my thighs except the leper who carried me on his back across the ford and my husband, King Mark’.  The leper is Tristan in disguise, so while Yseut’s vow has one meaning for us, the readers, it intentionally deceives the other characters. In fact, there is no moral heart to the story: the only religious character, Friar Ogrin, advises the lovers to lie to the king in order to be pardoned. King Mark himself is not at all sympathetic, quick to violence and easily persuaded by whichever of his barons has his ear at any one moment. We may not be able to approve of Tristan and Yseut’s behaviour, but we can’t feel in the least sorry for the cuckolded husband. Powerful as Mark is, especially compared to a foreign knight and a woman, he is easily outwitted by their resourcefulness and courage.

(Illustration used for the cover of Joseph Bédier, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, translated by Hilaire Belloc and completed by Paul Rosenfeld, New York: Random House; found here)

So what is going on here? Well, it seems to me that Béroul has chosen this legend, which would already have been in circulation orally for many years, to undermine mediaeval ideas about courtly love. Although their love for each other is strong and they willingly suffer for one another, and although their ingenuity is admirable, Tristan and Yseut are portrayed by Béroul as selfish and deceitful adulterers. They play with words and distort the truth (even in the quote above, in which Tristan claims he cannot sleep for love of Yseut, he is fibbing for effect). Courtly love is, like the lovers’ language, just a disguise for a rather less glamorous truth, a pretty dress to cover selfishness. Is Béroul also criticising an equivocal Church and a violent feudal society? That I don’t feel qualified to answer. However, I do urge you to settle down with this ambiguous, lively and often funny little book one evening and draw your own conclusions.

Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood and the Harem Within, by Elif Shafak, translated by Hande Zapsu

The past six months have been a funny time for me, reading-wise. While I have read some amazing books and loved every word of them, I’ve also had uncharacteristic longeurs, when nothing on my shelves (or what I can see of them) fitted my reading mood. During the most recent of these slumps I worked my way through the last year’s archives of Tales from the Reading Room and picked out a few books which appealed to me; when they arrived, I put them safely aside until A Moment of Great Need (approximately two weeks later). Then I settled down with a cup of tea, a poorly, sleeping child and the first of the books: Black Milk. litlove’s discussion of it with Dark Puss, is here.

I am a writer.

I am a nomad.

I am a cosmopolite.

I am a lover of Sufism.

I am a pacifist.

I am a vegetarian and I am a woman, more or less in that order.

That is how I would have defined myself until I reached the age of thirty-five.

Up to that moment, first and foremost I saw myself as a teller of tales. Once upon a time, people like me shared their stories around a campfire, under a sky so wide you could never be sure where it ended, if it ever did. In Paris, they scraped together the money for rent by writing for newspapers. In the palace of a despotic sultan each story earned them the right to live one more day. Be it the Anonymous Narrator, Balzac or the beautiful Shehrazat, I felt connected to these storytellers of old. The truth is, like many other novelists, I felt closer to dead writers than to contemporary ones, and perhaps related more easily to imaginary people than those who were real – well, too real.

That was how I lived. That was how I planned to go on living. But then something totally unexpected, miraculous and bewildering happened to me: motherhood.

Elif Shafak is a very successful Turkish novelist and one of the few who have been published in English. Black Milk is an inventive, witty account of her change in heart from determined spinster to wife to mother and her reconciliation of all the apparently competing elements of her psyche. Within ‘the labyrinth of [her] soul’ is a ‘harem’ of ‘Thumbelinas’ – tiny women representing different selves – Little Miss Practical, Dame Dervish, her spirituality, Miss Highbrow Cynic, her intellectual persona, and Miss Ambitious Chekhovian, the driven novelist. They bicker constantly (and entertainingly) and govern her through uneasy and shifting alliances, oligarchy, monarchy, dictatorship. Later she encounters two suppressed aspects: Mama Rice Pudding, her maternal side, and Blue Belle Bovary, her sensuality. Interspersed with this story are accounts of other women writers – Jane Austen, Louisa M. Alcott, Simone de Beauvoir, Toshiko Tamura, Zelda Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, and more.

(Portrait of Elif Shafak from here; her website is here)

The Thumbelinas might look like a nauseating idea, but in fact I found them charming, funny and the highlights of the book. They allowed Shafak to explore her complicated persona in an amusing but perceptive way. You don’t need to be a writer or, I think, a woman to appreciate her fears about parenthood and its pressures on self-identity. The rest of the book was enjoyable but in my opinion less successful. I found the summaries of other women writers’ lives and the ‘lessons’ they offered Shafak wore a bit thin after a while, some of them felt a little pat. But what really disappointed me were her accounts of postpartum depression and motherhood. After the birth of her daughter, the Thumbelinas are banished to a box by the djinn of postpartum depression, Lord Poton. While vividly described, he offered little to illuminate Shafak’s experience to me and I felt no wiser about the condition after reading it than before. And then, once Lord Poton is defeated, Shafak’s husband Eyup suggests they hire a nanny and it’s the end of the book! What of the conflicting demands – self-introspection against selflessness, restlessness against stability, the energy and time for writing against those for mothering – over which Shafak and I had pondered for so many pages? Do the Thumbelinas really live harmoniously together? How does she manage such a successful writing career, two children (and a husband!) and a life divided between London and Istanbul? Is Shafak suggesting that actually it is easy, after all?

Despite my complaints about the ending, I loved Shafak’s humour, wild imagination and lively style and will definitely be seeking out her novels. Does anyone have any favourites to recommend?

And many thanks to litlove!

Also, happy Friday the Thirteenth...

A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar, by Suzanne Joinson

One night Frieda finds a man, Tayeb, sleeping in the stairwell outside her door, and gives him a blanket and pillow. The next morning he is gone, leaving a painting of a bird on the wall and the words:

As the great poet says, you’re afflicted,
Like me, with a bird’s journey.

The great poet is the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), and his poem ‘Here the birds’ journey ends’ forms one part of the epigraph to A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar; the other is from Ecclesiastes (10:20):

A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.

This is my starting point for writing about A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar: it has been excellently reviewed at Cornflower Books, if you want to read more about it.

Birds are a central motif to the novel, both an actual and a metaphorical presence. Their flight is mimicked by Frieda’s incessant journeys for her work (researching the concerns of ‘the youth of the Islamic world’ and devising solutions for them which Western governments can act upon), the aeroplanes which leave smoky paths above her flat, Tayeb’s wanderings across southern England and, in a story from 1923 told in parallel, the ill-fated Christian mission to proselytise Kashgar. Eva, the reluctant missionary whose notes for a proposed travel book narrate this parallel story, compares riding her bicycle to flying. At a more metaphorical level, most of the characters are in flight from themselves, seeking something. Yet this is perhaps not (simply) what Darwish and Tayeb mean when they write of a bird’s journey.

Those who are afflicted with birds’ journeys are pioneers. They want to change the world.  They may be missionaries, like Millicent Frost, who are eager to convert the Muslims of Turkestan and, in a different manner, Frieda, whose ultimate aim is greater intercultural understanding but whose work is perhaps used in a more subtle form of ideological colonialism. But they may be artists, writers, photographers or film-makers, like Eva, Lizzie and Tayeb, people who leave a trail of beauty or truth behind them. Joinson draws a distinction between these groups, again using bird imagery: Lizzie and Eva reminisce about their sojourn in a convent school in Geneva where, to counteract the religious fervour of the Catholic girls around them, they spoke to each other in bird language.

And the novel is hopping with real birds. They are fragile bodies, caged or roasted in Kashgar, bred to be shot in the Yemen. In fact, they are rarely free. The cruelty against the bodies of birds, explicitly described, hints at the violence suffered off-stage by human bodies, the victims of government repression, of banditry and revolution. This link between vulnerable human and avian bodies is reinforced when Tayeb paints a feather on Frieda’s naked back, but the central bird (ho ho) of them all is Irene Guy.

I may as well begin with the bones.

They were scalded, sun-bleached, like tiny flutes, and I called out to the carter to stop. It was early evening; anxious to reach our destination we had travelled, in the English fashion, through the hottest part of the day. They were bird bones, piled in front of a tamarisk tree and I suppose my fate could be read from the pattern they made in the dust, if I only knew how to see it.

This was when I heard the cry.

This is Irene’s birth, and her delicate little bones are likened to the bird’s skeleton. Later, her caged owl is part of her legacy to Frieda – along with a written record, Eva’s notes. Irene has no ‘voice’ in the novel, and her life, full of hope and plans, is ultimately almost as constricted as the owl’s. The birds in the book may represent dreams as well as bodies.

A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar is a novel which was widely reviewed by bloggers when it was first published last year, and for that I am very grateful: were it not for your recommendations of it I should never have picked it out of the kringwinkel (recycling shop) as the paperback edition has a truly hideous abd offputting cover. (And publishers! Please persuade your illustrators to read the books whose covers they design!) It is an evocative novel which touches on literature and silence, rootlessness, power dynamics between lovers and sexes, relations between mothers and daughters. Joinson’s patterning and use of echoes, in terms of both plot and image, between the two narratives strengthens her message that we are doomed to repeat the past if we do not know or understand it.

You can read more about the Trio, three women missionaries part of whose adventures the 1924 story is loosely based upon, here. It’s fascinating to see how Joinson adapted elements of their and Topsy’s biography. And finally, here is the beautiful poem ‘Here the birds’ journey ends’:

Here the birds’ journey ends
Mahmoud Darwish

Here the birds’ journey ends, our journey, the journey of words,
and after us there will be a horizon for the new birds.
We are the ones who forge the sky’s copper, the sky that will carve roads
after us and make amends with our names above the distant cloud slopes.
Soon we will descend the widow’s descent in the memory fields
and raise our tent to the final winds: blow, for the poem to live, and blow
on the poem’s road. After us, the plants will grow and grow
over roads only we have walked and our obstinate steps inaugurated.
And we will etch on the final rocks, ‘Long live life, long live life,’
and fall into ourselves. And after us there’ll be a horizon for the new birds.

(Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah; published in the New Yorker, 25th August 2008)

(The illustrations are of an ostrich, from a ninth-century copy of Kitab al Hayawan [Book of Animals]; Basra, found here; three francolins, from a thirteenth-century copy in the British Library)

Little Brother and Little Sister

(Illustration by Kay Nielsen from Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, Hansel and Gretel and Other Stories by the Brothers Grimm; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925; from here.)

Like ‘The Pack of No-good, Low-life Ruffians’, ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’ opens by plunging immediately into a conversation:

Little Brother took his Little Sister by the hand and said: ‘Ever since our mother died, we have not had one good hour; our stepmother beats us every day, and when we go to her she kicks us away. The hard leftover crusts of bread are our food, and the little dog under the table is better off than we are: at least she sometimes throws him a tasty bit to eat. God have mercy, if only our mother knew! Come, let us go out into the wide world together.’

No messing about: off they go. It rains, they are sad, they enter a forest and sleep there. But their wicked stepmother follows them and enchants all the streams in the forest. Next morning they are thirsty and search for a brook; when they find one, Little Sister hears it murmuring, ‘Whoever drinks from me will turn into a tiger’ and warns her brother to restrain himself. This happens three times; the third time Little Brother disregards his sister and drinks. He is instantly transformed into a (talking) fawn. (This is lucky for Little Sister: roe deer, unlike tigers and wolves, don’t tend to gobble up little girls for breakfast.) Little Sister weeps, but then she makes him a collar from her golden garter and plaits a rope of rushes with which she leads him further into the forest. They find an abandoned house and begin a rustic existence sustained by nuts, berries, roots etc.

Back at their old home, the wicked stepmother is incandescent at their good fortune. She still wants to harm the siblings, and her own daughter, who is ‘as ugly as night and ha[s] only one eye’, nags away at her and complains that she should have been queen. So the stepmother comes up with a plan. When the new queen has just given birth to a baby boy, the stepmother assumes the form of her waiting-woman, draws a bath for the queen and helps her to the bathroom – then she and the ugly stepdaughter slam and lock the door. ‘[I]n the bath-room they had built such a hellfire that the lovely young queen was soon bound to suffocate.’ Then the stepmother magics her daughter into the form of the queen and shoves her into the bed. But. The stepmother cannot do anything about her daughter’s missing eye. When the king pops in for a visit, the false bride lies on her side while her mother squawks at him to keep the curtains drawn because the queen is still too fragile to look at the light.

That night a nurse is sitting awake by the baby’s cradle. In comes the real queen. She lifts the baby from the cradle and nurses him and cuddles him, strokes the fawn who shares his room and leaves.  The nurse is too frightened to tell anyone. For many nights the visits continue, until the queen speaks:

How fares my child? How fares my roe?
I’ll come but twice, and then no more.

Although the nurse doesn’t reply, she does go the next morning and tell the king, who keeps watch with her the next night but is also afraid to reply to the ghostly queen. On the third night and her last visit he finally cries, ‘You cannot be anyone but my dear wife’. ‘And at that moment, by God’s grace, she received her life again; she was rosy, fresh, and well.’ The stepdaughter is taken to the forest where she is torn to pieces by wild animals and the stepmother is burnt. (These are both fates that the stepmother had envisaged for Little Sister.) With her death, Little Brother is released from the spell and becomes human again.  

There are several tropes in this story which recur in fairy tales. The ‘false bride’ is, Joyce Crick writes, also a feature of ‘Three Little Men in the Forest’; the wicked mother-in-law who claims the new bride is a witch and demands her burning (‘The Twelve Brothers’, ‘The Six Swans’) is surely related. So are the wicked stepmother and horrible stepsister from ‘Mother Holle’. Important events – the encounters with streams, the hunts, the visits of the ghostly queen – come in threes – three sets of threes, in fact. The cottage in the forest is a benign version of the gingerbread house, offering protection instead of danger.

Many, many fairy tales concern themselves with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers; as Marina Warner notes, in From the Beast to the Blonde, ‘bad’ motherhood is often split off from the real mother into the character of the stepmother, because the cruelty of a birth mother is so very shocking and ‘unnatural’ to us, even now. This splitting is sometimes very deliberate: Wilhelm Grimm altered ‘Snow White’ to turn the jealous mother into a stepmother. In ‘Little Brother and Little Sister’, Joyce Crick sees the maternal splitting as being between not the ‘good’ dead mother and the ‘bad’ stepmother, but between the nurturing sister, who cares for the fawn and returns from the dead to nurse her baby, and the malignant stepmother. But this is a tale open to many readings: Ellen Steiber interprets it as concerned with the survival of childhood abuse, and for her the splitting is of the girl figure into the half-blind imposter bride, who has ‘shut down’, and the ‘real’, suppressed, ghost. (You can read her essay in the Journal of Mythic Arts, spring 2007.)

(Illustration by Arthur Rackham from Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, Little Brother and Little Sister and Other Tales By the Brothers Grimm; London: Constable & Company Ltd, 1917; from here.)

The story certainly does seem interested in identity. Little Brother loses his to the witchy stepmother and it is only restored when she is removed. The king knows Little Sister as the woman he wants to marry as soon as he claps eyes on her, yet after the birth of their son is unable to see that she’s been replaced by a monster/is alienated from herself.  (Postnatal depression?) When at last he recognises her true self, she returns to life.

Next time (I won’t say next week because ! But you never know): Rapunzel.

(Uncredited illustrations: colour illustration by Paul Meyerheim from Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen,  1889; from here. Black-and-white illustration by Walter Crane from Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, Household Stories from the Collection of the Brothers Grimm, translated by Lucy Crane. London: Macmillan & Co., 1882; from here.)

Moomins and memories

It’s the last week of term, I’m finishing my paperwork, waiting for my exam results and thinking about the future and what to do next (learning to drive a car is definitely featuring here; I keep telling  myself that it can’t be as difficult as following a teacher-training course in Dutch, please don’t disillusion me!). Writing more here, and more about books and less about me, is also part of the future. But today I lack energy, time and focus, so instead here are three links for you.

(The Moomins and the Great Flood; detail from the cover art from here)

The first is Jeanette Winterson, writing about the Moomins, and remembering how Finn Family Moomintroll affected her as a ten-year-old. 

I wrote out random words and stuck them on the wall above my bed with flour and water. This got me into trouble but I didn’t care. The words, random, alive, were making a kind of leaf mould in my mind. From that rich and fertile place came language of a different order.

Poetic disorder is how language is made. Only later is it codified. Naming starts as joy. Think of the pleasure a child has in finding words and inventing words and forming sentences that are also shapes. Words are ear and mouth before they are pen and paper. Words run away; you have to catch them.

 

The second is Medieval Memoria Online.

(St Jerome in the Desert, outer panels of an early sixteenth-century triptych made for the Van Beesd Van Heemskerck-Van Diemen family, from the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen; MeMO memorial object ID 504, 25-06-2013)

MeMo is a newly established database of inventories and descriptions of pre-1580 commemorative objects and texts from the Netherlands. It has been set up by the University of Utrecht, and includes images, inscriptions, epitaphs, altarpieces, tomb monuments and archival sources.

Researchers of medieval memoria consider the commemoration of the dead (i.e. memoria) a complex phenomenon, in which prayer for the care of the souls of the deceased, the care for the poor and the sick, commemoration of the deeds of the living and the dead and political aspects are inextricably linked.

It is fascinating...

(Claire Loder, big face, ceramic; from here)

The artist Claire Loder has been working with elderly people in the rural Cotswolds, ‘to help learn or rekindle skills while reminiscing and creating lasting memories in clay’. She has also created ceramic portraits of them, which are being shown in ‘Making Memories’ at New Brewery Arts in Cirencester. Her work is lovely; do go and see it if you have the chance. A commemoration of the living.